Bone into Stone, Jhumpa Lahiri's essay on translating Ovid, made me suddenly aware again of the enchanted zone of the text — Ovid's The Metamophoses is not a book, it's a text — such attention to the word is already a translation.
I like thinking this way. While the saga of the neighbours rolls on — we have brought in a 3-ton digger — where would I go but to the page? Metamorphosis. Changing, turning, erring, stumbling. The stone, the living, infinitely flexible stone.
(At times I wonder if translation is tantamount to another language spreading, lava-like, over a pre-existing text, allowing it to live on in the very act of silencing it.)
Bone into Stone made me think of Bone the Dancer which I have been translating or wanting to translate into the person I now am. The difficulty, the endurance of re-reading it, moving it into the person I now am, wondering in turn who that is, the way you find it hard to see yourself in your own shoes.
I have translated bits of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and a short story by René Daumal. I have never translated myself.
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