Deformation Zone by Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Goransson

b : an area where something is missing: gap as : a serious discrepancy: FLAW, WEAKNESS (2) : an opening in a defensive formation: esp. : the area or space between the two front teeth suggesting entrance, permissiveness, or deviancy (3) : a defect in a mouth due to the tongue having left its normal positions in one of the crystal bonds and that is equivalent in many respects to a positively charged utterance … a cavity, depression, or hollowed-out space …” (34) Here the dictionary entry, presumably looked up in an attempt to find the right word in a translation, becomes exactly the kind of “opening” it describes. The act of translation creates this proliferation of openings, of “space[s] between.” But it’s important to note that the result is not some kind of vague “ambiguity” or “indeterminacy,” but a powerful, grotesque poem in its own right. The wound of language, created by the act of translation, results in a poem.

The wound adds another dimension to the Poundian translation corpse, as it becomes a multi-media site of entry: a site where media enters and where inside becomes outside, outside becomes inside. And it might be here that the real danger of translation can be found: the inner and the outer are confused; we can no longer have simplistic notions of representation or “witness.” We no longer have inside or outside but what Hawkey calls an “in-between space”: “Trakl knew, as Heidegger knew, that the ghostly is not a spiritual state, but a being between states, a “being terrified, a being beside himself,