Sinister agenda - part five: the translation


Find the other episodes of the "Sinister Drawing" saga by following this link.
And yet, notice: the polarizations that work best in the context of the "matrix" are precisely the "translated" ones. The examples are the usual ones. There are two peoples fighting a real war, thousands of kilometers from here. And in parallel, two factions develop among us–"translated" factions–which simulate a conflict whose roots, motivations, and ideals belong to ecosystems totally alien to ours and therefore difficult to understand in their most minute cultural details and anthropological recesses. These are the most recondite and ancestral elements of the dispute, and precisely for this reason the most fundamental ones. This elusiveness is the reason why the whole issue is simplified in a banal, pathetic, and sadly ridiculous way.
The same happens for other issues, translated onto dimensions other than the spatial one: fascism and anti-fascism on the temporal dimension, viruses and vaccines on the scientific one, capitalism and communism on the economic one. What makes these polarizations effective is precisely the elusiveness of the themes, very far from the concrete areas of the lives of the people who fall for them, and therefore persistent as they are not directly verifiable. The motto by now is well known: "Let the chickens squabble over translated issues. It will then be easy to screw them over in their most intimate context."

This post was machine-translated from Italian.

Comments

Post a Comment

Most popular shreds (so to speak)

On the black hill - Bruce Chatwin

Image
I’ve had Bruce Chatwin on my author list for a long time. I thought he was mainly a travel writer: I remember some friends of mine referring to “In Patagonia” and “What am I doing here” as great travel literature. When I found “On the black hill” on the shelves of one of my favorite used book stores I realized that he wrote fiction as well.
Read the rest of this post »
 

AirAsia: not so cool anymore

Image
Having been a rather regular customer of AirAsia - since the beginning, when they were still using old planes and few people trusted them (“They are always late...they'll lose your luggage.” was the typical refrain people were singing in Malaysia) - I can say that their online booking procedure was fast, simple, transparent and fair, their prices among the cheapest and their brand one of the coolest. Well...not anymore. Going through just a few screens, filling a limited number of fields and clicking some buttons one could choose date, destination, number of passengers, one way or return, could select their favorite flight among the available options, enter their personal data, the credit card ones and that was it. As I said: fast, simple, transparent and fair. No free meal and no seat allocation, true, but their prices were dirt cheap, really unbeatable on some routes. This took by surprise the traditional carriers that lost large shares of the market while AirAsia, from a ...
Read the rest of this post »
 

Passage-brothels in Brickfields - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Image
Photo of a passage-brothel, taken hurriedly and on the sly Brickfields is a neighborhood close to Kuala Lumpur central station (KL Sentral, yes, with "S"). Unlike other areas of the center it has remained rather untouched by the waves of modernity that altered large parts of the city, even though the imposing lines of skyscrapers and infrastructures besiege it assiduously. The district is home to a picturesque Little India, budget hotels, little multi-ethnic restaurants, street stalls and places of worship, including numerous Christian churches.  The most bizarre joints, though, are a series of long and narrow passages facing the sidewalks. The entrance half-hidden by a rag used as a curtain, a pale pink light coming out of the clear sides, from which it is possible to peep at a sequence of run-down doors, each one watched over by a scantily-clad lady leaning on a doorpost or seated on a plastic stool. A pimp with the typical attitude of a human-spider (I was about to wr...
Read the rest of this post »