Using Pinterest as a Montage for Literary Translation Practice

Christiana Hills

Prelude

In my practice as a literary translator from French, I have increasingly

found online image retrieval tools such as Google Image Search to be useful

both for expanding of my research process and creating a visual archive of

that process. I started using image retrieval when a professor in my

graduate program in translation recommended it for looking up specific

technical terms whose English rendering in a bilingual dictionary provided

little understanding.1 However, in my own practice, I soon found online

image searches useful for all kinds of references that came up in my

translations—historical figures, geographic features, specific animals and

plants, works of art, or indeed anything for which a visual reference could

greatly enhance a definition in a monolingual foreign dictionary or the list of

English options offered in a bilingual dictionary.

When I started translating the French novel Cent vingt et un jours by

Michèle Audin (2014), I soon found myself using image searches more than

usual due to the novel’s multiple historic settings and the high number of

cultural references. At that time, I also happened to be reading the English

translation of W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001) and was fascinated

1 I believe the French word I was trying to understand at the time was jerrican, for which the bilingual dictionary gave “jerrycan,” offering me no real revelation. On the other hand, a Google image search led me to recognize the large, military green gasoline containers bearing the mysterious name I was sure of having never heard before.

1

with the way in which Sebald incorporated images with his text without

directly referring to them or adding captions, in such a way that readers are

left to interpret how the images and the text relate to each other. Reading

Austerlitz inspired me to find a way to make a record of how my image-

searching interacted with my translation practice. I decided to create a

visual archive of these images, to which I could refer throughout the

process of translating and editing the novel could serve such a purpose.

Since I was already a user of the social media website Pinterest, I knew it

would serve as a good platform for the type of “visual archive” I wanted to

create. I will return to the specificities of Pinterest in the second half of this

paper.

In reading some of the works of Walter Benjamin since completing my

translation of Audin’s novel, I have come to realize that my process of

creating a visual archive has something akin to Benjamin’s idea of the

montage as a way to piece together fragments in order to discover new

truths. In my case, the fragments were images related to my translation that

I collected from the Internet, then saved in a montage that juxtaposes them

and allows them to interact with each other in new and unexpected ways.

This paper will explore the connection between Benjamin’s montage and my

own method in order to explore the unexpected possibilities that digital

montage creation can offer the practice and of literary translators.

2

Benjamin’s Conception of Montage

Before explaining my method in more detail, it will be useful here to

elucidate Benjamin’s conception of the montage and how it can be applied

to methods of image collecting such as my own. Benjamin’s monumental

Passagen-Werk, known in English as the Arcades Project (1999), which he

began in 1927 and left incomplete at his death in 1940, consists of

thousands of fragments of historical data—citations from various sorts of

texts, photographs, and illustrations—related to the rise of capitalism in

nineteenth-century Paris, along with some of Benjamin’s own commentary,

notes, and preliminary exposés, all ordered chronologically and grouped

thematically into thirty-six files, called “convolutes.” Since, as Buck-Morss

(1989) notes, the Arcades Project as a text does not actually exist, even as a

draft, we are left only with “an astoundingly rich and provocative collection

of outlines, research notes, and fragmentary commentary” (5-6).

Nevertheless, both the content and the form of the Arcades Project have

proven a rich source of academic scholarship and artistic inspiration.

Indeed, it is its fragmented form that concerns us here.

Benjamin himself described his method for the Arcades Project as

“literary montage,” as discussed in Convolute N:

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything.

Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious

formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but

allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use

of them. (1999: 460 [Nla,8])

3

While we will never know the exact form in which Benjamin planned to

“make use” of the fragments he had collected, the Arcades Project as we

know it can be viewed as a montage of various fragments. We might have a

clue from the following comment, which appears earlier in Convolute N:

“This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without

quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage” (458

[N110]). The notions of “merely showing” and “citing without quotation

marks” are central to the entire project in its unfinished state, since the

juxtaposed fragments are left up to the reader for interpretation. Although

it is likely that Benjamin planned to expand his collection of fragments as

Buck-Morss (1989) has suggested, the unfinished nature of the Arcades

Project lends itself to epitomizing Benjamin’s conception of what a montage

of textual fragments could do.

Benjamin made prolific use of fragmentation and citation throughout

his writing career, notably in the Origin of German Tragic Drama ([1925]

1998a) and One-Way Street ([1928] 1998b). Throughout his life, Benjamin

developed a method of philosophical thinking to which fragmentation was

central. This method is perhaps most fully developed in his last completed

essay, titled “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in English ([1940] 1968).

In this essay, Benjamin describes his unique conception of what should be

the task of historical materialists: rather than seeking to view a historical

period “as it really was,” the historical materialist can only grasp the past

“as an image which flashes up at the instant it can be recognized and is

4

never seen again” (255). By collecting the rubble of the past, “he grasps the

constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one”

(263) and that constellation brings a moment of awakening and

understanding. This method is also described in Convolute N of the Arcades

Project:

A central problem of historical materialism that ought to be seen in

the end: Must the Marxist understanding of history necessarily be

acquired at the expense of the perceptibility of history? Or: in what

way is it possible to conjoin a heightened graphicness to the

realization of the Marxist method? The first stage in this undertaking

will be to carry over the principle of montage into history. That is, to

assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most

precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the

small individual moment the crystal of the total event. And, therefore,

to break with vulgar historical naturalism. To grasp the construction

of history as such. In the structure of commentary.” (1999: 461

[N2,6])

The Arcades Project exemplifies this method, since Benjamin sought to

grasp the history of the rise of capitalism in nineteenth-century Paris by

collecting citations from a wide variety of sources and building large-scale

constructions out of them. Thus, each convolute of the Arcades Project is

organized under key words such as “Fashion,” “The Collector,” or

“Prostitution, Gambling,” in which the citations and commentary present

contradicting ideas of modernity. As Buck-Morss writes, “the same

5

conceptual elements appear in several images, in such varying

configurations that their meanings cannot be fixed or combined into a non-

contradictory picture” (1989: 55). At times, such contradictory fragments

“plunge the interpreter into an abyss of meanings, threatening her or him

with an epistemological despair” (54). Yet these contradicting ideas would

form what Benjamin called a “dialectical image” when the reader grasped

them together and they crystallize in a moment of awakening that presents

that reader with the truth of the past. As Buck-Morss elaborates, Benjamin

sought “a graphic, concrete representation of truth” in which “historical

images” rendered philosophical ideas visible (1989: 55). His search to give

the reconstruction of history a “heightened graphicness” resulting in a

method emphasizing the creation of dialectic images and an organized

structure out of the disorder of the “rags and refuse” of diverse citations.

Theodor Adorno famously criticized Benjamin’s method in a letter to

him written on November 10, 1938, stating that the “ascetic” nature of the

work allowed Benjamin “to abstain from conclusive theoretical questions

throughout the text” to the point of “allow[ing] the questions themselves to

become apparent only to initiates” (508). In other words, according to

Adorno, Benjamin does not present any sort of clear argument in the

Arcades Project, rather leaving theoretical questions and interpretation up

to readers. However, it is exactly the fact that Benjamin did not offer any

conclusive theoretical interpretation that allows the Arcades Project to

remain open to so many possibilities of interpretation, not only in the

6

scholarly realm but also as an inspiration for artistic creation, as Dillon

(2004) has aptly recognized. Dillon and others have even suggested viewing

the work as a precursor to the hypertext and other postmodern forms of

textual and digital media, including, as I will argue, my method of digital

montage for literary translation.

Besides, it should not be forgotten that the Arcades Project does in

fact contain a significant amount of Benjamin’s own commentary, as shown

in the quoted passages from Convolute N above. As Buck-Morss points,

Tiedemann, the original German editor of the Arcades Project, disagreed

with Adorno’s literal interpretation of Benjamin’s “literary montage” as

being composed simply of quotations. Instead, Tiedemann saw Benjamin’s

fragmented commentary as an integral part of the Arcades montage

construction, such that “in place of mediating theory, the form of

commentary was to have appeared, which [Benjamin] defined as

‘interpretation out of the particulars’” (qtd. in Buck-Morss 1989: 74).

Recalling the quote above from [N2,6], we can thus conceive of the entire

Arcades Project as built “[i]n the structure of commentary” that, as Buck-

Morss argues, “gives support and coherence to the whole” (1989: 77).

Before we move on, we should note the way in which Benjamin’s

concept of “montage” differs from that of the “mosaic,” a conception he

outlines in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1998a). In combining

various quotations concerning the German Trauerspiel, Benjamin conceived

of a method of writing akin to the mosaic, which he outlines in the book’s

7

Prologue, in which the disparate fragments would combine and a single

“underlying idea” would emerge from the constellation (28-29). While

Benjamin’s notion of the montage developed from the mosaic, the former

differs in that its fragments never come together to form a unified idea.

Rather, the dialectic image that emerges from the fragments maintains all

their contradictions, in such a way that, like a Dada or Surrealist montage,

the fragments remain distinct even as their constellation provides an

awakening.

Relating Image Collection to Arcades Project

While the principle montage of the Arcades Project is its vast configuration

of texts, scholars of Benjamin and of literary history in general have

discussed the possibility of applying it to images. After all, as Max Pensky

(2004) has observed, the original notion of “montage” was a configuration

of images, named for the Dada and Surrealist practices in which discarded

materials were assembled in a construction designed to shock the viewer

through the defamiliarization effect caused by the objects being used in a

new way (186). Neither movement sought to create a new whole image out

of the construction, since the shock came out of the tension the mounted

fragments created with each other. We can therefore already see the

relation to Benjamin’s “literary montage” to this method, since he sought a

similar effect of defamiliarization that would bring the reader to a point of

awakening and understanding when they grasped a dialectic image from

the juxtaposed fragments.

8

Besides this relation to the avant-garde origin of montage, Benjamin

himself may have intended to include many more actual images in the

Arcades Project itself, as he is reported to have amassed a large collection

of photographs and illustrations for the project (Dillon 2004). While many of

these images were lost, several have since been recovered by scholars

based on the specificity of Benjamin’s descriptions of them, and Buck-Morss

has notably included many of these found photographs along with several

more related historical images in The Dialectics of Seeing (1989), her

acclaimed book-length study of the Arcades Project.

Moving beyond the scholarly realm, many artists have viewed the

Arcades Project as an invitation to create their own multimedia of a

fragmentary nature, particularly those involving photography and

hypertexts (Dillon 2004). As Dillon writes in Section 4 of his article, such

artists have borrowed from Benjamin “a method of juxtaposing multiple and

incompatible accounts of particular phenomena drawn from diverse

sources, forcing readers who want to make a coherent account to do some

work with the fragments.” Just as the Arcades Project forces readers to

make the connections, such multimedia works force viewers to interact with

the material to find meaning out of the juxtaposed fragments.

If Benjamin was justified in borrowing a method from the literary

avant-garde and carrying it from the aesthetic realm to critical

historiography (Pensky 2004: 185), an application that adds a “graphicness”

to a critical approach of a literary method does not seem so great a jump as

9

it may first appear. Such is my approach to translation in using image

searches to create a visual archive of my literary translation projects, as I

will discuss in the next section.

The Relevance of Image Searches to Literary Translation

While little has been written in the academic sphere about the usefulness of

image searches for translation (literary or otherwise), online platforms for

writing of a more informal nature concerned with practical questions of

translation, such as professional and pedagogical blogs and forums for

translators, often mention it as a useful technique for translators, but

without going into much detail. After one user of a ProZ professional

translator’s forum suggested a few examples of how it can be done, another

user asked a pertinent question for this juncture of my argument: what use

can images have for those working with words?2

A large part of the relevancy of images to my project may well be the

fact that the content of Cent vingt et un jours is deeply embedded in the

political and cultural history of France in the first half of the twentieth

century, with a particular focus on the events of two World Wars and how

they affected university students and professors in the cities of Paris and

Strasbourg. However, like the Arcades Project, the text’s form is just as

meaningful as its content. In fact, Cent vingt et un jours is highly

2 From ProZ forum thread titled “Using image search during translation,” last modified February 26, 2014, accessed May 5, 2016, http://www.proz.com/forum/translation_theory_and_practice/264992-using_image_search_during_translation.html.

10

fragmentary in nature, containing eleven chapters that each appear in a

different genre or several genres, including a fairytale, a diary, a series of

newspaper articles, a transcribed interview, a description of a photograph,

scholarly research notes, and even a “binder” containing various letters,

notes, articles, receipts, and postcards. Indeed, Cent vingt et un jours could

even be viewed as a fictional cousin to the Arcades Project, since many of

its fragments are exactly the kind of “historical data” that Benjamin

collected for his monumental work.3

In my case, the “data” I used to create my montage came out of the

novel itself. My process consisted of the following: whenever I came across

a word in the text whose referent seemed to extend beyond my knowledge—

such as historical figures and events, references to cultural works, or

geographical features and locations—I found one or more images through

Google Image Search that represented that reference for me based on my

conception of it in the text. At times, I performed background research

online before finding an image in order to gain a better understanding of

how that reference connected with the text and why the author might have

chosen to include it. For any given image search online, I was immediately

confronted with a montage produced by the algorithms behind Google

Image Search that provided thousands of possibilities for images that could

correspond with the reference I was searching (Figure 1). After all, the 3 Another constellation for which I lack the room to discuss here: the final chapter of Cent vingt et un jours is a description of the streets of modern-day Paris told firsthand by a narrator-turned flâneur as he decides to walk home from a funeral in Montmartre Cemetery.

11

Internet has become the arcade of the twenty-first century, filled with

millions of “wish-images” at our fingertips that have been commodified and

pulled out of their contexts.4 My method can therefore be considered as one

way to rescue these images from oblivion and shock them with the history

Audin explores in her novel.

Figure 1: Example of the montage created by a Google Image Search for “Robert-le-diable,” a cultural reference that appears in Cent vingt et un jours.

4 In his 1935 exposé titled, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” which appears at the beginning of the Arcades Project, Benjamin writes that wish images are “images in the collective consciousness in which the old and the new interpenetrate” that causes the constant drive for novelty spurred by capitalism (1999: 4). According to Pensky, wish images are “sedimented in a society’s material culture; in its commodities, its institutions of consumption and distraction, its building styles and architectural fashions, its popular literature” (2004: 192) and that the only possibility of escape from such a cycle is the transformation of wish images into dialectic images in a moment of awakening (193).

12

To offer a clearer idea of the types of references I was researching,

here are some examples (as they appear in my translated version) of

references that led me to search for images, preceded by categories in bold:

- Clothing: “Christian… will wear the full uniform of the École

Polytechnique” (Audin 2016: 29)

- Nature: “There is a butterfly with my name—no, not G., Robert-le-Diable.”

(58)

- Film: “the filming of Les visiteurs du soir in Paris. The flames coming up to

lick the hands of Jules Berry (the devil).” (93)

- Photography: “The Moulin Rouge, red, not dark gray like the last time I

saw it in a black and white archival photo showing two German soldiers

joking with two blonde women.” (146)

- Historical event: “On August 27th, [1944], Clermont-Ferrand was liberated

as well. This, too, was a collective outpouring of jubilation. The female

Alsatian students who had been taking refuge in the town along with the

University of Strasbourg for almost five years made traditional costumes

with big black headdresses and danced in the Place de Jaude.” (97)

- Architecture: “Underneath the bridge of Rue Caulaincourt are the iron

columns supporting it, forged in 1888 in the blast furnaces of Montluçon.”

(146)

In the appendix at the end of this paper, I have included the images from

my Pinterest board that related to the above quotations to “merely show”

how such fragmentary references and images might relate to each other.

How can such image searches apply to Benjamin’s method of

montage, specifically as used in the Arcades Project? While there are many

13

possibilities, what I am thinking of is the way in which readers, being in a

dreamlike state, often skip over cultural references they don’t recognize. As

the translator of Audin’s novel, part of how I interpret my responsibility to

the text is having a basic knowledge of the references mentioned and how

they might relate to the text. I therefore do not allow myself to “skip over”

references. Rather, as soon as I come across a reference in the text, it

becomes as a “found object” for me, and I seek a way to rescue it from

possible oblivion—ignorance, apathy—by finding historical images

connected with it. This process can be seen as a way of giving a “shock” to

the configuration of the literary text itself by breaking its language into

images from the past that nevertheless correspond with our present in

various ways, whether linking back to websites for history or tourism, or

being themselves digital forms of modern photographs. Indeed, living as we

are in the age of digital reproduction, the freedom of these images to

circulate and be collected in methods such as mine points to their potential

for alternative, revolutionary methods of reading.

Creating a Pinterest Montage

Thus far, I hope to have illustrated the relevance of online image retrieval

for literary translation research and how such a method relates to

Benjamin’s conception of the montage as exhibited in his Arcades Project.

In this final section, I hope to address why I specifically chose Pinterest as a

platform for saving and displaying my image collection, and how it can offer

14

an expanded conception of montage as an alternative method for reading

and translating literary texts.

Besides Pinterest, there are several alternatives I could have used for

my collections of digital images. Rather than posting them to an online

platform, I could have saved them to my personal computer in an image file

or pasted them to a document in a word processing program. Or I could

have made a physical montage by printing the images and mounting them

on some type of board, thus returning to the Dada and Surrealist methods

for combining visual fragments. There are even several alternatives to

Pinterest on the Internet for posting images, including interactive platforms

for blogging and digital collaboration. Indeed, these methods and others

imaginable could have allowed me more agency in terms of the

arrangement of the images and the text I chose to include with them.

However, as I will explain in this final section, Pinterest was the only

platform that appealed to me as I was formulating my method because of

the ease with which I could add images from anywhere on the Internet and

the way images cannot be rearranged, but rather remain in the order they

are posted.5

Phillips, Miller, and McQuarrie (2014) describe Pinterest as “a web-

enabled form of scrapbooking and collage” (633) which has only become

viable as such within the last few years due to “the costless abundance of

5 My Pinterest board to which I will refer throughout this final section can be viewed at the following link: https://www.pinterest.com/christianahills/translation-cent-vingt-et-un-jours.

15

imagery” now available on the Internet (642). Once a user joins Pinterest,

s/he can “pin” an unlimited number of images to an unlimited number of

“boards” s/he creates. The pins on boards cannot be rearranged, since they

are simply saved in the order they are pinned with the newest pins at the

top. Users can give boards titles and descriptions, and tend to organize

them by subject. In addition, each pin includes a space underneath it where

users can include their own caption.

As Phillips, Miller, and McQuarrie note, Pinterest use can be viewed

as a form of digital production and consumption, since users often engage

with the site as a source for inspiration that will likely lead to future

purchases and/or creations (641). With common board topics such as

recipes, home décor ideas, and wedding plans, it may not seem immediately

clear how Pinterest could be used for a purpose other than finding

consumerist “wish-images” that fulfill desires for consumption prompted by

our capitalist culture. However, several features make the site conducive

for alternative aims of collecting images such as my own.6 First, as

mentioned above, Pinterest allows for a seamless way to save images from

anywhere on the Internet to a set interface. Thanks to a free Pinterest

extension I added to my Internet browser, I can save an image with a single

right-click and customize its board and caption without even going to

6 Other alternative uses for Pinterest that I have seen include teachers finding inspiration for student projects and ways to display them, artists displaying their portfolios, history professors collecting art depicting notable historical personalities, and avid readers saving collections of their favorite book titles or links to their favorite literary articles.

16

Pinterest itself. Second, because the images I pin to the board must be

displayed in chronological order by when I added them, they reflect my

research process over time. While the sequence images roughly follow the

order they appear in the book, there are some I added as I did further

research on certain references during the editing process, thus revealing

how my research process wasn’t always linear through the book. Third, the

way in which the images are juxtaposed on a single board (see Figure 2)

bears a striking similarity to the way in which Google Image Search displays

images, thus allowing the way in which the images are arranged to mimic

my search process. Finally, because Pinterest is a social media platform, my

board is automatically a “public artefact” (Phillips, Miller, and McQuarrie

2014: 636), since any Pinterest user can view my board and even “repin”

any of the images to their own boards.

17

Figure 2: My Pinterest board for Cent vingt et un jours (partial view from the top

of the page)

These features lead to several resemblances with both Benjamin’s

Arcades Project and his conception of the montage, the most prescient

being the question of authorship. While montages present the illusion of

having no authorial intention, they are always created by a subjective

organizing force. For example, Surrealist montage is organized by what

Pensky calls the “principle of construction,” that is, the series of decisions

as to what fragments will be included and how they will be arranged and

mounted (2004: 186). Similarly, the highly organized nature of the Arcades

Project—not only in terms of the convolutes, but also the way the fragments

are ordered inside each convolute—points to a certain “principle of

construction” Benjamin used.

As illustrated above, the very choice of Pinterest to display my image

collection points to my subjective principle of construction for the project.

Moreover, Phillips, Miller, and McQuarrie note that “the retention,

placement and omission of certain images reveal a distinct view of the

world that can be identified” (2014: 638). Indeed, I selected images for

references based on my idea of how those references were represented in

the book, as well as for their own aesthetic qualities. For example, a certain

photographic perspective out of many may have captured the way I pictured

a character interacting with a statue, or the quality and color of modern-day

photographs may have appealed to my aesthetic sensibilities more than

18

historic, black and white ones. However, because I did not keep a record of

why I chose certain images over others, that aspect can be added to the

theoretical questions left for viewers of the board seeking to understand my

conception of the text. The captions for each pin are another customizable

element on Pinterest, yet when using image that others had previously

posted on Pinterest, I usually chose to leave the caption unchanged, which

Phillips, Miller, and McQuarrie note is in fact a common practice among

Pinterest users (641). This choice may point to my emphasis on the images

themselves in my research process rather than the text accompanying them.

In a similar manner, in cases where I created a new pin from another site, I

tended to simply add a basic descriptive caption that would remind me of

what the image represented, which often came from the website where I

had found it. I never thought to make the connection between the images

and the texts explicit, in part because I already knew what those

connections were. In this way, such connections are left for readers of the

text to find for themselves in viewing the board, which leaves open the

possibilities for them to create their own “dialectic images” out of the

juxtaposed fragments.

In spite of the high amount of subjectivity in the creation of Pinterest

boards, there are certain unexpected effects caused by the Pinterest

platform that point to its potential for multiple interpretations, the first

being “image clusters.” Due to the automatic chronological ordering

mentioned above, there are several places on the board where clusters of

19

similar images appear—such as the various details from the Montmartre

Cemetery shown in Figure 3. Phillips, Miller, and McQuarrie observe that

this is a common feature of Pinterest boards in general, caused when

pinners “fixate” on a certain idea (2014: 646). In my case, these clusters

were either created when I chose to include several different images

representing the same reference on the board, or when several similar

references appeared together in the text, such as the description of

Montmartre Cemetery in the book’s final chapter which mentions various

tombstones, pathways, and the iron bridge constructed over part of the

cemetery. These image clusters bear something akin to the Arcades

convolutes, in that, while representing the same concept, they offer up

differing depictions that challenge the notion that any idea can be

represented with a single image. Like the mix of citations and commentary

in each of Benjamin’s convolutes, the real image I was seeking in creating

the board appears to the viewer in the form of a “dialectic image” that

crystallizes in his or her mind while viewing the images together on a

computer screen.

20

Figure 3: Partial view of my Pinterest board showing cluster of images from the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris in black boxes.

Another unexpected effect that leads to multiple interpretations is the

mutability of the way images can be displayed Pinterest. While pins on a

given board remain in the order in which they were posted, the way in

which they appear changes based on a user’s screen resolution, zoom level,

and the type of device s/he is using to view the board. For example, the

configurations shown in Figures 2 and 3 are both from screenshots taken on

my laptop at a 67% zoom level. At a 100% zoom level, the images appear

larger, but fewer can be viewed together at once (Figure 4). Such mutability

grants viewers the power to customize their viewing experience and

expands the possibilities for interaction.

21

Figure 4: Partial view of my Pinterest board with 100% zoom level.

Thirdly, while there is a certain “construction principle” behind the

way in which I added images and how they are displayed, the content of the

images does not follow a temporal progression in terms of when they were

created. Just as the past and the present are juxtaposed frequently in Cent

vingt et un jours, there is a constant dialectic between the past and present

on my board. Black and white photographs of ephemeral moments from the

past mingle with modern-day color photographs of sites mentioned in the

novel that can still be visited today. Similarly, the entire board invites a

dialectic between history and fiction, since all the images “appear” in the

fictional text in one way or another, but real references for them can be

found in the ever-growing historical archive of the Internet.

Finally, I did not anticipate the extent to which the intertextual nature

of the images would be explicit to viewers and take part in the dialectics of

22

the board. Yet, as Phillips, Miller, and McQuarrie argue, “the juxtaposition

of images [on Pinterest] from different contexts produces a commentary on

those contexts,” (2014: 636). The intertextuality of Cent vingt et un jours

achieves a graphicness in the abovementioned juxtapositions between old

black-and-while photographs and modern color ones, between the various

references to diverse geographic locations, historical events and people,

and artistic works. In addition to the explicit intertextuality of the images,

the captions below the images intertextually reference the first pinner and

the picture’s original source, as well as commentary of previous pinners if

the caption has been left unchanged (637). These captions therefore leave

traces of where I found them on the Internet and the text others chose to

include with them.

As my analysis of these unexpected effects suggests, in spite of my

subjective agency in creating the board and choosing images and text to

include on it, my montage holds the potential for multiple interpretations

from viewers that go beyond my intentions for the board. While such

interpretive potential exists for all forms of artistic media we engage with,

forms of media that are highly fragmented and explicitly intertextual do not

explicitly state or show their creator’s intention, but rather allow those

interacting with them the illusion of greater freedom to make their own

associations and connections. Thus, while the Arcades Project did not fulfill

Benjamin’s suggested method of “not saying anything” but rather “merely

showing” through a montage of citations (1999: 460 [N1a,8]), Adorno’s

23

criticism in his 1938 letter to Benjamin shows that such a method

nevertheless hides the montage-maker’s hand well, freeing the reader of the

clutches of perceived authorial intention. In a similar manner, Dillon claims

at the beginning of his article that current artists who make use of montage

“attempt to do critique without an integrating authorial voice” (2004). This

may in a large part be due to the intertextuality inherent to montage in the

way it brings together diverse, fragmented sources. Yet we must remember

that the “construction principle” holds for all creations, no matter how

fragmented.

While I have explained above how my montage relates to Benjamin’s

Arcades Project and his conception of montage, the question remains how it

directly relates to my translation of Michèle Audin’s Cent vingt et un jours—

that is, how do the images relate to the text? This list, by no means

exhaustive, will suggest a few possibilities to conclude. First, as mentioned

above, I always saved at least one image at the end of a research trail, in

such a way that each image can serve for me as a madeleine that brings

back up that research process for me as I contemplate it. Secondly, my

montage also serves to blur the lines between reality and fiction, perhaps

going even further than the text itself in doing so. By finding photographic

“evidence” of the real places where fictional characters lived and worked,

real events they attended, real uniforms they wore, real people they

interacted with, and real documents (newspapers, academic journals,

literary works, but also food tickets, posters, and anti-Semitic signs) that

24

they read, my images invite a dialectic with the text that can bring readers

to question the historical nature of the text, which blurs fact and fiction so

masterfully. Finally, as the above discussion of authorship and

intertextuality brought to light, my montage of images does not seek to fix a

certain meaning to the text, but rather expand the possibilities of meaning

beyond the words in the text. This is especially relevant for places where I

found several images to represent different views of the same idea, or

images that correspond with several places in the text. As Buck-Morss

writes of photomontage, such a method “allows the gap between sign and

referent to remain visible” which allows the montage-maker “to represent

their identity in the form of a critique” (1989: 62). Indeed, my montage is

a commentary on the text, just as my translation is a commentary on

Audin’s French text, for interpretation is inevitable in the process of

translation, whether translating words into images or French into English.

In this way, my “Pinterest montage” serves as an alternative site for

my translation of Cent vingt et un jours that forms a constellation with the

translated text, forcing readers to find their own truth if they choose to

interact with them both. It destabilizes the text as a space for alternative

trajectories of research, representation, and interpretation. Just as Buck-

Morss has written of the Arcades Project, such a constellation “makes of us

historical detectives even against our will, forcing us to become actively

involved in the reconstruction of the work” (1989: x). This notion of

reconstruction calls to mind Benjamin’s essay on the translator’s task, in

25

which a translation and its original are both mere fragments of a greater

vessel of pure language ([1923] 2012: 81). Thus my method of creating a

montage of images out of my translation process brings the translation to a

place beyond language where images can help readers to form new

constellations between the past and the present, fiction and history, image

and text.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. 1938. “306. Theodore W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin.”

In The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910-1940, edited and

annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, translated by

Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson, 579-591. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Audin, Michèle. 2014. Cent vingt et un jours. Paris: Gallimard. Translated

into English by Christiana Hills as One Hundred Twenty-One Days,

Dallas: Deep Vellum, 2016.

Benjamin, Walter. (1923) 2012. “The Translator’s Task,” translated by

Steven Rendall. In The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed., edited by

Lawrence Venuti: 75-83. London: Routledge.

——— . (1925) 1998a. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by

John Osborne. London: Verso.

26

——— . (1928) 1998b. One Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by

Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: NLB.

——— . (1940) 1968. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Translated by

Harry Zohn. In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 235-264. New

York: Schocken Books.

——— . 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin

McLaughlin. Prepared on the basis on the German volume edited by

Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University

Press.

Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and

the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dillon, George L. 2004. “Montage/Critique: Another Way of Writing Social

History.” Postmodern Culture 14 (2). doi:10.1353/pmc.2004.0005.

Pensky, Max. 2004. “Method and time: Benjamin’s dialectical images.” In

Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris,

177-198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Phillips, Barbara J., Jessica Miller, and Edward F. McQuarrie. 2014.

“Dreaming out loud on Pinterest: New forms of indirect persuasion.”

International Journal of Advertising 33(4): 633-655.

27

Sebald, W. G. 2001. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York:

Random House.

Appendix: Examples of quotations from Cent vingt et un jours containing extratextual references and their corresponding images from my Pinterest board.

Clothing: “Christian… will wear the full uniform of the École Polytechnique” (Audin 2016: 29)

28

Nature: “There is a butterfly with my name—no, not G., Robert-le-Diable.” (58)

Film: “the filming of Les visiteurs du soir in Paris. The flames coming up to lick the hands of Jules Berry (the devil).” (93)

29

Photography: “The Moulin Rouge, red, not dark gray like the last time I saw it in a black and white archival photo showing two German soldiers joking with two blonde women.” (146)

Historical event: “On August 27th, [1944], Clermont-Ferrand was liberated as well. This, too, was a collective outpouring of jubilation. The female Alsatian students who had been taking refuge in the town along with the University of Strasbourg for almost five years made traditional cos-tumes with big black headdresses and danced in the Place de Jaude.” (97)

30

Architecture: “Underneath the bridge of Rue Caulaincourt are the iron columns supporting it, forged in 1888 in the blast furnaces of Montluçon.” (146)

31

32