May 3, 2019

"I wonder if that exquisite closeness—that sharing of words and incident, of music and movement, of hands pointing together on a page, isn’t part of the reason I became a translator," writes Feitlowitz. "As my mother would later demonstrate, there was adventure galore in the enterprise. A family’s well-being could hang on a particular string of words, a sentence whose clauses are slippery, whose knots could be used for a noose. What is accuracy? What most needs to come across, and for whose benefit? What do we mean when we say, Respectful? Slavish? Can wrong be an honest mistake, causing little or no harm, or is it always treacherous? Long before I turned my hand to translating literature, I was embroiled in these questions."

My grandmother, my mother, myself—we are a daisy chain of readers, a coil of translators, a broken chain of writers.

Marguerite Feitlowitz

PANK

Feitlowitz's "Cardinal Perched on a Wire," an original short story, appears in the current print edition of PANK.

Information for Foreigners

Feitlowitz also served as the editor and translator for Purdue University's Department of Theater April production of Information for Foreigners: A Chronicle in Twenty Scenes, written by Griselda Gambaro.

Gambaro completed Information For Foreigners in 1973, foreshadowing the events of the Dirty War in Argentina, where 30,000 Argentines were disappeared by the military dictatorship. The piece is site-specific; Gambaro wrote it to be staged and performed in a vacant house, with "tour guide" characters leading the audience in multiple groups to witness scenes in the various rooms.