Translation as a Border Site (Tennant)

Pilar Godayol's argument about "the third age" of gendered translation metaphors reminded me of a William James quote that Maggie Nelson cites in her memoir The Argonauts: "We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold" (54). James and Nelson challenge the idea that conjunctions and prepositions are merely transitional tools in language and enrich their value by transforming them into sites of expression. If such a change were embraced by the world, the result would be a more expansive discourse. Relatedly, Gloria Anzaldúa conceives of translation as a "between" space that is reminiscent of a borderland, which she defines as "a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary" and inhabited by "those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the 'normal.'" This metaphor conjures a space where binaries are destabilized and imperfection is championed as an unavoidable yet worthwhile aspect of cultural exchange. (Clare Cavanagh might call it a breeding ground for "joyous failure.") What I love about this depiction is the way in which it refutes the fraught, idealized notion of an original text ("said to have a totalized prior moment of being or meaning - an essence") and flawless translation ("an exploration of imbalance"). Instead, it humanizes and celebrates the role of the translator as "recognizing that solutions are often only partial and always varied." To invoke Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," the concept of faithful translation "always attempts to conceive of structure on the basis of a full presence which is beyond play" (Writing and Difference, 279). According to Derrida, there is no definitive center or origin for structure, just as there is no original text in translation, because the so-called center "was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play" (280). The borderland is thus a functionally open, active, and pluralistic site of what Carolyn Shread calls metramorphosis that produces and reproduces a chain or sequence of meanings with no fixed origin.