Translating as Becoming Intimate

Explore the experience of translating the poetry of Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson, Poemas 1-600. Fue – culpa – del Paraíso, prologue, translation and reading of the poems in Spanish by Ana Mañeru Méndez and María-Milagros Rivera Garretas, Madrid: Sabina editorial, 2012) as an act of intimacy between the
living history of the writer and that of her translators, particularly mine. I understand that for a woman there is no betrayal in the translation, as there does seem to be in the male (since it is to him that the saying “Traduttore traditore” (betraying translator) belongs; as there is not plagiarism in writing but rather embodiment, exercises of embodiment. And that, for the same reason, a woman translator cannot, in substance, translate just anything, although she might do so instrumentally (and there is
nothing wrong with that). She can translate that which she is able to embody. On going deeper into the experience of embodiment that the translation of female writing requires, the sensation emerged of becoming closer, of translating as becoming intimate. “Becoming intimate” are words that derive from the Latin “intus”, which means “inside”, and that, in turn, comes from the Indo-European root *en, as in the preposition “in”, in its meaning of “within”. “To become intimate” is the verb that expresses the superlative quality of “intus”, that is, “intimus”, “very inside”. Translating female writing is, in my opinion, a journey to the most inner, or, rather, a journey from the most inner to the most inner, from the most intimate part of an experience (that of the writer) to the most intimate of another (that of the translator); with the hope that the journey is repeated in the reader, in the readers and, in their own sexuate way, in one or many male readers.