These lips that are not (d)one: Writing with the ‘pash’ of translation

Abstract

Taking up the embodied erotics of translation put forward by Aarón Lacayo and drawing on Luce Irigaray’s figure of the lips as meeting the other at the threshold of their irreducible becoming, this paper presents the make-out session, or ‘pash’ of translation, as a framework for producing multilingual writing that preserves the messy, multidirectional movement of interlingual translation on the page. Close textual analysis of Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote and Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing! serves to demonstrate that such a mode of translative writing defers textual closure so as to facilitate the emergence of a multiplicity of textual resonances and highlight the asymmetries and discomfort of the interlingual encounter. An accompanying creative text, also published in this edition of TEXT (Fisher 2020), experiments with the application of such multidirectional and ‘suspended’ translation techniques to produce a response to a poem by the Argentinian author Alejandra Pizarnik, moving between Old Provençal, Castellano and English to produce a piece of poetic prose that interrogates the frustration of displaced infatuation, the ethically questionable state of travelling ‘for pleasure’ and the embodied resonances between material discursive bodies in various states of becoming and becoming undone in desire.