• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: Metramorphosis in Translation: Refiguring the Intimacy of Translation beyond the Metaphysics of Loss
  • Contributor: von Flotow, Luise; Shread, Carolyn
  • Published: University of Chicago Press, 2014
  • Published in: Signs, 39 (2014) 3, Seite 592-596
  • Language: English
  • DOI: 10.1086/674298
  • ISSN: 0097-9740; 1545-6943
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: Abstract Thinking about the intimacy that translation demands and creates, and the limits of this intimacy, we explore Bracha L. Ettinger’s concept of metramorphosis to propose a paradigmatic feminist refiguring of translation that recognizes and validates alternative modalities of contact and interrelation. Here “Several comes before the One,” and translation is the place where we all come from, the place where we start together, in a relationship of interdependence and metramorphic exchange. Metramorphosis is never one way: it respects the mutual implication of exchange and as such alters the framing of the problematic. From the perspective of metramorphosis, we start not here or there, with self or other, in any given mother tongue, but together, in “distance-in-proximity” and therefore necessarily in translation. This shift from translation as destination to translation as the place we all come from is gaining increasing traction as the single nation-language-culture narrative erodes to reveal a continuum of languages, cultures, places, and ecologies.