For-Against Translation

Against/For Translation. For all the ink splattered here to make the words appear, I am flummoxed and frustrated that there is never any excuse for translation. I am against it, for the obvious reasons of lack and limit, the failure to access idiom, to respect meanings and metaphors sipped with mother’s milk into a mother-tongue. There really is no sanity in trying, an impossible madness to try to bridge that gap with grammar or study or learning – you just won’t catch the drift or cadence of drifting and careening across the contours of mixed messages and a terrain of experience hardly conscious. The translator betrays their origins, albeit creatively, heroically, in a futile gesture of hope, or faith, or Quixote. There is no measure of the effort to convey the entire structure of meaning when one regime of segregation must be forced into another – the aching unspeakable trauma of repeating crimes against to your own, when one faction retaliates in sectarian turn to survive, or where…