Ole Nopea! Multilingual Writing, Google Translate, and the Polaroid

Ole Nopea!Multilingual Writing, Google Translate, and the Polaroid Elena Siemens Click for larger view View full resolution The Polaroid Project Exhibition, McCord Museum, Montreal, 2019. Photo by the author. [End Page 331] “This is not a place where people live on 88th and Third, as in Manhattan,” Tim Weiner writes in “Mexico City Journal: A City Hears Poetry in the Naming of Streets” (Weiner). In Mexico’s capital, Weiner explains, “One can stand on the corner of Tolstoy and Dante, Dickens and Molière, Verdi and Wagner, Socrates and Homer, Shakespeare and Darwin, imagining the conversations” (Weiner). Akin to Diego Rivera’s magical-realist art, Mexico City’s map is crisscrossed with streets named after diverse cultural and historical figures, as well as equally diverse geographical locations. Here, walkers can cross distant countries and continents in no time at all, as, for example, at the intersection of Calle Tokio and Calle Praga (Tokyo and Prague streets) in the Zona Rosa area. Similarly, Calle Dublin is found in close proximity to Paseo de la Reforma and Calle Tokio. Frida Kahlo’s landmark Blue House, her former residence, now a house-museum, is located at the intersection of Londres (London) and Ignacio Allende in Coyoacán. Mexico City’s fast-paced street map corresponds perfectly to the slogan “Ole Nopea!”-“Be fast” in Finnish-in this essay’s title. The seventh of ten “golden rules” of Lomo photography, this particular rule instructs photographers: “Just don’t waste any time with settings, adjustments, setting things up, thinking about it, faffing around and procrastinating. First impressions have a quality all of their own” (What the Hell Is Lomo?). The “Ole Nopea” mandate also defines a set of fast-paced multilingual texts addressed in this essay. Like Eisenstein’s “collision montage,” Joseph Brodsky’s Мексиканский романсеро (Mexican Romancero) captures Mexico’s highs and lows in rapid succession. His poetry shifts freely from Russian to Spanish, transcribed in Cyrillic. Photosynthesis by Vera Polozkova and Olga Pavolga jumps from Russian to untranslated English within a span of just one line. In addition, Photosynthesis mixes words and images, as does Ayumu Takahashi’s experimental travelogue Love and Free, which chronicles the author’s breathless journey around the world. A tangible record of places and people, Polaroid photography-also highlighted in the title-takes virtually no time to process. Its on-the-spot delivery makes the Polaroid a close sibling of the much-debated Google Translate tool that offers instant results. My set of photographs of The Polaroid Project exhibit (2019) in Montreal provides an essential component for this inquiry into “Ole Nopea”-driven texts and images. In Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau points out that “[n]umbered streets and street numbers (112th St., or rue 9 Saint-Charles) orient the magnetic field of trajectories just as they can haunt dreams” (104). He cites the following example: A friend who lives in the city of Sévres drifts, when he is in Paris, toward the rue des Saints-Péres and the rue de Sévres, even though he is going to see his mother in another part of town: these names articulate a sentence that his steps compose without his knowing it. (104) De Certeau writes that this also applies to city spaces beyond Paris: “Saints-Péres, Corentin Celton, Red Square […] these names make themselves available to the diverse meanings given them by passers-by” (104). He further argues that their “rich [End Page 332] indetermination” gives street names “by means of semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning” (105). Click for larger view View full resolution The Polaroid Project Exhibition, McCord Museum, Montreal, 2019. Photo by the author. Sergei Eisenstein, the celebrated director of the classic film Battleship Potemkin (1925), appears to agree. Discussing his experience of navigating New York City, he states that he “found it very difficult to remember the images of New York’s [numbered] streets, and, consequently, to recognize the streets themselves” (“Word and Image” 15). In his opinion, “streets with names at once bring up an image of a given street” (15). Eisenstein had a...

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