Editor's note: This is the second half of a two-part article. Part one can be read here. In The Politics of Translation, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theses explore the nuances of the relationship that exists between the translator and the text during the process of translation.She writes, “the translator must surrender to the text…unless the translator has earned the right to become the intimate reader, she cannot surrender to the text, cannot respond to the special call of the text” (Spivak 183). Spivak posits the relationship of the translator to the text as one of loving, almost sensual, appreciation and understanding. Significantly, the translator must labor to earn the right to approach the text in this way and enter into a relationship of such proximity and intimacy with it. Only through this approach can the translator surrender to the text; a surrender that is necessary in order to insure that the translator will sublimate her own taste, values, or political agenda as she works with the text, thus allowing the priorities implicit in the text to speak their truth in the translation. In the case of the Taliban portraits, the portraits are the texts that we are called to respond to. As we view these portraits and attempt to understand them, we must translate them, if only to ourselves, as we interpret the signs and signals that they contain. As a Western viewer, the language of these photographs is not my own, and it is vital that I understand this before I can begin to surrender to them. But what kind of labor can I undertake as I prepare for an encounter with these images? If I am to surrender to these images, I must begin by surrendering my judgment of them. As with any art, I must allow myself to experience them aesthetically and allow them to work upon me through color, composition and gesture. But the activity of translating them is quite different from passive appreciation or submission to their mesmerizing allure. Translating these images, a phrase I am using to describe the articulation of an ethically informed response to them, is a critical process that requires a great deal more than succumbing to the images’ aesthetic spell. In translating the images I must not view them through the assumptions and vocabulary that I possess as an American, a Westerner, or even as a student of visual culture. It is my charge to labor to understand them as I might endeavor to understand words written in a language not my own, and to identify the individual signifiers contained within the images as fragments of meaning that may or may not be translatable. Above all, I must resist coming to easy conclusions about them. In her writing, Spivak warns that an awareness that I am dealing with artifacts from a culture different from my own may not be enough preparation for an ethical translation. According to Spivak, “…depth of commitment to correct cultural politics, felt in the details of personal life, is sometimes not enough. The history of the language, the history of the author’s moment, the history of the language-in-and-as-translation, must figure in the weaving as well” (186). Because I know relatively little about the history of Afghanistan, the history of the Taliban, and the significance of images and specifically of portraiture within this culture, I possess very few of the qualifications that would entitle me to read and translate these images. Knowing that nomads in this area often wear kohl around their eyes to protect from sun and sandstorms is one small but helpful detail. Knowing that flowers were one of the only forms of decoration allowed under the Taliban offers another clue. However, under Spivak’s rules, I am, quite simply, unprepared to translate these photographs. So is the writer from the Gay and Lesbian Review, and so are the majority of the shoppers at Urban Outfitters. Thomas Dworzak, however, works for one of the most reputable and well-known photographic agencies in the world. Through his photojournalist work for Magnum, he has traveled widely throughout Afghanistan, both during the Taliban’s rule and after its fall. Is he perhaps more qualified to read and translate these images? In assembling the book Taliban, in framing these portraits against other images from Afghanistan, and through the brief, evocative essay that introduces the book, has he begun to translate them? He is the Westerner responsible for the photographs’ discovery, he purchased them, and he organized them into a volume for publication. Dworzak says that often people mistakenly assume that he took these photographs, and that he manipulated and posed the soldiers in this way, using these props and backdrops. He is quick to clarify that he is not their creator; that these photographs exist because the soldiers wanted pictures of themselves, and that the soldiers themselves chose to appear in the particular way that they do. The soldiers who posed for these images, therefore, can be considered to share the photographs’ authorship with the unnamed photographers responsible for clicking the shutter. As the subjects of the photographs, the soldiers styled and presented themselves before the camera in a specific way. What the soldiers thought of, and even if they thought of, those who might look upon or receive the images, is impossible to guess. Walter Benjamin might argue that the reception of the photographs is not of issue here. In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin makes the point that the work of art, while necessarily created by an artist who is aware of the presence of other human beings, never considers its audience. He writes, “Art… posits man’s physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener” (Benjamin 69). In my interpretation, Benjamin alludes here to the phenomenon that occurs after a work of art comes into being—that a work of art leads an unpredictable existence. It cannot be intended for its beholder, because it is impossible for anyone to anticipate who that beholder will be. The photographs of the Taliban, accordingly, bear no intentionality in the relationship they have with me as their viewer. These photographs serve as a very literal example of Benjamin’s thesis, for, on many levels, these photographs were not intended for me to see. Yet, this book has come into my possession, and I am able to behold these pictures. Although, as I’ve already explored, Spivak would probably deem me unprepared and unqualified to translate them, they still call to me. In particular, I feel compelled to respond to the beatific look in the eyes of the soldier whose hand is placed gently over his heart, his gaze lifted to directly encounter my own. This gaze and this gesture are of such utter sincerity and unexpected vulnerability that I am forced to pause. I feel, as I look at this image, that there is something significant and precise that the subject wants to convey about himself through the photograph. Because I know that the literal subject of the photograph, what Roland Barthes calls the “studium” (Barthes 26), is a Taliban soldier, this sensitive, committed gesture that the subject makes, holding his hand over his heart, becomes for me the “punctum” of the image (Barthes 26). This punctum, the unexpected prick that pierces me, is what I find so compelling about these images, and what motivates me to work towards understanding them. Because I equate understanding the images with the act of translating them, I turn to Walter Benjamin and “The Task of the Translator” for further guidance. In his discussion of literary texts and translation, Benjamin asks the question: “What does a literary work ‘say’? What does it communicate? It ‘tells’ very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information” (Benjamin 69). Although Benjamin writes here specifically about literary texts, these same questions can be asked of the Taliban photographs. If, just as with a literary text, their essential quality or purpose is not informative, what is it that I can learn from them? In his essay, Benjamin continues: “But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information—as even a poor translator will admit—the unfathomable, the mysterious, the ‘poetic,’ something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet?” (Benjamin 70). Because these are images, is it therefore easier for them to transmit this mysterious, unfathomable, poetic essence across cultures, unencumbered as they are by words written in another language? And what, in the context of these images, constitutes this ineffable quality? What is the essence of the photographs—and if this essence can be defined, is it commeasurable with the essence of the subject each photograph individually represents? Is this quality, which for Benjamin, is all that really matters in a text, something that I must labor to reproduce through a translation of the visual codes that the images contain? As he considers the process of translation, Benjamin comments that when a text is translated, it enters into an entirely new phase of its existence: its afterlife. He writes, “Their translation marks their stage of continued life” (Benjamin 71). In a similar way, the publication of these images in book form has facilitated the continued life of the Taliban photographs. This continued life, or afterlife, ripples across many different media as the book is discussed in newspapers, in magazines, and online. The images are carrying on an existence far outside the context of their original creation. To a certain extent, these images and their subjects have become famous. For Benjamin, the fame of a written text is a significant indicator of its successful translation. Benjamin writes, “Translations that are more than transmissions of subject matter come into being when in the course of its survival a work has reached the age of its fame” (Benjamin 72). In the case of the Taliban photographs, however, it might be possible that their fame is not the result of their successful translation, but rather might be better understood as a consequence of the ways in which they are mistranslated or misread. The book sells at Urban Outfitters, for example, because a certain demographic considers the photographs to have kitsch value. They are interesting to a Western audience, because they are photographs of enemy soldiers that reveal qualities that we don’t expect. But an ethical, informed reading or translation of these images, in the vein that Spivak would approve of, would see past the surprise and the kitsch of them and attempt to locate the pure meaning within the photographs. Benjamin describes this sort of purity in “The Task of the Translator” when he writes, “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully” (Benjamin 79). Readings or translations of these portraits that are real and transparent, therefore, will not be filtered or covered by the preconceptions and assumptions of the viewer. It is these assumptions that block the light emanating from the photographs. Previously, I’ve established that Spivak insists that a good translation is the result of labor and a certain kind of earned intimacy with a text. Benjamin, however, suggests in “The Task of the Translator” that good translations happen when the translator acknowledges and honors the foreignness of the original text, and allows that quality to affect the language of the translation. Benjamin states, “the basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue” (81). If we transfer this idea to the exercise of reading an image, then, we must allow the foreignness of the image to remain in our translation of it. We cannot attempt to preserve our own vocabulary of signs and symbols as we consider the image. We must always be conscious of the fact that the images are foreign, and no detail or gesture can be assumed to have the same meaning that it does according to our catalog of visual signs. In accepting this, I have no option but to call into question my emotional response to the image of the solider with his hand held over his heart. It is possible that I am reading a deep sincerity into what may be nothing more than a conventionalized, ritualized gesture—something that is expected of the subject, not something that came spontaneously out of him. Because I do not know the context of the gesture, I cannot infer its intended meaning. The Taliban photographs represent a fascinating example of something very private becoming very public. However, according to Roland Barthes, this is a consequence of photography in general. In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes: “the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly” (Barthes 98). In this passage, Barthes suggests that what has happened to these private portraits is symptomatic of photography’s impact upon culture. In the passage, Barthes suggests not only correspondence between the advent of photography and the entrance of the private into the public sphere, but implies causality. Photography has enabled private moments, or in the case of the Taliban portraits, private identities, to be captured. After the moment of capture, however, the private becomes an object to be consumed. In The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, Jean Baudrillard considers the way in which the image is both a perpetrator and a victim of violence. Baudrillard writes: …it is true that there is a violence of the image. But that violence is substantially offset by the violence done to the image: its exploitation for documentary purposes, as testimony or message, its exploitation for moral, political or promotional ends… this is where the destiny of the image comes to an end, both as fateful illusion and vital illusion” (Baudrillard 92). In Beaudrillard’s figuration, the violence that the image commits stems from the way that images force the real to disappear (91). We read some of the images in Taliban as overtly violent, particularly in those images where the subject points his pistol directly forward. The book’s title ensures that we never forget that these subjects are soldiers that belonged to a regime that we consider to have been exceedingly repressive and evil. Yet these images, and by association these subjects, have also experienced violence. They have been wrested from their context, packaged up and sold. They will be interpreted and used in ways that their subjects could never have anticipated, and almost certainly would not have wanted. As readers of these images, we can mitigate this violence by laboring towards an ethical translation of them. Failing that, we can honor these images through the admission that they are mysteries to us, and that we cannot know the content of these subject’s hearts any more than they can know ours.