Since 2018, the artist Daniel Blaufuks is working on a visual-textual non-diary composed by landscape A4 sheets containing different archival materials and notes. The sheets are numbered, corresponding to one day each, and intersect private with public documents, (unreferenced) quotations with newly written fragments, different languages with (snapshot) photographs and old newspaper clippings. In this paper I will focus on the first larger exhibition of the project, The days are numbered (MAAT, Lisbon, 2024), and the corresponding photobook. Putting Blaufuks’ work in conversation with Walter Benjmain’s thought on memory, translation and (mechanical) reproduction, I will argue that The days are numbered is not only a sensible reflection about (human) decay and finitude, but also about a profound sense of contamination and affectedness of the self. Sidestepping the spatial and temporal coordinates that characterize many theorizations of hospitality, Blaufuks’ project rather invites to think through relationality and welcome in the context of historical responsibility and complex modes of implication (Rothberg 2019). Following this invitation, I propose to analyze Blaufuks’ project as a collection and archive of Benjaminian constellations of “Nowtime” (“Jetztzeit”) which by refusing the readability of the past seek to lay open the hidden “messianic” potentialities of remembrance (“eingedenken”). Exploring the role of materiality and the use of different media, I aim to show how The days are numbered seeks to think through the impact of technological change and the risk of the depolitization of art to ask how relationality might be imagined otherwise.

In Cécile Wajsbrot’s 2021 novel Nevermore, a translator struggling with grief and loss, translates the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, from English into French, sentence by sentence. The unnamed translator moves to a city, Dresden, that had once been destroyed and is surrounded by a language that she is neither translating into or from. This paper examines the reparative process of translation as an act of hospitality in the world of the inhospitable: Wajsbrot’s translator keeps returning to places decimated or abandoned by modern technology and humans: Dresden, Chernobyl, the High Line, Foula, as she contemplates translating the Ramsay’s house, emptied of humans. The representation, in the novel, of the embodied translator, reacting with affect to the text she is translating suggests that process of translation allows for the kind of human and ecological renewal seen in the decimated places she describes.

This paper also focuses on the how the process of translation is theorized as an embodied act within the novel, “in which theorising remains open to the twists and turns of its practice, an experiment in thinking with translation rather than a straightforward synthetisation of its craft” and in which “transient theories of doing and thinking translation surface and remain entangled in the first-person singular” (Grass, 9). Following Klaus Kaindl’s call for a rehumanized Translator Studies in which we are “translating human beings” (Kaindl, 2) with all their “illogicalities, fuzziness, subjectivity, ephemerality” (22), this paper posits that Nevermore’s fictional portrayal of the subjective choices of the translator at a moment of personal and planetary grief allows us a way into re-humanizing how we might theorize translation as a human and hospitable process. Finally, the paper analyzes Tess Lewis’s 2024 English-language translation of Wajsbrot’s novel, and her collaboration with Wajsbrot.

At a time when technological advances and the proliferation of AI-generated narratives seem to suggest the possibility of ever-present, perfect communication between speakers of all languages, reflecting on the intricacies of human translation emerges as a radical practice of linguistic hospitality and offers an opportunity to rethink how the inherent fragilities of human, embodied translators can be crucial towards achieving mutual understanding between cultures and creating more hospitable translational communities in which the labor of (literary) translators is also valued.

Recently published “translation memoirs” – a subgenre at the intersection of translation studies and life writing in which literary translators reflect on their creative practice (Grass & Robert Foley 2024) – attest to the interest in understanding translation as a human, relational gesture rather than a mere instrumental and technical procedure that serves to facilitate information across languages. Instead, translation memoirs by Kate Briggs, Jhumpa Lahiri or Doireann Ní Ghríofa, to name but a few, have opened up a space of hospitable dialogue about literary translation that reveal “many of the hidden avenues of translation that get passed over in silence or eclipsed in invisibility: the archive of hesitations, doubts, and errors, the personal and political negotiations that must happen in the record of translation subjects’ travels between languages” (Grass and Robert-Foley 2024, 2). In this paper, I aim to give center stage to the importance of such recent writing trends which emphasize the complexity of human translation as a form of relational and embodied translational hospitality: building on the aforementioned genre of the translation memoir, I want to expand the scope of translation life writing to include recent epistolary writings between writers and translators who have also engaged in meaningful conversation about translation. More specifically, I propose to close read the letter exchange between Kate Briggs and Lisa Robertson published in the online magazine Granta in January 2024, in dialogue with excerpts from Brigg’s 2017 translation memoir This Little Art. By thinking about translation as a friendly conversation with oneself (in a memoir) and with another (in letters) made up of joyful hesitations and doubts, healthy disagreements and shared stories, I hope to contribute to the ongoing revival of literary translation as a human, dialogical activity that fosters translational hospitality. As Mexican author Jazmina Barrera noted in a recent letter to her English translator Christina MacSweeney, “[she has] come to think about friendship as a very long conversation. One where distances and intensities are constantly changing, one that has a lot of stops [...]. Translation is also a form of conversation: an actual one, with the author; an implied one, with the text; a constant one, with yourself or with the person who translates next to you.”

This paper will explore Suzette Haden Elgin’s feminist science fiction classic Native Tongue (1984), the first of her trilogy of the same name, which imagines a dystopian, patriarchal future where women have been stripped of all rights and are viewed as property. Their existence is limited to serving men – the “master[s] of the household” (Derrida 2000, 4) – as wives, mothers and translators at a time when space exploration and colonization have led to frequent interplanetary communication and negotiations.

The paper proposes to analyze Elgin’s novel to reflect on the relationship between translation and hospitality from the women’s perspective and the power of language to alter their condition. With that goal in mind, it will look into two spaces where women find a sense of belonging and reclaim some agency: 1) the interpreting booth, and 2) the Barren House.

Regarding the first, despite all the technological advancements, translation remains a human activity, namely, a female task. Women from linguistic families, known as “lines”, are trained from birth in several human and alien languages to respond to the growing demand for translation. Ironically, their linguistic skills, intended to keep them overworked and under strict control, end up empowering them. As the sole proficient speakers of alien languages and experts on their customs, women become both essential and irreplaceable in all exchanges with the strange(r). Men depend on their knowledge to conduct business and avoid cultural conflicts and misunderstandings.

The second is a space for women who can no longer bear children and strengthen the numbers of the “lines”. While originally designed by men as a place to hold those deemed unwanted or useless, the Barren House gains a different meaning to women. It becomes their safe haven, a place they can call “home”, and the heart of their resistance movement. Left to their own devices, they slowly and secretly develop an exclusively female language, Láadan, to freely interact with each other and express their feelings, experiences, and perceptions. As a language by women and for women, thus essentially untranslatable to outsiders, it allows them to challenge their hostile and oppressive lived reality and conceive a new, more hospitable one.

This paper explores the intersection of translation, hospitality, and the mother figure through Elissa Marder's The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, alongside the works of queer Chilean authors Gabriela Mistral and Pedro Lemebel. Taking Walter Benjamin’s reflections on technical reproducibility as a point of departure, I argue that the maternal, as theorized by Marder and depicted in Chilean literature, serves as a site of both translation and hospitality—resisting mechanization while opening onto relationality and difference. If translation operates as imaginative interpretation, then the maternal is a translational condition par excellence: generating and unsettling meaning, resisting the reduction of the human to a standardized form.

The mother figure, as elaborated by Marder and reflected in Mistral's poetry and Lemebel's narratives, is not a static origin but a threshold where language, experience, and subjectivity emerge unpredictably. Like translation, the maternal is an act of hospitality—an opening to the foreign, the arrival of the other. Yet, contemporary capitalism and digital technologies threaten to reconfigure both translation and maternity into functions of efficiency and production rather than sites of radical openness. This paper interrogates how hospitality, as a function of translation, might resist the instrumentalization of both language and the maternal, affirming translation as an inherently fractured, relational, and ethical act.

By thinking the maternal alongside translation, as portrayed in the works of Mistral and Lemebel, I propose reconsidering the place of imagination in an age where technological mediation raises urgent questions about agency, embodiment, and ethics. If, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o suggests, translation is ‘the language of languages,’ then the maternal might be reimagined as an archi-originary translation: a locus where meaning, identity, and relation are continually negotiated. In this sense, the mother, like the translator, becomes the figure through which hospitality is extended and redefined, offering a way to think translation beyond mechanization and as a practice of ethical encounter.

This theoretical framework finds resonance in Chilean literary works that engage with themes of hospitality, the maternal, and, unexpectedly, translation. The writings of Nobel Prize-winning poet Gabriela Mistral and author and performance artist Pedro Lemebel provide concrete literary explorations of these ideas, demonstrating how hospitality and maternity evoke the dynamics of translation. Their framing of maternity and hospitality offers a perspective through which translation can be reconsidered as a site of political resistance, queer and polymorphic creativity, and ethical relation within specific historical and cultural contexts.