On Abra Ancliffe’s American to Icelandic Dictionary Dictionary

Mind the Gap(s)

Look up the word “understand” in Abra Ancliffe's most recent project, “American to Icelandic Dictionary / Íslenska til Bandaríska Orðabók.” You'll find not one but multiple translations with no indication of usage, of nuance, context. Something's going on here. Some words in this exquisite letterpress dictionary are translated in the same way twice, some in many different ways...some of which, it turns out, are just plain wrong.

Ancliffe transcribed these translations during long winter nights in Iceland watching American television shows with Icelandic subtitles. She sat with familiar characters and personalities from Beverly Hills 90210 and CSI as well as Rachel Ray and made lists of words translated by anonymous subtitle writers. The resulting dictionary of sorts (no definitions, just translations of words) is a faithful record of those lists with their duplications and their errors made both by the translators and Ancliffe.

A project of the gaps between that these errors represent, Ancliffe's “American to Icelandic Dictionary / Íslenska til Bandaríska Orðabók” is both a series of prints of individual pages of her dictionary and a very few copies beautifully cloth bound. Printed in cool grey type, Ancliffe's “dictionary” could not be farther from the tiny, crowded, utilitarian type, thin margins, and whisper-thin paper of common dictionaries. Not to mention that for those of us unaccustomed to reading Icelandic, the exotically accented letters look a lot like a form of calligraphy. Without knowing a thing about her process (though it is explained in her foreword) the form of her dictionary conveys that this is something extraordinary.

Note the ironic distance between the precision of letterpress typesetting and printing and the fast and loose methodology of the subtitle translations. Note the distance between the dictionary/book and the dregs of American television as information delivery systems/tools for learning English/Icelandic.

This "dictionary" questions translation, an art not a science, as anyone whose contemplated issues of translating for sound and rhythm as well as meaning can attest. Even in the mundane conversations of fake California teenagers there are choices to be made by translators as well as of course, mistakes.

In an introduction to a translation of a collection of poems by Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin wrote that, “Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own.” The action happens at the center of the equation, where the equal sign should be but never is. It's a slippery business, translation. What's more, we may fix translation (or definition) in a dictionary, but the language is always incrementally stretching, heaving, growing, dying.

This "dictionary" questions the authority of the “dictionary” itself. This is a human enterprise, we are reminded. Recall that the Oxford English Dictionary, that singular authority, was originally compiled with the assistance of armies of amateur (and some not so amateur) volunteers. And while we're at it, consider the word "abridged" and the kind of abridging that happens when one can't write fast enough as Ray vigorously spits out cooking instructions or Shannen Doherty spits out something that's guaranteed to stir something up.

A bi-product of Ancliffe's project is a consideration of the larger consequences of homogenization of global culture (of which language is a dominant component). Setting aside the beneficial flattening of exchange that the internet permits to focus more specifically on the export of American (especially pop) culture, we can note a range of assaults on the integrity of national language ("C'est le weekend!") and culture (the latter embodied by the unlikely Euro-stardom of David Hasselhoff).

On the night we saw Ancliffe's project, the pages lining the walls of the No. 2 Print Shop, the room was filled with printmakers and a handful of non-printmaking artists. Did they focus on the form of the pages, the words extending out like ribs from a white spine, on the impeccable printing, on the where-did-she-get-that-Icelandic-type? Or did they read and in reading notice that the project is really not about what is printed, but what isn't, about that white spine around which the word lists are arranged. In real space it measures maybe a quarter of an inch, but when we consider what is lost both figuratively and metaphorically in the distance between the left and right columns, that space yawns wide.

This review was written for ultra.