‘Foreign to Oneself’ by Amanda DeMarco

‘Foreign to Oneself’ by Amanda DeMarco, is an essay on translation, voicelessness, and alienation. It’s comprised entirely of found text from 18 sources, but the reader doesn’t know where one piece of found text fuses into the next. The only manipulation is the replacement of various words and phrases with “translation,” “translator,” and “translate.”

The result is a stunningly gorgeous and seamless meditation. If there’s one quote (a quote of a quote) that gets at the dizzying depth of this piece, it might be this one:

For literature repeats itself. (In 450 b.c., Bacchylides wrote, “One author pilfers the best of another and calls it tradition.”) Likewise the only true reading is re-reading, and homecoming is the flight from flight.

It’s as much a fourth-wall breaking moment as it is a comment on art making as it is a tender moment of lyricism. Using collage to get at a polyvocal quality is a simple idea, but ‘Foreign to Oneself’ takes that idea to such a incredible extreme. It’s how we get this moment of insight into a translator’s work …

For the translator, the book is the world, because what is beyond it does not exist for her; it could not even exist for her. Thus, the difference between reading the world and living in it breaks down and woe to the woman who does not recognise which story she is living in.

… and it’s how we get this triumphant, affirmative call-to-arms near the end: “There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.”

Asymptote