Ava Hofmann’s […] is a corrupted text. Pulling on a lineage of leech books and grimoires, now distorted by time into strange digital constructs. Restorations performed in the occulted settings of Microsoft Word, with shape and line tools. Their language abridged and transplanted.
^
We enter the text by means of the Voynich Manuscript. With an epigraph of the original work’s illegible language system. The stamped or scanned appearance of this passage perhaps foreshadowing the fluctuating materiality of the work.
^
Page numbers are accompanied by an r (recto) or v (verso), scanned illustrations and scrawl appear as part of various collages, photographs are overlaid with coarse textures. At the same time, most textual elements are placed in simplified facsimiles of torn paper (sharp outlines), certain passages are blurred or faded. It feels as if we have caught […] in a period of transition. Its writhing-shift from physical to digital. Scraps of the original pages are traced by Microsoft line tools and catalogued in a haphazardly piled mound. Each of which are flattened onto their surface by the closing of the book.
^
It is strange to encounter something that’s assembly is so overtly connected to a specific digital tool, but that still feels so physical. Viewing the work on my computer, I do not feel like I am seeing the real thing. This is only a projection. The real book is somewhere else. With dimensions and weight. A corrupted and waterlogged leech book.
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They claim […] they […] do not exist […]
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The base unit of the […] is simultaneously fragile and stable / open and closed. It is an antithetical device for communication. The ellipsis often denoting a passage of time, a pause, an abridging of materials. The bracket meanwhile, a means of containment—intended to hold and isolate certain phrases / terms.
^
Although it functions similarly, the […] never really feels like erasure. Erasure is temporalized through a severing of past and present. The past text is reduced / partially forgotten in the creation of a new text. With the blacked-out segments acting as evidence of this process. The […] however is more closely related to duration. There is a passing through of the obscured material. It is not removed but ignored. A connection is not so much formed between past and present, but between loose moments in time or space. It is more a closing of distance than a removal of language.
^
Although still inaccessible, the ellipses give this sense that, if the reader desired, they could go back, enter that space, and find what was passed over.
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It is an abridging rather than an erasure.
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Erasure as well appears as a more annihilatory praxis. It destroys the original. It leaves rubble behind. Hofmann’s abridging is mutative. Everything is recycled, rearranged, repurposed. This feels especially notable with the content of the work being predominantly occupied by incantations, spells, instructions. Translating / interpreting old, seemingly medieval texts and contorting them into contemporary forms.
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Police pleasure / for the long laws
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Notes from the reader (Hofmann or whomever occupies […]) elaborate on frequent choices to change the base text. Reorienting it into something new, making it more personal or aesthetically complex. Words like “weallwalan” meaning wall-walls or foundation, are instead translated into woman-walls through tangential connections that can be made in the work’s original language.
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[…] is often a site of these radical mistranslations. Intentionally misconstruing its source in order to create a new work.
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Returning to this tension between erasure and abridgement, we might view these sites similarly to Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson’s conception of the deformation zone. Where the practice of translation is haunted / wounded / messy.
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In Hofmann’s iteration of these writings, we see a great disparity between the desires of the original work and the desires of the translated work. They are not one in the same—in a way that is much more overtly noticeable than is frequent in conventional translation. When there is an alternative or seemingly non sequitur interpretation of a term or phrase, it is followed. With whatever onlooker wrote the footnotes attempting as best they can to trace these lines of flight.
^
The original intention of scrying, summoning, incanting, is still present. But its means and methods have changed drastically. Lines like “bash my fascist vas deferens” and “for treatment of dysmorphia” surface alongside treatments for shipwrecks and petty theft. All of these elements commingling in this anachronistic pool.
^
The translator functions as a virulent entity. Infecting the text with alternative modes of being. Scrying new poetic forms from the heap. Sator squares and poison charms. The text is no longer a grimoire but a text containing the still articulating limbs of a grimoire. Whatever this is, it has grown beyond that state.
^
how queer are the wealth stones?
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The leech book has been sucking blood from another source, wishing it around in its gullet, spurting it up as bile or stomach acid after the process of digestion has already begun. There is the sense that whatever Hofmann set out to do is not what the final book became. It has engulfed that desire and seeded a mass of new ones.
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Pulsating and groaning. […] exhibits a certain amount of autonomy. Threaded throughout there is this personal series of images but budding around them is a seemingly infinite methods of interpreting the text, of moving through it, of navigating the surfaces within spreads.
^
The text summons itself in a semiotics of tangling knots and scattered bones.
Mike Corrao is the author of three novels, Man, Oh Man (Orson’s Publishing); Gut Text (11:11 Press) and Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede (11:11 Press); one book of poetry, Two Novels (Orson’s Publishing); two plays, Smut-Maker (Inside the Castle) and Andromedusa (Forthcoming – Plays Inverse); and three chapbooks, Avian Funeral March (Self-Fuck); Material Catalogue (Alienist) and Spelunker (Schism – Neuronics). Along with earning multiple Best of the Net nominations, Mike’s work has been featured in publications such as 3:AM, Collagist, Always Crashing, and Denver Quarterly. His work often explores the haptic, architectural, and organismal qualities of the text-object. He lives in Minneapolis. @ShmikeShmorrao