TRANSLATING KUIR MAGAZINE

TKUIR
TRANSLATING
KUIR

2

Outburst, FAQ Festival de
Arte Queer and Risco Festival
present
TKUIR
TRANSLATING
KUIR
A collaborative project between OUTBURST (Northern Ireland), FAQ—Festival de Arte Queer
(Argentina), and RISCO (Brazil). With support from the British Council’s Digital Collaboration
Fund, these festivals came together in a research, reflection and creation project on the different
translation processes involved in the exchange, production and circulation of Kuir / Queer arts:
Linguistic, cultural, and digital translation. The project offered a series of workshops fostering
collaboration between artists, thinkers, activists and accessibility specialists.
The investigation focused on linguistic translation (terminology, hegemonic languages,
interpretive processes), cultural translation (challenges to and possibilities of expressing
experiences and unique cosmologies) and digital translation (understanding the digital medium
as a language that requires processes of transcreation of artistic and political practices).
3

TKUIR is published by Outburst Americas as part of the project Translating Kuir, supported by
the Digital Collaboration Fund - British Council.
TKuir Magazine
Text: Liliana Viola
Cover image: Transälien
Back cover image: Ali Prando
Translations: Stephanie Reist, Mariana Costa, Lucas Sampaio Costa Souza and Natalia Mallo
Visual Identity TKuir: Leandro Ibarra
Graphic design: Bia Lombardi - Marca Viva
TKuir Team:
Natalia Mallo / Risco: Co-producer, Editorial Coordinator, Executive Producer
Ruth McCarthy / Outburst: Co-producer
Lisa Kerner / FAQ: Co-producer
Violeta Uman / FAQ: Co-producer
Adylem de Agosto:Production Assistant, Communication Coordinator
Provocateurs: Vir Cano, Maoíliosia Scott, Fran Cus, Ali Prando, Raphael Khouri, Marlene
Wayar, Transälien, Dominic Montague, Lolo y Lauti
Artkitektes: Ronaldo Serruya y Analia Couceyro
Accessibility Consultant: Quiplash
4

TRANSLATING PRESENCES,
WORDS AND CULTURES:
LOOKING FOR AN
UNEVEN CONCEPT
By Liliana Viola
5

During August 2020, 3 festivals based in 3 countries —FAQ (Argentina), Risco (Brasil) and
OUTBURST (Northern Ireland)— held three online meetings under the title TRANSLATING KUIR.
In each meeting, 3 invited provocateurs encouraged reflexions along 3 axes: TRANSLATING
WORDS (Cus Cus, Vir Cano, Maoilísia Scott) TRANSLATING CULTURE (Ali Prando, Marlene Wayar,
Raphael Kouri) TRANSLATING PRESENCES (Transalien, Lolo and Lauti, Dominic Montague).
Is this insistence on the number 3 a mere coincidence or does it mark a pursuit outside the
obligatory binary of good and bad, true or false?
Here are, following that odd number, some impressions about 1) what was said 2) what was
heard 3) what is about to be said.
WORKSHOP VIDEOS
WORDS
CULTURE
PRESENCE
6

1. CORDIALITY AS TERRITORY
It may come as a surprise that the first concept explored in this chronicle of what was done
and said during the “Translating Kuir” encounters is that of cordiality. A term in disuse that
is rescued from oblivion every so often and, usually, for the purposes of irony. Cordiality is a
vintage gesture. At least in Argentina –from where I write – the term already belongs to last
century’s archive of permissible words, of sinisterly incorrect words, or of those words that
can no longer be trusted. The “cordial relationship” belongs, for example, to the set of good
manners and, even worst, to the set of useful advice doled out by the self-help industry, which
aims to preserve good manners in order to ensure the customer “is always right”, even though
that rightness is not to please him but to keep him captive. Precisely because of this narrow
association with a second-rate capitalist ethics, cordiality is not talked about much anymore,
even less so within the context of cultural criticism, of art, of activism.
However, as I watch these meetings with the task of producing a record that will capture what
was said beyond the material of “pure truth” or “uncut truth” that digital devices provide, the
meaning of “cordiality” suddenly returns with its intact and imprecise etymology: from heart!
Heartbeats Cannot Be Translated
And here is where the originality of this case resides: cordiality has appeared within these three
meeting not as a sales strategy but, instead, as a condition of possibility: because if we are in
different countries, if we have lived experiences that are similars but unlabelable, if we take
a position towards art and the ways in which it relates to activism that does not necessarily
coincide with the positions of others nor with what we ourselves may think some days, the point
of these encounters cannot be a territory, a nation, not even a language. Nor can it be reached
with a word enshrined in the dictionary nor in local slangs!
7

!
KUIR
DOES NOT EXIST
OR IT DOES ONLY
WITHIN OUR
FOUND ILLUSIONS
!
First of all, what makes “Translating Kuir” impactful is how it produces rounds of talks that are
completely distict from the familiar ways queer themse are presented: it reproduces neither the
academy, the confessional, nor the assembly.
What are the ways of cordiality? The interventions, even though they correspond to the genre
of “exhibition,” always imply a dialogue, an imaginary conversation with others. They all start
in media res (in full action). They will detail their works, their lives or they will think about a
certain word. And although it is evident the participants do not know each other, they speak
with the confidence that whatever they say and however they say, it will be decoded. It is not
necessary to put anything in context because the context is exactly what is being shared. The
encounter possesses something from bygone times despite taking place through computer
screens–something closer to that imaginary time of gatherings, where you listen with the
conviction that something interesting will suddenly arise. No rush. And if it does not resonate in
that very moment, it will after. In this sense, cordiality in listening and in relating experiences
seems to be a tacit answer to the imposture and imposition of both speed and express solutions.
8

This exercise suggests that something has changed or, at least, that a shift is becoming
necessary, well into the 21st century. These festivals seem to be looking for the point of
encounter within a context of hate that has learned to camouflage itself. One that nowadays
is able to celebrate gay weddings and to perfectly use neutral pronouns. We will recall that in
the not at all distant past, the meeting point among dissidents used to be injury, the common
wound, the expulsion as destiny that Didier Eribon deeply described in Réflexions sur la question
gay (published as Insult and the Making of the Gay Self in English). The meeting point was, in
turn, the experience of the closet which includes an obligatory and unifying secret, an open
secret. The traumatic and violent exit from that crystal closet of compulsory heterossexuality so
well described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwic has been the great living room (death room?) where
reflections, reactions, and new languages have taken shape. The meeting point used to be that
crystal closet constructed from the outside of families, friendship and guardian institutions to
perpetuate “pretending not to be” what everyone knows and the existential limit of running the
risk of being discovered.
The references to this common territory appear in almost every intervention. But the closet has
remained in the prehistoric times of each person and community and this sets these meetings
apart. Perhaps, within this archeology of obscurity, and no longer within the open sore, are the
conditions of possibility for the artistic expressions of the present. Because if we cannot quite
say that persectuion, both murderous and symbollic, has remained in the past as a dreadful
yet overcome stage, we know that the real advances in mentalities and parctices, thanks to
feminists and antiracist struggles and dissident activisim, as well as the deceptive goodness of
tolerance, have brought some change. The context is different, even in spaces where violence
keeps killing; perspectives and legal frameworks have been modified and therefore the possible
points of confluence and struggle have too. Within this context, one of the main creative and
political impulses of the “Translating Kuir” cycle is, beyond the stories that describe that injury,
the exercise of cordiality as a platform of knowledge production.
So, here and now, following the course proposed by this laboratory of thought, what does what
we will call a Kuir Kordiality mean?
Not politeness, nor good
education, nor good manners.
9

And even less so the concealing of resistance movements and insurgencies or, as you could say
in hard to translate concepts, without leaving behind the struggle for “lesbian visibility,” “trans
anger” nor “gay pride”. (Each person who reads these pages, can translate the concepts that
seem incompatible, though complementary within a common history). Without setting aside
these historic and genuine alliances, but also without subjecting ourselves to the labeling they
are at risk of becoming. This cordiality, in turn, bears the sign of a Bartleby-like negation: we
do not want to translate it, we do not want to deflate it. There is a risk in this posture, and here
lies the challenge. To return to being completely unintelligible and thus to being considered
less human. Is this not, perhaps, the same place from whence we came? The general purpose
of the interventions seems to be to not forget these common origins, to reinhabit them, to
go through them with the new lights and tools of the present and to gather from there the
materials for work.
An art able to traverse the field of
pain with other eyes.
And then? What is KORDIAL KUIR? It is very difficult to explain a concept that pulses and that
at the same time represents an invisible bond.
Lolo y Lauti
10

2. HOSTILITY HAS A SOCIAL BODY
Now, let us, at the other extreme of cordiality, look for its opposite, and we find “hostility”. Here
we uncover another word erased from the official contemporary line up; probably, in this case,
because it is too gentle when compared to other, more forceful terms (violence, bullying, hate
crimes, discrimination, abuse, aggressions) that circulate in militant discourse and, for some
time now, in progressive and not so progressive medias as well.
But hostility is much more than a vintage and inoffensive gesture in comparison with a pointblank
gunshot or orchestrated persecution by the State itself. “Hostility” rests in the foundation
of all these other words. You could say that without hostility, the others would not be possible.
Hostility is not a matter of bad manners, it is the great enemy of truth. Because “rather than
reconsidering their own opinion, a hostile individual dedicates themselves to convincing and
forcing the world to adjust it to their way of thinking, regardless of the costs and effort involved.”
An orthopedic world marching towards a single point is the world hostility constructs.
At the extreme opposite end from the patience of listening, and especially opposed to the
curiosity, hostility proposes a single thought, outside of all truths. And here is where within
TRANSLATING KUIR emerges the circulation of a specific knowledge with a great capacity to
multiply itself arises.
Nine guests invited to discuss the problem of translation in their different spaces, the
provocateurs speak from a “privileged” knowledge about this hostility. Whether they suffered it
personally or not, they know in a singular way its forms, languages and strategies of necessity.
And somehow that shared knowledge is revealing. Not as tears anymore, nor revolt, nor pride,
but as raw material. The starting point of the artistic event. From Argentina, for example, Lolo
and Lauti analyze the place of humor, not as a virtue of “laughing about or laughing with” but as
a possibility of adopting a point of view completely apart from the heteronormative perspective.
Marlene Wayar develops what she herself calls a Latin American Trans theory.
Each story reveals the extent to which this shared knowledge, lived in each body, has become
part of artistic practices. The tone of the conversation remains focused on what you cannot
translate, on telling a story that borders the singular word.
From Brazil, known for being “the country that kills the largest number of transvestites in the
world”, Transalien historicizes her experience like someone singing a new song: “When I was
11

Marlene Wayar
young I had no self esteem, always rushed by fear, but it was never an option to go unnoticed.
We don’t have the right to be invisible…I’m stared at on the streets, but now it’s me who stares
back at them. The only freedom we have is choosing which prison we’ll be locked up in–that
is what categories bring, terms that limit experience.”
An unavoidable question: Is cordiality free? Considering that the project received financial
support, that we were able to carry it out in the midst of the pandemic thanks to perfect
internet connections, and we made each intervention under the shelter and comfort of a safe
roof, you could conclude that it is relatively easy to espouse cordiality when our lives are
protected and the possibility of our reflections is sustained by more than just money for basic
survival. And would be correct. And this is not minor. But it only reaffirms the need for that room
of one’s own that feminism has been demanding for more than a century. Not only for women
(or femininities) in a postponed individual sense, but also to achieve production in community.
Can you be kuir in underprivileged areas of the world without an international rescue? From
Argentina, the provocateur Vir Cano, highlights the elementary fact that...
12

Transälien
“...translations are not reversible,
we cannot deny the extent to which
English is imposed in academic,
political and even artistic markets.”
13

Vir Cano
The warning goes further: to what extent does thinking, wherever it is produced, inevitably
become Anglo-Saxon? And in turn: to what extent do our own stories not already have a mark
of translation informed by overhearing? The outside translates us before we open our mouths; it
builds an acceptable and digestible routine of how diverse experiences should be narrated. It is
not by accident that the story of the closet or of the unpropitious transvestite, from getting kick
out of their homes through the experience of prison and prostitution, is much more expected
than any story that deviates or skips those steps of pain permitted by the listener.
“When I use the Irish language I feel more secure; I feel I can be more of myself,”
affirms provocateur Maoilíosa Scott. Here the window for the theme of erased and repressed
languages is opened, as is the case of Irish, which was denied institutional recognition under
British colonialism. The hostility faced by a language is a mirror of the hostility faced by certain
bodies and certain ways of making connections and families. “There is almost no queer material
available in the Irish language. I write in both languages, but the most beautiful things I write
14

are in Irish, in which, for example, the pronouns are much more subtle, less painful. But what is
certain is that, in the national schools under British occupation, English used to be taught and
the use of Irish language was not allowed; you could speak among your family, of course, but
English was the language of your livelihood.”
Maoilíosa Scott
15

This question grows as the narratives of the provocateurs are put in relation to each other. And
then the question takes its political and concrete dimension: Is it possible to build a cordial
ground outside of the demands imposed by the agenda of markets and the tolerance of the
moment if among ourselves there is a proliferation of discussions about the same concept of
who we are, what we want, what we want to be within the framework of this humanity? Is it
possible to choose? To what extent?
For the moment, the experience of TRANSLATING KUIR allows us to
rehearse a transitional answer: only a cordial reasoning conversation,
sustained by the experience of suffering, propelled by the search for
love and happiness, amazed by the absurdity of injustice, is strong
enough to unravel the logic, or lack thereof, that runs through the
veins of this mysterious realm.
Let ‘s go.
3. RISK ZONE
Theories about translation and, above all, warnings about its limits and its deceitful solutions
take ages. You could say that it starts when the act of “speaking on behalf of others to others”
manifests itself as a fundamental act within struggles for power. Who said what? And to start
at the top: What did God say?
With the translation of the Old Testament to the German language by Martin Luther and
other theologians, the pillars of this Empire of meaning were laid. Facing the risk of free
interpretation, translation becomes indispensable: more than deciphering, it closes and
decides. The colonization of Latin America is another extensive example of this evangelization
of knowledge and practices. Beyond the very common expression that equates the translator
with the traitor, it must be admitted that translation runs with blood. Luther’s text, which serves
as the foundation of the Protestant Reformation, becomes one of the most forceful heresies
within the Catholic Church and beyond. Protest, expulsion, and struggle are three elements that
return again and again in the provocateurs’ reflexions: “Translation is a vehicle and weapon…
In contexts where speed is demanded of us, it is worth asking ourselves what a slow, disabled
16

Fran Cus
translation would be, beyond the physical condition….” (Fran Cus)
Another substantial obstacle: distance. Is it possible to translate a text from ancient Greek
when the whole world based on that language has vanished? The distance between bodies, the
distance between territories and, definitively, the distance that constitutes hostility are realities
that highlight the problems implied by the act of translation. Even, and much more so, when
the intent is translating yourself.
The panoramic view
Basic manuals on translation underscore the necessity of having a wide view capable of going
beyond direct “word to word” translation and also capable of going above and beyond the fear
of making a mistake: “to translate a text it’s not enough to know the words; it’s necessary,
moreover, to know the issues that they are related to. It’s necessary then to know the language
and the culture, in other words, the life, the civilization, the ethnography of the people who
use that form of expression.” And in turn: “we should expect a genuine transformation of the
original from the translator, just as we demand artistic expression from the author and, at the
same time, a legitimate expression of reality. For this reason, the translator will have to look
17

Dominic Montague
for those communicative systems common to both languages with which identical information
can be exchanged.” Here we could add:
Translating kuir is
becoming kuir (again).
One of the provocateurs, Dominic Montague, turns to the metaphor of water. Water circulates
in different ways and in different containers. In the step between the source and the package,
so the water can circulate without spilling, lies the first act of translation. “We have often
had to build, to pass through packages that do not fit us; we are always translating, and this
also translates the body. Choosing which private things become public is a way of deciding
the course the water will flow. Because before we start to speak, we have to calculate how
our muscles and neurons stack up, analyzing what is safe, what can be said. Once we make
18

ourselves public, we translate ourselves in our presence. Being queer is very different depending
on where we are, and will also be different five years from now.”
This, perhaps, is the reality: as queer beings we share an experience within time and distance.
“I used to think that the last threshold of freedom was saying whatever we want. Now I think
the last threshold is when someone translates theirself.”
Returning here to the good translation manual, we find another definition that TRANSLATING
KUIR brings into play: “The translator’s role is therefore to decipher ciphered communication
and transpose it on to their own language by way of a new key.”
Translating Kuir is
refusing to build
a single language.
Taking risks
Since the call for proposal one question has been raised that, as it probes for answers,
reformulates itself and reveals a tremendous problem. So tremendous that it could have even
questioned the feasibility of the very call. Natalia Mallo, Lisa Kerner, Violeta Uman and Ruth
MacCarth–the hosts from their respective spaces–are aware of the dilemma they are pointing to
with their invitation: “The central theme of these encounters is the untranslatable”. What words
do we speak to each other? What is the tone? From the beginning, we assume the impossibility
of the subject we are going to try to discover. The great question is how to talk for and from a
collective, how to address a community looking for shared paths without “smoothing over the
difference”. Does this community exist? And if we assume that it does, what unifies it? How do
you avoid naming yourself and limiting yourself to the place of reaction, to what you are not,
to your opposite?
19

The original idea of building up a network of art festivals in different countries delves into
this question. The call has been clear: “This is a research, reflection and creation project
on different translation processes. Workshops promoting thought and discussion involve the
exchange, production and circulation of Kuir / Queer / Cuir art.” This tripling in the way of
enunciating the same sound (kuir) already announces the dislocation of the problem. And also
the hope within it. A common sound, like a song that is not subject to any translation, calls us.
And we answer.
In the 20th century, the concept “queer” brought a certain viability to the discourse of
differences, but also, as has already been largely pointed out in this encounter and during the
infinite discussion on the subject, it was also brought to the limit of the insipid, the normalizable.
Queer, which had been an insult, a fundamnetal insignia of the injury we are born into, now also
appears as something calming and diffusive.
Moreover, what does it mean to recognize yourself as queer here and now? And here is the
core of the reflections: does the answer not change depending on the language from which it
is spoken, on the moment of life and of the century from which it is pronounced, and according
to the concrete situation in which we find that word? Facing a TV interviewer or an aggressor
on the streets, is it the same thing to say “I am queer”? Is it possible to translate or is it urgent
to defend irreversible words? Is the experience of being a lesbian or trans artist in North Ireland
comparable to the experience of gay artists working in the city of Buenos Aires? Is it the same
to be 20 years old and 60 years old inhabiting a body and a humanity that does not coincide
with the standard endorsed by morals and the market? On the other hand, how do you avoid
becoming one of the not just permitted but promoted options on the shelves of that same
market while hatred continues to run its course, entrenching itself in violence and still taking
forms?
TRANSLATING KUIR aims for the zero degree of that impossibility. The first step was the decision
to use a fictitious spelling. The next, the question of whether there is a we-ness that does not
pass over the singularity of individual, local, regional, age group and class experiences. How can
we ensure that singularity is not exhausted in solipsism and, on the contrary, builds networks,
resistance movements and theories of its own?
In the words of the organizers: If your words are my words…which words name us or do
not name us? More and more we have questions. That’s why we invited different people from
different cultures and perspectives to think together. Working internationally as a collective for
over 4 years, we have often met each other in situations in which we had to question ourselves
20

about what we do in relation to translation.”
Since the beginning, the problem has taken three different directions guided by three questions
that will inevitably remain open: how to translate bodies/presences, how to translate words
and how to translate cultures. Each festival has chosen its guests, who they call meaningfully
“provocateurs,” from their respective country and reality. What do the participants of these
meetings have in common? Not knowledge, nor languages, nor ages, nor origins. The
provocateurs’ function, as put forward by the hosts, “is to participate in the process without
focusing on the results; we simply expect it to happen.” Free from the need to yield a conclusion,
the provocateurs share their modest findings, their intuitions, as well as their doubts. At times
the exhibition takes the form of a secret, a curriculum vitae, a speech, a manifesto, a poetic
work. It is from this “lack” that the invitation to “provoke” established a fertile ground for
the exchange of perspectives and unfinished theorizations. “Translation wants fast answers
to complex problems, how about we keep searching before we declare ourselves powerless?”
The adventure continues
As a warning or conclusion, as shade under which to attentively rest, Spaniard Paco Vidarte
launches a critical cry in light of the ways in which the concept of queer, queer theory and their
consequences in everyday life have advanced:
“Queer, in addition to many other things, when converted into theory, say, into chewing gum/
rubber, becomes as hegemonic and colonial as any other way of thinking, creating its castes,
hirearchies, specialists, popes, conflicts for the crown, affective-intellectual disputes, I was first,
I got here before you, they’re a newcomer, you don’t know anything, that one is not our friend,
I broke up with you, esoteric circles, groups of the initiated, emotional gangs, self-satisfied
smiles, hordes of proselytes and no small dose of good conscience, and saving and evangelizing
spirit. The inexplicable demand for authenticity (what an unqueer value!) that can sometimes
be detected among us with explicit accusations of cynicism or fraud that lead many people to
personal destruction, somewhere between the leave everything, take up your cross and follow
me and the old revelation’s iluminating sparkle of surrogate bourgeois postmodern crossing
cables: if you are queer by your own decision, you assume a certain disgraced condition, you do
appeal to the law nor any kind of authority, you collectivize personal work, you renounce your
own name, to have a job, you have to survive miserably, to do rare things, to live in a certain
helplessness, you take a liking to provocations, to volunteerly occupying spheres of marginality,
21

to dressing weirdly, to flirting with self-destructive attitudes sometimes, to falling into fantasies
of de-marriage, to indulging scoundrels and jerks just because they are also queer and to
assuming a páthos that one could no doubt classify as egodystonic. I discourage everyone from
taking this path of queer baptism by immersion.”
TRANSLATING KUIR opens a path that retraces the idea of queer purity
and queer authenticity, its need to answer to all the evils of the world
and to bow down by becoming the strangest thing on the planet, the
most suffering. <<No, no, I am not where you are trying to find me
but here, where I am looking at you, laughing>>. More than just the
right word to translate, or the most truthful image, the search for
this provisory community is amiss. Art that doesn’t make itself art in
order to find ourselves, nor to define, nor to translate, but rather to
lose itself.
22

TRANSLATING CULTURE
By Raphael Khouri
23

This text is part of a video-art piece created by one of the panelists of Translating Kuir. Raphael
poetically considers memory, queer culture and public space.
I live in the center of Cairo, in the only pedestrian area available. Almost all of the shops
and cafés in the pedestrian area are closed. A few months ago, the zone wonderfully came
back to life with the adolescents that used to come here to skate or ride their bikes. In
an Arab region where we live without hope and without public space, it was lovely to see.
The adolescents, who come from all over Cairo, having fun. Girls and young women freely
finding joy in their own bodies. Kids together, teaching each other how to skate and do
tricks. Kids interacting in non-toxic ways. Making something out of nothing.
When the scene became a bit too joyful, a security guard arrived to chase them away.
The angry man with the gun, the uniform and the walkie talking ordered them to leave!
He told them that they were “causing a headache.” They even put up cement barricades
and chains to keep them out. The boardwalk once again became lifeless. I was devastated.
These kids gave us life in a daily context that would’ve made Pinochet jealous.
Not too long ago, I heard some young queer people whispering about the pedestrian area
where I live. Incredulously, they were telling each other about how ten years ago, right
after the revolution, it used to be full of queer cafés where lgbt people would hang out and
be completely extravagant. Cairo was a different place back then, with legendary queer
parties. I could also hardly image my own neighborhood full of queer bars. It really is a
completely different place now.
Many lgbt people of older generations have stopped going to the center because the
memories hurt too much. All of their old gathering places are closed. The cafés and the
liveliness are gone. Their friends have left the country or are in prison or died or are
clinically depressed.
I often think about how one of the first things that the Nazis infamously burned in Berlin
was Magnus Hischfeld Institute’s research and books. The institute was an innovative
center that supported queer and trans people. The founder himself, Magnus Hirschfeld,
was queer and worked extremely hard to change Germany’s homophobic laws. The
institute helped trans people reassign their sex to align with their gender identities. They
made it so officially affirming your gender was easier than it is now. There were more
than 100 lgbt bars, many of which were exclusively trans bars. There isn’t even a trans
bar in Berlin any more.
24

Yesterday, when I went through the chain fence to enter the pedestrian area and my
home, I noticed that some of the kids had started slowly coming back.
On the threshold
of the untranslatable:
Calling ourselves lesbianxs
by Vir Cano
A. The scent of names: You can say lesbianxs in many ways
Lesbiana, lesbianx, lesbiano, tortillera, marimacho, camionera, bombera, torta, tortillita, travo,
trola, chonga, transbiana, chonguito, chongo, chongazo, fem y tortillerx are a few of the names
through which we delineate some of the contours of our lesbian existences. These words carry
the traces of what has been said about (and by) us, with time coming closer to some of the
ways we have named ourselves. In this sense, they constitute some of the raw materials we
have used to construct a discursive trench, a curler in the hair of language that holds on to that
which we have become, of what we have resisted, of what we have lost and also of what we
have built. In our mouths, these words know struggle, joy, sadness and shared life and death.
They speak of our existential territories, of the networks we have woven and the ways in which
language has been, as val flores says, a disputed territory that we cannot give up on. They
speak of the nuances and trajectories of our ways of seeing and feeling the world, of inhabiting
its meanings and its possibilities.
If I had to translate these words to other languages, I am sure that I would quickly stumble into
the difficultity of “crossing from those nuances and regions of local lesbian language to idioms
that propose–and enclose–their own relief and gaze of the world.” How do you take into account
the particular and situated histories carried, in my corner of the world, by the words “lesbianx,”
“transviano” or “trola”? How do you do justice, in other languages, to the history and the injury
and the reapproation at play–and risked–in these terms? What unites and what separates our
“torillera” from terms in English like “dyke” or “lezzy,” the Portuguese expression “sapatão,”
25

the German “lesbiche” or the French “gouine”? How do you approximate the sweet aroma
of a corn tortilla that evokes the “arepera” or “cachapera” of Colombia and Venezuela? How
do you narrative in other languages the South American genealogy that connects prostitutes
with lesbians in names like “trola” and “degeneradx”? How do you tell the story of these
condemned and banned professions associated with those assigned the female gender that
connect the local [Argentine] “camioneras” with the Mexican or Ecuadorian “camiones” and
the Costa Rican “tractor”?
B. The precious im/possibility of translation
Perhaps it’s appropriate to recuperate that distinction that Jacques Derrida proposes about the
purpose of a “tongue”. For the French-Algerian philosopher, in the strict sense a “tongue” refers
to a language; in a broader sense, however, a “tongue” is tied to an ethos, which is to say, with
what the gringxs call a “way of being,” of acting, of feeling, of inhabiting the world:
“In the broad sense, the language in which the foreigner is addressed or in which he is heard,
if he is, is the ensemble of culture, it is the values, the norms, the meanings that inhabit the
language. Speaking the same language is not only a linguistic operation. It’s a matter of ethos
generally.”
In every language lies (or adheres) a tongue, moreover, many tongues. Between one and the
other, between the tongue and the language, the philosopher warns, “difference and adhesion,”
separation and superposition. For this reason, translating always entails confronting a double
challenge: the (im/possible) passage from one language to another and the complicated task
of rendering a tongue (that which all languages carry), which is always a view of the world, not
assimilatable nor fully comparable to the ‘destination’ tongue. But it is this very adhesion of the
tongue–that which unifies it and separates it from distinction languages–that makes it possible
to think about translating (in one language made up of many tongues) from the Argentine lesbitongue
to the Colombia, Chilean, or Mexican lesbi-tongue. This adhesion allows us to think,
feel, and smell the nuances that unite and separate this pastry tradition from the Colombian
“arepera” to the Spanish “bollo” or our already mythical “tortón patrio.”
Perhaps this is why translating entails not just a challenge, but a risk: that of passing, inhabiting,
and connecting languages, as well as the tongues that nest within them. At stake would not just
be accuracy or correcting the passage from one language to another, but the hospitality–just as
Derrida also asserted–of the translation, which is to say, the capacity we have to let in, to give
26

space or to welcome this whole ethos that dwells in our tongues, where they don’t just speak
the world, but also produce it, mold it and make it possibile.
C. The threshold of the untranslatable: the zone of contagions
On the threshold of the untranslatable circulate the nuances and wrinkles of our existences, in
this traffic zone also circulate experiences and ways of being that can turn out to be contagious,
inspiring, productive.
The untranslatable is, in part, a traffic zone of tongues (in the broad sense) with a creative
and contaminating potential. Where there doesn’t seem to be an adequate translation, where
we can’t find the words or even where a misunderstanding arises, that’s where the zone of
promises lies: the promise of an unexpected encounter that collapses borders between worlds,
maybe even provides the possibility of mixing, as Silvia Molloy affirmed:
“Mixing, coming and going, switching belongs to the realm of the unheimliche [uncanny],
which is precisely that which rocks the foundation of home.”
Through mixing, through this contact that takes us out of the familiar and hurls us towards the
sinister space of the other that invades their own home, where, perhaps, the un/translatable
becomes a zone of promises. “The distinct always results–if it results in anything–dangerously
in translation,” Molloy also states. And it is this potential to insert difference in the home of
the tongue (of departure or of destination) that makes translation an act of creative risk, even
of producing difference, of reverberations in other worlds, of contaminated feelings that cross
borders between languages and echo in our words.
27

Translating Crip (with your
heart on your sleeve)
By Fran Cus
There’s no place in a perfect circle.
Susana Thénon
I’ve written a short text in order to share a few questions, insights, and impressions with
you all. I would like to introduce a word: crip. A word can also be an experience. I would
like to contemplate the crip experience, inhabiting a crip body–a body so monstrous and
unpredictable–like having the task of constructing a raft in the middle of an often hostile
and out of control sea. I still do not quite know how this raft is built, my raft: there are some
bones, some tissue fragilely tied between them, such that every so often they fall out of place.
Sometimes they fuse together, the muscles, the bones; they swell, howl, hurt, burn, tremble,
rest, sleep, require an urgent pause. On these bones and tissues of mine befall winds, storms,
squalls, earth, iodine, rust, rain showers, unknown airs that pass through its gaps and scars,
more or less visible: they mark my skin. My skin seems to never forget, and sometimes this
insistence plagues and disturbs me, but it’s ok. WIth time I make space for it, enjoying the visits
and unexpected guests.
But a raft, in this case a crip raft, my raft, is not at all the same thing as a boat or a ship. By
which I mean: sometimes there are no life vests and I have to learn and relearn how to swim.
That my raft does not sink or get swept out to sea. In other words, and as a friend of mine who
is no longer with us yet who visits me when I miss her wrote, submerging myself to lose weight,
finding and traveling with other rafts, acquires finesse, something of depth. The bare secret
that I believe finds and unites these crip rafts comes from precarious ties and I believe that crip
people do the best that we can, including when we sink and have to surf vast stretches against
the wind and with no sign of the surface or the coast in sight. As Deligny–another master–
writes in his wonderful autobiography “(...) When it rains questions, when hard times intensify,
we bring together our flesh to construct a well assembled platform. Very much to the contrary.
Having lived together in our solitude we retain what brings us together and sets us free. You
can see the importance of our ties and our strange way of gathering and coming together, the
distance that our bodies can sustain between each other. Bonds take care of us, protect us, as
long as they are loose enough and don’t let us go (...)”
28

I would like to take advantage of these few minutes to continue thinking with you all about
the translation of this word: crip. Crip lives: dragged, broken, crippled, limping, crazy, anxious,
obsessive, blemished, dysfunctional, painful, fatigued, disposable, disabled, depressed,
insufficient…I pronounce crip without the original Saxon accent, with the intention of
approximating its vibrations and subtle movements, of transforming this word into a touchable
and touching body: I drag myself in my precarious raft there, I push the pronunciation against
the mud of this hybrid and undermined tongue that I speak with and hear every day. I sense that
this act of linguistic and somatic disobedience could be a start. Translating a word, obsessing
over its elusions, its feints, its resistance and its mysterious flotsam is much more to me than
managing to find the more or less precise adaptations: it affects the world. As I translate I feel
like I can make a more habitable world. In different circumstances in my life, and for distinct
reasons, I’ve had to make myself such a solitary world with the few words that happened to be
within my reach, that preoccupied me, that moved me, that sheltered me, that energized me,
that accompanied me.
So, crip: a teasing monosyllable, if you will, that for a while has bothered me and has called
me to traffic, to reappropriation, to shared resonances. Traffic that in my case always ends up
dispersed, incomplete, and unstable. Writing these lines, I also thought about how monosyllabic
words rarely have much idiomatic value and status: neither do crip lives. They drag, and we
drag our flesh-covered skeletons with their scars into the fresh air. We do this work of dragging,
of pulling through the mud and of swimming however we can and whatever arises from us,
always at the edge of exhaustion–and sometimes not even that. Inhabiting a crip body in a
world that seems to only want productive, capable, fast, resolute, competent, upright, straight,
whole bodies embroils me and embroils many of us in the political task of survival. There are
essential jobs, there are essential bodies, and words that are also essential: recognizing them,
dignifying them, making space for them is also a crip task. Saying crip (with your heart on
your sleeve) is not always welcome. Not being welcome can sometimes be a stroke of luck, an
unknown force, from which we fan the flame of writing, of thinking, of mutual and common
support. Weaving through bodies and dwellings that we dock, we do not always move and
feel in the most expected or appropriate ways. Crip lives speak with muddy, tireless tongues.
Speaking in tongues, wrote Gloria Anzaldúa, allows us to make times and spaces that foster
mutual flourishing. Time, place, land. Crip: a life, lives that break themselves; rhythms, speeds,
bonds that aren’t available nor possible. Sometimes there isn’t even a remedy for the damage.
We seek support in the face of what appears incurable: saying crip gives the feeling of the
fragil, vibrating, and even of the untranslatable.
We find friendly tongues, build precarious rafts on the sea, havens for our rejected bodies, for
29

30
our slow, perforated lives; we create outdoor shelters, we embrace the irreparable, we cure
ulcers with extreme care. In this way, we survive, inhabiting, confronting, and resisting the
collapse of our earth, woven to its irresistible promise of being a place for all.

31

TKUIR
TRANSLATING
KUIR
©Outburst Americas 2022
supported by
Digital Collaboration Fund