When the snagged limb fell, I lost communication for four days. Everything was grayscale. The only presence was Victoria the poet, whose only presence was her mother’s absent body. In the first snow, I had held my fingertips against my grandmother’s skin on the hospital bed. This touch allowed me to write winter, to write of Victoria the poet who could not write anything else.
As Victoria the author plied herself from Victoria the poet to give birth to her mother, I ran down the canal of the book. I translated as quickly as I could read and type, to not get caught on any sutures about fetuses under the bed or offspring half dead. The grief of the text descended on my shoulders in a way only comprehensible to me in my own tongue. The valley of my warm body turned the ice to slush and hung every limb heavy.
I requested to translate the text the week after my grandmother died. I had heard the howling that forced a word of difference between luto and duelo, seeable and unseeable griefs. I was convinced by the first principle of translation—that the text is never gone. Translation became practice against absolute loss.
I opened the text to the wide field of “se fue.” The poet’s mother, she’s left, passed, departed. I was tempted to laugh in the face of these options like the hawing of branch shadows on the ceiling the night my uncle said “she’s gone.”
I started looking out for how the dead are tended, the ways a manner of phrase or a taught pull are tending. I wanted these to not go unnoticed by my obtuse eye seeking opulent grief. My sister made pecan cookies and set them on the gravestone in October, the day before I went for the ultrasound.
Left Ovary Status: Visualized, Comment: Hypoechoic area measuring 2.7 x 2.2 x 2.8 cm. Hypoechoic: giving off few echoes, object of distinct density. The act of translation sounds out the hypoechoic words, those words which do not point to other words, to other sounds, like a knot in the text, the unfamiliar object in the house.
I set [brackets] around words as I translated. Words that held the place for something else; [uterus]. I inserted all the possibilities into the bracket, like [blood, cyst, periscope, ow, clot, fetus]. The procedure would involve inserting a plastic sac to capture and excise the [she, shush, slush, cyst].
To recover from the surgery, I traveled to my grandmother’s vacant house. The first incision was through the belly button, umbilical doorway. The first incision was entrance to the vacant home, to photograph its contents. My abdomen was injected with CO2 to allow for “visualization.” The spaces inside the home grew, injected in silence. We were laparoscope protruding dormant body, visualizing excision.
We began the archive of my grandmother’s house in the first days I walked again, hands pressed against my middle. We photographed then measured every object in the house, calling out length, width, and depth. The appraiser instructed us to turn everything over and note any signature.
My uterus measures __ cm wide by __ cm tall by __ cm long. The laparoscopic scope took a picture of the bottom. The uterus turned over was font without lettering. When I asked if we were looking at the uterus from above, the doctor said we were looking towards the toes. Like germ gods marionetting the fetus pose and voyeurs of gaze.
We measured for value determination, justified to the IRS by identifying equivalents. To write the pathology report, the size of the ovary was compared to equivalents, to normal bounds. The surgeon removed 20 mL of “cloudy, amber fluid,” a hairball that looked like a cat spat, and a bawl of cartilage—bone, tooth, nail. It was the benign petrified activation of the Wolff gland, interrupted testes, tempered mutant alternate of other life syringed from the abdomen. I was validated by the reality of the plastic dish of corporal slush, incurable by Milk Thistle pill or acupuncture point, vital matter.
An auction would be too hasty, we worried. Creating the archive allowed for a frame of beholding, attention to every underneath we had never seen. The brackets in the translation were the facing mirrors in my grandmother’s bathroom, amounting echo. We avoided considering the inevitable succession, objects auctioned off: who will take this word? What will you give for it?
I made the first pass through the translation without the internet, without reference or consultation. On the first pass of the archive, we input our own object names based on functionality, memory, familial pertinence.
There was something too crude about meeting Victoria with dictionary in hand, like scalpel. As though the text itself needed to lie in wake before the translator, the house in wake before the family. The translation was, before anything else, what I whispered in the company of the corpse, under my own breath, not for any reader.
In this period of the original half-dead, I perceived its flesh. Like the year after death, every word was in its first season of new language. The first pass was precious, and not because of accuracy. Victoria was disclosing something to me which I had priorly agreed to take into my own hands and mouth without knowing what I had agreed to take. The first pass was the taste hitting.
Naming precedes the possibility of removal. Each object in the house had to be named before it could be claimed, excised. My task became uploading the photos to the archive and providing each object with a name. The appraiser, a city away and outside the house, was later tasked with renaming.
Yet naming is also the beginning of settling. What I put in my mouth is what I take to be for me. I was poised to name objects in my grandmother’s home that were not for my mouth—what is ingestible mutating by generation. Some words in the text—La Celadora, Estremecida—bobbed through untouched.
I began learning new names for what was already inside my body. When other people tried to diagnose me, I could say: mine is different from that one, it has a name. It is called ___.
Do you think your pain has increased because you now know the name? the doctor had asked.
In the winter months, I ran the car engine without destination or ownership. The translation, the house, was mine and never mine. I occupied the house in the in-between after being child and before being mother, which I take to be the same in-between of translation. If reading is receiving, being provided with and for, the protected time of having language given. We rise to the text in a long adolescence, to hear what we couldn’t ourselves say.
The long in-between of translation becomes less like the timeline’s arrow between child and mother, I came to see. That linear in-between of capital fantasy: scale from the non-productive to the productive. The act of translating Victoria to read, of working to receive, then of receiving as I produced, and becoming product, altered, of the reading, allowed me to understand how original and translation produce each other, which in turn allowed me to sense how to mother and to child could be simultaneous.
I wrote in my own words a text in which Victoria, the poet, gives birth to her mother. I felt, in translating, word-mother and at once acutely child to the grandmother text, who watched each choice in glow or glower, while saying no more than what she was given to say. In translating, I was occupying the grandmother’s house.
It was a winter of discerning the subtle differences of things. At the appraiser’s request, I fetched a key hanging on a string in the basement stairwell and opened the glass cabinet. The appraiser asked me to hold the Chinese snuff bottle in my hand and to feel if it warmed up quickly, to discern if it was glass or stone. Through the winter, I held Victoria’s words in my throat and tested their heave in my gut. What difference between parir and dar luz? Calve, lamb, litter, foal, birth, bear. What slice between grito and llanto? Shout, cry, yell, scream, howl, bellow, call, wail, lament, weep.
In the ice months, the house congealed. I turned over every object for the archive and set each back in its place. Like Guerrero’s rabbit with her half-dead brood, I carried around the gangly translation in my mouth, the skin-formatting stripped off. This in-between time of inhabiting something neither as it was, nor as it would become. With the half-dead offspring of the translation, I could gnaw a sack of grief more grossly obvious than my own.
February was the mean face-to-face not with death, but with after-death, the storms that crash through the standing dead. It was the first snow compacting to ice. It was the gridlocked stream before the flood. That winter, I sat with the dead, sat with the text in a state of half-translation. The standing dead not yet firewood, not yet warmth.
I took breaks from the page to walk into a field of knee-deep snow. Birches creaked like doors opening; meanwhile, underneath, every movement left its trace impression. I translated like the snow that falls not onto the ground but into it. The snow without flurry of accumulated creation, the snow which awaits the first text’s thaw.
Or perhaps the snow of translation was rather like standing in the fir’s branch skirt. Above, clumps cling to hemlock boughs. Brackets clot on branches like wasp’s nests, withheld. Rollicking the trunk, the translator makes fall the snow where it has not yet fallen, un-stung in the flurry.
I met my sister on the banks of the river, and we followed ski treads and fox tracks. When the mandated gap quivered, I suggested we throw ourselves down to the snow, which could do for us what we could not do for each other—embrace. Could take our form, could sink with our weight, could express, corporally, our impressions. We first encountered Victoria together, translating Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress. Perhaps this is why we translated together in the pandemic, hoping that a text could take our shape in the way that we could not take each other’s.
Rattling the house, the text brackets became tonnage shed as I ran. Keeping my own womb buoyant, heaving cargo, the bracket crates sinking through the gum of the text. Removal of the cyst was the removal of brackets from the translation: possibilities that had become protrusion and interruption. Arriving at the end of Y la muerte no tendrá dominio, I encountered the last paragraph, entirely inside of a bracket. By the end of the text, the indications of my uncertainties had become inadequate.
In the spring, I would pass each word-object on to other places, packing and repacking. Chucking out basement trash against a heart-pull snag, a photo glimpse, or whiff of stench, my grandmother's house spat its sutures. Preparing the house for viewing, resolving annotations, I cleared mantles of the move’s dust and tether.
After the Word doc wake, I shook out the contents of the brackets into dictionaries and search engines. Using the yellow highlight, I identified words in the mass for consultation. On the exam table, the doctor said that it is called spitting sutures when the body expels the translucent threads that had bound the wound, regurgitation of forgetting. Under the gooseneck gynecological LED the tweezers came at low angle and cast a shadow. The highlight function became the gooseneck bulb. The translated text spat its sutures.
