![]() ![]() The translator of a poem dismantles a machine of consciousness in one language and rebuilds it in another, and perhaps in this process reveals something about machines, consciousness, and language. As John Culkin famously observed, "We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish." 1 So how can we have perspective on language when we are immersed in it? The medium is the message, and so it may be that the mediating act of translation is a place to start. But it is hard to perceive perception, and harder still to perceive how the mind is processed by the structures of language within works of literature. Poems are small machines constructed to organize and process the mind. ![]() Yet if we are to believe Freud, we can glimpse the unconscious through the cracks in consciousness, through jokes, dreams, fantasies, "Freudian slips," and even through art, which Freud sees as a form of daydreaming. ![]()
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