As I write this post on the tail-end of your ideas, I find myself encountering many of the same problems, the greatest of which is translation. I don’t know that I agree with John when he argues that the Tagalog was used to simulate "a mesh of Spanish, English and native dialects." I’m pretty sure it is an Austronesian language that is the base of Filipino (the language, not the nation). Perhaps you were thinking of the "Pigeon English" that is sometimes spoken, not only in the Philippines, but many other Asian countries (especially China). Furthermore, the un-translated text also includes Latin, French, Spanish, and probably a few others I did not recognize. For me, the lack of translation speaks to a greater problem, one that has supposedly existed since the Tower of Babel. Texts are inherently untranslatable. To translate is to conquer. To change a language into English is to divorce the original language from its context and rob it of its inherent connotations. However, this begs the question: what about the texts she did translate? Are there in-jokes I would get if I read these languages? Is there a subtle context within the translation? I believe that this question balloons out to encompass the entire text. I am only vaguely familiar with the history of the Philippines, the filming of Apocalypse Now, and the paintings of Goya. What intertextual references am I missing with my Eurocentric understanding of our world’s history? If anything, this text plays off of our lack of knowledge and in doing so is able to rewrite history. What part of this text is real? Was there a former child actor in Apocalypse Now? This of course speaks to the fictional (or at least narrative) nature of history that many of you have already mentioned. Hagerdorn’s text is asserting a different voice in the narrative of the history of a notion. Though fictive, I am no position to see to what extent it is so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I write this post on the tail-end of your ideas, I find myself encountering many of the same problems, the greatest of which is translation. I don’t know that I agree with John when he argues that the Tagalog was used to simulate "a mesh of Spanish, English and native dialects." I’m pretty sure … Continue reading A Rehashing of What has Already been Mentioned<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}