This chapter investigates a selected translation and reception history of Catullus 85 in English, with a focus on Brandon Brown’s embodied retranslation. The chapter argues that embodied, iterative, intersemiotic, and pedagogicial translation strategies create ruptures in the hegemonic approaches to translating Catullus 85 in particular and canonical ancient Classical texts in general. These ruptures invite readers to engage more critically with old texts in new and renewed ways.

The analysis and translation of extreme texts, or highly constrained texts, such as acronyms, anagrams, lipograms, pangrams, plays on words, and puns but also poems, lyrics, and even novels, are not just useful teaching practices that can allow students to improve their linguistic competence, both in their native and foreign languages. These activities have a fundamental pedagogical and political value. In training translators, ‘talk-and-chalk’ lectures should be replaced by collaborative workshops, attended not only by teachers and students but also by experts and actors in the editorial productive chain (professional translators, editors, publishers, and clients).

The association of translation with loss is usually reductive. Loss is invoked to argue that translation is either deficient or impossible. In this chapter we argue that loss is less a lack that needs to be remedied, a criticism that needs to be endlessly refuted in a defensive or elegiac mode, and more a dimension of translation which makes the practice integral to the production of meaning. A mode of enquiry which situates loss at its centre and not at its margins is infinitely more productive than modes which seek to disenfranchise loss in the name of perpetual gain. Addressing issues around translation in literature, ecology, migration and the language industry, we want to claim that getting exercised about what is ‘lost’ in translation is fundamentally wrong-headed because it is only loss – the absential, the decision not to activate or realize certain possibilities – that makes translation, the work of constraint, effective and meaningful.

Turle’s interest is ‘translator studies’ at a time when translators seek recognition, claim they are ‘authors’, when biographies of translators seem to surface as a proof that they are flesh and blood, facing their programmed disappearance due to the advent of translation apps. As a self-avowed ‘gallicizing patchworker’ and author of around 200 translations spanning forty years, he recounts his typical day, describing the translator’s everyday aches, doubts, failures, and their possible effects on his work and role in the editorial and publishing process. In particular he reflects on globish; India as the republic of multilingualism; somnolence as a time of maturation, research, and sometimes unexpected revelation; and a bottle of South African wine given to him by Andre Brink on their last meeting.

Both neuroscientists and literary translators aim to understand how invariance of meaning can arise across different forms. But literary translators must render experiences that are more subtle, more contextual, more entire, than a glimpse of a cat’s tail. Thus, for the neuroscientist who seeks to understand invariances, the goals of literary translation match the highest levels of scientific aspiration. From a neuroscientific perspective, it is fascinating that literary translation is possible at all.

This chapter is a written exchange, between five women with different stakes in literary translation, that took place in 2019. It touches on translation craft, the formation of translators, who gets to translate what, questions of accessibility and privilege, the intimacies between the author and translator, the negative affect that comes with translating in a culture of rampant ‘gotcha’ criticism, translation as collaboration, among other topics. It is a conversation without consensus and clearly without end – but powered by an ongoing investment in thinking, reading and writing translations.