UNTRANSLATABLE KERNELS
In May 2023 as part of Kunstverein Aughrim’s friendly takeover of The Courthouse Arts Centre in Tinahely, Kunstverein Aughrim presented Untranslatable Kernels – a writing workshop by Rik Higashikawa.
The workshop took place on Saturday 20 May, from 11am–1pm at The Courthouse Arts Centre, Tinahely, County Wicklow. Eight participants joined for a two-hour writing workshop, featuring a series of writing exercises devised in response to ideas around hospitality and untranslatability, based on Richard Kearney's text ‘Linguistic Hospitality – The Risk of Translation’*.
A crucial step in resisting the lure of the Perfect Translation is to honor a dialectical balance between proximity (welcoming the stranger into our midst) and distance (acknowledging that something is always lost in translation: the other’s meanings can never be completely mine).
*A version of this essay features in Richard Kearney and Melissa Fitzpatrick's "Radical Hospitality: From Thought to Action", published in 2021.
Another version may be accessed here