Title: Sunnudagur, 29. september 1912
Artists: Gavin Morrison & Arild Tveito
Dimensions: 520 x 760 mm
Publishers: FOSS and Widowed Swan
Edition size: 75 numbered copies + 15 printers and artist’s proofs
Price: 10.000,- isk (order via mail@foss.press)
Description:
Norwegian artist Arild Tveito and Scottish writer, curator, and director of Widowed Swan, Gavin Morrison, collaborated on this edition. The text is an Icelandic translation, from English, of a journal entry by David Pinsent. The journal from which it is taken describes a tour of Iceland that Pinsent and Wittgenstein—who were friends from Cambridge University—started from Reykjavik. The journal is frustrating in its absence of detail of the environment, or the pair’s discussions. Instead, its note-like form reveals mainly the pragmatics of the trip, and Wittgenstein as a somewhat irascible companion. The entry for Sunday, September 29, 1912—during their homeward journey when their ship stopped in Seyðisfjörður (which is also the home of Foss Editions)—mentions the landscape and the northern lights, yet the words allude to more than is expressed. Wittgenstein’s successes in logic are not described and the photographs that Pinsent mentions he has taken are now lost. As much as the words reveal, they also obscure. The description becomes a near-isolated totality, as Wittgenstein says in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922): “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. Morrison and Tveito sought to create an echo of this linguistic exiling, banishing this single entry, and having it translated into the language of the place of which it speaks.
The translation from English to Icelandic is by Þorbergur Þórsson, who has previously translated Wittgenstein for publication in Iceland. Printed by FOSS at The Technical Museum of East Iceland.
The project has been kindly supported by Uppbyggingarsjóður Austurland.
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