Third Plateau: The Silence of the Crabgrass

The topic of this Third Plateau is silence, but silence explored rhizomatically through a nonlinear plant network of shoots and nodes starting ostensibly from the Kafka parable on the silence of the sirens but actually starting nowhere, because in a rhizomatic network there is no beginning, no middle, and no end. One of the main connections the silence shoot forms is with an early meditation on silence by a very young Walter Benjamin titled “Das Gespräch” / “Conversation.” Thus connected, Benjamin’s piece intersects tellingly with his “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” / “The Task of the Translator,” published 10 years after “Conversation”; but the rhizomatic root mass and its shoots also connect with passages from English translations of Aleksis Kivi’s 1870 novel Seitsemän veljestä / Seven Brothers / The Brothers Seven , and with the student suggestion that one way to “add value” to a translation by increasing its cognitive load might be to shift the burden of deverbalization to the target reader.