El arte modernista para Trotsky no podía ser considerado como una nueva cultura sino más bien como una expresión de la tarea y demanda de trascender la sociedad y cultura burguesas.

“If there has ever been a present to work in spite of, it is ours, but how different was that of the late nineteenth century? Or rather, is there a present? No such thing, thought Mallarmé — just a gap that the news tries to paper over.“

n+1 Editor Marco Roth responds to Caesura’s Issue 0 prompt.

The spirit riding through the house of human memory. A taste of heavenliness still melancholy with lived sufferings. The hell of the present through which heaven is found — the finding of which is a middle-ground, and the site of personal, heretical, intense theology.

Michel Leiris’s 1929 essay on the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, translated by Rainer Hanshe.

Frédéric sees the desk where his mother, now passed, did her business, shoved unopened mail, searched for a pen, locked away in a glass case. “Doesn't it seem caged?”

Cualquiera puede solamente verse beneficiado por una buena traducción, porque una traducción actúa sobre y retroactivamente transforma el original.

The re-imagining of Christianity among its livelier adherents is as vital as any secular “poetics.”

El pasado no desaparece en el presente sino que trona hacia el olvido junto con él. El presente es supuesto por el pasado, incluso si no es el futuro que el pasado tenía en mente.

Caesura publica la primera parte del ensayo Traducción como Conquista de Austin Carder traducido al español por Christopher Uribe.

Artists of our generation are so hopeless that they would rather wish for fascism than confront the real challenge of the present.

What’s objectionable for Lehrer is that the products of the culture industry transmit a comfortable (numbing) attitude towards reality as opposed to an “ambiguous” or “critical” one, which art formerly laid claim to.

The art that casts a critical eye towards our society in its totality, or even just employs ambiguity to inspire criticality in its viewers, is met with skepticism, if not hostility.

Art itself doesn’t need to be defended: even when it whispers fake nothings, or indulges suspicious behavior, it speaks more than any defense ever could.

Devlin’s cover-art, in conjunction with the title and text, suggests to me the situation of the astrologer on earth, whose observations describe the dome of the heavens.

If objects — like that dead paintbrush — mean nothing but their functional definition, a human being might well be nothing more than a machine for destroying nature; love, a purely mechanical function.

Conpo replicates the cultural effluvia it poaches with little trace whatsoever, really, of any purposeful détournement.

When people today criticize the leaders of the American Revolution they only project their own narrowness and narcissism onto the conditions of the past. Had the American Revolution been defeated, in 1776 or in 1865, there would be no critique of present freedom possible today and no hope for any greater freedom in the future.

According to a young Courbet, whatever we encounter en masse today might just as well need to be considered a (neo-) Romanticism, waiting for its own Burial in order to explode the heteronomy of the given and the same in which we constantly entrench ourselves.

Rather than trying to convey what is seen through a sentence in the original, the translator should replicate the structure of seeing — the syntax — since this structure registers the most elemental sense of the intention behind the original.