ABSTRACT
As we move through cultural and social contexts in the world, we are naturally driven to try and understand the environment we are embedded in. This everyday speculative engagement with our surroundings is the focus of our collaborative exploration of communicating beyond linguistic constraints, and the implications this has for facilitating communication and translation across languages and/or cultures.
Asemic writing (writing without alphabet) appears congenial to our enquiry. Exploring an asemic text requires the ‘reader’ or ‘experiencer’ to embrace incomprehension, moving into the realm of sensual encounter. While asemic writing looks like, but isn’t writing, this chapter argues that it can be read and translated if approached through Tong King Lee’s theory of memesis and ludic translation, and Clive Scott’s notion of translation as “centrifugal” and his focus on the active participation of the reader in the text. The chapter presents findings from two public workshops which focused on collaborative, creative translations of asemic texts. Exploring performative embodiment and materialities in translation, the authors argue that the asemic takes on the meaning of a universal in-between language where material gesture is expanded and encapsulated in sound and movement. They conclude that it is above all uncertainty, the hallmark of the asemic, which is central to meaning-making per se.
