Soho’s Frith Street is no stranger to spooky goings-on. At No. 22, John Logie Baird invented the television: The crossover between the Victorian inventor’s wave-channeling invention and his belief in Spiritualism was evoked, some years ago, in a series of wraithlike projections by Tony Oursler in nearby Soho Square. No. 60, home of Frith Street Gallery, is a recurring flashpoint for coincidence, as one discovers in Jaki Irvine’s six-part video installation Towards a Polar Sea, 2005. In the opener, the only segment in black-and-white, gallery director Jane Hamlyn recalls how a Craigie Horsfield

“Translation is only impossible as any worthwhile enterprise is impossible: impossible to perform with the perfection that we desire. What translators must do, like modern knights errant, is to come as close as we can to the impossible goal,” John Rutherford writes in the introduction to his recent Penguin Classics translation of Don Quixote. This would seem the standard take on translation. Yet its paradox feels glib. Can translation survive deconstruction? How might translation be done once the fantasy of perfection has been relinquished?

Juan Cruz is translating Don Quijote (again), 2005,