At Agnes Scott college, there are two mandatory classes first years must attend and participate in: Global Gateways and Leadership Prologue. The two classes are taught with the intent of teaching student leadership and global values in preparation for college, life, and more specifically – the global journey trips taken during the second semester of the school year.
While Global Gateways is a near identical class covering the same content across different professors, all Leadership Prologue courses cover the same topic, leadership, but through different materials and lessons individualized to each course. Such as Leadership Prologue 101, section A.
While other courses focused on leadership through the women’s suffrage movement, Mexican murals, young adult novels, and etc., in Leadership Prologue 101 A we studied leadership through the art of translation. Translation, by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is defined as, “an act, process, or instance of translating: such as a rendering from one language into another”, but in Leadership Prologue 101 A, we freed the art of translation. For our purposes, translating meant to translate or change one medium to another or different medium.
When selecting which Leadership Prologue, I would attend, I chose Freeing the Word: The Art of Translationbecause it involved poetry, an art I personally think I’m good at, and the final project listed sounded interesting. As stated in the blurb describing the course, “The texts we will study include translations across genres–poetry, prose, art, dance, and song–as well as theory. We will consider how to translate through image, sound and body in addition to language. Each student will work towards completing an individual translation project while collaborating with their peers as editors, artists, and performers to gain a deeper understanding of language as a living breathing thing that changes often, just as we ourselves grow and change.” Reading that, my mind began to spark with a multitude of ‘translations’ I could do if I took the class.
My first idea, before attending the course and actually learning about the art of translation, was to capture a series of pictures in an attempt to define and show what a moment entitles. I wanted to depict life but not in a singular meaning, as in my life, but living in general. For reference, I was inspired by John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrowin which he creates new words to describe vague and all-encompassing emotions felt by a collective of people. In theory, my idea sounded good, but it was not concrete. I did not a criteria for the pictures I would capture nor take, nor a time dedicated to taking the pictures. I was basing a project off of random emotions that were not reliable. That and the fact that this project would not have been a translation. I was not translating said photos from a previous medium; I was just creating which was not the purpose of the project.
So, not learning my lesson the first time, I allowed my emotions to dictate me and chose to do my project on Pluto. Spoiler alert, I did do my final project on Pluto, but not as I originally envisioned.
What inspired me to even select Pluto as my subject was a poem, I had written one night after feeling lonely although I was surrounded by my peers. They poem went,
“I feel like a space cadet
But not like I ‘m a foreign entity invading the Galaxy
I’m a celestial body too, but Pluto
So, after centuries of fading away, in the distance I appear smaller
and smaller
and smaller.
My peers no longer recognize me as a part of the solar system.
I’m just a dwarf, a fantasy creature, not even real
A figment in the recesses of your mind
It is cold here, and lonely.
I can feel the darkness wander near”.
The poem itself wasn’t much, but it did inspire me to think about loneliness in the constraints of space and how lonely astronauts must feel when conducting EVAs, extravehicular activities or basically space walks. A seemingly random jump, but here’s my logic. Although astronauts are deployed with five to six other people when launched into space, during EVAs you see yourself in perspective to the universe. You’re surrounded by a chasm of darkness, specks of light, and enormous rocky bodies literally called “celestials”. You, a human of flesh and blood with a likely lifespan of seventy-nine years, are near planetary gods who could blink and see the whole of humanity start, grow, and die.
It is like a gentlemen’s club, a private social club for upper-class British men, expect only planets are allowed and unfortunately humans, nor Pluto, made the cut.
In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), an international association of professional astronomers, held a convention and voted on a working definition of what a planet is. By the IAU, in our solar system:
“A planet is a celestial body that:
- (a) is in orbit around the Sun,
- (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces, so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and
- (c) has cleared the neighborhoods around its orbit.”
By that criteria, Pluto could have been a planet expect for its inability to clear the space around it due to its small mass. So, by technicality, Pluto was excluded from the planetary club and abandoned by its family making the solar system shrink from nine to eight.
So, thinking of it in this light, I felt a kinship between Pluto and I, and wanted to demonstrate it my class as a translation project. But how? The first version of this project was going to be a podcast. I would script a fictional story detailing an astronaut’s fatal accident during an EVA that caused the astronaut to slip into a coma and hallucinate about finding Pluto a new home outside of the solar system. But again, this wouldn’t be a direct translation, merely me creating something new which was not the project’s purpose. So, I was forced to revisit the drawing board.
But I didn’t want to give up on Pluto, so I started doing research, both scientific and literary, and found that I wasn’t the only person interested in Pluto outside of it being an ex-planet. While I held pity and sadness for Pluto, and other poets did as well, there were people who were amazed at Pluto and the environment it lived in. Poet Fatimah Asghar implied that Pluto was a rebel who gave no cares about in place in the solar system because regardless of where Pluto was, it was still Pluto and would continue to “chaos like a motherfucker” (Fatimah Asghar). And her attitude towards Pluto blew my mind because it never crossed my mind that Pluto could be anything outside of pitiful. So, with that in mind, I decided to change my translation project into a translation of literature into drawings with the intent of changing people’s perception of Pluto.
I did so by selecting three poems from various poets, Fatimah Asghar, Maggie Dietz, and Kelli Agodon, and depicted their rendition of Pluto into a drawing. The drawings were two-fold in themselves. Of every drawing, there was a traditionally styled version (with pencil and paper) and a digital version (with an iPad and apple pencil). This was done with the intention of replicating the look of the first images taken of Pluto in 1930 by the Lowell Observatory and the most recent images taken of Pluto in 2015 by NASA’s New Horizons space probe. The first images of Pluto were grainy and black and white while the recent images were colorful and detailed.
The six pictures I created of Pluto differed in style but attempted to capture the same meanings, while Pluto and us, as humans, are lonely, we are not alone. We are empathic beings who feel for one another and experience similar emotions. We are a multitude of things – happy, enraged, enamored, narcissistic, rebellious, and much more, but never just lonely and pitiful.
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