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Vivian Arimany on Translating Juliana Rozo’s Archaeology of a Swan
Unfamiliarity is what drew me to Juliana Rozo’s work: unfamiliarity with Juliana herself as well as with the type of exciting, amorphous work she produces. When I received a request to translate Archaeology of a Swan, I immediately accepted.
What sort of marvelous, brief beast had been laid upon me? The whiteness of the page that characterizes poetry was there, but interrupted by Hilma af Klint’s strikingly colorful images. Af Klint is an artist I came to know and grow fond of through translation, the same way that I came to Juliana’s friendship. Serendipitously, the publication of Archaeology of a Swan coincided with a Hilma af Klint exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA). In fact, the more I revisit the book following its publication, the more I realize how af Klint’s visual poetics (characterized by surreal and abstract imagery) reflects the fragmentary and experimental nature of Archaeology of a Swan.
I prefer translating works by living authors, so that my process can be collaborative. It is true that a work of translation stands apart from the original, as Walter Benjamin noted, but this doesn’t mean that the translator can’t breathe in and exhale the same music and art that inspired the original author. After our first phone conversation, Juliana shared with me a short playlist of songs she listened to while writing: an omen that guided me through my own process.
I prefer translating works by living authors, so that my process can be collaborative.
Both Juliana and I moved to New York City from Latin America to study and write. She was back in Colombia at the time of our call, however, while I was in our shared new home, where we had never met, despite also sharing a small circle of Spanish-speaking writers and artists. It was destiny that Archaeology of a Swan would bring us together. Juliana and I passionately discussed musical female divas, distinctively Björk and the swan dress she wore at the 2001 Academy Awards. Despite not adding it to the text itself, Juliana perceives musical divas as human iterations of swans, equally elegant and intimidating. There are myriad other references throughout Archaeology of a Swan. It is a fractured body, moving among memories of childhood in Colombia; reflections on its violent history, like the Bogotazo rioting after the murder of a presidential candidate; and cultural references, from Marcel Proust to the music of Luis Alberto Spinetta.
The grandmother, who is mentioned several times, is a swan-like diva herself. The past is revealed not just through cultural history and firsthand accounts but also through documents like the grandfather’s letter to his boss. The narrating voice did not experience these moments herself, but they are still threaded within her actual memories to build up the self presented to us. Due to elements like the grandfather’s letter, as well as the frequency of the first-person “I,” one could easily categorize the volume as partly autobiographical. This compulsion for biographical readings resonates with Hélène Cixous’s concept of “écriture feminine,” which posits women’s writing as intrinsically personal due to the authors’ marginal position in society.
The grandmother, who is mentioned several times, is a swan-like diva herself
However, in texts like Rozo’s, the personal is destabilized, or torn apart, through the elucidation of a shared experience (here the important historical and cultural references). The body of the text comes undone, like the personal, in moments such as “(linguistic parentheses a.k.a. boomerang),” which consists of a dictionary definition, or “juvenilia (or first writings),” which holds a direct quote from Proust’s Swann’s Way. In these moments, others’ writing becomes part of Rozo’s writing—not in an act of plagiarizing, but in recognition of the innate inspiration that external sources evoke in us. Countless authors have remarked how emulating others is the route to polished writing. It was intimidating for me to translate a passage by a literary master like Proust into English, especially when there already exist other translations, such as Lydia Davis’s. In this process of multitranslation, however, I became a hybrid creature along with Juliana and her text.
Throughout the translation process, I made decisions to leave certain words in the original Spanish. I left the Spanish gozo (or jouissance in French), which has sometimes been translated to English as “joy” or “pleasure.” However, neither of those words can fully encompass the experience of goce, described in psychoanalytic theory as an intense embodied gratification that is sexual in nature. Even though I could have found a proper alternative based on the context (a description of how swans gleefully wail before dying), it was important for me to not translate it due to the long and rich history of dissent that gozo conveys. Writers like Jane Gallop have noted their conscious decision to leave jouissance untranslated when transferring French psychoanalytic theory into English. For Gallop, this is a way of disrupting patriarchal language, of adding a pause of uninhibited joy to an otherwise rational system. Rozo’s book, with its breaks and silences, morphs readers (if they let it) into beings of pleasure (akin to a swan), and rips a caesura onto the linearity of memory and narrative.
Vivian Arimany is a PhD student at Columbia University and the translator of Juliana Rozo’s Archaeology of a Swan / Arqueología de un cisne.