The Voice Imitator

In the historical center of Mexico City, in Santo Domingo Square, there are still people who carry out the trade of scriveners and copyists. Sitting in small cubicles, they type all kinds of documents. It is still possible to hear people dictating love letters while the copyists quickly transcribe the recitation.

The Thomas Bernhard story The Voice Imitator was ideal for Bonillas (for its content and length) to carry out a very specific action: he asked each one of the scribes at Santo Domingo to do an exact copy of the text, both from the original German and from the Spanish translation. A text, furthermore, that invites us to think about the idea of originals and copies.

Here each copy (that is, each imitation of the text) has its own errors and unique alterations in relation to the first version. It could even be said that the craftsmanship of the copyists at Santo Domingo Square is grounded on such errors, which are what make every copy an original.

The question arising from the Bernhard story (if a voice imitator would be able to imitate his own voice) is here taken into the context of writing. Can the scrivener imitate his own style? When confronted with the Bernhard text, each copyist, as Manuel Cirauqui explains, “seems to respond to it in a subliminal and involuntary way. The imitator is a parasite of an authorship that he does not have, and only through it is he able to make manifest his own paradoxical art: the good copy is, in general, the one that cannot be recognized.” It is the perfect imitation of somebody else’s voice. Yet the way that the diverse copies in El imitador de voces are displayed allows us to see them as copies or versions of the original text.

Each of the copies made by the scribes is accompanied by its own copy (the copy of the copy) and the carbon-copy paper that made it possible. This is perhaps a demonstration that originality is a utopia that is difficult to reach, since more often than not we are faced with imitations, revisions, decodings, appropriations and reinterpretations that try to make themselves unique in the most unexpected ways possible. Perhaps this is all we can aspire to. Isn’t an artist, after all, a sort of voice imitator? Isn’t that what Plaza is?