My mother is the text. I cannot enter her.
Kate Zambreno, Book of Mutter
The notebook begins like this: search for death rattle. Search for: death rattle, translation. Search for: rantolo terminale. The notebook is blue and green and pink—a blue background, green cacti, pink flowers. It begins on May 22, two days before the death of my mother (my mom, la mia mamma), and ends on June 30.
*
If I Google quote unquote “translation is like” I find: Translation is like fashioning a table, or doing jazz improvisation, or ferrying people across a river. Translation is like “trying to remember a dream.” Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful. Translation is like taking a shower and forgetting to dry off. Translation is like taking a shower with a raincoat on. Translation is like love; I do not know what it is but I think I know what it is not.
*
The notebook ends like this: I reached the last chapter and, instead of immediately beginning the translation of the new book, I read the last few pages very quickly. I finished more than a day early, without having to ask for extra time—I hope I did a good job anyway. T. says I did; who knows. I thought: this is the last book I was assigned before my mom died. When A. wrote to ask if I wanted to translate it, I called my mother (my mom, la mia mamma) to tell her—they gave me another book. For her, it was the last one; for me, it was the last time I was able to call and tell her (was I really able to call her? I don’t remember). It will perhaps be the first book —my first translation—that she won’t see in print, the first time I won’t be able to bring her a copy she won’t read but that will make her proud anyway. It was the book I tried to translate while she was dying, and I failed—it was the book I translated when she was already dead, and it was about a mom, no, a mother, and I couldn’t even tell her about it.
*
Translation is like a tangent line: it touches the original only in the slightest point. Translation is like a channel. Translation is like toilet paper: invisible until it’s missing. Translation is like teleportation. Translation is like a dance. Translation is like a football game. Suddenly everyone seems to be an expert until they actually do it. Translation is like any art: in the best of cases, it helps shed light on ourselves.
*
It’s the last flower-patterned notebook—after this one come five brown paper–colored notebooks, one of which has a coffee stain on it. In the brown paper–colored notebook with the yellow spine, on August 26, I write: in a few days, in less than a week, I will have finished translating this book too. It will be the second book I have finished translating since my mother died, I thought. I also thought that I would measure time this way: every book I work on from now on will be a book I translated after my mother died, a book that will be added to the other books I translated after my mother died—and soon there will be more books I translated after my mother died than books I translated while my mother was still alive.
There are no other notebooks; there have been other translations. There are now more books I have translated after my mother died than there are books that I translated when my mom was still alive.
After the second, I stopped counting.
*
Translation is like a microwave. It takes time to heat up your food properly. Translation is like a three-dimensional cryptic crossword because there are so many possible correct answers, but they’re all interconnected. Translation is like a prism. Translation is like swimming, a series of doors, a form of blindness, a kind of graft, a process of dismantling, of “rendering … invisible.” Translation is like a stewed strawberry. Translation is like dialogue; it is not only a dialogue between culturally formed strangers, but also between selves (or selves as strangers).
*
Things I’ve translated: all the songs by Guns N’ Roses; many songs by Nirvana, and the blue Garzanti dictionary didn’t say anything about Leonard Cohen, and there was no Internet, and you didn’t understand what Kurt Cobain meant, and there was no one who could explain it to you; some articles, including one about chewing gum and asphalt; a microeconomics textbook; a book about a colony on Mars; a book about a world where males have practically become extinct; a book where aliens land in Nigeria; a story about trauma and space and time; a book about two boys who meet a few hours before they both die, which I translated a few months before you died; a book where a little girl has to run away from her evil mother, which I translated after you died and which I don’t even remember translating because I remember almost nothing about those weeks—only the streets of Milan where I wandered for hours dressed in black, my hand reaching for my phone at two in the afternoon to call you, the feeling that the only person I wanted to talk to about your death was you; a book about a disease that doesn’t exist; a book about a house on top of a hill; a book about a journey across the ice; a book about divorce; a book about alternative universes; a book about suicide; a book about a land similar to this one but not identical, almost, in a sense, a mirror image; other books that I don’t know how to sum up in one word or three.
A book about losing words and finding them again in another language. Do you understand that I’m talking about this one?
*
Translation is like creating a second voice to sing a duet with the poem. Translation is like an improvisation of ourselves through a given text, and thus an improvisation of that text. Translation is like High Intensity Training for a poet. Translation is like playing word games. Shall we play with translation together? Translation is like a bowl of cherries. Translation is like walking a tightrope. Translation is like the clasping of two hands. Translation is like trying to hold the wind.
*
Mother, mom
A mother is never young, never a child, always a mother, even in that black and white class picture where she doesn’t smile. She cannot be young because she will always be older than you.
In twenty-three years and six months I will be older than my mother.
This is the first time I call her mother. She was always mom to me. My mom. Mother is an idea, mom is red and hot and sweaty.
My mom died almost a year ago. Almost a year ago I became an orphan. Almost a year later I am writing about her, desperately trying to summon her on the page. But I only manage to summon my mother, not my mom.
Where are you?
This is the first time I call her mother. She was always mom to me. My mom. Except she wasn’t. She was mamma, la mia mamma.
If I had called her mother, or mom, she wouldn’t have answered. She wouldn’t have understood.
My mother existed before me except she wasn’t my mother, she was a woman who was eventually going to be my mother. The woman who was eventually going to be my mother became my mother the moment I started to exist as her daughter. For a long time, we coexisted as mother and daughter. When she died, I stopped being her daughter.
The books I translate exist before I translate them, except they’re different books. The books I translate start existing when I translate them as books in translation.
What am I trying to say? I have no idea. Something about sets and intersections and Venn diagrams and logical relations between people and objects and books and their translators and mothers and daughters.
My mother’s circle overlapped with my circle and the overlapping region is the time we spent as mother and daughter. Outside of that region there is a woman A and there is a woman B and the combined region of sets A and B is called the union of A and B even though there is a detachment a disconnection a dissolution a division a separation because I (B) am still a part of her (A). Since my mother died I am the relative complement of A in B. It is sometimes written B minus A. I am me minus my mother. I have a hole the size of my mother.
Madre, mamma
Una madre non è mai giovane, mai una bambina, sempre una madre, persino in quella foto di classe in bianco e nero in cui non sorride. Non può essere giovane perché sarà sempre più vecchia di te.
Fra diciannove anni sarò più vecchia di mia madre.
Questa è la prima volta che la chiamo madre. È sempre stata “mamma,” per me. La mia mamma. Madre è un’idea, mamma è una cosa rossa e calda e sudata.
Mia mamma è morta quasi sette anni fa. Quasi sette anni fa sono diventata un’orfana. Quasi sette anni dopo sto traducendo quello che ho scritto di lei, cercando disperatamente di evocarla sulla pagina. Ma riesco solo a evocare mia madre, non mia mamma.
Dove sei?
Questa è la prima volta che la chiamo madre. È sempre stata “mamma” per me. Ma lo era in italiano, non in inglese.
Se l’avessi chiamata mother o mom non mi avrebbe risposto. Non avrebbe capito. Era mamma, la mia mamma.
Mia madre è esistita prima di me ma prima di me non era mia madre, era una donna che sarebbe poi diventata mia madre. La donna che sarebbe poi diventata mia madre è diventata mia madre nel momento in cui ho iniziato a esistere come sua figlia. Per molto tempo, siamo esistite insieme come madre e figlia. Quando è morta, ho smesso di essere sua figlia.
I libri che traduco esistono prima che io li traduca, ma sono libri diversi. I libri che traduco iniziano a esistere quando li traduco come libri tradotti. Cosa sto cercando di dire? Non ne ho idea.
Qualcosa che riguarda set e intersezioni e diagrammi di Venn e relazioni logiche tra persone e oggetti e libri e chi li traduce e le madri e le figlie.
L’insieme di mia madre si interseca col mio e l’intersezione è il tempo che abbiamo passato insieme come madre e figlia. Al di fuori di quella regione c’è una donna A e c’è una donna B e la regione combinata degli insiemi A e B è chiamata unione di A e B anche se c’è un distacco, una disconnessione, una dissoluzione, una divisione, una separazione perché io (B) sono ancora parte di lei (A). Da quando mia madre è morta, sono il complemento relativo di A in B. A volte viene scritto B meno A. Io sono me stessa meno mia madre. Ho un vuoto grande quanto mia madre.
*
Self-translation is like one of those radioactive dyes that enable doctors to look through our skin to locate damage in the cartilage … and other states of imperfection. The process of self-translation and linguistic translation is like crossing a wild river from one bank to the other. To get across, you have to deal with treacherous weeds and hidden rocks and whirlpools of culture and concept. And the other bank is not always in view.
But you swim on.
Chiara Reali is a writer and literary translator based in Turin, Italy. Her work has appeared in Italian literary journals and anthologies, and she was shortlisted for the 2020 Desperate Literature Prize. She is currently at work on a bilingual memoir about language, grief, and digital archives.
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Heavy Feather Review 