trans.n.lit

"With its vital concern for proximate agonies, translation owes 
something crucial to vigilation for its protean form. If translation offers itself as literature's wake, it is because it is already so suffused with morbid abidance—it can only present itself in catastrophic echo to what it might otherwise be. Which is to say that translation is nothing other than the matter of death itself, ruminated, deformed and devoured by its own attempts, verging on murderous complacency, duplicitous in its desiring. Mortific matter, as it were, immaterialised. Translation's reproach, then, which operates a paradoxical rapprochement, exists, of necessity, in the protraction of a work's cadaveric resistances. The deliberate misapprehension of these androgynous terms—reproach conjoined to rapprochement—make evident the untenable collusion between otherwise symbiotic signs. To near, in this instance, is to injure; and injury, which is inimical to intimacy, takes the unexpected posture of an injunction."

Reproach, rapprochement
Nathanael on Herve Guibert

Asymptote Journal

oh my head.
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