I'll read a little bit of my bootlegged
copy of Say Translation is Art.
I bootleg myself at the same time as my publisher
because they wanted to make extra copies
and I said I was wanting to do that too.
So we mutually bootlegged the same book.
And I'm going to read a middle section.
Say vomit.
Say gagging.
Say choking translation.
Say I spent the entire summer of 2020
with low grade fever and endless nausea.
Say this vomit inducing country translation.
Say my younger body drinking alcohol.
Body rejecting even a small amount by vomiting.
They say women have trouble saying no.
I envied my body's clarity in vomit translation.
Say race and racism quiet translation of.
Say in Asia I learned to better understand it, to talk freely.
Say in 2017 I returned to where I'm from
and learn a new how to speak.
How not to say the wrong thing to the wrong person
at the wrong time.
Say translating myself into silence, into poetry.
Say a book full of translated vomit, gagging, choking.
Say in the before of translation is silence.
Say in the after of translation is silence.
Say fuck the police translation.
Say Public Enemy translation.
Say Tribe Called Quest translation.
Say Blackalicious translation.
Say TLC's No Scrubs written on an old envelope
in the car translation.
Say "Jok'Air!
On va turn up toute la nuit" translation.
Say defund the police translation.
Say divesting from racist brutality
and investing in social services translation.
Say priorities, preferences, customs, inclinations,
values of importance and investment
can shift because they need not stay the same in translation.
Say just because it is common and normal to translate
and prioritize the sense and meaning of a poem
at the cost of goods sound and music,
or to translate this poem and that poem
but not the book in its entirety translation.
Say micro translation.
Say for example translate only one component of a poem.
Translate only the syntax.
Translate the syntax in its entirety.
Say translate the entire sonic landscape of the poem.
Say translate the spirit, the kinetics,
the ghost that haunts it.
Say leaf behind, leaf out, alter the sense.
Say no they would never do that.
Would I do that?
Say I would do that.
Say do that to me.
Do that to me.
Say the more time I spend writing and translating
and making art, the more they all blend into each other.
Say the more time I spend being human and knowing and caring
about other humans, the more the conventional structures
of human relationships blend and regroup
and reinvent those structures.
Say new structures of language articulated via the LGBTQIA+
community opening the door to new formulations for structures
of literature.
Say translation is opportunity.
Say I'm sick of too many conversations
about source and target, author and translator,
foreignizing and domesticating.
Say non-binary stances toward translation
sitting with and alongside both extremes.
Say on one end the magic of translation
allows me to read the work of Alejandra Pizarnik and Ursula
Andkjaer Olsen and Dorothy Tse.
And then say on the other end, the ambitious comparative
literature student reading in 2, 3, 4 languages
because if one is to read seriously,
one must read it in the original.
Say all of it together alongside.
Say two-legged human being, female, lesbian, musician,
composer among other things translation, Pauline Oliveros.
Say what you can do to help if you'd
like is to call your families, your bosses, your landlords,
your friends, everyone you know and come out
of the closet as queer translation.
CAConrad and Harvey Milk.
Say overcoming heteronormativity naturalized desires
by learning to recognize all naturalized desires,
such as the desire for a certain kind of beauty in translation.
Say desire wears the mask of naturalization.
Say translation is a process of denaturalization, which also is
a means of decolonizing desire.
Say suspicion in all that appears
to be natural translation, all that appears to be compulsorily
able-bodied translation.
Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Göransson.
Say I translate with my body.
Say my body is not the same as your body.
Kate Briggs.
In fact, say my body produces bags of shit.
One heat seeking bag of shit and another heat seeking
bag of shit translation.
Translation into and out of continuous inferno.
Translatable bags of shit because we cannot scream,
we translate.
Daniel Borzutzky.
Say translation as a means of denaturalizing desire
in language as rehearsal for denaturalizing, decolonizing,
and overall flat out liberating desire in real actual,
lived life hurray.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]