Duelo, or the Cryptic Translation of Mourning: Friendship Between Languages
Noraedén Mora Méndez | University of Southern California, USA
Publication: Volume 5 Issue 2
Abstract | The experience of loss and the possibility to overcome mourning has been a concern for both psychoanalysis and philosophy. Loss is also important in the practice of translation; Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, among other thinkers, have insisted on the complication between texts in translation and the concepts of life, death, survival, and love and friendship. This paper follows these complications to argue that the word duelo in translation, as well as translation itself, enacts and symptomizes the frictions that arise between languages and friendship. By closely reading Sigmund Freud’s and Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s psychoanalytic theories of mourning, melancholia, love object, and crypt, the paper traces loss of meaning in translation and translation as a work of mourning. The word duelo in Spanish is a homonym that comes from two different roots in Latin, one corresponding with the term mourning, dolus, and the other with duel, duellum. By reading two of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories about different duelos the paper shows how translation embodies the loss of meaning between languages that is also present in friendship and love. This paper reads friendship between different languages and examines how the idea of friendship is transformed in translation. In this sense, this work takes duelo as the struggle between languages to suggest a cryptic translation, a seemingly contradictory task based on friendship that aims to highlight the nuances of the text in translation. This paper wants to insist on friendship and alterity between languages as part of the dynamic that translation entails, not an ideal or diplomatic friendship, but one that is complicated and involves love, mourning, and combat. To translate cryptically, to maintain a duelo in translation, would mean to resist the impulse of one language comprehending or dominating the other, and strive for a loving friendship.
Key words | Mourning, duelo, translation, crypt, friendship, love, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud
Noraedén Mora Méndez (moramend@usc.edu) is a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture program at University of Southern California, USA. She holds a B.A. in Psychology (Andrés Bello Catholic University, Venezuela), and an M.A. in Cultural and Critical Studies (Birkbeck, University of London, UK). Her approach is transdisciplinary and her interests include the intersections between literature, visuality and philosophy, with a focus on Latin America. She is interested in translation and editing as practices that imply collaboration, mourning, and contamination. Her current research focuses on the motif of the passage in aesthetic works to establish a conversation about Venezuela and its borders, media and temporality.