The New Quarantine: Translation and Continuous Bodying
I have written a lot about the issue of “the body” in translation - for example how we are constantly told that the purpose of translation is the “capture the spirit.” This follows a kind of Christian model of selfhood: the spirit is the important thing, the body is where the spirit is corrupted.
In his new introduction to the second edition of his classic, Parables of the Virtual, Brian Massumi writes about the body:
What the body is, [Spinoza] says, is what it can do as it goes along… A body is defined by what capacities it carries from step to step. What these are exactly is constantly changing. A body’s ability to affect or be affected - its charge of affect or power of existence - isn’t something fixed… For Spinoza, the body is one with its transitions. There is no the body. There is a continuous bodying.
This is perhaps the threat of the body: it is continuously bodying. Moreover, it is affected, influenced, fluctuating, in a way that runs counter to our still dominant idea of what translation is: finding “the original.” That is, the body makes originals, makes movement, change. In Transgressive Circulation I show how adverse our literary culture[s] is to “foreign influence” - the site of transgression and corruption.
A lot of my thinking about this was shaped and re-shaped by the years I spent translating/creating what became The New Quarantine (Inside the Castle) with the Swedish writer and performance artist Sara Tuss Erik.
A few years ago, I received an email from Efrik. “I have translated A New Quarantine Will Take My Place into Swedish,” she wrote, referring to my first book, which had first been published in 2007 but been out of print for many years.
Since I love Efrik’s writing, I eagerly read her translation. I was not disappointed, though I was surprised. My book of poems had in her translation been transformed into a horror movie: Sara Tuss Efrik enters Johannes Göransson’s quarantine and has to stay in there – midst the grossness and violence – for forty days (the root of “quarantine” being forty days).
Once I had entered Efrik’s quarantine, I recognized phrase and words from my original, but they had a new narrative vectors. Efrik had used my words and phrases to tell a different story. Often “her” story – of going into my quarantine, yes, but also of experiences that were decidedly “hers” not “mine” (a boyfriend overdoses and dies for example).
Further, she had played with language and slippages – much the way I had done in the original – allowing for example the word “bourgeoisie” in the title of one of my poems to give rise to an occult communication with the artist “Louise Bourgeois,” who had become one of the main characters (despite not explicitly being a character in the original).
I soon started to translate Efrik’s translation back into English. At first, I translated in a traditional mode (thinking of the best words and so on), but soon realized that this “faithfulness” was actually not faithful to Efrik’s translation, and I started to approach things the way she had, as a stranger stuck in another person’s quarantine. New voices appeared, including my dead daughter. It seemed translation was an occult practice, something akin to a ouiji board, where voices sprang out of out of our exchanges. The strangest realization was that this “unfaithful” translation process was absolutely faithful to the way the “original” – whether Efrik’s or mine – used language.
After a few months, we started translating back and forth to each other. The book grew to unreasonable lengths, including versions and versions of versions, grown out of slippages and experiences. Correct translations and mistranslations.
It became clear to my that the excess of this big messy bag of a book was the fear behind so many translation dictums:
1. The use of “the original” and the intentions of “the author” as a kind of gold standard that can always be used to find the “correct” version, to limit noise, to limit the kind of inflation that is the very mode of Efrik’s and my book.
2. This gold standard becomes key in the pervasive model of judging the translation according to an economic model of “equivalence,” as if the two texts were different currencies that could be made to mean the same thing, have the same value.
3. The model of mastery: the masterful translator is the one whose skill allows less noise, and definitely does not allow their lives, their “own” personal experiences and – even more weirdly – writing style to infect the original. Translation as a quarantine.
4. The ultimate exchange rate: translators must “capture the spirit” of the foreign text. But what about the body?
What if we don’t “capture” “it”? What if it infiltrates us? What if influence is not some grand model by which nations creates lineages (Shelley influences Stevens who influences etc) but something much more volatile? What if we cannot capture it?
