Bianca me invitó a escribir sobre la traducción. Inmediatamente, immediately me pregunto en qué idioma lo voy a escribir. How would I do it? Think and translate or immerse myself in one or the other language? I don’t think I can do the switch entirely. Suelo pensar en español a pesar de haber vivido casi la mitad de mi vida en Brooklyn. ¿Cómo es posible que en el acto de pensar todavía no adopte mi lenguaje secundario? Hay frases, after all, si, palabras también, que vienen a mi con toda naturalidad en inglés sobre todo aquellas que no utilizaba antes de mudarme de Buenos Aires. Sobre todo las financieras como loan y due date. Before I used to live day by day with some money in my pocket, moving to NYC has made me part of the economic system where I can acquire debt in order to get what I need. Schedule, me acuerdo que me costó… grasp the word until I acknowledge it by repetition, by looking at it, writing it, hearing it… Razorblade.
It seems que hay una lengua, una de las lenguas francas de la República de África Central, my friend Marcelo told us about it one night at a restaurant, Sango, if you interrupt you don’t understand… You’ll have to listen till the end of the phrase… He read it in a book called Foreign Words, parece que hasta que no terminás la oración el oyente no sabe si es afirmación o negación así que no se puede interrumpir, hay que escuchar hasta el final.
Personally I find that the Spanish language makes us speakers not go in a straight line of thought, when we answer we take diagonals, long roads and curves, never a short cut. We bring free association to the table. One thing takes us to another and so on. We don’t go directly to the point. Ja ja how did we arrive here?
What are you trying to tell me?
Which one is your mnemonic device to help with the order of sharps and flats in scales? Fat cat gets diabetes after eating butter, Feliz casa gira dando arabescos entre baladas. That means our references are different, what we store in our brains to help memorize. Our patterns are not necessarily alike pe ppe ro ni pizza. Tiem bla la tie rra
Rueda que rueda la rueda del ferrocarril
Some centro-americanos living in the US for a long time do double translation and create phrases like Te llamo pa’ trás, I’ll call you back. Does it make sense to call someone in reverse? Te llamo más tarde. They went full circle in terms of expression.
You make a gesture I cannot get… translate, make it reachable. Me haces un gesto que no puedo entender, que me querés decir?
Hoy aprendí que “sera” es noche en Italiano. Valeria me cuenta en español que ella lo habla perfecto y que entiende como tres o cuatro dialectos. Yo tengo el pasaporte más não falo niente, wait a minute…Italian, Portuguese? parole palabras words
Viajo de un país a otro
Estoy llegando a Nueva York, New York desde Buenos Aires, me cambiará la cabeza el punto de inflexión entre un lugar y otro? No lo creo, siempre pienso en Argentino, do you? I adopted in charge, following up... but my intonation will always be foreign…
I don’t work enough on having the mouth open for each sound, beyond the vowels
Leo inglés y traduzco/no traduzco, vivo un momento, el momento de la naturalización de la lengua. May Sarton describe la diferencia entre feeling lonely versus being alone. En Buenos Aires se lo cuento a una amiga en castellano, y le digo estar sola no es lo mismo que feeling lonely.
There is a baby in the plane. If we speak to babies in different languages would they end up understanding them all? Is it the landscape that configured us all? How do mountains translate/relate to lakes and jungles?
Con Federico tocamos, hacemos diálogos con sonidos, we make dialogues with musical instruments. We generate soundscapes. The violín communicates with a bombo legüero, with toc tocs, piano, chinchines and castañuelas. They are unified by their sound capacity, timbre and pitch. Would I be understood when I speak in another language to you? Can you understand me following my rhythm, my tone? I don’t think so. Maybe yes by gestures.
Una vez en un statement escribí, soy un traductor del polvo que nos une. Isn’t that the ultimate desire of artists? And ghosts our ghosts. I want to talk to you all. Let me sense the language of the invisible. I’ll translate it into a painting. Then I will let it echo, morph into these words so I can become after all the translator of the dust that unifies you and me, this and that. But why do I speak like this and you speak like that? I know…because the river flows into the waters of the ocean. Because existence is bears and flowers, because a cat is not a dog although a cat might feel it is a dog. Who, like an actor, doesn’t want to be it all?
¿Cómo es la voz de un color que suena a la intemperie? Camino mientras escribo ya estoy en otro país, otra lengua, otros códigos. Antes de llegar pensé en la crisis que me aqueja, la idea de estar allá o acá. Esta vez no, salí de un mundo y entre a otro sin brusquedad, mi cabeza hizo un click and I spoke in English all day long without questioning or even feeling tiresome from the implicit effort.
Is there a passage for transformation? Are dreams language or space?
This is a translation of my friend Claudina’s dream. Left to me in an audio memo, in Spanish…“I was going through a town that was like a prehistoric labyrinth. All of a sudden someone was jumping from the floor up, alive. I couldn’t associate it with the movies I watched, with anything, it was natural. It was like a moving pebble, that is what it was. I kept on going pi pi pi and then I found a skateboard, then an old pair of scissors and another little thing I don’t remember and I kept it, y me la guardaba. No me lo guardaba for stealing it, sino que la agarraba in one of those old corridors. All of a sudden a tía passed by and said, I like something of you.” Then she said, “I know you because of the pictures you took of Rita,” and that was it, the clue of what I was seeing versus…I don’t know. That is all. My god I know that! Se me juntan porque muchas veces el sueño se me transforma en otra cosa…here I am, alone and don’t build up anything and I’m watching eight movies a day…I associate all in that place of dreams. Then I watched something, about a clinic where they treat you with a psychedelic drug and the work it does with the unconscious to cure people.”
Miro a mi alrededor desde una posición de loto frente a una pintura. Acto seguido miro la máquina de coser, in my bedroom I look at the sewing machine, the table light is putting the focus on it. It is the main character of that angle in the bedroom.
I’m looking for words to present what I see. A warm light. A foot on the floor, half on the carpet that contains the almohadón for meditation. I am sitting here and therefore I write.
