Hearing “Mother’s Life”

Many years ago, when I first heard Pink Floyd’s The Thin Ice, I was instantly drawn into the universe of Freudian psychology: “Momma loves her baby/ And Daddy loves you too,” David Gilmour writes in the opening two lines of the song. For years after that, I heard the opening lines of the second verse as “If you should go skating/ on the thin ice of mother’s life.” Only much later did I discover that they are actually singing “on the thin ice of modern life,” thereby changing the meaning of the song entirely. “Mother’s life” would indicate a psychological, relational reading of the child living on the edge of the mother’s own fragility, traumas and care. “Modern life,” on the other hand, is a sociological reading – a critique of modern society and alienation.

My mishearing, my translation of the sound waves into words, may be an error, but it is not an empty one. It makes me ponder the scaffolding of meaning in the lyrics. It makes me notice how I constantly translate what I experience into something that fits my own narrative. And now, looking up the lyrics and discovering that Gilmour wrote the first verse and Waters the second, I cannot help but wonder if this split, psychological vs. sociological, also maps onto a deeper divide within the band.

Normally, we think of translations as something that needs to be perfect, completely invisible. The ideal is to mimic the original 1:1, to stay loyal to the source and avoid introducing errors.

Translation as Anarchic Transformation

In the Translator’s Note to Catherine Malabou’s Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy, Carolyn Shread makes the case for the value of translation being something other than mere transfer from one language to another – to her, translation holds the potential power of transformation.

What if she is right? What if the “errors” or the slight imprecision or misunderstanding that naturally come with translation are actually something precious? A site of potentiality and anarchist thinking. And what if imperfection does not falsify the original text but instead heightens our sense of both the original text and ourselves?

For Shread, there is a type of translation that is not merely a speaking for, or a strategy of domination, but rather about amplifying and regenerating an authorial voice with the translator’s own. Instead of being subservient to representation or merely an act of copying, translation in itself embodies elements of anarchism because it is always more a “speaking with” than simple transfer. In the unruly imperfections of translation, in the intertwining of the authorial voice and the translator’s voice, anarchistic otherness can sometimes emerge. The text becomes a site of potentiality. The imperfection of the copy allows us to see the world through our own eyes and the gaze of another at the same time.

We too are constantly translating, taking in the voices of the world around us, interpreting them and merging them with our own experiences and perspectives. Most often the translation process is entirely subconscious, but now and then (mis)translations open up a gap between the original and the translation, thereby opening up a space where we can see the seams of language, and how meaning is filtered through the way we think and speak.

In this age of autocorrect, of Google Translate and ChatGPT, there is a digital dream of perfect transfer – of seamless zeroes and ones copying from one domain to another. But I say we should strive to both notice and create difference, rather than strive for immaculate transfer.

Rolling the Dice with Andersen and Ærtebjerg

When working as a curator, I have often used dissonance – for example by introducing mutually excluding points of view on the same subject matter – as a way to both kickstart and question the visitor’s translation process. A few years back, I had the task of matching Hans Christian Andersen quotes to paintings by Danish artist Kathrine Ærtebjerg for the artist’s first retrospective. Both have been classified as artists working in the realm of the fantastical, and thus the obvious approach would be to try to match quote and painting 1:1.

But having them mirror each other directly would not work. It would flatten both artists into their most superficial traits, making the visitors look for the most obvious connections between motif and text. Instead, I chose the most mysterious, playful, obscure quotes from Andersen’s stories I could find. And then – inspired by Dadaism – I rolled the dice and applied the quotes randomly.

It worked surprisingly well. Instead of insisting on similarities, it created tensions between the worlds of Andersen and Ærtebjerg, carving out an interpretive space rather than closing it off by providing shallow answers.

By staging imperfect translations between realms, I conducted a form of anarchistic curation, consciously sabotaging 1:1 mimicry in order for the visitors’ own interpretation and imagination to come to the fore.

Imperfect Translation as Thinking Technology

Both the misheard Pink Floyd lyric and the exhibition experiment with Hans Christian Andersen and Kathrine Ærtebjerg show how imperfect translations can do more than merely distort an original. They act as small thinking machines. They generate interpretations, expose us to ourselves and quietly undermine ideas of fixed authority.

First, imperfect translation works as a generator of interpretation. When I hear “the thin ice of mother’s life” instead of “modern life”, the song suddenly branches off into an entirely new reading. The same happens when Andersen’s quotes are disconnected from obvious visual matches and instead collide randomly with Ærtebjerg’s paintings. In both cases, a slight misalignment between “original” and “translation” opens up a surplus of meaning. The reader, listener or visitor starts working: looking for possible connections, constructing bridges, noticing resonances that are not pre-packaged. The imperfect copy does not close meaning down; it multiplies it.

Second, imperfect translation functions as a mirror of self-understanding. My mishearing of Pink Floyd does not just reveal something about the lyrics – it reveals something about me. I bring a Freudian framework (after all, I was studying literature when I first heard the song), a certain sensitivity to mother–child relations, perhaps my own history, to the act of listening. Similarly, when visitors move between Ærtebjerg’s images and Andersen’s strange, dislocated quotes, the stories they construct in the gap between the two say as much about their own inner landscape as about either artist. Misunderstandings and strange matches are not neutral accidents. They show us the filters through which we translate the world.

Third, imperfect translation can be a subtle breaking of power. To insist that a translation must be perfectly faithful is also to insist on a certain hierarchy: the original as sovereign, the translation as obedient servant. When a translation deviates, when it “speaks with” rather than “for”, this hierarchy loosens. In my curatorial choice to roll the dice instead of mirroring motifs, I was, in a small way, refusing to let the idea of perfect transfer dictate the terms of the encounter. I was shifting some authority to the visitor’s own interpretive work. In Shread’s sense, this is where a touch of anarchism enters: translation is no longer a cordoned-off, secondary operation, but a site where voices and perspectives can be redistributed.

Set against today’s standardized demands for correctness and the ideal of “faithful” AI translation, understood as maximal smoothness, this might seem inefficient, even risky. Why tolerate noise when we could have clarity? But what we call “noise” is often where thinking actually takes place.

A Small Invitation to Mishear

All of this is not an argument against translation. It is an argument against the fantasy of immaculate transfer – against the idea that meaning can be moved from one place to another without friction, without remainder, without us.

So here is a small invitation:
Think of a line from a song you later discovered you had heard “wrong”. Or a quote you misremembered, slightly altered, and still repeated for years. What did your version reveal about you? What possibilities did the “wrong” version quietly open up?

Next time you stumble on an odd phrasing in a translated text, an awkward subtitle, a strange match between image and words in an exhibition, you could, of course, correct it mentally and move on. Or you could stop for a moment, and ask: what becomes possible because this translation is imperfect? What new reading, what new self-knowledge, what small shift in authority might be hiding in this mismatch?