Lecture by Ashkan Sepahvand

What are the qualities of movement? If translation is to be imagined as a dispersal, an echo resonating at the edge of a forest (as Walter Benjamin would describe it), then it must be grasped as both process and movement. Thus, more than a relation between the senses and language, translation is an activity that all entities are constantly undergoing, as words, images, and entities both human and nonhuman are dispersed in their everyday movements. These are the thoughts that inform the essay “Between Angel and Sage”, a personal reflection on movement in-the-world and how translation can be treated as a practice of narration. Trying to work beyond origins and destinations, the text treats “migration” specifically as an unfolding process of becoming - all is in flux. To speak of a life, whether that be the journeys of a person, a plant, or an image, means to engage in translation: the practice by which incongruous tales are told. 

Ashkan Sepahvand