TranscUlturAl, vol. 11.1 (2019), 114-124 https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/tc/index.php/tc This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License 114 Where Text Translation Fails, Art Speaks Lynn Penrod University of Alberta Using the words of Hans Christian Andersen, “Where words fail, music speaks,” and applying them to our thinking about the concept of embodiment as it relates to translation, we open our minds to a wider conception of the ways in which translation affects contemporary ideas of what the field encompasses. Most of us who teach, study, or practice translation are through force of habit accustomed to think of the act of translation as primarily a linguistic and cultural transfer between text and text. In the applied translation courses, we usually teach from one language to another—French to English, Chinese to German, Spanish to Farsi—eternally pairing two, sometimes quite obstreperous, frenemies: words for words, sense for sense, across the no man’s land we face. How to translate a word like patriot? How to handle an apparently simple idiomatic phrase? How to convey a culturally sensitive argument? As translators we love languages, spoken and written, and we love reading the printed word. Yet sometimes our text translations fail us, and it is at these times that art can step in to speak. We all recognize that text translation involves other kinds of knowing, other knowledge that exists well beyond linguistic competence. These ways of knowing involve a deep understanding of and appreciation for other forms of cultural expression: art, music, dance, political and social structures and tensions, history, religion, philosophy, mythology, poetry, architecture, and sports—just to name the most obvious. We know this, we recognize this, and we teach our students the importance of the knowledge that exists beyond textual language per se. However, what if we were somehow trapped by the linguistic texts we carry inside ourselves, even though we might carry a multiplicity of linguistic resources for our work? What if language itself, in its embodied presence within us, could not, for whatever reason, move beyond its interiority and be expressed so that another person could in a way capture it, “understand” it, without words? What if interior embodied language could be translated into a non- textual medium? What if these inarticulacies could allow a different mode of “translation” than the one intended for literate readers who already own the proper linguistic tools key to enter into a written text? What if our embodied interior language could somehow, even awkwardly, move meaning into another “language” that would allow our trapped lexicon with its frozen concepts or trapped inarticulateness, to safely cross our textual no man’s land? One basic question remains: what can interior embodied language do when textual production per se is unavailable to it? Or in other words, when faced with the impossibility of producing a linguistic text, how can embodied language successfully emerge?