«To translate is to place ourselves in and inhabit the space of misunderstanding. Not to dissolve it, as this would presume it never existed, but rather to open and enlarge the space we didn't imagine could exist between the "speeches" in contact: a space hidden by the misunderstanding itself. The misunderstanding is not what prevents relation, rather what originates it and gives it momentum: a difference of perspective. To translate is to think there always is a misunderstanding; it means communicating through difference, instead of avoiding to talk about the Other, assuming an original univocality and a fundamental redundancy: an essential resemblance between what it was and what we were "about to say".»
From Cannibal Metaphysics: for a Post-structural Anthropology by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, translated by myself from the 2017 Italian edition
