ABSTRACT
Studying the translation process today implies going beyond the mere interlinguistic transfer to delve into its complex idiosyncrasies. The new paradigm offers the possibility of opening up frontiers and conceiving this exercise as a plural and collaborative activity in which voices, cultures, spaces, artistic disciplines and media intermingle. The study presented here focuses on translation as performance. Recent studies revolving around the relationship between translation and contemporary art beyond linguistic barriers offer a new and interesting perspective from which to approach hitherto unpublished experimental texts published from postmodernism to the present day. John Cage, for example, experimented with language through multilingual, intersemiotic and intermodal procedures, combining literature with other disciplines such as music, dance and the visual arts. His literary works, composed like pieces of music, cannot be read, understood nor, of course, translated without first approaching them as unitary artistic products, which are at the mercy of a multitude of interpretations and representations that derive from their materiality. The present study includes a selection of interlinguistic translations from English into Spanish and intersemiotic translations into music, dance and even painting, of Cage’s works. In the first of these groups, the author of the publication adds her own experimental translation. This allows her to analyse Cage’s mesostics not only from a theoretical but also from an applied perspective. The porosity through the silences and spaces of these texts suggests that they have been written to be listened to as much as read, thus advocating the application of new translatological theories in which translation and other artistic disciplines (co)exist as a necessary resource for intercultural production as a means of communication.
