“Words Are Things”: Translation, Materiality, and Mario Ortiz's Cuadernos de lengua y literatura

Abstract This essay examines connections between the materiality of language and the impulse to translate through the hybrid series Cuadernos de lengua y literatura (2000– ; Language and Literature Notebooks ) by the Argentine writer Mario Ortiz. These books confront historical trauma through a study of materials and processes that generate language in their author's domestic environment. I read Ortiz to argue that a task of translation consists of tracing how words function through ways in which their original meaning breaks down. Their function is revealed through the tasks the translator carries out to create the new linguistic object of the translated text. This essay revisits a key image from Walter Benjamin's “The Task of the Translator,” the broken vessel, through broken vessels in Ortiz's work, as well as recent materially focused translation scholarship. I conclude that the material specificity of language intervenes in the lives of readers, writers, and translators to respond to grief.