ABSTRACT

This chapter presents an example of creative non-fiction writing produced “drawingly”: by identifying the characteristics of a method of drawing and translating them into the field of writing to derive a novel writing method. These characteristics include working with acute attentiveness and close proximity to the object under scrutiny, pursuing digressions when and where they arise, and working with a greatly restricted view of any endpoint such that process takes precedence over product. The chapter follows such parallels between drawing and writing to ask whether this instance of translation is also undertaken “drawingly.” A range of analogies between the processes of drawing and translation is introduced, including reading the object of the drawing as a text, the impossibility of perfect equivalence in drawing as in translation, and the prospect that the impulse to translate, like the impulse to draw, might be understood in terms of a strongly ambivalent desire both to caress and to capture the object under scrutiny. References points include the work of Ingold, Berger, Schwenger, and Nancy on drawing and naming; Venuti, Derrida, and Bataille on metaphor and translation; and Marks and Levinas on touch and haptic visuality.