Printer-Poet, Poet-Printer Session III: a fourth and final translation
– on inkage (Divya Victor’s translations of Catullus 99) VULNING
“Ink shrinks space down to the letter.
You will print the earth in its split attention. You will print the sky in its
diffuse impossibility. The work imposes its choice on us. Can [the printer]
claim [her] daring if the choice is bold?”
-- Edmond Jabés
Printer, you work with what the eye sees when an object is
held at a horizontal level. If what your eye sees is a pulled proof of a work that
is not off center or having uneven margins, your desire to follow the impulse
to readjust the type in the chase is not necessary. But printer – you also work
with what the eye should not see as well. A reader of the work you print should
not see or notice the type face you have used; the attention of the eye must fall
elsewhere. Type faces are to be readable and understandable, hence – invisible.
Many a contemporary type face serves to dazzle the eye – to distract it away
from the language and the meaning embedded within the text and to pull it
toward the design of the face.
But what of the history of the face? And what of the choice
made for each letter under this face? How do you represent a type face that is
designed not to be seen? Perhaps this is spoken through the inking on the page,
and with that, how each piece of type can take the inking. Let the invisibility
of such type face be made visible here as you speak the process of working to
ink pieces of Bodoni type from a worn set. Printer, you work within doubled
invisibility.
