Conclusion

For Erín Moure, translation cannot be an innocent act. Each word translated is an unabashed deformation. Each one is a result of a translator’s necessarily unique reading of the text and each word typed shackles the story or poem tighter into the target language. The new, translated words hold within them the potential for countless other readings yet to be experienced through the reader’s unique “idioculture”¹.

In the undertaking of this translation, as I kept my journal, it became clear that my “idioculture” changed daily based on an enormous number of factors: how I was feeling, the weather, the media I had consumed that day. It exemplified for me that the process of translation occurs within an undulating, constantly changing space and this can all influence the final output. These variants are evidence of my engaging with and “experiencing”² of the differing qualities of the source text through time and have each, in their own way, altered the tension which a translator must negotiate between the otherness of the text and the receiving culture. There will be traces of these variants and traces of this process, however unconsciously, left on the final piece in “much the way an earthen vessel bears the trace of the potter's hand”³.