Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08468_Field_TCGG T233.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 977b | 16 lines

cultures. The reason we find myths difficult to grasp is just this
fact, that they do not exclude any facet of experience as
literate cultures do. All the levels of meaning are simultaneous.
Thus natives, when asked Freudian questions about the
symbolism of their thoughts or dreams, insist that all the
meanings are right there in the verbal statement. The work of
Jung and Freud is a laborious translation of nonliterate
awareness into literary terms, and like any translation distorts
and omits. The main advantage in translation is the creative
effort it fosters, as Ezra Pound spent his life in telling and
illustrating. And culture that is engaged in translating itself
from one radical mode such as the auditory, into another mode
like the visual, is bound to be in a creative ferment, as was
classical Greece or the Renaissance. But our own time is an
even more massive instance of such ferment, and just because
of such “translation.”