An intimate procedure: translating val flores

Abstract

This translator’s note prefaces my translation of the essay “The Intimacy of the Procedure: Writing, lesbian, south as practices of the self” by the Argentine lesbian activist and writer val flores. I comment on flores’s writing from the perspective of translating it, attending to the corporeality of her language, its imbrication with lesbian writing across languages and continents, and her tactics of citation, as well as providing some context for her first-time anglophone readers. I then dialogue with the text to think about translation itself as an “intimate procedure”: an act of (self-)transformation and desire; the work of bridging worlds and tongues; and a kind of queer or feminized labor rendered invisible in a colonial imagination. I offer lesbian, anticolonial translation as part of literature's possibilities and erotics.

Keywords:

• Translation
• lesbian
• feminism
• intimacy
• language

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “a while ago I lost the capitals in my name, an attempt to put the proper name to bed, a way to put it face down and have it crawl among words to confuse itself with them, val flores, like saying bug or plant. making out of the name a zone patched with voice, an amorphous blight of a scrapped ego, a longing for a failure in the arbitrary coherence of representation, a low-crawling idea that quarters up already all-finished and very erect thought” (val flores, labiar el desierto, 15. My translation). flores also cites the Black US-American writer bell hooks as an inspiration for her lowercase proper name.

2 A nod to marie bardet and val flores’s Modos del ahuecar/se (2021). In this pamphlet publication, they think through and enact the idea of “ahuecar/se,” or “hollowing out” – “hollowing out” the space of a question, or a space for someone or something, or simply a space, within and as part of something else. “Hollows” of one’s body, or “hollows” in which to shelter another body, often a way of making possible, of holding, of care.

3 In her study of “autotheory as feminist practice,” Lauren Fournier (2022) acknowledges this question of access. Fournier cites a blogger called kc: “kc asks who has access to writing texts like The Argonauts, and answers that it is those who have already established themselves as legitimate within the terms of academia (or, relatedly, of contemporary art). To consider autotheory as feminist, one must consider the politics of access and power around the production of theory and the reinscription of what constitutes acceptable knowledge in spaces of higher learning” (26).

4 As an example of this engagement, flores formed part of a group of lesbians who organized “La celebración de las amantes – Jornadas de orgullo y disidencia lesbiana” in Córdoba in 2012, a multi-day meeting of lesbians which took Wittig and Sande Zeig’s Brouillon pour un dictionnare des amantes as a starting point for organization and conversation (at a time when this work had effectively no readership in the region), and also memorialized Pepa Gaitán, a lesbian murdered in the same city in 2010. In fact, flores’s engagement with Wittig’s work has already contributed to its contemporary revival. Publishing flores’s Romper el Corazon del Mundo led the Spanish editorial Continta Me Tienes to republish Borrador para un diccionario de las amantes in 2023, translated by Cristina Peri Rossi and with a prologue by Sara Torres. At the Barcelona book launch in July 2023, flores recounted how circulating photocopies of the 2004 edition “injected blood into my writing,” and read out a statement collectively composed by the organizers of “La celebración de las amantes.” She also emphasized the importance of Wittig’s iconic statement that “a lesbian is not a woman” to her and her interlocutors’ political imagination at the time. More recently, flores and marie bardet organized the event/collective art piece “50 años de el/un cuerp° lesbian°. 34° latitud sur,” in December 2023.

5 As is, I would guess, the case more often than is usually avowed, expansive circuits of queer intimacies subtend the very possibility of this translation. However, I particularly wish to thank marie bardet, who introduced me to val’s work by including this essay in the class she was teaching at the Universidad de San Martín. marie also put me in contact with val, at my request. (Gracias, marie).