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• 1 2016-12-05T17:54:22-08:00 Doctor Mister Miracles's Guide to Miracle-Making: A Manual (Abridged) by Josh Hockensmith 6 plain 2016-12-06T18:10:00-08:00 Doctor Mister Miracles's Guide to Miracle-Making: A Manual (Abridged) is a zinecreated by Josh Hockensmith, a book artist and a librarian at the Sloane Art Library here at UNC Chapel Hill. (For a look at another artists' book made by Hockensmith, be sure to check out this page by Emmie Banks) Hockensmith was inspired by the idea of miracles, while also including ideas about the limits of translation and cultural appropriation. To create this zine, Hockensmith collected pages found in a Chinese acupuncture manual and subsequently altered them, first translating them into Enochian (the 16th century language of the angels) and then translating them from Enochian into English.
  
  This zine utilizes the nature of translating to call attention to the use of symbols in interpretation, and Hockensmith seems to turn the idea of translation on its head, due to the controversial nature of the Enochian "language" and how very few people have used it since its inception. To take such a language as Chinese, the one language that has the most speakers on the entire planet, and to then translate it into a language that no one speaks, only to then translate it again into another language--English--seems to make a subtle statement about how a text can lose a piece of itself with each time translated. Due to the fact that Enochian is a language that virtually no one speaks, its letters and language have little meaning beyond its symbols, unless you are well-versed in Enochian. 
  
  Since I would imagine that there are only a few people who know how to translate and read Enochian, readers can utilize these symbols and their general shape to extract their own personal meaning from them, making every reader's experience wholly different. While this is not inherently a bad thing, it makes it difficult to discuss when each person's interpretation of a symbol is different. 
  
  Because this is a zine, it's meant to be distributed more so than an artists' book, meaning that its function is to be easily accessed by many people. While it's meant to be accessible, the typographical form of this text shows that everyone, whether or not they know Chinese or English, should be able to come up with their own interpretation of the Enochian symbols, regardless of what linguistic or cultural background they come from.
  
  Be sure to check out another page about this zine focusing on the relationship between the recto and verso, written by Deanna Fayed!