To stay silent is a situation that leads someone sometimes to consider guilty, sometimes creates confusion and others leads to controversy for his sayings or his actions. However, in the other hand, to remain silent probably is the only way to express the pure reality and hides the only truth that someone has inside him. In the story of Anne Carson ‘’ Variations on the right to remain silent ‘’ the classic author represents exactly this of two substances morph of the silence. Here we have three stories that are mostly represented, and each of them is a different case, but all of them have the same denominator witch is the silence of their words or the silence that covers painting, or the silence that it is hide behind the translation of words.
In the first case something that caught my attention was a word (mwly) the Greek from mythology word that is it is very difficult to translate in English, but even more is difficult to translate and to give the real meaning or the real story that is behind this word. Even if we try to do that this word that for the ancient Greek mythology was something important, will lose this religious power that it has. Furthermore, Francis Bacon has also a silence painting. He wanted to convey the sense through of his painting without to give more explanation, because then, if do so its painting will lose its magic and real meaning of what he wants to convey with his painting. As this article was ending Anne Carson try to translate some fragment poems and she did that in a funny way, because she was trying to translate them with wrong words or with meaning totally different from its original. Emphasizes in this way how much difficult is to translate, and she underlines that some words has to remain silent in order to stay with their truth and real meaning.
The subject that makes me to struggle more and creates me a lot of senses of sadness and of injustice was the story of Joan of Arc. This particular came to the point to prove that we are unable to translate everything and to give to them en exact meaning. She refers to her ‘’voices’’ in her trial, that guided her personality as a God in her life.’’ Voices’’ which she does not want to give physical substation, she does not want to explain how these voices were for her in what shape or what form. She wanted to let them as an abstract which if someone explains it loses its meaning and loses their power. This decision that she took to do not explain clearly the meaning of the voices and to translate them in the real world, by letting them in silence was finally her condemnation in the court, it something that makes me thinking that a silence make really troubles, and brings injustices. That point leads me to think even more about the title of this article ‘’ variations on the right to remain silent’’. Her right to remain silent and to do not explain the meaning of these voices gave to other people the right to make her guilty.
Questions 1 ) : The title of the article is ‘’ Variations on the right to remain silent’’, how this right to remain silent it is expressed and responds in the stories of the article.
Question 2) : Do you have ever think in the way that Anne Carson thinks about the silence of the words that are untranslated? Do you have ever think how much power has an untranslated word or action?