Ole Nopea! Multilingual Writing, Google Translate, and the Polaroid

Abstract

"Ole Nopea!" - "Be fast" in Finnish - in this essay's title is the seventh of ten "golden rules" of Lomo photography. This particular rule instructs photographers: "Just don't waste any time with settings, adjustments, setting things up, thinking about it, faffing around and procrastinating. First impressions have a quality all of their own". The "Ole Nopea" mandate also defines a set of fast-paced multilingual texts addressed in this essay. Like Eisenstein's "collision montage," Joseph Brodsky's Mexican Romancero captures Mexico's highs and lows in rapid succession. His poetry shifts freely from Russian to Spanish, transcribed in Cyrillic. Photosynthesis by Vera Polozkova and Olga Pavolga jumps from Russian to untranslated English within a span of just one line. In addition, Photosynthesis mixes words and images, as does Ayumu Takahashi’s experimental travelogue Love and Free, which chronicles the author's breathless journey around the world. A tangible record of places and people, Polaroid photography – also highlighted in the title – takes virtually no time to process. Its on-the-spot delivery makes the Polaroid a close sibling of the much-debated Google Translate tool that offers instant results. My set of photographs of The Polaroid Project exhibit (2019) in Montreal provides an essential component for this inquiry into "Ole Nopea"-driven texts and images.