An intimate procedure: translating val flores

Abstract

This translator’s note prefaces my translation of the essay “The Intimacy of the Procedure: Writing, lesbian, south as practices of the self” by the Argentine lesbian activist and writer val flores. I comment on flores’s writing from the perspective of translating it, attending to the corporeality of her language, its imbrication with lesbian writing across languages and continents, and her tactics of citation, as well as providing some context for her first-time anglophone readers. I then dialogue with the text to think about translation itself as an “intimate procedure”: an act of (self-)transformation and desire; the work of bridging worlds and tongues; and a kind of queer or feminized labor rendered invisible in a colonial imagination. I offer lesbian, anticolonial translation as part of literature's possibilities and erotics.