Space and Silence as a Possible Form of It: Thoughts of a Literary Translator

Abstract

Space is often referred to as vacuum and sound cannot travel in it, thus the silence experienced in space. But based on Einstein’s thought scientists now found that space is not silent after all, it is full of vibrations and energy. “The universe is a musical that we've been watching all this time as a silent movie.”[1]   If our outer space is not silent what can be said of our other spaces defined as such in our everyday life for example space between letters in this paper? Silence in space is gaps between particles while gaps or blanks in other fields such as literature is part of the explanation reception theorists, Iser (2006) among them, give us to the question why we have different readings of the same text arguing that these gaps, in given parts of the text „trigger synthesizing operations in the reader’s mind “ as they “lead to collisions between  the individual ideas formed.” (p.66)  If space associated with silence is not silent than what will silence really mean in translation, which is bridging space between different cultures. We will see that silence as a certain form of appearance associated with all kinds of space is universal and at the same time culture-bound and, thus, it also acquires meaning in context while we try to capture and trace the different meanings and notions of it in different fields and consider it from a dialectical aspect as well.   [1] https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-sounds-of-spacetime (12 11 2022)