Translating as Becoming Intimate by María-Milagros Rivera Garretas (review)

María-Milagros Rivera Garretas's essay, "Translating as Becoming Intimate," explores the experience of translating the poetry of Emily Dickinson as an act of intimacy between the living history of the writer and that of her translators, particularly Rivera Garretas herself. Rivera Garretas's conception is that for a woman there is no betrayal in her translation, as there does seem to be in a man's (since it is to him that the saying "Traduttore traditore"—Translator traitor—belongs). For a woman, there is not plagiarism in writing but rather embodiment and exercises of embodiment. For the same reason, a woman translator cannot, in substance, translate just anything, although she might do so instrumentally (and there is nothing wrong with that). She can translate that which she is able to embody. On going deeper into the experience of embodiment that a woman's translation of female writing requires, the sensation emerges of becoming closer, of translating as becoming intimate. "Becoming intimate" are words that derive from the Latin "intus," which means "inside," which, in turn, comes from the Indo-European root *en-, as in the preposition "in," in its meaning of "within." "To become intimate" is the phrase that expresses the superlative quality of "intus," that is, "intimus," meaning "very inside." Translating female writing is, in Rivera Garretas's opinion, a journey to the most inner, or, rather, a journey from the most inner to the most inner, from the most intimate part of an experience (that of the writer) to the most intimate of another's experience (that of the translator), with the hope that the journey is repeated in the reader, in women readers and, in their own sexuate way, in one or many male readers.