When I saw the assignment the first thing I felt was frustration over the length of the book in English, poetry... and how I translate this on DeepL. Followed by anguish at the fact that I can't copy the text on DeepL to read. It is not enough to tell you about my limitation with language, but it makes sense to mention it again as a result of the text.
So googlee, I find descriptions in English, nothing in Spanish and finally the book in English with the possibility to copy and paste in DeepL, I don't analyze if every paragraph I translate is right or wrong because the exercise of translating by copying and pasting every paragraph becomes eternal, at least I'm doing it by paragraphs and not by sheets. DeepL throws up a lot of errors, for example all the "Too" appear as "T 00", Those "00's" are "zeros". When I paste the same paragraph in another translator the words are different, although despite the complexity of the text they manage to keep the meanings.
My first thought as I start reading the first 14 paragraphs is, this writing is a "bodily performance" translated or transcribed. His writing is shaken and altered, as if it were the refuge of having lost the tongue and the corporal gesture, she channels it there, in a writing that makes body, between a mixture of performance and expectation. In his writing, the performance of his body in the words, makes rebellion mocking the linearity.
I'm reading it again, because I don't think I quite understand what it's about and I've been going over these 14 paragraphs over and over again. I was reminded of many moments of discomfort and anguish over language and the impossibility of action, both here and in situations in Chile. Every time I worked as a teacher of high school students, I needed to avoid meetings with my fellow teachers and those routine conversations that became eternal, where my opinion was completely divided. In one of those jobs that lasted 3 years, I had to complete the last one with daily relaxation routines and a weekly therapy, I had begun to physically experience the impossibility of my voice, my throat began to close, causing feelings of suffocation, I also felt the hardening of my face especially in the area of the jaw, or the deviation of my eyes looking for another place exhausted from being in my reality, the back, the neck... the weight of the words.
Finally I managed to read the whole book with several grammatical mistakes, I think they were thrown out by DeepL, beyond that I think I managed to understand something. I am going to stop and talk about the disappearance which is the appearance of the author, in herself and the others, within her story. The appearance of the missing, with all those gaps that come with loss, the trauma of loss, the story there is always fragmented, how could she silver a fluid grammar if she speaks from the loss.
I remember the Mapuches, and the loss of their native language, the people there say that they stopped speaking it because it was forbidden, the rituals had to mimic the Christian rituals, there they had a secret language, coded, that the Spanish let pass because they did not see it. However, the traumatic violence, the need to emigrate from their territories, the expropriation of all their property, are making this culture disappear. The stories there are full of myths because cuts in the flow of their history have not stopped happening.
Taking up Theresa's text, I see how historical and identity problems are updated regardless of times, territories and genres. When she says: Why resurrect everything now? From the past. History, the old wound. The past emotions again. Confessing to relive the same madness. To name her now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. Inevitably I think of Chile, and all those popular phrases that went around with the popular awakening that stopped their demonstrations in the streets by the Covid-19. The words of the disappearance are repeated so that the memory contains them: Neither forgiveness nor oblivion!
I am also interested in how Theresa approaches the feminine in a polymorphic way, as
if it were a center or a labyrinth that she spins around trying to reach. The multiple meanings that the maternal acquires, the maternal also as the refuge, the "I", my center. But censored and expropriated. The story told from the violent female body, from there it goes from one place to another, from one pain to another, from one woman to another, in its different temporalities and representations. They are not one, they are all there intermingled with their different stories connected rhizomatically by violence, but they are also heroines. Este texto aunque dolido me resulta valiente. As the Argentine singer Sara Hebe says "Antes que hysterica HISTORIKA"; "De tanto que siente EUFÓRICA".
Finally, I liked this phrase that I don't remember which page I was on, but I copied it when I read it: "You smell filtered through progress and westernization".
Luego tengo que traducir en inglés este texto que ahora escribo, eso es más complejo, es pasar por deepl y recurrir a Samu discutiendo el texto en inglés desde mi inglés para que él pueda ayudarme y ustedes enterderme, pero vale la pena este ejercicio porque me ha gustado mucho leer sus apreciaciones sobre el libro, he descubierto nuevos mundos de pensamiento en ustedes, gracias!!