In Defense of Mimicry 

1.

Translators are told over and over that they have to maintain fidelity, that they should not be unfaithful, that they should not take liberties with the original text. Reviews of translated books seldom even mention the translator—unless the translator has made what the reviewer considers an error. In such cases, the reviewer will criticize the translator for lacking “fidelity” to the original, or simply for lacking competence. The reviewer establishes mastery by casting doubt on the translator’s. The translator becomes visible by making errors, by allowing noise into the transformation of the text.

However, if translators hew too closely to the original, they are liable to be dismissed as mere mimics. They have, as it were, lost their individuality, originality, and agency. Translators must never depart from some idealized version of fidelity to the original, but they also must not appear to follow it too closely. In the former case, the translator lacks competence and mastery; in the latter case, they lose their agency and authority. The two predicaments are related; both suggest a failure of selfhood. How can translators escape from this impossible situation? Should we?

I am intrigued by the common rhetorical figure of the mimic and its related concept of mimesis. It seems to describe what translators do: we imitate the original, make doubles of it, become the double of the author. And yet the mimic embodies many fears about translation: the loss of selfhood and agency, the loss of the singular original, the generating of excess. I am intrigued by the figure of the mimic as a model for the translator precisely because of its excess, its noise—and the sense of mimicry as something bodily.

Throughout my career as a translator, I’ve been told that my job is to “capture the spirit” of the foreign text. But I have often wondered, why do I have to capture it? Why does it have to be contained? And what about the body? What makes it so corruptible? Why must it be repressed in translation? Is there something about the body that resists capture? What is the relationship between body and mastery? And is mastery the best way to engage with the foreign?

2.

One of the most common solutions to the excess and noise of translation is the model of equivalence. According to this model, the translator’s task is to find an abstracted “spirit” of the texts—separate from the actual language—and use it as a kind of exchange rate to convert the text into a new language, with as little friction as possible. As the exchange rate analogy suggests, equivalence arguments tend to blend the religious aspect of spirit with a fundamentally economic metaphor. This model is about balancing the exchange and containing the excess that is always part of translation. Fundamentally conservative, this model is what Georges Bataille called a “restricted economy” based on “the principle of conservation.”

Unsurprisingly, the most influential proponent of equivalence was a sometime Christian missionary, Eugene Nida. In Towards a Science of Translating (1964), Nida sets out the necessity of using the “spirit” of the text to guide the translation:

Since no two languages are identical either in the meanings given to corresponding symbols or in the ways in which such symbols are arranged in phrases and sentences, it stands to reason that there can be no absolute correspondence between languages. Hence there can be no fully exact translations. The total impact of a translation may be reasonably close to the original, but there can be no identity in detail. Constance B. West (1932, p. 344) clearly states the problem: “Whoever takes upon himself to translate contracts a debt; to discharge it, he must pay not with the same money, but the same sum.” One must not imagine that the process of translation can avoid a certain degree of interpretation by the translator.

Nida acknowledges there can be “no fully exact translations.” But, comparing the “spirit” of a text to a currency exchange rate, he suggests the translator’s “debt” can be paid off with a different currency. Even if translators cannot use “the same money,” they can pay “the same sum.” It may be impossible to create identical translation, but by abstracting the text into a “sum,” we might find equivalence. Equivalence is economic: it’s about balancing the books, maintaining order, and keeping noise out.

To achieve “dynamic equivalence,” Nida states, the translator must aim at “complete naturalness of expression” while keeping in mind the “modes of behavior within the context of his own culture.” For example, Nida argues that a Biblical passage featuring two men greeting each other with a kiss should be translated as “hearty handshake” in order to avoid homoerotic implications in the target culture. If the target culture would balk at homoeroticism, all such allusions must be excised and the text made “natural.” This idea of naturalness is fundamentally conservative. Its purpose is not only to maintain the value and meaning of a text, but also to contain its influence and effects on the target culture. It ignores the heterogeneity of cultures as well as the subversive potential of translation.

For Nida, the opposite of “dynamic equivalence” is a more literalist method. If the former is based on translating the “spirit” of the text, then it follows that the literalist method must involve translating the “body”—the letters and words, the actual language of the text. And the body is flawed. Nida quotes the British translator Francis Storr: “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” The “letter”—the language—of the text is the site of violence and damage. This depiction of translation as a harmed body is not unusual. John Dryden compared a bad translation to a “carcass,” while Ezra Pound compared his retranslations of Guido Cavalcanti to reanimating a corpse. While the “spirit” floats above linguistic boundaries and borders, the body of translation registers both the violence of translation and the intersection of languages and cultures. The body in translation is not “natural,” but monstrous, a threat to the “natural” order.

In After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975), George Steiner argues in much the same way for the importance of mastery, warning against the corruptibility of the body. In a colonial analogy, he suggests that translators “extract” an essence of value from the foreign culture, and that they must master this essence—or “spirit,” in Nida’s terms—to properly assimilate the text into the target culture. Steiner calls this process “economical.” He also defines translation as the “appropriative transfer of meaning.” If read hastily, we might even mistake the phrase for “transfer of money.” Again, the “spirit” functions as a kind of exchange rate: a way of controlling the excess of translation.

However, Steiner warns that the translation process is highly volatile: there is always a “risk of being transformed.” To master the foreign text, the translator must fully understand the foreign meaning and fully assimilate it into the target culture in the “appropriative transfer.” If the translator fails, the process of translation may lead to “infection” and “contagion.” They may lose their own voice, their individuality: “the inhaled voice of the foreign text had come to choke their own.” The body is a site of corruption; it’s where selfhood is lost.

For Steiner, the failure to master and integrate the foreign text will lead the target culture to be “awash in mimicry.” Translation may lead to a state where “almost anything” can mean “everything,” or the target culture may find that the texts have no meaning, no value. In other words, mimicry both causes and is the symptom of a kind of “inflation.” As with Nida, Steiner weds a fundamentally economic model with a distrust of the body. Mimicry is the result of this corruption of the body.

What is it about mimicry that is so dangerous? What is its relationship to the body? And why is the body such a problem for translation? For the ideal of mastery?

3.

I would argue that the rhetoric of equivalence is tied up in idealizations of mastery. In Nida's and Steiner's models, the translator is able to extract the “spirit” of the text only by mastering the foreign text (and its language, its culture). Behind the urge for mastery is an element of control, as well as an investment in agency and power. The master translator masters the foreign text; it does not master her. By virtue of capturing the “spirit,” the master translator remains in control.

This insistence on mastery reminds me of various Foucauldian critiques of psychoanalysis. The critic Leo Bersani argues that behind the analyst’s constant need to unearth and diagnose a patient’s secrets is a drive toward mastery—a “driv[e] to appropriate the other’s desire.” Bersani (and his cowriter Adam Phillips) sees in this desire for mastery an “ego-project,” or a “defensive move” against “the world’s threatening difference from the self.” If we apply this critique to translation, we see how the pervasive demand for mastery is actually a way of defending the translator—and the target culture—against the very otherness they seek to engage. Mastery maintains the wholeness of the translator’s ego against the threats of being too affected by the foreign, and of being transformed into a mimic—someone who might let the foreign text change the target culture or transform the target language.

Is mastery really the best way of engaging with foreign texts? With any text? With a foreign culture? Or may we look for a more vulnerable, corruptible model?

4.

I would like to propose a model of translation based precisely on mimicry. Mimicry allows us to think about translation in terms beyond mastery, competence, and “naturalness.” When I translate, I imitate a foreign text in English. This act of mimicry is volatile. It makes doubles. It makes me double. I do not extract a “spirit”; I cross boundaries, with my body. In this crossing, I take a foreign language into my mouth, into my brain. Like a contagion, the text and the language enter my body and my computer. Like a child playing on a swing—“I am the Phoenix!”—I am transformed. I begin to speak English as if it were my native Swedish. The Swedish makes my English “unnatural,” and maybe even monstrous. We need a model of translation that does not seek to contain the noise and transformations caused by translation, but instead finds poetry in this transgressive circulation.

Fundamentally, the mimic is someone who imitates. Someone who takes a foreign concept and brings it into their own selves, and makes copies of it. The mimic does not own this foreign idea—if they did, they would not be imitators—but they generate copies all the same. They are not in control of the foreign concept. It controls them. The mimic is an exemplary exhibitor of what I call “foreign influence.” The mimic’s texts come not from within themselves but from outside forces. Their individuality and agency are questionable. They are not authors. They are not geniuses. They lack authority.

Mimicry gives us a model of transgression that brings the body into the act of translation: not as something that needs to be repressed or contained, but as a site of vulnerability.

5.

In order to think about translation as mimicry, we might first consider Walter Benjamin’s brief essay “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1933). He begins by establishing the importance of mimicry:

Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.

Mimicry does not abstract in order to create exchanges that maintain identities; mimicry is about transformation (“become and behave like something else”). Mimicry does not extract a “spirit”; it is bodily. Mimicry does not seek to maintain equivalences and identities but leads people to become “something else.”

Though Benjamin points out that mimicry is most evident in children’s play, he argues that in European modernity people lost the capacity of “producing similarities,” turning an originally “sensuous” approach into “nonsensuous correspondences.” (Nida called his theory “Principles of Correspondence.”) In mimicry’s emphasis on play, onomatopoeia, and the body, Benjamin finds something running counter to modern capitalism and its abstracted language, which has “liquidated” magic. From his emphasis on the “surface” and the “sensuous”—that is, the bodily—aspect of mimicry, we can begin to think about translation, with its emphasis on the “spirit,” as an alternative to the “nonsensuous” model of “correspondence” and “equivalence.” We can begin to consider a model that doesn’t seek to contain, rather includes, the body and its transformations.

6.

Drawing on Benjamin’s essay, the anthropologist Michael Taussig explored the powerful political dimensions of mimicry, especially pertaining to anti-colonial practices. One key feature Taussig takes from Benjamin is the idea of the “sensuous” quality of mimicry:

To get hold of something by means of its likeness. Here is what is crucial in the resurgence of the mimetic faculty, namely the two-layered notion of mimesis that is involved—a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived . . .

This “sensuous” engagement leads to an unsettling of identities: “The fundamental move of the mimetic faculty taking us bodily into alterity” and the “radical displacement of self in sentience.” Through the bodily engagement with the copy, identities are unsettled and set in motion. Perhaps this is the threat of the body in translation: it will cause transformation, infection, contagion. The “master” translator maintains their identity and agency; the mimic becomes “something else.”

Importantly, the excess of mimicry disrupts the urge toward mastery. Mimicry does not maintain identities but destabilizes them, causing metamorphosis: “mimesis has an inbuilt propensity to provoke a chain reaction in which things become other things in a process of mimetic fission.” Taussig called the ultimate state of mimicry “the metamorphic sublime”: “Such is the overload of mimetic delirium and metamorphic sublimity that the organization of mimesis as the basis of the domination gives way to its disorganization through the mimicry of mimicry.” In this state, everything has the potential to become something else. This is the danger Steiner warned against: Everything can mean something else. Identities are destabilized. Mimicry’s openness to the foreign, and its willingness to be “sensuous[ly]” transformed, fundamentally opposes the sobriety of mastery and its “ego” defenses. That is why “mimetic excess” is seen as such a threat.

7.

According to Taussig, mimicry’s engagement with “sensuousness”—the surface level of appearances—inevitably leads to noise, but this noise does not interfere with the effectiveness of the mimesis. Rather than the model where poetry is “lost in translation” because of changes to the text, Taussig argues that the noise of mimicry is part of its power. Drawing on examples such as an African dance that mimics colonial French oppressors, Taussig suggests that the errors in replication is the reason the mimetic act works: “I want to dwell on this notion of the copy, in magical practice, affecting the original to such a degree that the representation shares in or acquires the properties of the represented.” The noise of mimicry does not make for an imperfect copy, but this imperfection is a key part of the process of mimicry.

The persistence of noise in communication may find its best description in Michel Serres’s 1980 work The Parasite (translated from the French in 2007 by Lawrence R. Schehr). For Serres, it is precisely through the noise of transmission that we generate “new” ideas. The book title is a generative pun that runs throughout the text: in French, “parasite” means both noise and a literal parasite. Rather than the idealizations of “communication” and abstract systems of “equivalence,” Serres argues that there is noise in every act of communication and that through this parasite/noise, the message is

changed by mutation, by absence, substitution, or difference of elements. It is not entirely a metaphoric expression when we claim that it has to do with the intervention of a noise in the message. Noise in the sense of disorder, and thus chance, but noise also in the sense of interception, an interception that changes the order and thus the meaning, if we can speak of meaning. But that changes the order above all. The interception is a parasite; we could have guessed as much. The new order appears by the parasite troubling the message. It disconcerts the ancient series, order, and message; and then composes [concerte] new ones.

The noise is not a useless interference with the true message. The interference makes things happen, and allows for transformations and changes in the order. It is precisely through the deformations of these parasites—not the Great Author or Creator as in so many of our narratives about literature—that new systems are created. Serres writes: “The parasite intervenes, enters the system as an element of fluctuation. It excites it or incites it; it puts it in motion . . .” And as a result, “The parasite invents something new.”

Mimicry, rather than the stable, “dead” text it is so often imagined to be, is what generates noise and newness. It is what excites.

8.

I would like to bring these ideas about mimicry, noise, and metamorphosis from Benjamin, Taussig, and Serres into the contemporary conversation about translation. Instead of seeing poetry as “lost in translation,” I want to see poetry as something that is transformed in translation. This transformation does not “kill” the original but registers changes and refractions as it crosses boundaries. The new text will be different, but that is an important part of mimicry, and of poetry. It doesn’t ruin the translation but is part of its power, its dynamic.

While our literary culture remains intent on either dismissing translators as insufficiently masterful or elevating them to something almost author-like—a “visibility” defined by prizes, awards, and money—mimicry offers a different model of not just authorship but personhood: the mimic is a person infected by the foreign. The mimic doesn’t master the “spirit” of an artwork; they are mastered by the effect of the artwork. They become a site of vulnerability, like how a foreign language and literature might influence the US status quo. The mimic generates excess, inflation, change. The mimic is a figure of excitement and incitement, a figure thriving on fluctuation.

Instead of the “restricted economy" of so much literary discourse, I embrace a Bataillean "general economy" of translation: an economy “always in excess,” in which "the question always posed [is] in terms of extravagance.”

9.

To get at the excess of mimicry, and the mimicry of translation, I would like to turn to a specific case: my experience translating the 2017 book-length poem Det Ängelsgröna Sakramentet by the Swedish poet Eva Kristina Olsson, which I translated as The Angelgreen Sacrament (2021). This book retells—or really, restages—an intensive experience of encountering an “angel.” In some ways, it is a prototypical visionary poem: the poet has an encounter with something beyond reality, which engenders a poem.

Following Jonathan Cullers’s 1977 essay "Apostrophe," we can say that by Olsson’s usage of second-person address brings the angel into being and establishes herself as a visionary figure. But that description or formula breaks down almost immediately. There is always an excess in mimicry. Olsson’s poem does not seek to eliminate this noise; the noisiness of the poem is what makes it angelic. As an “excitement” that vibrates in language, the poem cannot contain the experience. And it is out of this excess, or failure, that The Angelgreen Sacrament takes shape out of “unimages”: constantly transforming “sensuous” language (green, slime, brightness, softness, fetuses, wings, hair, etc.) that never stabilizes and constantly moves—ultimately creating what poet Ann Jäderlund describes as “an event space of potentiality.”

On a purely textual level, the noisiness of mimicry becomes instantly evident. The poet does not merely describe the experience, but ventriloquizes it. The angel, not just the object of the mimicry, enters the voice of the poem. The poet becomes “something else,” becomes the angel. In true biblical fashion, the angel tells the poet (in the poet’s poem): “Don’t be afraid.” But soon this becomes: “Don’t be afraid / you are afraid / I am afraid.” It is unclear who is the “I” and who is the “you.” More precisely, the poem is spoken by a voice that is both angel and human. At one point, the voice says, “you vibrate between angel and rose.” This may be the human unable to figure out the angel’s identity, or it could be that the pronoun “you” is “vibrating.” This vibration of speakers is in large part what creates the “event”-ness of the poem. And readers participate by taking the words into their mouths. Or, as the poem puts it toward the end: “I rise pale / You rise pale / with me greening out of your mouth.” As in Taussig’s description of mimicry, the poem’s “sensuousness” leads to the unsettling identities—a metamorphic sublime.

The vibration that is the volatile ambience of the poem could be said to be the subject matter as well as the mode. I use “ambience” to describe the “angelgreen” rather than “mood” or “tone” because “ambience” accounts for the corporeality of the book. It is about bodies interacting—transforming, metamorphizing—in the “angelgreen” event space. The bodies, which are not stable, are constantly broken down and rearranged. We begin with an “illuminated cranium” and quickly move on to “my wing”:

    The illuminated cranium which glows green 
and without light 
would never melt into my wing 
lies on the first step of the stairs : your sacrament : 
the midsummersolstice’s pistachiogreen angel 
pistachiogreen body, born wings 
of no one more than no one 
are so light.   disappear   in light

The angelic encounter contains the traditional “light” and “wings,” but these words are devoid of their traditional transcendence, instead becoming deeply physical. As soon as the angel appears, its cranium “glows green” and seems to “melt” into the wing. It also instantly becomes connected to the very physical color “pistachiogreen.”

Both the “angelgreen” of the title and this “pistachiogreen” color attempt to name, to mimic, the “sensuous” ambience of the encounter in a profoundly sensuous way. The green ambience is evident before one even opens the book. The original cover is an “angelgreen” paper that is almost translucent, as if to imitate the appearance of the angel’s frequently invoked wings. This color comes into the very type of the poem, as the words are printed in color. In two climactic moments, entire pages of the book go green.

It is as if color is stronger than language. In what Taussig might call moments of “metamorphic sublime,” color overwhelms the print medium. In this hyper-sensuous, nonsignifying ambience, I am reminded of Taussig’s discussion of sacred color that can transform the viewer: “Color vision becomes less a retinal and more a total bodily activity to the fairytale extent that looking at something, we may even pass into the image.”

10.

The ambience of the poem is profoundly sticky: parts of the body are constantly attaching to other parts of the body, to objects, to colors. The very words stick together: we get not just “pistachiogreen” but also “midsummersolstices’s pistachogreen angel.” The words adhese, pile up, and vibrate. “Stav” is used as a noun (staff) and as a verb (spell): “I stand and open myself in three directions / they spell me.” The key repetends in the poem—“no one” and “wings”—can be attached to other words, which in turn produces new words like “angelgreen” and “no-one-wing.”

The use of compound words is a hallmark of the Swedish language, where these kinds of combinations are allowed by the rules of grammar. By making the English act like Swedish—that is to say, I have lost the critical distance that should allow me to merely pay my debt in a new currency—I begin to meld the currencies. At some points, I use this Swedish structure even when the Swedish original does not. As in any translation, there is much noise within the new text. English does not have the same capacity for stickiness and compounding of language; we had to deform it to bring the poem into it. For example,

    my pistachiogreen wings 
  
of your endlessly fragile glance 
  
in the allthetime collapsing hair 
  
you rise

The “allthetime” repetend in this section emblematizes the intensity of the encounter. In Swedish, the phrase “i det hela tiden” suggest an ongoingness, but the more conventional translation “constantly” is too abstract. So we created the neologism “allthetime,” making sure that it contained the word “hela” (“all”) to bring in the complete, overwhelming quality of the interaction. The experience is all-encompassing in both time and space; we are submerged in it even though it is made up of “nothing.”

At times the translation of the poem calls attention to the inherent instability of language. At one point, the angel’s hair “trängs.” This means something like “pushes” or “crowds,” but I translated it as “throngs” because of the sonic similarity.  That is to say, I translate as much for the sound as the “meaning.” And if I translate for the “spirit,” it is not Nida’s disembodied one that allows for clean exchange and equivalence, but rather a physical ambience that bleeds the languages together.

11.

The mimetic excess of the poem only gets more extreme when we consider the author’s intention, the gold standard reference when it comes to translation and poetry. When I asked Olsson what had occasioned the poem, she said:

I have always wondered about these sheer creatures with their wings on their slender bodies—where do they come from, how do they survive the winter? I rarely see them in the summer, sometimes it happens, then with a more intense green body and with more clearly drawn wings.

She then pivoted to another source for the book:

There are different inspirations for Angelgreen; the angel is one of them, another is a long pistachio green prom dress I wore when I was 16, 17 years old. Another touchstone is an unusually vivid and clear dream I had several years ago: a densely populated city and a small door.

Olsson’s angel is not symbolic and meaningful but defiantly material: she is drawn to them because their bodies (“sheer,” “slender,” “green”) fascinate her. The physicality of the bodies—the dress—generates the poem in an act of mimetic excess: there are always more sources for the poem, always more mimetic invocations of these textures, shapes, colors. The angel might also be moths. The inspiration could be from a dress, or a city, or even a “small door.”

I am particularly interested in the second “source” for the poem: the dress. Everything from the thin cover and colored pages to the encounter with the “angel” can be seen as being an intensive engagement with the memory of a dress, and the poem can be seen as an extreme act of ekphrasis. Running counter to the still-prevalent model of authorship—the author as originator—ekphrasis posits the author as a mimic. This is someone who, in Steiner’s terms, is infected by another work of art. The mimicry becomes excessive, as Olsson repeatedly mimics the intensive, vibrating color of a dress she wore when she was a teenager. The problem with mimicking a dress, as opposed to a painting or poem, is that it is flat. The dress undermines the common assumption that the translator needs to master the “spirit”—something outside of the “body”—of the text. Olsson’s writing is a vibrating materiality, a bodily spirit.

However, the single biggest threat of Olsson’s work might be even simpler. When I asked why certain words were capitalized, such as the “O” in “sOng,” Olsson replied: “Sometimes there is no reason for things.” The model of mastery is based on the notion that something—whether it be the intention or the “spirit”—can be extracted. This is a fiction. Often there is no reason for something. In Steiner’s words, puns and concrete poetry “betray” the translator. Except here it’s not just puns and concrete poetry, it’s all poetry. All poetry betrays the mastery model of poetry.

12.

I started to read and translate Olsson’s work long before I published my book Summer (2022). Back in 2016, I was in Sweden for the summer, reading her work along with Jäderlund’s poems. Surrounded by all this Swedish, I was not “alone . . . with English,” as Gertrude Stein famously said about her time in France, but infected by it. The Swedish poetry I was reading and translating transformed me and took away my voice. I started to write in Swedish, and what I wrote was very different from what I would normally have been writing in English. The poems were full of puns: the pun on the Swedish words “skuld” (“debt”) and “oskuld” (“virginity,” but also “undebt” if read through a foreigner’s eyes), for example, as well as on sounds particular to the Swedish language. Jäderlund and Olsson’s poems pushed me deeper into the Swedish language, thinking in volatile enjambments and torquey switches in perspective. I became the bad translator, the mimic. The poetry I was translating was, as Steiner describes, taking away my voice. Or was it? Written under the influence of these poets and the Swedish language, I had to go back into the language, and that movement affected my English as I translated the poems:

I live under threat 
of tusenskönor everywhere 
I go it’s latesummer 
there’s tusen tusenskönorskönor  
around you in 
the painting the evil tree 
wants to kill me syrenerna 
involve me where my children 
play I can't hear 
what they are humming 
in the underworld 
the one with syrenerna 
döttrarna want me to 
speak with summer lips 
prata med oss 
I can only speak with an obscene 
kimono I tell it to burn as 
I light my lighter 
I have its carcass as my plan 
it is mimicry again 
it floods me med tusen 
skönor as I write tre dikter 
i den sköna underjorden 
the overworld writes tyranny 
I write kimono I set fire 
to the evil tree

When I tried to translate the poems, some of the Swedish words remained, infecting my English. I did not display the proper mastery; I could not keep the languages apart. The languages “trängdes.” When translating “tusenskönor,” I could not write “daisies” because it was not the right kind of word—so I chose “tusenskönor.” That became “tusen tusenskönorskönor.” This continued like a virus: When I tried to translate “syrén,” I struggled to turn the word into “lilacs.” I left the words in Swedish; they had betrayed me.

When I spoke the words out loud, my mouth got stuck in the shape it makes when I speak Swedish, so my English words were spoken with a Swedish mouth. The Swedish language had infected me. The sound from my “wrong mouth” created the rhythm of the poems—stilted and enjambed, crooked and echoey. Words and sentences stuck together; lines stuck to other lines. I wrote in an infected language. Neither Swedish nor English was my “first language” anymore. From there, I wrote a monstrous text about being stuck in the wrong place: a beautiful summer in the underworld of poetry, translation, mimicry.

I end with this anecdote because it exemplifies my view of both poet and translator as engaging in a kind of mimicry that creates an excess, a deformation zone, and a transformation. Both poet and translator write out of that zone; both read from it. As a translator I am infected by what I translate. I am a mimic. I don’t need to uphold my true voice, copyrighted and made “visible.” The underworld in which I operate does not have such clear identities. The transgressive circulation of poetry changes me, and I change the poet. We can try to contain these transformations by insisting on equivalence and a restricted economy that maintains balance—or we can allow ourselves to be transformed by the poem.