Those who translate must necessarily be acquainted with two languages. Like Teiresias in the field of gender and sexuality, they are archetypally bi; this conveys on them both privileged insights and a particular blindness. Working within duality, they must also be aware of the essential doubleness of language itself, of the arbitrary correlation between sign and signification, of the duplication that is made possible by the existence of the metaphorical dimension as well as the literal one, and of the complexities of cultural interpellation. They know what it means to switch languages, to write in a language perceived as foreign and/or to make language choices that are dependent on the intended audience. They can pun across languages and within them, play hide and seek with other insiders and suddenly withdraw from those who do not have that privilege. But they can never return to that state of primal innocence in which a word and a thing were co-extensive. Like Teiresias, they have unlearned essentialism.
B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett in Queer in Translation (2017)
