When I was in grad school, Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” was appearing on everyone’s reading lists. I read it as part of a poetry translation workshop–a room full of people doing literary translations, lead by a guy who was a professional literary translator. Nikolai Popov said things like “finessing the hermeneutic” and he meant it in the Bridge sense. Moving the poetry of words from one language to another while remaining true to the original artist and getting it just right feels like a winning trick. He taught me it is easier to translate the dirty jokes first because you have more options for synonyms in that vocabulary. His take away on Benjamin, that I agreed with (and it resolved a bit of anxiety when I absorbed it) was that it’s a brilliant piece that isn’t actually at all useful for the task of working translators.The biggest reason, as we discussed it, is that Benjamin is mystical. And mysticism comes down to an ineffable experience that can’t be reduced. You just feel it. You just know it is true. And it is fleeting. If you want to share the experience, you need to leverage religion, or art, or music, or write a poem or however you experience things like communion and harmony.
I went back to Benjamin a while back when I was getting my head around spec driven development and how teams of people work with AI. If AI is going to be doing the coding, if you are handing over the actual form of code to a language model, maintaining the spec is key to ensuring the project delivers on your intentions. Benjamin argues that translators carry the original text forward, extending its life and meaning. A good spec carries the intentions of its authors forward into code and implementation. I wallowed in my “wow, man!” moment and spent too much time trying to explain my enthusiasm to my team. But just as Benjamin’s piece never helped much when I was trying to capture tone, rhyme, and feeling bringing a work from Spanish or Italian into English, I came back to the position “yeah, Benjamin is mystical and probably not going to add value to the SDLC for the enterprise.”
When Rick Rubin first published The Creative Act, I found it to be exciting mysticism, but sort of shelved it because it felt like that irreducible mystical experience that I can feel but doesn’t seem practical for a creator. However, after picking it up again in our AI moment, I’m finding it is actually quite practical because it embraces its mysticism as an impetus that jump starts creating. Embodiment is key here. “Look for what you notice but no one else sees” is a method Rubin advocates for enabling yourself to create. His advice is more literal than metaphorical. He expects you to be intentional with your eyes. He has great advice about how to practice. Exercises you can do to see with your eyes and notice with the part of you that is you. “A practice is the embodiment of an approach to a concept.”
Musicians practice so they can express when they perform. When I upgrade stereo components and speakers, I’ll listen to the same piece performed and recorded by different musicians, and in order to pass the audition the new speakers have to make it easy for me to know if I’m listening to Heifetz, Mutter, Perlman, Hahn, or Dueñas on violin. (And for Perlman, to hear which of his violins he’s using–he seems to trade them out like a golfer picking irons as he progresses down the fairway). Our physical, embodied experience of living is part of what makes us individuals, whether you want to look for souls or minds or inspiration. That part of you that is you. I can’t hear Mutter without thinking about how she only performs in shoulderless dresses so she can get the right grip on her instrument. It’s part of her sound as much as the pretty high notes. And only she makes those sounds even when everyone else plays the same notes.
I’m drawn to both Benjamin and Rubin because they get at that how to craft art that feels like you are exceeding ordinary experience, getting closer to ultimate reality, something grander. During our new AI moment, I’m curious how this new way of putting language to work will make things more beautiful. As an artist drawn to big feelings and romantic impulses, Rubin feels useful because his book prescribes a thoroughly embodied method.
