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'This work uses translation and diagramming as devices in offering an interpretation of Colombian poet Beatriz Restrepo’s 2014 collection Bestiario. The collection indexes sixty animals in sixty poems (a translation of ten poems taken from the collection’s first section are given here), in reference to the medieval Bestiarium Vocabularium, a formative element in the encyclopaedic tradition that permeates the natural sciences. My translation also uses the affordances of visual metaphor to convey my reading of Restrepo’s ‘Bestiary’ as concerned with the mutual nesting of human and non-human animal worlds — with beasts as human inventions, and with human invention as critically shaping animal worlds. Each poem frames a species either in terms of its implication in a human social practice or in terms of its presence in a cultural imaginary — not bees, for instance, but the bees of the novel Pedro Páramo; not albatrosses, but Baudelaire’s ‘Albatross’. Not least among such social practices is the domesticating technology of alphabetisation in the cataloguing of the more-than-human. I have re-ordered Restrepo’s poems to stress this.' (Introduction)
Notes
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Epigraph:
A translation is a theory of the source text.
— Andrew Chesterman, Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory, 1997
Figures are […] material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another.
— Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 2008
The relation of organism to organism [is] the most important of all relations.
— Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859
We were never human.
— Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 2008
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Axon : Creative Explorations
