Unpolished Response to Tyrone's Talk

“In his New Republic essay “Cool We Can Believe In” novelist/poet Paul Beatty attempts to pin down Obama’s apparent invulnerability to closet skeletons, his anti-Tar Baby immunity, to that most ineffable of blues and jazz attitudes-sans-attitude—cool. This updated stoicism, for Beatty, is the very antithesis of translation—it does not convert, change or represent. It is before all morality, outside any ethos…”

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That’s taken from Tyrone’s talk. And I’m still sitting with “cool” as a method and a mood of operation pertinent to, even as it counters, translation. For Beatty, the unaffected equipoise that is cool is precisely what does not translate, what is untranslatable (“It's not so much Barack's blackness that makes him hard to attack so much as it is his unaffected cool, because the state of being f'able is ineffable. How can you find the words to attack something that there are no words for?”).

“Cool” appears to exist as response – a response (as a sort of low-level subsistence or maintenance) that transcends its occasion so much so that it barely surfaces as response, is unresponsive… perhaps even irresponsibly so. It’s a performance of non-reaction. Consider this in light of translation’s authoritative discourse, which desires a text so “natural,” so “fluent,” that it doesn’t even seem to be translated. Lawrence Venuti, for instance, in “The Translator’s Invisibility,” suggesting all translations necessarily either foreignize or domesticate, though ironically through a translator who must remain indiscernible (read: cool?).

But what is translation’s antithesis? Can there be such a thing as absolute unaffectedness, this cool, as it exists in a dialectical relationship to translation? Or might it actually be impossible, even in the most basic acts of textual engagement (“The Glance,” “The Skim”), to say there is a term that stands in such direct opposition? The “cool” whereby Beatty defines Obama’s response to the question he was asked during a debate this past January (“Was Bill Clinton the first black president?”) is still a response, as every engagement (textual, interrogative) necessarily demands. It’s a mean coincidence (or rather, it is not) that three days before this talk took place Obama had finally to resign from Trinity United Church of Christ. For the dynamics of readership is ultimately and immediately the dynamics of response. And the transcendental stasis that is “cool” might be vertically static, but I’m not sure it can be horizontally (temporally) so.

Where translation fails, of course, is where neutrality fails… which’s everywhere. What gets concealed, when the translator is invisible, are the very circumstances under which the translation is made. Obama’s initial (and comparatively unagitated) response to Reverend Wright’s comments was actually glaring response (read: translation) even as it registered as coolly nonreactive. “[T]here are no individual black men or women in public” (that’s Tyrone again). Yet Obama’s reaction was necessarily either going to “foreignize” or “domesticate” Wright’s speech.

The more invisible the translator, the more he opposes the very conditions he desires to represent. But what is the representation the “cool” translator, should he exist, would desire?