Helen Frankenthaler, Monoprint VII

The eye receives reflected light from the sun. The Eyes and Their Care. 1941.

[...] emotion, if the sense of life is inscribed therein, cannot be subordinated to any useful end. Thus the paradox of emotion is that it wants to have much more sense than it does have. Emotion is not tied to the opening of a horizon but to some nearby object, emotion within the limits of reason only offers us a compressed life. Burdened by our lost truth, the cry of emotion rises out of disorder, such as it might be imagined by the child contrasting the window of his bedroom to the depths of the night.

– Georges Bataille, “The Cruel Practice of Art”

“Reading a poem in translation,“ wrote Bialek, “is like kissing a woman through a veil”; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.

– Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

Couro de Gato ("Cat Skin") 1962, dir. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

Robert Mapplethorpe. Untitled (Charles), 1974