manifesto
Inside the press machine. Into the belly of the whale. We are fed up of last minute calls asking us to translate pages upon pages in few hours, indeed of reversing by the piece thousands of bytes from one side of the anglo-romance spectrum to the other. We are fed up of waiting for an electronic attachment to be turned into 2,000-characters typewritten pages, which will then in their turn be translated into bread and cheese, rents and bills. The bytes we count are as anonymous as the pages we translate: sometimes we don’t even know who’ll be the lucky author whose name will be printed on the title page, before those words lined up in hours and hours of intellectual piecework, our toil being soothed by doses of NEXT, the eyedrops we use to moisten our eye-pupils, dried by hour-long monitor exposition. Two eyedrops every fifth page, and a walk around our chairs to stretch our legs.
Mountains of paper and bytes, hasty revisions urged by deadlines independent from holidays or overtime. We are fed up of moistening with eyedrops the short terms forced on our world outlook. We are fed up of translating but the radical nature of our yearning.
Yet we are not the first people who have seen how fatiguing crafts and trades can be. Coopers, dyers, knife-grinders and horse-shoers have all experienced the forced readjustment of their skills. Now it’s our turn to resist transformations in the job of translating, and of any knowledge work, for that matter. Learning from ancient handicrafts, we have created a collective, a guild of translators united by the wish to personally promote radical works expressing a creative aspiration, an aspiration which the Italian press machine will not translate.
We will translate it ourselves, then, and we will contact publishers and editors to discuss about terms, prefaces and covers. In order to push the publishing discourse to the most radical and unexplored lands. Those lands we have already ventured out to together with the authors we have translated, with the authors who have become our friends and accomplices. Together with small and medium publishing houses, which are capable of anticipating the press industry molochs in discovering the best books, without thinking about the thousands of copies to be printed, about the swollen best-sellers’ lists, about the tons of ink-tattooed paper. But we are not even scared of entering the belly of the whale. And of throwing away our NEXT, for good.
Trans/NEXT Guild of radical translators
