On the third night of the festival the writer knocked on the door of the simultaneous translation booth.

He said, “I want you to translate with less enthusiasm. Something about your voice annoys me.”

The translator yawned and rubbed his eyes.

“What?”

“Once again, although I’m sure you heard me, I want you to curb your enthusiasm a little bit during translation,” the writer said to him, standing his body up on his tiptoes for part of a second.

He does this occasionally, as if to emphasize his words with a sharp body gesture. Especially when he’s tense.

This is not the first time he’s confronted his translators.

The last time he traveled abroad they chose a sophisticated translator for him, a tall handsome young man, and at the beginning of any encounter the audience thought the translator was the writer and the writer was the translator. They didn’t hesitate for a moment, the minute they saw him they grabbed his hands and shook it vigorously, and the son of a bitch would smile slyly and was in no rush to correct the mistake. The writer thought seriously about asking the organizers to replace him. But in the end he pitied the young man—didn’t want to get him fired and cut off his income.

He survived a week of humiliations, occasional looks that were seemingly contemptuous from his translator, and at other times empathetic looks—but the kind of empathy that isn’t much different from contempt in the end.

But this time … it’s strange. He decided that he would not expose himself to a similar humiliation—he insisted to the festival organizers that the translator was to sit in a closed booth far from the audience and they could listen to the translation through headphones. He relaxed a bit once he met the translator when he arrived: he was a very normal person and not particularly attractive.

Despite all this, the people gathered around him after the reading and shook his hands and patted his shoulder and congratulated him on his performance. As for the writer, who is supposed to be the center of attention, there were a few older women who got close to him very shyly and rained on him questions and stories about the loneliness and boredom they suffer from on a daily basis.

And when he knocked on the door of the translator he had really had enough. No. He did not have to put with all this.

The translator scratched his head and said: “But what a strange request. Don’t you want people to admire your words?”

“Yes, of course, don’t be silly. But I don’t want them to admire your delivery.”

“I don’t understand you, my delivery is your delivery, no? Did I ever mention to you that I’m one of your biggest fans? I’ve observed you well. I watched videos of you before you came. Even the way you move your hands when you speak, I’ve memorized it and I use it while I’m sitting in the cabin. All this is reflected in my performance, even if the audience can’t see it.”

To prove what he said, the translator raised his right hand to head height and started shaking it like a bird wing. The writer stood in his place, his mouth gaping. The moment he saw the other copying his hand gestures he had a frightening hallucination: he felt like he was looking in the mirror, a mirror of flesh and blood. True, the translator was short, bald and fat like him, and there was no difference between them in age…

After a few seconds, or minutes, or even hours of silence, he pushed himself and gathered the last bit of energy he had and said:

“Listen to me. It’s my reading and I’m free to do with it as I please. So when I ask you to do a bad translation then you do a bad translation, understood?”

But he didn’t calm down for the whole night and he couldn’t close an eyelid. And when the alarm clock rang he had decided what he had to do. He went to the festival administration and told them he would read his texts from the translation booth.

Mirror by Mahmoud Tawfik, short story from Blu (Dar Merit, Cairo, 2013)

1. Huit Tableaux et un Prototype, exhibitions at Galerie Claude Givauden, Paris, 1969 and 1970

STURTEVANT: Repeated—

HAINLEY: Exactly.

STURTEVANT: The same show.

LOBEL: Is that one year after the other?

STURTEVANT: Yes.

HAINLEY: Yes.

STURTEVANT: Yes.

HAINLEY: Sixty-nine and ’70.

LOBEL: So it’s the same show—

STURTEVANT: Exactly the same show.

LOBEL: —the following year. [Laughs.]

STURTEVANT: The following year, yes. [They laugh.] Yes, very strong show.

HAINLEY: Strong, and it’s so strong, you can do it twice. [They laugh.]

STURTEVANT: You can do it twice, yes. Well, it was a very good way to demonstrate the power of repetition, you know, in a very simplistic way.

2. America America, exhibition at Galerie J, Paris, 1966

HAINLEY: And I just wonder, in terms of process, as something that goes on in addition to the physical process of making a work, how would you talk about the scene, the moment—

STURTEVANT: You mean what was going on around us?

HAINLEY: Exactly, as part of process or concept.

STURTEVANT: Well, firstly process because it’s part of the creative process, so it’s very important. Then, yeah, because that must have been—at that time, things were really shifting from interior to exterior, or at that time, you would call it up to the surface. And so—and then all the mass—all the images were from mass society. Mass—what do I want to say?

LOBEL: Mass media?

STURTEVANT: Mass media, or mass—

LOBEL: Or mass culture?

STURTEVANT: Messy mass. [They laugh.] So this is very surface. You’re really going to the outside, and then all the collectors were very much into that, so then you had all those artists that were involved with the outside. And so the work became—it was still about beauty, but it was not about anything very profound other than, which is profound, a reflection of the society that we were surrounded by.

LOBEL: Speaking of which, can you say anything about the title of the Galerie J show in 1966, which was America, America? Because […] you’re really thinking through the kind of, for me, the possibilities of this kind of process and practice. And to have it in Paris and call it America, America – it seems significant to me.

STURTEVANT: Well that’s because it was all the works. I had Oldenburg; I had Lichtenstein—

HAINLEY: Wesselmann.

STURTEVANT: Wesselmann, and George Segal and [Frank] Stella. That’s America, baby. [Laughs.] I did all that work when I was down in the south of France. I had a studio in the south of France, and so it was on the street level in an old part of Antibes and there was a—it had a big window and because it was open, some guy—[laughs]—I’m sure I told you this story. So some guy stops by and he says are you Jasper Johns? [Hainley and Lobel laugh.] Because I was working on the Flag, and I said, “Yes.” [Hainley and Lobel laugh]. He said, “Oh.” “Here I am.” So I told that story to Jasper and he hated it. [They laugh.] He hated that story.

3. Sturtevant: Studies for Warhol’s Marilyns, Beuys’ Actions and Objects and Duchamp’s etc, Including Film, exhibition catalogue (ed. Judson Rosebush), Everson Museum, New York, 1973

LOBEL: […] one of the things I want to put on the record, because I think it’s something I had totally missed until Bruce pointed it out to me, and it gets back to the issue of copy, although in a much more pointed, technical way, is the catalogue to your 1973 Everson show, which, when I saw it originally, I saw it as a photocopy, and I thought, oh, someone Xeroxed this very poorly. And then, Bruce corrected me and said, “No, the catalog was actually printed.” Am I getting this right? The catalog was—

HAINLEY: —Printed to look like a Xerox copy.

STURTEVANT: Well, it was a Xerox copy that I absolutely insisted had to be printed.

[…]

LOBEL: I’m just saying that it was another way of thinking about this discourse around copy.

STURTEVANT: Copy? What was another way?

LOBEL: Making the catalog like—

HAINLEY: Printing it rather than allowing it—

STURTEVANT: No, no, no, because I don’t think trying—no, I don’t think that was based on copy at all. This is because this was based on the dynamics of repetition, which is nothing to do with copy. And so, repetition is—you have to—repetition is displacement; repetition is difference; repetition is—what else is repetition? Repetition is pushing the limits of resemblance and limitation—repetition is—it has some other factors or dynamics. So it’s not like—it’s not like saying you repeat. See, the interesting thing is, for instance, Andy Warhol repeated, but he did not do repetition. And his brilliance really lies in the fact that he was—because repeat is surface. You’re just talking about the surface. He managed to take repeat and make it into a very, very dynamic thing. So I mean, for me, that’s where his brilliance lies. But repetition has nothing to do with repeating. So I think that’s a basic premise that people do not—

But I’d like to get off this copy nonsense, if we could, because for me, that’s really a finished subject.  And I don’t care whether they think it’s copy or not. You know, we’re moving ahead anyhow.

Excerpts from an interview with Sturtevant conducted in 2007 by Bruce Hainley & Michael Lobel at the Archives of American Art, New York