Rinko's diary googlemangled

[imomus]

I've mentioned Rinko Kawauchi's diary before. In her exhibitions this great photographer works with large format cameras and big scale prints. But for her Foil blog she snaps with a keitai phone camera. One picture per day, always the same aspect ratio: upright. Sometimes Rinko shoots into a flaring light, sometimes up at the sky or the ceiling, sometimes down at her feet. Sometimes she snaps food, other times an animal or a flower. I think we're very lucky to have this diary, which has a modest, poetic flavour all of its own.



There's also poetry in the Japanese texts. If you Google Translate them into English you get some very peculiar phrases indeed. I must admit I've been using some of these in my lyric composition. Here are some picks from what Google made of Rinko's January entries.



January 30th
The tremendously lovely amulet is received. It is dense, with the [illegible] of the bee.

January 29th
It goes to the visit of the friend who is hospitalized. Because is not possible at all, inhaling the foot, stroking the head, it returned.

January 28th
Receiving the handmade Japanese radish, it is delightful.

January 27th
Opening and/or closing the big cardboard, concentrating at a stroke, it categorizeeed.

January 26th
Somehow, however you kept wearing the kimono by yourself, in the various person.

January 25th
Joint life 4 of girls was visible, however perhaps, there is a variety, very pleasantly so.

January 24th
It has teaching the compilation of image, to Special Interest Group Ro.

January 23rd
You feel that one day passes lately quickly.

January 22nd
When morning, the curtain is opened, the snowman and the eye were agreeable.

January 21st
Wearing the socks, wearing the underwear, wearing the kimono, it winds the band.

January 20th
Outside heavy snow. Doubtful by your the circumstances from the place where it is far a little it photographs with the video camera,

January 19th
The camera bag and the tripod of ideal it goes to Ginza in searching.

January 18th
Sometimes, with the notion that where, the Eguti male be completed it makes the store keep accompanying with everyone it probably will go to the kind of place which always it cannot go.

January 17th
Morning, real the burglar intrudes inside you looked at dream.

January 16th
After cleaning cheerfully, it went to the gym, bought the beer and the wine and the flower to the return.

January 15th
A little, you received the telephone from the person where communication has broken off, very became delightful.

January 14th
Rain.

January 13th
Cold one day. The cat had died with Kawahara.

January 12th
Not making the change of feeling good, drag to useless mode and be troubled it may.

January 11th
It goes to the vaccination of yellow fever in order to go to next month Brazil.

January 10th
It is what, becoming the kind of feeling which keeps the girl small of the kindred, the various knobs remaining ones it puts out.


This stuff makes me think about the uses of inexactitude. Google translation is in its "poetry golden age" precisely because it is inexact. Who knows how long this golden age will last before perfection moves in, destroying the poetry? I feel the same way about my own very limited Japanese skills. In a vocabulary of perhaps 400 words, I know two words for "mushroom" and two words for "sorry". This is in some ways more telling than if I knew the whole lexicon.

The unreliable tour guide act I'm about to do at the Whitney also works with inexactitude. Everything I say about the work on display will be false, but the wrongness will be like a torch beam shining light on the work from a parallel world, the parallel world in which that information is true. The relationship between these two worlds will be telling, perhaps more telling than a true and exact description. Inexactitude has the advantage of creating a parallel world for us (the world where its lies and mistakes are truths and facts), whereas exactitude's claim to be the single right answer can only be arrogant, reductive and boring, an appeal to authority rather than the imagination.

Exactitude contains the delusion that one language maps to another, or that true descriptions are possible. Inexactitude is puckish (though we don't want to fly in a plane piloted by Puck).

Exoticism is only made possible by inexactitude. Exoticism is that place where we invest all we don't know about someone with glamour. Inexactitude is the soil for the flowers of fascination.

Comments

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

Do I own them for designating Google's howlers "poetry"?

Here are the first few lines of "Howl" translated into Japanese and then back into English:

The empty eyed which as for me it is to be destroyed the heart where my formation is best the hipsters which burns because related to ancient sky to the starry die/di ナモ of the machines of the angelheaded night crossing destitution and the び rag and on the city where jazz is looked were seen in the dawn which searches the predicament which is gotten angry the insanity which pulls through the sort of the black namely the hysterical which is hungry it exposed due to, the water which floats is cool and flatly smokes with the supernatural darkness of the box high Saturday