Language of Grief and Body in Translation

Michelle Gil-Montero

doi:10.21992/tc29537

Abstract

 Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship was, in the words of scholar Marguerite Feitlowitz, "an intensely verbal takeover" (Feitlowitz 22). The language of the military junta was one that spun an illusion of reality out of abstractions and absolutes, while in fact, it cloaked real events to produce a culture of denial. I discuss my translation of María Negroni’s lyric novel about The Dirty War, The Annunciation, which enters the dysfunctional language of dictatorship as a site of poetic play. Negroni dramatizes how this language prohibits, above all else, grief. Specifically, it deploys a language of melancholy as a radical gesture in a linguistic-political context where the body, and the embodied, have disappeared. Drawing from passages in my translation I highlight translation as it participates in problems of loss, silence, and absence, and ultimately, as it performs the recuperative work of mourning.

Highlights

Marguerite Feitlowitz, in her seminal book A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, has characterized Argentina’s 1976–1983 military dictatorship as a war on language
The activists struggle to unify their political message, but their movement becomes fragmented as their communication breaks down
[There were...] Brains claiming he never bought a word of Socialist Peronism, Mousie hunched over like a little Duke of Orsini, and with him, Penguin, Bashful, Cripple, Filly, and Chester, a veritable Sacred Forest of Monsters...and Evita, who dropped her literature major...because the meetings always devolved into a debate about whether the universe is a finite series of concentric spheres or a totality of worlds in eternal exile, and with all that nonsense, how the hell can anyone do anything that might affect the masses...” (Negroni 11)

Summary

Introduction

Marguerite Feitlowitz, in her seminal book A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, has characterized Argentina’s 1976–1983 military dictatorship as a war on language. Like Celan’s poetic economy, Negroni’s novel holds the body of language “close and secure against loss” (Celan 395).

Results

Conclusion