ABSTRACT
Mónica de la Torre's 2020 poetry collection, Repetition Nineteen, centers on a series of experimental translations, the 19th of which, “A Big, Beautiful Wall,” uses only words with Anglo-Saxon roots. This version highlights the political potential of translation experiments, parodically critiquing aesthetic tendencies to “domesticate” foreign texts. It also raises questions about the scope of translation's action: how can translation protest, evade, or even dismantle English? How can experimental translation resist linguistic power and still fulfill translation's varied tasks? This chapter argues that de la Torre's book—and experimental translations more generally—counteract the power of English by creating, simultaneously, absence and excess. The chapter makes this argument through a survey of recent radical translation theory, as well as a rereading of Benjamin's “Task of the Translator.” It approaches contemporary theory and Benjamin through metaphors of emptiness and multiplication common to both, as well as to Repetition Nineteen: the metaphor of the break, and the metaphor of the hole, which, like its homophonic counterpart, the whole, can encompass, rather than suture, two sides of a division. The chapter also uses as a governing image Eva Hesse's installation, Repetition Nineteen III, which lends its title to de la Torre's book.
