Revealing something about the melancholic roots of language, the beginning of this translation-movement carried a desperate, manic flavoured search for words. For a long time, I was riding the roller-coaster of language that cannot cease moving to encounter its own alienation. I was working hard to deny the loss that sits at the heart of this transition, to cover – rather than discover – the sense of being misunderstood.
When my analyst suggested that the haunted chase for words is a painful attempt to find a home in language, the stream of words has gone quiet, and it was the first time I felt it was possible for me to sit in silence. Gradually, the acrobatic dance between languages shifted to a painful sense of alienation and I became more familiar with both my homelessness and my longing to find a home. Homeless in both languages, I grew an awareness of my inability to articulate thoughts, feelings, images and experiences, I was slowly and painfully confronted with the boundaries of both my speech and my listening.
Testifying to this sense of ending, a gap that cannot be crossed, the Hebrew word for language, safa, also means a rim, an edge and a boundary. As Walter Benjamin sketches through the image of a broken vessel (in Jennings and Bullock, 1996), words created in the process of translation are not testifying for any origin but are, in fact, a broken conformation for its absence. What is uncovered in translation is that the point of origin of language, safa, is also a point of ending. Languages, like pieces of a broken vessel, are irreconcilable and can only meet at the point of their breaking. In my trans-passing between Hebrew and English I was learning about the saf in safa, the inherent rift of languages in translation.