The Borrowed Silence of Translation

I am taking a standardized test in a boys' school in a different town. The desks are small and right-handed and my pencil drops.

There is a space between its scratching in the bubbles on my exam and the small clatter it makes on the worn marble floor.

Where silence clearly signifies, has codified meaning within culture, noise fails to. The sounds that hold up the silence, surround it, cushion, make for it a velvet rope, cannot be integrated into the system. Examples? I am in this studio. I hear cars and birds. I hear the water pipes, I hear my neighborhood cursing at her canvas. They are a background, I can focus on them or not. Or I can focus on the quiet of this empty house. A buzz. The dishwasher. The church bells, shouting seven floors below, my neighbor's television, Tú sí que vales, it is very loud, she is very old. How do they fit in my translation?

I have a recurring and frustrating conversation with one of my students in an evening creative nonfiction class. The students, all traditionally college-age undergrads, come in tired and world weary at 6 p.m. They sit down and this one student starts talking about John Cage again. She uses his 4'33'' as an example for everything. One of her favorite things is to tell me she "could have done it." I tell her "but you didn't do it" and every time someone makes that comment about contemporary art an artist dies. At some point we get talking about the role of silence in writing, of the pause, of how to use space and breath for dramatic effect in her sad love stories. She brings up Cage again. That his whole work was nothing. I listen to her—she seems very invested in this reading—and then counter. But wasn't he saying, by holding his hands in the air, by not striking the keys, that the audience was doing the composing? Have you listened to the piece? To different recordings? The auditorium is far from silent. Silence isn't silence, I keep attempting to drive this home. I find I too am invested in my reading.

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Lately, I am very interested in exploring the parts that society deems empty. Because I am convinced nothing is ever empty, not the air, not our pauses, not gutters between the frames in comic books. It doesn't mean I know what they're filled with, but I know they are filled. I know air contains heat and cold, that we have to cut through fog, that pauses are too often pregnant.

So I ask: Do the spaces between the words, the pages left intentionally blank (by someone else), the timed pause (without time signature to read), the extra indent, the character who stands wordless but is marked by speech—do they create lines of flight in my translations? Deleuze and Guattari's term, not mine: movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Wide air shafts for the words to fall through, suddenly the line is less grounded. The pauses and breaks, what is seeming silence in the text, allows room for clutter, proliferation. It allows room for noise. When I write my own work I am somehow aware of this. I am living it.

In a text there are often signs of silence. Like the inscription of a pause in a measure of music. But they belong to a different culture, a different economy of time. As an author my words hold breath for as long as I see fit. My attempts at someone else's timing seem needy, mollifying. Because silence is filled with noise. Noises large and small, uncontrollable and undefinable, noise is at one with silence, partner, companion.

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The Hypothesis: I've been doing it wrong. When I write my own work I seek out relations, when I translate work I look at words as individual signs. I keep going back to Charles Olson and his discussion about there being two kinds of poets: those concerned with the choice of...