A Collaborative Essay on Friendship and Translation
The skin often limits itself to translating what the viscera cannot say alone: disgust stirs our guts and we turn pale, falling in love alters our nervous system and our palms sweat, shame dilates our blood vessels and our cheeks go red. The heart is the only organ that makes sound, but it is not the only one that has things to say. It is a question of language, a matter of translation. If this text were a gesture, it would be a pirouette. A loving movement that turns and turns until it penetrates the body into the guts. We write with four hands (Blanca’s and Laura’s): One of us opens the torso pulling the skin back on both sides, elastic and porous, while the other penetrates with her fingers, pushing aside the organs, soft and viscous, until she reaches a clue, a hint where certainty lies.
We have been friends for ten years, and what makes this old friendship so difficult to dissect is precisely the fact that we are tied together by our guts. Our stomachs are connected by their pits, a very thin and precise bridge stretches between my retina and your optic nerve, our fingers have exactly the same number of nerve endings: three thousand and one. We feel together all the time. We feel together and we feel a lot. But we learn from the feminist thinker, Sara Ahmed, that when someone says “over-sensitive”, we say “sensitive to what is not over.” When we translate each other’s ways of being, we become sculptors: we shape matter to create, with our own hands, a world where we both fit in. When someone says “blanca, you’re not punk enough to be a feminist,” Laura says “blanca, there’s room for your femininity here”. When someone says “Laura, don’t overreact, it’s not such a big deal,” blanca says “Laura, your sensitivity is a gift to all those around you.” Having a friend is having a translator.
The relationship between translation and friendship is interesting because they share something elemental: on the one hand, the need for complicity between both parties to reach a mutual understanding, on the other, translation’s capacity to anticipate the text, to advance what one does not yet have the words to say. It is not expert knowledge that leads us—blanca as the art historian, Laura as the humanities scholar—to write a text about translation, but the decade-long history that we share. We write from a place that we know well: the love we feel for each other and the years we have spent sharing languages of love are what qualifies us to interpret and reformulate what the other may want to communicate. This text is driven by what the artist Mar Reykjavik calls affective translation, which is, understanding translation as a place where emotions have a direct impact on language and where meaning is constantly being created through its different interpersonal uses. We are thinking about the practice of translation from a sensitivity that trusts personal experience and unacademic knowledge rather than from the confines of the disciplining, discipline of words. We’d like to explore other more crooked, deviant and queer ways of decoding the world that depend, paradoxically, on what cannot be communicated or put into words. Echoing poets Athena Farrokhzad and Svetlana Cârstean:
We write in order to try to understand what / we would write if we were to write. / We love in order to try to understand who / we would love if we were to love. / We betray in order to try to understand who / we would betray if we were to betray. / We translate in order to try to understand what / we would translate if we were to translate.”
[7/3/25, 10:12:29] blanca: My Laurita
[7/3/25, 10:12:36] blanca: quick question!
[7/3/25, 10:13:10] blanca: I think if our text were a gesture it would be a pirouette in pairs, like a spiralling hug
[7/3/25, 10:13:18] blanca: how do you see it?
[7/3/25, 11:15:37] Laura: omg this question deserves an award
[7/3/25, 11:16:56] Laura: I love imagining us doing a pirouette together, hugging in spiral
[7/3/25, 11:19:02] Laura: a part of me sees this text the same way as the documentary we made, like a compromise or a projection towards the future, and I suddenly imagine it like a small interweaved prayer, like a moment of attention to everything that surrounds us and that makes us, us
[7/3/25, 11:19:18] Laura: does that make sense?
If this essay were a gesture, it would be a quiet, patient prayer. Our twenty fingers weaved into each other, our hands creating warmth together. The same way I played with my grandmother’s hands in the last few weeks of her life. She was weak and sleepy, she’d say: “My hands are cold, can you hold them tight?” We’d sit in silence, until about ten minutes later she’d say: “Your hands are cold! I’ll hold them!” The emotional volumes that flood my life at times have often made me feel slightly inadequate, embarrassed. The way I feel things through my guts, or rather, my guts feel things for me. In this friendship, floods are a commonplace event, rather understood as tides, fleeting but consistent and they are faced with a smile. Our friendship exists in motion, we tell each other stories. And while we tell each other stories, while we talk and talk, our bodies speak a secret language to each other. We can translate each other because our bodies speak the same language, they make room for each other, and provide warmth when the other needs it.
Roland Barthes said there was a difference between interacting with photographs, and photographs interacting with you. While the former implied approaching the photograph with a certain acquired culture and language, to which the result was an average affect (produced through decoding), the latter approached you: Shot out of the scene, stung you like an arrow and pierced you. It is a roll of the dice that results in a wound, a prick, a sting, a bruise, a cut or a little hole—the result being a transformative affect that we submit to, one that opens up our flesh and moves through our guts as it fancies, leaving them changed. I believe this applies to everything in our lives, far beyond just photography. What happens when this flesh of ours is connected to someone else’s? When they can feel these wounds, when their skin bruises the same way as ours? It’s an experience from within, and it surpasses language.
When asking myself these questions, I brought this up to you. It was November. I was sitting at my desk and you were standing—coat on, bag crossing your chest (with that button pinned on the strap that reads something delicious about lesbians and honey), obviously about to leave. In our friendship, I have been spoiled by being understood no matter what, so I often find myself bringing up heavy things that would require time and concentration, at what one would think is an inadequate moment. As usual, you effortlessly answered by mentioning a book that your partner edu had recently gifted to you. The premise: Athena Farrokhzad and Svetlana Cârstean decided to translate each other’s poems without speaking each other’s language. Again, our bodies in communion had done their work, and you’d had the answer for weeks before I had even come up with this question.
[10/3/2025 16:29:03] Laura: I’m writing in first person, I’ll adapt it later! But for the moment it’s coming out like this.
[10/3/2025 16:32:09] blanca: That also happened to me! I think it’s beautiful that the reader can’t figure out what I is me and what I is you <3
[10/3/2025 16:32:48] blanca: because I’m not quite sure what my first person would sound like without yours
At minute fifty-nine of the film Sedmikrásky (Daisies, 1966) by Věra Chytilová, its two protagonists, clad in short dresses and jet-black eye makeup that lengthens their features, get ready to eat the delicacies for a banquet they had not been invited to. After dipping their fingers into each and every one of the appetizing dishes that decorate an endless table on silver trays, the two friends climb on it and start stomping and dancing on the food. They throw cakes of all colors at each other, swing on the glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling, dance, laugh—owing nothing to anyone. We learn, with them, that we have the right to have a seat at the table. And we also learn that we have the tools to claim it. From the screen to real life: we can put on eyeshadow, walk on a dinner table, hang from a lamp.
We meet in 2014, as we start our last years of high school and begin to think of ourselves as feminists. Together, we often go to Xcèntric—the consultation space of CCCB’s (Barcelona’s Contemporary Culture Centre) experimental film archive—which has a screning room for groups. There, we watch Fuses (1971) by Carolee Schneemann, Maria Lassnig’s Kantate (1992), removed (1999) by Naomi Uman, and, above all, Věra Chytilová’s Sedmikrásky. Fascinated by this nebula of images of possibility, we begin to make short videos, photos and drawings formally imitating the language we are learning from these artists. From there, we discover our bodies from another place, borrowing tools from feminist experimental cinema linked to fragmentation, multiplication or juxtaposition. Together, we begin to babble our feminism, to re-educate our tongue so that it could pronounce a language we learn holding hands and in the dark.
In a sleuthing manner, we explore images that can render what is still shapeless but combustive inside of us. For example, Sofia Coppola’s adaptation of The Virgin Suicides (1999) introduces us to the experience of being multiple things at once. The blurriness of identity. Our own experience of girlhood connects us to the sisters, the increasing awareness of being observed, of existing through someone else’s gaze. However, as a surprise to us, we are also the neighbourhood boys: we devote ourselves to our obsessions, we let them define us and we redefine them back. Rookie Magazine’s Tavi Gevinson put words into this and frames a couple of essential things to us. The first is that what an image, text or song does to us is equally important as the image, text or song itself. The second, is the unbelievable relief of understanding we are malleable, shifting and supple. Everytime I now listen to The Virgin Suicide’s score, composed by Air—unsettling and sweet in equal parts—my body is taken back to this ungrudging ambivalence.
In 2015, while we hold hands in our shared expedition into knowledge, we attempt to put into words, images and sounds, what our bodies already know. Like otter pups fumbling for the first time with the pebble that will eventually become their most treasured tool, we use these newly acquired tools to articulate our feminist urges. This fledgling experiment takes the shape of a documentary about our friendship, and the result, in pup fashion, is a babble. A loving, stubborn and naturally precocious babble. The documentary brings to the surface the assurance that a mutual language between us exists—an undisciplined one that jumps between Catalan, Spanish and English as it fancies, as well as between its own common references that we have collected through time.
A mutual friend of ours felt jealous when we talked about preparing this documentary. “You’re making a documentary about your friendship, having sleepovers and hanging out—but you’ve never had a sleepover together before and you don’t usually hang out outside of school”. This was true. And because this was true, there was a quiet doubt inside that wondered whether this documentary was in any way phony. Ten years later, a soothing and confident hand goes back in time and caresses these doubts. Looking back now, this documentary was clearly a vow, a declaration of intentions, a sprint towards what we wanted to become, together. Climbing onto the inflatable mattress you slept on at my parents’ house and stretching my arms as far as I could until the camera almost touched the ceiling, I feel like one of the protagonists of Sedmikrásky. You translate my gesture back to me before I can speak: “You look like you’re doing circus tricks. I thought you were tired?” I confess: “I am.” Behind the revelation, a gesture on your part: You tap hard with your arm on the mattress for me to lie down next to you. The translator knows what the text needs before the text is written.
In one of my favorite passages from Borderlands / La frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa recalls her experience as a professor at a conservative New England university, where one of the students confessed to her that he believed the meaning of the term “homophobia” was “fear of going back home.” Based on this dislocation of meaning, this unfolding of the word in a cosmos, Anzaldúa develops a reflection on the link between the rejection of difference and the fear of returning home, understanding them as consequent experiences that open like a window into the depths of our feelings. Fear of returning home: fear of not being accepted, of having to pretend to be someone else, of having to put on armor, harden one’s skin, prepare for battle. Fear of returning home: fear of having to speak another language, of forcing communication in an improper language, of having to succumb to words, to rectitude, to certainty.
In 2018, we live in different countries and have lost touch for a while. We talk from time to time to send each other something that reminds us of us. The last song we listened to, a movie we have to watch together or a photo from high school, excuses to confirm that we continue to be in each other’s minds, that we continue to imagine a future together. We miss each other, but we live with a truth that we feel deep inside and that we cannot reason about; a very accurate intuition that, when we meet again, time will not have passed for us. And that is because our friendship is a house with heavy, thick and dense foundations, dense especially. A foundation of bone—and flesh, of course, always flesh, and fat—that goes from our hips to our feet without forgetting any toe or nail and that provides us with just the right amount of weight that gravity needs to keep us rooted, that solidity necessary to survive the flood, but also that malleability enough not to surrender to the wind, not to lose tenderness or space for change. Our friendship-house is one that does not yet have a roof, but that certainly has a front door and, in the back to your left, a small flowered altar where Věra Chytilová, Carolee Schneemann, Maria Lassnig, Naomi Uman, Sofia Coppola, Tavi Gevinson and Gloria Anzaldúa live in harmony. Homosexuality: desire for home. Without knowing it, at this time in 2018, we are both reading Borderlands / La frontera. We are reading in conjunction, separated only by an ocean and a few kilometers that become shorter when a loving message from the other arrives.
Later, during our university years, we continue to feed this altar. On July 21, 2020, I ask you if you have read all about love by bell hooks and you tell me that you haven’t, just as I have not yet read The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. I ask you to do so because it has made me think a lot about you, “about everything we have learnt and continue to learn together,” I tell you. Then, you remind me that there is a text that we have both read—also at a distance, also synchronized by the higher force that is feminism: The Uses of the Erotic by Audre Lorde. This text has a special candle on our altar, one that burns with its own intensity. We call it ‘Feminist telepathy’: an energy that unites us and puts the same books in our hands and thoughts in our minds. I imagine us reading aloud, in unison, as if pronouncing some sort of incantation:
The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearing to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.
I don’t know if you underlined this text, but I’m pretty sure that, if you had, you would have marked these paragraphs. Ours is a house of joy. A place to enjoy music and dance and images and reading. A place to learn to walk and fall, to love and stagger. This is what feminism teaches us at twenty: that before speaking, we must babble, but also that what will set our tone will be dancing, kissing, laughing and crying. To quote Gretel Ammann Martínez, a key figure in our feminist life: “Feminism is not manufactured, nor pulled out from a sleeve. Feminism is laughed, invented, cried and lived.” Feminism laughs to make space for joy, it invents itself to avoid falling into the immobility of truth, it cries to be able to pronounce together yo sí te creo, hermana (I do believe you, sister), it lives to always remember that, in the beginning, all of this came from the guts. If we say that feminism is a language it is because it lends us its own and creative tools to interpret and translate the strangeness of the world that surrounds us, understanding difference not as a threat but as a gift. Translating does not mean homogenizing, but making space for the sliding of meanings, for the transfer of poetry, insisting on the porosity of the text. That is why we have always spoken to each other in Catalan, Spanish and English, as if juggling words. You tell me: “Tinc por de trobar a faltar Barcelona” (“I’m scared of missing Barcelona”). I reply: “I wish that I could swim and sleep like a shark does / I’d fall to the bottom and I’d hide ’til the end of time / In that sweet cool darkness / Asleep and constantly floating away”. I tell you: “A vegades em sento desagraïda” (“Sometimes I feel ungrateful”). You reply: I’ve been out walking / I don’t do too much talking these days / These days / These days I seem to think a lot / About the things that I forgot to do / And all the times I had / A chance to.” And I speak English but I still don’t understand what you mean. Even so, I choose to follow you and, singing, I understand what you were trying to make me understand.
In 2023, our wishes come true. They come true in a room guarded by walls as old as the Roman Empire. Literally, one of the walls is part of what was the Ancient Roman city wall of Barcelona. There is even an old Roman well protected by glass that we too often fail to notice. It’s the Documentation Centre at Ca la Dona, archive and library. Ca la Dona is Barcelona’s first feminist association, created in 1988. It came to be after hundreds of women broke into and squatted in an empty institutional building in 1987, demanding the City Hall to cease a space for them. The house has since existed in multiple locations, but its constant is the archive: one that holds and preserves documents from the local and national feminist movement—in both its public and private form.
At the archive, we find a space that finally allows us to be in each other’s daily life. Through volunteer work, we catalogue and take care of documents that institutional archives do not deem valuable: stickers, love notes in paper napkins, buttons, t-shirts. And we are not alone, we are surrounded by people of all ages who share our love for these documents. Some appear in the photographs from forty and fifty years ago, some have donated these documents themselves, some have just encountered them for the first time and have felt the magic of realising you are by far not the first nor the last. There is a murmur that echoes in the stone walls and returns to us as our own voices: “you are not alone”.
From 2020 to 2023 we are in the same city but meet sporadically. I remember well one of these occasions, walking down Les Rambles arm in arm, on the unusual but beloved foggy and wet day that visits Barcelona early in the year. Walking down Les Rambles to the sea is a ritual I have carried with me since my teenage days. On winter days the street smells of candied popcorn and salty water and there is something about the finitude of the city that allows me to wind down. It’s a similar feeling to writing someone a letter without sending it. You get to sign it and leave. During the journey we tell each other about the girls we love, the frustrations and amazements of loving someone who speaks a different language. The frustrations and amazements of creating a bridge, mutual language with these people.
This love you tell me about, now morphed into something new, is partly what brings you back to the archive in 2023. And when it is 10 of us in the same room and I see you both speak, I get a glimpse of another language, another world only you and her are part of. Obviously this applies to everyone else there, for example two sisters we both love and learn so much from, whose comings and goings tenderly remind me of the world I share with my twin. Or when I see someone’s cheeks get rosy, or someone’s voice get shaky when speaking for the first time at our assembly meetings, but speak with brazen assurance a few minutes later to their old friend who is in the same room. Yet again, a murmur: these are windows into the multitudes of languages that exist around us.
At Ca la Dona, among all these meandering, personal, fluid languages; among all these gestures that, happily, we are not always able to decipher: us. When you tell me about the friend of a friend who has a cousin who lives with the ex of another friend’s friend, I don’t need context to remember who you are talking about. When I tell you about a kiss that never happened outside of my head in front of the porch of a house that never existed, you know the number, the floor and the door. We are living archives of each other’s memories. We carry an archive of languages and images that we have created together, but also what one has created to make sense of her world with the other. Paul B. Preciado speaks of the concept somatheque to refer to the way in which the body is constructed as an archive by being informed by a series of gestural and discursive, poetic and political languages that we learn from a multiplicity of practices of epistemological production and reproduction that shape us. In our somatheques, there are shared documents: the hyperbolic way in which we raise our eyebrows when we really like something, the length of farewell hugs, the shape the corners of our lips take when we do not want to continue a conversation. How will we bequeath this to our future friends, dear? How to make a donation of gestures to our beloved archive?
If our chronology of personal growth goes hand in hand with our learning of feminism as a language, the most exciting thing about this friendship—which is also a cinema, a house and an archive—is always what is yet to come: the steps we still have to dance, the songs we still have to sing, the love languages that we have not yet invented. Translation, like friendship, begins with a desire: the desire to love someone that is still unknown. It begins, then, with a leap into the void, with a gesture of trust in knowing that there will be someone to support us at the bottom of the abyss, arms that will pick us up and caress our wounds. Eleven years ago we approached each other and, without any guarantee, we committed to loving each other, we committed to translating the world for the other, and to sharing the tools with which each of us made sense of the world. Now, with stomachs connected by their pits, a bridge between gazes and three thousand and one nerve endings ready for touch, you say to me: “Do you want us to write a text together?” And I answer: “We’ve been writing it for eleven years.”
And so our bodies know things we are not yet aware of, and it is through these translation games that we are slowly unveiling our truth. We are not in a rush to unearth all of it and in fact it often feels like we are gracefully speaking in tongues, saying things as we go without fully knowing what they mean or where they are taking us next. Speaking in tongues: a fluidity of speech like syllables that the body is religiously confident in but the conscious mind is incapable of understanding. Like the documentary we made at sixteen, this text we are now writing at twenty six is a vow of unconditional trust to this ongoing journey of growth and discovery of what has always been nestled inside.
We often sing a Nick Drake song together that we have loved for as long as we have been friends. Through the years we have managed to sing it together by discreetly queuing it at gatherings with other friends, in shared car rides (where neither of us are driving) and such. We have never acknowledged this, but I am realising it now as I’m baking, at home, listening and singing the lyrics. We also share a deep admiration for people who know how to give room to silence, we are not so good at it. Nick Drake often comes across as someone like that, and it is funny that this song is so wordy. The end of the song goes: Let’s sing a song, for Hazey Jane, she’s back again, in my mind. If songs were lines in conversation, the situation would be fine.
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