Entranced

Alice A. Parker in the entry on Nicole Brossard in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader's Companion to the Writers and their Works from Antiquity to the Present edited by Claude J. Summers writes

Translation, like writing, opens up a quantum field of inquiry into words, syntax, grammar, and the production of meaning.

I like to think of the translating text and the translated text as the givens in actuality and the translation as that which hovers between them in virtuality. It's a dimension accessible only through comparison, constant comparison, of target and source. To translate is to read bilingually.

It is reading that I associate with opening up a field. Writing for me is a task in the service of materializing a selection. Writing is a kind of closure. For some people writing is a form of reading. To translate, to write, to read. Different modalities of a play with form in the service of what matters? Not surprising when one considers that the opening of a field is connected to the setting of boundaries, a type of n-closure.

And so for day 435
21.02.2008