The Magic of Translation

Run this line of BASIC code and it blossoms into a maze, it takes on aesthetic qualities that lie dormant in the line itself. Like a Benjaminian original, the act of running the code confers on the line its aura – a magic that yields, as its aesthetic translation, a maze. For those of us who need the translation, the maze lightens the task of understanding the original, provides a pathway, itself perhaps labyrinthine, back to the original line. Translations open up originals and studying code helps us understand that, if languages and their close study has not. A translation speaks volumes about its original; indeed the original cannot claim its place as “original” until its translation confers its originality. The maze may appear somewhat chaotic, and the “slashes” quickly reveal themselves without any easily discernable pattern – indeed a pattern, it turns out, best and most succinctly expressed as a line of code, namely 10 PRINT CHR$(109+RND(1)*2); : GOTO 10. 

If this line is not English (or “human-readable” finally, though the term is convenient, I suppose), its meaning is revealed in its visualization.

Also in this part: Ezra Pound famously translated Chinese without understanding it. Others have done this rather less famously (and perhaps less successfully). That’s like translating another sort of code = translating a secret to which one is not privy or an encryption that won’t finally be unlocked adequately.