TRANSLATING KUIR MAGAZINE

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
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