Introduction

In his essay “Translation from Drawings to Buildings,” architectural historian Robin Evans argues that the translation of words can be compared to the translation of geometrical figures from one point in space to another. Yet, the substratum across which they travel, he adds, is not isotropic and words get “bent, broken or lost on the way” (1997, 54). This description implies that words are autonomous objects of study, somehow disconnected from human experience, and also raises questions about the relationship between language and geometry. As an architect and bilingual writer, I contend that the relationship between linguistic translation and spatial translation is not reducible to simple analogy but instead offers a more complex and fertile relationship. I argue that linguistic translation and spatial translation relate at a fundamental level originating in the speaker’s body. The premise of this collection of essays is therefore to consider language as an embodied and spatial practice, as has been developed by post-structuralist philosophers and by phenomenologists, and to consider linguistic translation as a lived phenomenon. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body as expression and of the sensing body in particular is absolutely essential to this inquiry. By referring to Merleau-Ponty’s work on sens and his analysis of relative and absolute movement, the aim is to develop an understanding of the corporeity of linguistic translation. Each of the following essays, with the exception of “Translators’ Notes,” originated as a conference paper, and each of them tackles the experience of translation, whether it be considered as linguistic or as spatial. Ultimately, what the essays endeavour to show is that these movements can no longer be categorised as distinct, but rather join in the capacity of our bodies to sense and in our desire to make sense.