Intimate Alienation, or [blank for your response]

The inability to take classical texts for granted is a great gift that some female translators are able to use as a point of leverage, to shift the canon to a different and unexpected place … the position of being a woman translating one of these dead, white men creates a strange and potentially productive sense of intimate alienation.

—Emily Wilson, Found in Translation

A great (Trojan Horse of a) gift: I called it "his tongue in my mouth," (desperate for) a way to (re)frame and (re)phrase what had been done to me; that which I was (or so I thought) taking back. A foundation for the practice of literature as activism ab initio, in taking hold of and reshaping the tools.

To dare (I did) to (mis)translate sacred and canonical texts from the various colonial heteropatriarchal traditions into which I had been inducted was to bite the tongue that had abused me: religion, state authority, and cisheteromasculinity uprooted in one bloody, messy mouthful.

Intimate alienation: what it was like, thereafter, to feel that there was no room (look at all those [clotted] parentheses) in my mouth for my own tongue.

________

Harryette Mullen calls her practice "sleeping with the dictionary." She opens her 2002 collection of that title with the poem "All She Wrote," which sets out:

Forgive me, I'm no good at this. I can't write back. I never read your letter. I can't say I got your note. I haven't had the strength to open the envelope … By the way, my computer was stolen. Now I'm unable to process words. I suffer from aphasia. I've just returned from Kenya and Korea. Didn't you get a card from me yet? What can I tell you? I forgot what I was going to say. I still can't find a pen that works and then I broke my pencil. You know how scarce paper is these days.

(3)

Writing back to Roget's Thesaurus and the American Heritage Dictionary in an alphabetically titled series of poems, Mullen sharply, smartly states her own resistance to, and refusal of, the tactics she employs. Intimate alienation: the speaker of the poem cannot find alignment with the poet who is writing. It is the poet who undertakes the writing-back, not "I."

I denies/defies writing back: not denying that it works tactically as resistance to the classics, just flat out denies it, destroying computer, pen, and pencil on the way, and reminding us of the ecological crisis within which we keep producing. "You know how scarce paper is these days," and yet—not scared enough of that scarcity—we keep writing.

________

My childhood in the UK was marked by the famous miners' strike (1984–85) but also by the less well-known printers' strike the following year that attempted to block the monopolistic power of Rupert Murdoch's News International group and the automation of the press. Coal and ink, reminders that hands get dirty in marking the wor(l)d.

How, when writing, do we go on strike? Place our weight on the levers of production? I am typing this on a computer powered by conflict minerals, manufactured in sweated factory conditions. It is a computer that is always already stolen: parts and labor, from someone, from somewhere. How does a writer go on strike, when the truth is that no one wants or needs (to pay for) what we do.

________

Did the pen ever work?

Translating from is translating into, and it is an illusion that the target language is any less in need of intervention. It is just that often, by nature of our intimacy with it, we—where "we" in my case means we who are white, in particular—are less uncomfortable in it. More accustomed to (not hearing/seeing) its violences and omissions.

A reviewer once asked of my work: "Is she for ever translating English into English?" and I understood that "for ever" was the only stake I could play for, or rather against the myth that words have...