The Death of Translation

When my newborn daughter died after two weeks in the hospital, I learned something about debt. I learned about debt, grief and poetry. I learned about translation. I learned and I learned but it didn’t come to anything. It still doesn’t amount to anything.

I can’t turn her death into something worth money. I can’t buy her back, and her death is worthless.

After she died, we had to pay money. I don’t know how much, I don’t do money. There were medical issues that weren’t paid for. Supposedly our daughter who never made it out of the state of Indiana was somehow a non-naturalized citizen and thus not entitled to insurance coverage. We had to take out loans. Nothing came to anything. I learned what I already knew: money is worthless.

In our literary culture we are constantly told: We should learn things from experience. We should turn experience into something valuable. This is what happens in countless works of literature. People learn things. They have epiphanies. Experience is made meaningful. The words add up to something. There is a causality that runs through the words like gold. Meaning is money. We use it to pay off our debts.

I can’t pay off my words. They accumulate. My daughter’s 14 days cost thousands.

The day before she was born, my wife and I drove around South Bend listening to Built to Spill records from the 90s, we were happy. I can’t listen to those songs anymore. They are worthless. They are countefeits. I was fooled into investing in them. They put me in debt.

I sometimes think I deserved it. My hubris, I think, is what did it. I write poems, have a beautiful wife. How did I get so lucky? I got too lucky. There was an excess of luck. Too much poetry. I had to pay for it. I was in debt.

In his book Debt, David Graebner writes about the illusion of debtlessness. How society is built around debt. To enter into society, is to be in debt. Something like that.

I think about a conversation with Ursula Andkjaer Olsen. She said, everybody always want to be debtless, as if that’s even possible. We are always in debt. She said, I want to be in debt to people. I don’t want to be some independent person, free of all human bonds. I want to depend on my friends. Something like that.

When I wrote the book Summer, in part as an elegy to my daughter, I kept writing the word “oskuld.” It means innocence or virginity, but a more direct translation would be “un-debted” or “debtless.” Sex puts us in debt. It taints us. We have to pay it off.

Money is how we think about bodies, language. In this country, the right is always dreaming of the gold standard, when works of literature will be great again, when the West will be great again, when there will be no deconstruction or corruption of meaning, when words will mean what they mean. Signification is a gold standard, we hear about it not only from the right but from the poets. Their words are never wasted, never inflationary. They are like gold. They glimmer with authenticity.

Translation teaches me otherwise. Translation makes many words, many versions, many authors of the same text, from many places and languages. Translation is inflationary: every text contains versions. There are copies of the wellwrought urn. And each one has a flaw, some noise. As Michael Taussig writes, there’s always an excess in mimicry. As Michel Serres writes, there’s always noise in transmission. There’s always a parasite in the house.

My parasite is my daughter.

Inside my house, I still walk around as if a bomb had gone off.

People who know me must be getting sick of me talking about my daughter. She has been dead for seven years. I should be getting over it. I should have learned my lesson. I should have regained my personhood. I should be strong again, whole again. If I was writing a wellmade narrative, I would have learned my lesson by now. But I can’t. I’m not learning. I’m not translating her death into something valuable. Arachne is trash.

Translation is trash. George Steiner warns us that translation is “ethical” and “economical.” Steiner warns us that nonsense will “betray” the translator because it does not contain signification. Without signification, we lose the value. The loss of value betrays us. We have to master the foreign text, figure it out, make it meaningful, or else it will cause inflation. It wll be trash.

Steiner sees the loss of meaning as a sickness. Every time we engage in translation we risk being “transformed.” We risk infection, corruption, contagion. I keep quoting Steiner because his diagnosis is correct. We risk being transformed. One thing becomes another. Like Benjamin writes in “The Mimetic Faculty,” modern capitalism has tried to eliminate mimicry; it survives with children and their games, their onomatopoetic sounds. They become something they are not. They do not follow the exchange rates, they allow the noise into their mouths, their bodies. They become sites of excess, unbalanced exchange. They are inflationary. They are sites of contagion. They get sick and die.

Death is the ruin of exchange rates.

Death is the ruin of the gold standard.

A translation is a corpse, I’ve been told by 500 years of translation discourse. A bad translation is a corpse, I’ve been told by Ezra Pound. Translation infects us, kills us, kills the original. Translation ruins the economy of expression. These are things I’ve been told by translators.

I keep writing the same essay about translation.

About contagion and corpses.

When we begin to translate, we assume a debt, according to Eugene Nida. He argues that we have to pay it in a different currency than the original. The original is gold. We have to find its equivalence. We have to balance the books.

Balance the books: It’s what Bataile called a “restricted economy.” It’s where they give out awards to the best book of the year. To establish order, to keep inflation at bay.

Inflation is caused by too much equality, according to rightwingers.

We need class divides or else: inflation!

They want to balance the books and the books are balanced.

No, the books can’t be balanced.

I’m listening to Build to Spill. They sing: All that glimmers isn’t gold. It’s a quote.

Why am I listening? I’m not listening. I can’t hear you.

I fail to hear you. I must be corrupted. I must not be healthy. I’m unbalanced. There must be noise in my immune system. As a translator, I’m hardly a person. As a translator, I’m hardly an author. I don’t have the proper authority. I’m in debt. I’m in noise. I make versions.

Inside my house a bomb has gone off.

Inside my garden there’s a hole where the neighborhood cats are trapped. Each one I call Arachne. They all die, they’re all poisoned. They’re all metaphors. They’re all dead metaphors. I can see them but I can’t understand them. The hordes of death. If they were more meaningful, I could make them valuable. I could pay my debt.

Money is worthless.

This is a dream I keep having.

Dreams are worthless. Don’t tell people your dreams, they’re boring to other people. They are trash. You’re not in charge of your dreams. You’re not an author.

Dreams are the underworld, argues James Hillman. You are not yourself when you dream. You are your dead self. You are a translation. Don’t interpret your dreams, argued Hillman, just collect them, learn how to listen to them. Don’t turn them into valuable meaning, I might argue. Death has no meaning, it’s inflationary.

One night a couple of years ago, as I was finishing my translation of Sara Tuss Efrik’s translation of my book A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, I dreamt about a museum exhibit about translation. I was somehow involved. Most of the items seemed like relics or tools, exhibited behind glass cases. There was another wing called The Castle. Don’t go there, warned my friend Don Mee, it’s not meant for humans. But I couldn’t help myself, I turned one corner then another. The walls were white and looked like the elementary school I went to as a child. Then I knew I was about to enter the main room. I could feel it. And then I came into the room. It was called Death but there was castle in it.

I can’t tell how big the castle is because I can’t tell how big the room is. Either the castle is very big and so is the room, or it’s small and the room is small. Perhaps I can’t even fit into the room. But I can’t leave and go back. I have to go through the castle.

This dream means nothing but I’m sticking with it. I’m stuck in it. I can’t leave, don’t want to. I’m speaking to you from inside the castle.