Contestable Confessions of the Untranslatable: a Worldmaking Project

This research-creation project is an experimental translation of Claude Cahun’s book Aveux non avenus (1930), culminating in an artists’ book of image and text documenting the process. This approach suggests an alternative to biographization of the life and work of Cahun. It seeks to unpack how experimental translation, rooted in affect theory, might offer supplemental modes of interpretation and understanding that complicate, rather than render palatable, the complexity of a persons’ life/work. The emergent genre of female philosophical fiction is simultaneously engaged and interrogated—questions of categorization and transgression become central to the process. The arts-based methodology seeks to unpack and understand genre from the inside out. Ultimately, translation is framed as a metaphor for understanding, and worldmaking emerges as vital to processes of reading and writing.