Cliché confuses me. I stutter at its gymnastics – Cli-ch-cli-cli-ch-ché, Cli-chy, Cl-chie, Cli-ché. It is a word unchanged from French, simply assumed by the English language as a subtle thieving of a code we missed. It is necessary but unmade so let us lay claim to its syntax as our own. A cliché is something we know. It is what we already think of a situation, a thing ‘we resort to [cliché] because it’s easier than trying to make up something new’. We choose cliché over an original drawing, to use prewritten formats rather than our own because we know they work. Anne Carson suggests that a question is implicit in cliché – ‘don’t we have a formula we can use for this?’ I see it as more of an avoidance. To miss poking at the uneasy. By relying on cliché, we remain warm in the idea that works. But, what about catastrophe, Francis Bacon’s answer to cliché. The ideas blue at catastrophe, a carcass hung by its meaty rib, a Pope screaming in innocence. Bacon paints catastrophe. At every step of the translation there is a mistake, one intended to find a new intensity. His chairs are sat across boiling vermillion carpets, white arrows reel the eyes left and on the right, in a small corner of ripped sanded canvas, a jet of water spits across the face. The words are there, but the assembly is broken. What we recognise – the sofa, a stool, the face or Freud, Bacon disturbs by the chance interactions of one object and the other. The associations are short circuits soldered to disrupt. As Carson puts it, Francis Bacon ‘solicits the interventions of chance’ by what he calls ‘free marks’. The bucket of paint spilt over red, or the sticky brush ripped into the sandy paint of a tongue in cheek. His associations ask a question of the uneasy, the same thing cliché ignores. What would it mean to paint a free mark over binary? I search ‘the next American president’ on Google and besides the yellowing wigs of a President elect there are multiple paintings – floral and delicate. All hyperlinks point to the portfolio of Gretchen Andrew. In search engines such as Google, information is converted to data. That data is then indexed to a hierarchy based on relevancy, popularity and keywords. The process is systematic and regular. In a way, it’s a digital cliché. The search engine scopes the item to click and avoids the irrelevant or uneasy. Andrew’s paintings are a corruption of this system. She plays with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to trick Google into placing her above the coming leader of the United States. This ordering of images presents an unsteady version of contemporary politics. To have an artist positioned higher than the leader of the free world is to ask questions of the situation, the same ones I posed to the proposition of the US Apprentice’s main host sitting in the oval office. Andrew’s paintings are free marks, thrown across the internet. ‘A bang. Something inserting itself where it does not belong, that’s the poem, the snag.’ If we accredit her to the achievements Google believes she has, we are speaking of the Turner Prize winning, Whitney Biennial exhibiting, next president of the United States. It is a catastrophe of information. In digital code, binaries exist to stratify that which is impossible to categorise. Lists of ideas, ranked one above the other, this image more relevant than the next. The binaries exist in translating nuance to numbers. A linguistic translator must be slightly different. The action asks for creativity in taking the ideas of one language to another, acknowledging ‘the fact that languages are not sciences of one another, you cannot match them item for item’. A translation is not an encoding, but an enquiry into what right might possibly mean. For German lyric poet Friedreich Hölderlin, to be right was to be exact. In his translations from ancient Greek, he encountered words that posed a stutter in translation, for their innumerable definitions or lack of an equivalent in the German language, and translated them towards a very literal reading of the texts. ‘His translation method was to take hold of every item of the original diction and wrench it across into German exactly as it stood in its syntax, word order and lexical sense.’ This was maddening. Hölderlin would translate the language of Sophokles’ Antigone as a code towards disfigured texts of ‘more than a thousand mistakes’. As translators, Hölderlin and the screen approach language with a deadly literalism. For Hölderlin, this translation method committed him to madness. In 1806 he was certified insane. ‘His family committed him to a psychiatric clinic, from which after a year he was released as incurable. He spent the remaining thirty-seven years of his life in a tower overlooking the river Neckar, in varying states of indifference and ecstasy’. Yet the screen remains with us, unquestioned. I know that translation is not without consequence. It is the opening to an idea of difference, to be conscious of independence and unfamiliar thinking. A translator must be conscious of their role in the ‘delayed appearance’ of an individual’s work. The translator knows that in the negotiation of two webs, their decisions dictate the interpretation of a text. In twice-writing a work the second agenda is very consciously added as part of ‘a venturing of something new on the very close basis of something that already and persistently exists.’ Work is re-read, re-written, mistranslated and re-aligned. It is a to and fro between what was and what will be. Even Hölderlin the mad knew this. He had begun translating Sophokles in 1796 but only published the translations of Oedipus and Antigone in 1804. The texts were subject to constant misassembly and the decision was cogent. His translations may have fallen as the work of a madman, but this ‘mental derangement’ is ‘rather a manner of expressing himself which was very deliberately adopted’. He knew the manners of translation but chose catastrophe over its cliché. With the screen, posting on X or Instagram is an action without consequence. Translation without the promise of anything to anyone else. It is translation without consequence – an almost selfish act of positioning yourself in feeds you see as most important. It is words unconsidered and ideas unjustified, but in the slurry of it all they also go unchallenged. Translating like Hölderlin without a reason why. It is the order of an algorithm, to curate our feed according to difference as its priority. When researching the work of Basque translator Bernardo Axtaga, I read that ‘difference means repetition, and repetition means more difference’. This is the method of a social media. You read, you write, we translate and you re-read – the same ideas over and over, no questions necessary. We repeat. Again. We repeat. Cliché is the avoidance of questioning – to remain warm in the idea that works. These feeds of translation act as the embers of that warmth – it is a lack of challenge when overwhelmed by so much. Why question the word? Why the position of its author? It is all too much and as we thumb the screen, our critical position as the reader is numbed. We would never send the screen to a tower beside the river Neckar and yet its crimes of translation are far more intense than Hölderlin’s. I am asking for a translator to disturb the cliché of language, make it dull, throw blue paint over it, the algorithm to malfunction by a free mark and sequence it to appear in an order we don’t expect. For us to say yes to mistranslation as we do a website’s cookies. Else we are America’s next top victim singing in a language others hear and cannot tell. Again and again.