A Poetics of Translation Transduction: Lifting the Erasure on What Always-already Was

Abstract

This work is a collection of three essays and a playscript. The prefatory essays lay out the progression of my thinking as a “translator”—a term I use under erasure because I no longer think it serves as an accurate indicator of what “translators” actually contend with and do—while the play itself is a “translation” of Federico García Lorca’s Mariana Pineda. The collection as a whole turns largely on the word “transduction”—the term I’ve chosen to replace “translation”—whose emergence was born of my thinking, my working, and my thinking about my working over the months of “translating”. The essays have three main aims: to clarify the word “transduction” and, thereby, the concept it represents; to demonstrate how I propose to use it and its grammatical derivatives; and to explain why I’m capturing it for the fields of meaning transfer—as well as for the meaning-transfer aspects of all fields. The essays start out dealing with theory and move gradually into praxis, while the final section is pure product: an English-language playscript entitled The Good Woman of Granada, meant to be used by actors and academics alike. The work in its entirety is, thus, an exposure of my thinking at various points in its evolution through the deliberate identification of several discrete steps along my path to and through the complexity of “translation”.