This essay began in a footnote—number 2—located at the end of a sentence in the penultimate paragraph of the first section of my article “Haptic Tactic: Hyper-tenderness of the [Mexican] State and the Performances of Lia García,” published in this very journal (Delgado Huitrón 2019: 167). The article approaches the hypertender touch of transfeminist artist, poet, and pedagogue Lia García (La Novia Sirena) through a close analysis of a performance event entitled “Quinceañera,” part of her larger performative project Proyecto 10Bis (2016–17). In the article I propose using the anglophone composite to transgender touch for thinking about what trans embodiment does to the transitivity of touch. A grammatically incorrect (and perhaps controversial) formulation that makes of transgender a verb, to transgender touch intends to foreground the performative force that trans touch holds, in its capacity to do and its ability to undo, notions of gender and sexuality as abided and prescribed by the law. The sentence where this footnote is located introduces the term and inserts, between em dashes and in italics, the Spanish-language word transtocar. Instead of doing the explanatory work of translation, however, the footnote takes the reader to the crevices of the article only to offer up another creative, grammatically incorrect formulation that defers and disrupts meaning once more. The footnote explains that transtocar is the alteration of the Spanish-language word trastocar by way of an n in its midst: trastocar becomes “transtocar.” Withholding a “definitive” translation, the footnote offers a different linguistic (and therefore cultural) referent and then enacts the same creative and grammatically disruptive act onto language as that which conceives of to transgender touch: it alters the order established by its semantic construction.At once serious and playful, much of the work of translation happens in footnotes. Footnotes are the space in which original text or text in translation is inserted, engaging in direct translation and sometimes incorporating the possible different inflections and cultural connotations that these words might have. This form of bilingual academic writing serves to justify word choice and also to provide ease to the (assumed anglophone) reader in their journey through the text. Annotations, sidenotes, disclaimers, afterthoughts—the footnote is on the order of the fragment. Part of the main text but seemingly standing on its own, these pieces of writing hold thinking that gets easily tossed aside. Footnotes are also the location of the common authorial declaration, “translation mine.” In this particular footnote, however, I do not set out to provide or claim an authoritative translation. Instead, I explain that these two lexical formulations, to transgender touch and transtocar, are conceived alongside each other, much in the spirit of queer and performance theorist Eve Kosofky Sedgwick's (2003: 8–9) beside. In contrast to the logic and authority of the translative footnote, the footnote that concerns this essay performs a disruption to the power relations embedded within the translative footnote as genre by exposing the very act of thinking and theorizing across languages.Perhaps I succumbed too quickly to the allure of the beside, its spatial arrangement and its connotation of accompaniment, when in reality thinking trans-lingually engages the much messier spatiality of the overlap, the montage, something approximating Gloria Anzaldúa's nepantla. When crossed by geographic and linguistic borders, thinking and feeling, and therefore theorizing, entail a natural flow between one's languages at the psychic and embodied levels of the self. It is an unconscious operation that does not require us to code switch, releasing the heaviness of the tongue and its supposed illegitimacy. A tongue, Anzaldúa (2012: 81) suggests, that must be left to move wildly.There is always trouble in the wildness of translation. There is the trouble of loss: the loss of exactitude or of referential completeness premised on a fear of the irretrievability of what falls into the cracks of cultural translation. There is the trouble of loyalty: to the text, to the original and to origin; of betrayal, of misrepresenting or misunderstanding, premised on the fear of facing the truth of difference, the false promise of mimesis. There is the trouble of the political: of epistemic impositions, of unidirectional prescriptions, of power imbalances, of knowing that words and concepts are sites of struggle. And there is the problem of translation par excellence: having to navigate between a calculated loyalty to meaning and a felt commitment to poetic style. All these concerns cause trouble, time and time again, and are thus tackled, in praxis, through constant experimentation: by mixing languages (Spanglish, Portuñol), by refusing to translate words (travesti, lencha), by resignification (queer to cuir to kuir).While all this trouble haunts my footnote, this moment of translation emerged from another, more quiet concern, una inquietud. It was not the transfer of meaning from one language to another that unsettled me (although it was that too). What disquieted me was transcribing into English a form of touch that I had felt and experienced in another language. Does touch, as a sensorial language, also happen through spoken and written tongues? Do movement and gesture, sense and sensation, translate? And if so, what are the textures of such translations?A disruption to trastocar, transtocar wears the mark of what it intends: to semantically alter or perturb both gender and touch. In the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, published by Real Academia Española (RAE)—an institution I cite with great ambivalence—the verb trastocar, formed by the prefix tras- followed by the verb tocar, is defined as 1) trastornar o alterar algo, and in a reflexive form as 2) trastornarse o perturbarse.1 Broadly, then, trastocar means to alter or change something, with the unsettling yet at times desirable inflection of an action that is upsetting, perturbing, disrupting, or subverting.That the verb tocar is transitive already establishes a subject/object relation premised on an action. It involves a movement and therefore a transition between or across two or more entities: tocar, to touch another; ser tocado, to be touched by another; or tocarse, to touch oneself. In this way tocar is already trastocar, to touch is already to touch across, to touch through, to trans-touch. This speaks to the way that touch, tocar, and even toucher in French are used to express a change or alteration. Think here of Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui's (2002: 2) proposed triad of a touch that alters at the level of discourse: On a touché au vers (from Stéphane Mallarmé), on a touché à la critique (from Paul de Man), and his additional third term, on a touché le genre, as it emerges from “the transvestite['s] whispering: ‘He trastocado el género.’” It is this last formulation, in the textures of a whisper, with which transtocar converses.2The disordering the n provokes is semantic, political, and aesthetic. The semantic disruption occurs at the level of the word. The prefix tras- in trastocar is a simplified version of the prefix trans-, and it is nearly interchangeable with it. However, according to Spanish grammar rules, the n is removed when the prefix is used to denote a place situated detrás or behind the space designated by the base word.3 I bring up this onerous detail because it both emphasizes the spatiality of the prefix and elucidates the degree to which the addition of the n is a mischievous endeavor. Adding the n in italics is to resist convention as well as to alter the word trastocar itself. This way transtocar enters a contemporary (and playful) vernacular that makes explicit reference to a gender, sexual identity, and embodiment that the RAE disavows. With the outright rejection of any alteration to language that experiments with more gender inclusive expressions, as, for example, the use of the letters e and x to replace the gendered o for its plural forms, the institution forecloses language's alterability, and with it its translatability. This is part of the political disruption of the n.But this political disruption is also at the level of meaning. Returning to the RAE's definition of trastocar, we gather the first word used to define it is “trastornar.” This word conjures up a range of medical and specifically pathological connotations, especially its noun form, trastorno.4 Used in a similar way as disorder in English, it is the language of mental and pyschological diagnosis: un trastorno mental, a mental disorder. For this reason, the vernacular use of trastornar tends toward an injurious use, referring to being or going “crazy.” In fact, gender dysphoria was previously known as “trastorno de identidad de género.”5 This pathological inflection is embedded in the meaning of trastocar, also as a capacity to dis-order. The insertion of the n in transtocar, then, also serves to push back against this use and instead works toward a resignification of its pathological textures, especially with regard to gender and sexuality.Finally, transtocar is also an aesthetic disruption. The n is unapologetically ornamental. It is the accent piece in the word's wardrobe—the accessory that always risks being too much, in excess, edging kitsch. It disturbs, it disrupts, it dis-orders, just enough to make a statement that ripples in the hegemony of language.There is much to be said about what happens in the space between the Spanish transtocar and the English to transgender touch. In lieu of the skillful travestismo between verb, noun, and adjective that to transgender touch enacts, we have the playful travesura of the interruption of the n in transtocar, a one-word verb easy on the Latinate tongue. It is clear by now that in the fortresses of grammar, as in those of gender, both reassemblings are technically incorrect. There is something of the vulnerable in both words and in the gap between them—so present yet forced into hiding by the virtue of translation. And while something might appear to get lost in the space between transgender touch and transtocar, having been conceived simultaneously evinces this loss to be a dialogical transaction instead, a form of thinking developed already in and as translation. Such creative disposition follows Walter Benjamin's (2015) understanding of translation as a mode whereby the act of translating must focus on translating a language's mode of signification, rather than merely its meaning. That is, not just the object each word intends (to signify) but also the space in which it comes to intend such a thing. In other words, the infrastructure of language, and not just of each word, must be made palpable in translation. For this reason, it is not that something gets lost in the gap between one and the other, between transtocar and to transgender touch, but that each contains fragments of the other. To conceive of something in translation, then, forcibly means to translate one's own tender disposition, to acknowledge one's own split tongue and psyche—one's own fragments.Lia García collects broken dishes. This impulse emerged from a performance she called “Cocinar la Memoria” (2018), performed during an artist residency at the living museum Elsewhere, in Greensboro, North Carolina. Once a secondhand shop owned and run by Sylvia Gray, this three-story building downtown contains a vast array of old objects, from furniture to clothing to artworks. The premise of the residency was to use any and as many of the archived objects as desired and make with/of them a new artistic object or intervention. Surrounded by sculptors, García felt slightly out of place; the medium seemed to present some translative trouble of its own.6“Cooking Memory” consisted of moving three boxes from the space of the attic to the space of the kitchen with the help of a participatory audience. These boxes, each of which she labeled differently—Justicia, Fragilidad, Sueños—were full of broken dishes, pedacitos de vidrio y porcelana. Putting these trastes rotos on a table, García declared this to be the return of the dishes to their “rightful” place, an act of justice, dreaming, and fragility. With the dishes no longer relegated to the attic, García enabled their leaping movement of “return” to what she considered to be their original, and therefore rightful, place. García, however, does not merely consider this a return to an origin, “a su raíz” in her words, but an act of rescue, rescatándoles del olvido. This movement made the dishes travel from a relegated space that deemed them useless to the rife space of memory: “Tal vez esos trastes nunca imaginaron que alguien los iba a rescatar y los iba a hacer transitar de lo inservible a la memoria.”7 Thinking the kitchen as the dishes' original place is enacting a mode of signification that follows a specific spatial and taxonomic distribution: that dishes belong in a kitchen or on a dining-room table. In a way, García engages in a process of translation, attempting to speak the broken dishes' language and then transferring that meaning to her own performance. The kitchen may have been, in García's view, the dishes' place of origin, yet the dishes are certainly not in their original form but in disassembled fragments of themselves, shuffled and dis-ordered into heaping boxes of shards.In this performance, García writes and conducts a score for translation. The choreographed movement from attic to kitchen, arguably not one of translation in the strict sense, nods to the form of the movement between a translation and its original. There is a reciprocal relationship between these two spaces, just as there is between languages, and expressing such relation, Benjamin (2015: 73) argues, is the purpose of translation. Translation, as a manifestation of the kinship of languages, must not strive for likeness with the original, “for in its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and renewal of something living—the original undergoes a change” (73). In “Cooking Memory,” neither the movement of the dishes to the kitchen nor the dishes themselves strive for likeness to an imagined original location or original form. Instead, the performance foregrounds the transformation and changes that have occurred and that grant these broken pieces their afterlife, even if this is in the shape of memory.The shards of these broken dishes, like words in language, are always already fragments of a whole. Of broken dishes and translation, Benjamin writes, Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. (79; emphasis mine)While in “Cooking Memory” García does not engage in the task of gluing fragments of broken dishes back together, her broader movement, from attic to kitchen, incorporates the same mode of signification, its intended effect, through this performance of return and reassembly. The task of the translator thus lies in reassembling fragments “lovingly and in detail,” where the original text and its translation, the original location and the movement of return, are recognized to be “fragments of a greater language,” a process that requires a tender touch and a poetic closeness.Thinking about the fragment makes us leap back to Anzaldúa (2012), who takes fragmentation—of the self, of consciousness, and of the body—to be a given, a kind of point of departure, even if in the midst of things. This fragmented state, which she calls the Coyolxhauqui state, is counteracted by its own impulse toward recomposition, “the psychic and creative process of tearing apart and pulling together,” a deconstruction followed by reconstruction of a new order (50). In this dismemberment, re-membering is also an act of survival. And in the push-and-pull of fragmentation, in the kinship of languages, the small piece that alters transtocar—an n—shuffles meaning and re-members the word.Translating, much like touching, requires a certain predisposition to being moved and in movement. A willingness not unlike the movement of broken dishes from the attic to the kitchen; or the reading of a footnote where your eyes must leap from the main text and into the crevices at the bottom of a page. Benjamin (2015: 81) writes, “Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point . . . a translation touches the original lightly,” and—as García might say, tenderly—“only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux” (emphasis mine). To pursue its own course, to follow its own impulse, is to free the fragment from its original order. To collect broken dishes, as Lia García does, is to archive the possibility of other orders and the potential of a different future recomposition and re-membering. It is to follow the thrust of transtocar.