Dear readers,
V. has been berating me for my delays. Or, I’ve felt berated.
To make up for it I will keep the façade of politeness:
Dearest readers,
I hope this letter finds you well. Please consider it a weekend treat following on our conversations last time. There’s something cruel about writing ignoring the dealings of the world, isn’t there? To not address the keyboard I’m typing from, the chair I am sitting on, the friend who is visiting from Berlin and the rain outside; all of these concrete flourishes that trick us into thinking we share an outside rather than the inside of a text. That zeal for an air of familiarity rather than throwing 2kg of raw pork belly by your feet one morning, while you are still in bed. There’s no denying that we share words, however. Let’s talk about them.
How ironic would it be to translate a text about Sincerity with ChatGTP? Thankfully, that is not what happened last week. Not yet. I want to keep translation artisanal, a handicraft, digging through the dirt with my fingers. There are words I like and there are words we need in english and portuguese each. They live together with the bacteria in our gut, a colony of sense-making creatures that change our behavior from inside out.
While delving into the translation --- or attempting to, since my fingers kept hitting a rectangular screen that divides flesh from digital dust, at no point honesty was invoked, or earnestness. Honesty and sincerity must have nothing to do with each other, then. But earnest is one of my favorite words. Being earnest is an ethics, ethics is a word I learned to use with my friend T., and earnestness offers me a place of tonus and warmth. I went and googled it and realized it is a downright stern word, less inviting than what I felt it to be, a very serious word indeed. Seriousness can be gentle, though, welcoming. It's what earnestness taught me and the reason I wish we had it in portuguese.
Realizing, taking notice, making real through attention, is a verb I would like to bring over. And arousal, which in portuguese is not distinct from excitement. No portuguese speaker is whelmed, much less overwhelmed, and I always preferred the mysterious randomness to the strident aleatoriedade; the synergy of wandering and wondering is to be envied, but loitering não chega aos pés, cannot reach the feet, of the great vagabundear. Chatting with V., I became creeped out that we use the same word for both royal and real; realeza and realidade are things I would hope to be in contradicting terms.
I'm not sure what this proximity means, but I do want to share some of the ways I made way through last week's Betraying Gestures, rubbing, chewing, playing languages.
Acolhimento, acolher. This one I usually translate as embrace or embracing. Close enough, slightly off. It's like they are concave and convex to each other. To brace yourself is to prepare to be struck with great force, acolher speaks of colheita, the harvest, gathering, to collect, bring closer, there's a softness and a desire, a large space to be multiplied. Casa de mãe Joana, like a mother’s heart. Bracing radiates a repelling vector.
Together is to gather, which I love, but as you can see there's a gap in there, an assuredness of space that junto, tamo junto, juntar, conjunto fill up like honey or running mass, massa corrida, portuguese for spackling (which I just looked up, and it hit my lips and popped in my mouth like a fizzy drink. One more word to adore). Togethering as the lively act of continuing to bring close what was disparate; its necessity. How to make bricks melt? Melt into each other, put two and two together?Sure, you might be afraid of a brick hitting you, and it might speak of harshness and fixidity, of structure, but try soaking it in water. Shake that thing until it goes back to being clay. Access is a matter of means and meanings, meanderings. Words are never quite in the same place where we left them before.
I've been stumped by place several times. Place can be located anywhere; sure, my bedroom is a place, but this text is a place and the margin of misunderstanding between what was said and what was meant is also a place, a place to be inhabited intently. All of these places have their own phisicalities, and many cannot be located.
Then there is placement, placing. Let's take this here and put it there. Recolocar can sometimes be translated as replacing, a nightmare: it evokes substitiution, which has nothing to do with the colo, lap, of colocar, finding a place together, a nice warm lap, and then recolocar, do it again. Can you hear the echo? I settled for repositioning. Even if a position has a quality of fixated coordinates, my ears are satisfied with the movable and interchangeable parts it allows for.
Fala was a new challenge, that I burried under the cluncky act of speech. English offers me several options for speaking, saying, telling, talking. But they resist losing social momentum, coming into its own spiritual being: the fala. An old love of mine, however, that has a similar magnetism to it (let's make the connection and call it spirituous) and a happy translational match is coisa. There's no more lively thing! Coisa and thing make a good game out of each other, as long as we keep ourselves attentive to the gathering of materiality, narrative and circunstance that produces each thing (with my gratitude to Bruno Latour’s writings).
I hit a seagull today. I ran over a seagull I was cycling, I cycle fast —- my Mamba dearest goes fast --- I'd just curved a half-moon around a slower cyclist and shaved some speed not to hit a body crossing the street, I'd just said sorry to someone who said sorry back when I saw two birds, two seagulls I think, and one of them was going for a piece of food on the ground, or maybe it was already on its mouth --- I think I saw it inside the beak, I leaned over to mess with it, make a sound, I leaned a little too left it felt as if my body was outside my bike it felt as if if this bird was in my face —- it didn't know what to do and I'm sure it regrets what it did - I do! Because I ran over a seagull tonight.
And it wasn't even night. It was 9 p.m., sure, but there wasn't a drop of dark in the sky. Who determines that? The body or the concept or the agreement or the need, if we look at the sky together? If we feel tired together? Forget the word time, let's just use the word together, again. Together.
The bird got all confused and messed up the instinct of flight, I caught it by surprise on my wheels:
I felt
volume
through my tires,
below?
within the spokes
up and down,
shook
that's what it felt like
just a wing? a head? maybe a foot? no idea.
I didn't look back I was so fast.
I hit the bird and I wanted to be stable, I let my bike fly without loosing a beat, looking forward making sure my body was straight my frame was straight and straight ahead a straight couple crossing the pavement turned their heads, CARALHO, I shouted just before, and it was at the bird they turned their heads to and I passed by them && I sang
I ju-u-ust hit a-a seee-a-gu-ul!
Shit.
What did I do is this even humane, imagine that: hit and run, and I was laughing and I was happy and the whole day I'd been so cheerful that one more dead bird in the world couldn't weight me. Oh no, one more body in Gaza couldn't weight me. The starvation couldn't, I won't allow it, destroying the land, throwing out the guts of this world to the point of depletion, deletion! I won't allow it, oh no. Other birds must sing. Other birds do sing. I did not look back. I did not look back. I laughed, and I laughed.
Stability. What's the cost here? No prejudice. Destroyed flesh. What's left?
Here and there I had to force the plural form sadnesses; english seems convinced that there is only one great sadness soup we partake in at different points of our lives; while in portuguese as tristezas are many. Then again, maybe I haven't been listening to people who have many sadnesses to speak of. We are happy to fragment our joys, but the happinesses remain awkward under a demand for absolute feeling.
Meeting in place of encontro is disappointing. We would never use encontro in a business setting, reunião, or reunion, rendevouz, takes care of the formalities. The literal encounter is bizarre, I don't recall it ever appearing in conversation; RPG battles are my only association for it. I dare translate it as date: mashing romaticism with brutal factuality is a victory I will acknowledge on english's side. Even if I'm pretty sure playing with the polissemy will elict confused responses and requests for clarification.
The one that truly hurts me, however, is being unable to carry over vivência, convivência, conviver. Something like living together, co-existing. But there's a consistent quality to vivência: think of experience but less limited, and populated by other beings. Vivência can never be private the way experience is sometimes made to be. I could go for conviviality, but I ever only heard that word assigned to a certain politeness and pleasure of sociability. Sticking to the basics, liveliness will have to do.
Stability. Things are only as stable as we allow them to be. We tend to think of dictionaries as carriers of truth. Law rather than suggestion. But they started as humble collections of inventive notation, a map of bite-sized relational tools. Língua is both the muscle in your mouth and language; yesterday I went to E.’s morning practice and spent a good portion of a 10 minute exercise shaking my tongue wildly from side to side, fast and hard, feeling it a foreign and soft volume that belongs to the world, to the storm.
Geni Nùñez likes the word artesania. It is the reason I used artisanal before. I want to gather with her, and I want the warmth of this word to melt and weave the spaces between letters and intentions, the gaps every time my fingertips lift from the screen before diving and hitting it again and again like a confused, yet determined, bird.
Thank you for raednig!