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[ESSAY] “The Dead Are Still Addressing Us: On Jeremy Fernando’s translating love“ by Tyran Grillo

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on translating love.

Jeremy Fernando (author), with paintings by Sara Chong. translating love, Delere Press, 2026. 90 pgs

A translator enters a room where someone has already vanished. The chair retains an indentation; a voice persists in a language that cannot quite be called its owner’s. Whatever intimacy awaits will have to take place across that vacancy. Jeremy Fernando’s translating love, published by Delere Press with paintings by Sara Chong, begins under the sign of such impossible hospitality. Maurice Blanchot calls the translator an “eternal guest” in the language to which he supposedly belongs, a figure forever hearing in his own words the promise of something missing. Fernando receives this thought from Peggy Kamuf, who received it through Jacques Derrida’s conversations with others, and the resulting chain of transmission begins to resemble a séance whose participants cannot agree on who has summoned whom. Almost immediately Fernando wonders whether translation might be death itself. Much later he states, with disconcerting tenderness, that “to love literature is to be in love with the dead.” The intervening pages spend their considerable imaginative energy troubling the time between these propositions. Translation intensifies this arrangement until the very distinction between the living and the dead begins to lose its customary authority. It may be the most exacting love affair literature permits, precisely because neither party can be entirely present to claim it.

Death here exceeds the biographical fact that writers eventually die. Even the living author, having finished a sentence, becomes unavailable to the reader’s (if not also the writer’s) present encounter. An inscription survives the hand’s withdrawal, acquiring futures its maker cannot oversee. Fernando’s meditation turns poignantly towards Jacques Derrida’s understanding of friendship. Among any two friends, one will eventually be left to witness the other’s death. One voice will someday pronounce a name without hearing its customary answer. The translator inhabits this anticipated bereavement while its subject may still be alive, since every source text arrives as a communication whose original occasion cannot be reconstructed. Yet the book resists our temptation to turn such absence into a beautiful property of art. Fernando remembers Anne Dufourmantelle, whose writings on risk accompany his thinking, and whose death while trying to save children at sea gives the word an irreducible human cost. Reading that passage, I felt the whole undertaking lean away from its own elegance. We can be moved by the survival of words without pretending that the survival compensates for the person whose breath has stopped. Perhaps translation begins with precisely this prohibition. The dead must remain capable of addressing us without being recruited into the consoling fiction that we have brought them back.

The title, translating love, holds its grammatical attachments in suspension. Is love what translation attempts to carry across, or is translating an activity undertaken in love? Does the phrase describe the conversion of feeling into language, or the transformation of love itself as it passes between people? Fernando is interested in the utterance “I love you” partly because it refuses the reassuring economies of information. Following Roland Barthes, he treats its force as something accomplished in the speaking, closer to musical release than to the transmission of a stable proposition. Nor can a lover certify its reception. I find myself hearing a more troubling possibility inside the title. Love translates us, altering the syntax through which we understand our own being. To be loved, or to attempt to love, can mean discovering an unfamiliar person where our self-possession used to reside. Translation is implicated in this discovery because even the most intimate declaration travels through borrowed language. The pronoun that seems to locate us with such confidence is already inhabited by countless strangers. Each “I” is both an arrival and an inheritance, while every “you” might be an address whose destination remains unknown.

Luce Irigaray offers a useful disturbance to the apparent simplicity of this encounter. In I Love to You, she places a small, ungainly preposition between lover and beloved, hoping to prevent the second person from becoming the first person’s grammatical possession. Her “I love to you” asks language to preserve the distance within intimacy. Fluent declarations can conceal the speed with which desire turns another being into its object, while an obstruction in the sentence gives both speakers room to continue becoming. Fernando’s account of Alain Badiou’s Two, a perspective formed between lovers who remain irreducibly distinct, vibrates against this proposal. Translation also requires a Two. A text in another language must somehow become present without being absorbed into the translator’s sovereignty. Likewise, Irigaray’s account of sexual difference, shaped by an insistence on woman and man, cannot simply be carried over as a universal map of desire. Love has more arrangements than that binary permits, and no grammar guarantees reciprocity where power makes refusal dangerous. Still, the deliberately excessive “to” offers a remarkable model for translation. It gives relation a place to stand without demanding that either participant surrender a body or a name. One might even call it a very small footnote lodged inside a declaration of love, an interruption through which another person finally has space to answer.

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I have long regarded translation as the deepest form of reading. Ordinary reading permits a sentence to pass through the mind with its difficulties still folded inside it, whereas translation obliges one to reopen those folds and account for the pressure exerted by almost every word. (This does nothing, of course, to demote the act of reading as shallow or less meaningful, as the translator can easily get stuck in the mire of their own circular reasoning.) Rhythm can overturn an apparently obvious meaning. A pronoun can expose an entire architecture of exclusion. The translator must decide even when understanding remains incomplete, carrying the consequences of that decision into another language. Fernando complicates my cherished formulation when he writes that “reading itself might always be to-come.” His claim makes the metaphor of depth suddenly precarious. If reading is an encounter that precedes the categories by which we identify its object, no instrument can measure how far we have penetrated a work. What would count as the bottom of a sentence? The deepest reading may be the one most willing to relinquish its sounding line, to remain with what resists sounding at all. This does not exempt the translator from choosing. On the contrary, every finished sentence must contain the trace of an unfinished encounter. Fernando returns to Jean Genet’s advice to the tightrope walker, to give the wire its own beautiful expression. Balance, in this conception, happens through movement, never through the comparison of weights on opposite scales. Fernando’s small drawing of a figure poised among crossing lines makes the dilemma visible. The wire instructs the feet even as the feet give it tension. His insistence on unreadability therefore sharpens my responsibility at the desk. I must make an English sentence someone can read while resisting the fantasy that this sentence exhausts its source.

Fernando stages an especially illuminating segue through the opening sentence of Kafka’s The Trial. On one page, a version declares that someone must have “traduced” Josef K., beneath which hover rival possibilities for the German verleumdet, including formulations about rumours and false accusation. “Traduced” carries a faint, wicked echo of translation itself, while another rendering turns attention towards the social circulation of malicious speech. Each decision introduces a distinct world before Josef K. has had time to get out of bed. Translation becomes an art of choosing which ghosts will receive speaking parts. Fernando’s treatment of names deepens the predicament. A proper name insists on singularity even as its repeatability allows another mouth to pronounce it. Babel names both an event and the confusion by which its own significance remains unsettled. In my own work between Japanese and English, a title or term of address can summon relationships no glossary will adequately house. Smoothing it too quickly may erase the hesitation by which a reader discovers where they stand. I hear in Fernando’s pages a theory of translation written in the future imperfect, in which what we will have meant might still be changing after the words have been set down.

The physical book conducts an argument of its own. Instead of submitting its footnotes to the lower margins of the prose, Fernando gives them about-faces, frequently allowing a brief annotation to occupy an expanse of white. These are no obedient servants carrying evidence into the main text. Some offer intimate recollections, while others take a mischievous detour through a song or a pun. One remarkable note follows DJ Spooky’s reflections on spinning into an account of Lady Lue reading the tracks with her fingers, where listening becomes a bodily act of anticipation. To read the notes is to know that a second voice waits across the fold, sometimes qualifying what has been said and occasionally pulling the whole discussion into an unexpected key. They constitute a parallel translation of the thinking, a version whose deviations expose the incompleteness of its alleged original. The binding becomes an instrument of relation, holding two surfaces together by a seam that permits them to face each other without occupying the same space. Annotations usually promise to supply what a passage lacks. Here their extravagant autonomy invites a different question. What if a footnote records the portion of a thought that could survive only by leaving the sentence that produced it? Its generous vacancies give absence a typography, the page itself becoming a resting place for whatever refuses to enter the main account.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that Fernando’s most consequential witnesses so often reach him through other translators’ work. Blanchot arrives by way of Kamuf. Cixous speaks through English versions that cannot entirely contain the French (assuming the French can even entirely contain itself), while citations are personal recollections as much as scholarly authorities. Fernando quotes his friend Adibah Mustafa describing annotation as a desire to remember and to relate, carrying something from one place into another where it changes form. A beautiful proliferation of voices can disguise how readily an author chooses who is granted an entrance, who remains unnamed and whose translation supports the appearance of unmediated wisdom. I would press the question further. Affection for other people’s words must include accountability for the labour that brought them here. The translator’s signature need not be a claim of ownership, since it can mark where responsibility becomes unavoidable. In this sense, the generous interval between note and text holds a small political demand. The second voice should retain the possibility of disagreeing with the first, even when both are printed under the same cover.

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Sara Chong’s paintings extend this polyphony into another medium, though to regard them as illustrations would risk diminishing their independence. The first, Spurs and Burrs, is a self-portrait in which the artist stands with a metal vessel held near her waist. The black of her shirt gathers the figure into a compact presence against the grey-blue ground, while the vessel catches light more readily than the face seems willing to yield its thoughts. Her gaze meets ours without consenting to become an explanation. It is a beautifully unsentimental welcome. Someone has appeared before us, yet the portrait cannot tell us what relationship our looking has established. The held object becomes important precisely because its function is uncertain within the scene. Fernando’s idea of the reader as guest acquires an unexpected material body in this encounter. A portrait, too, translates a person into marks that continue to circulate beyond the moment of sitting. One could almost hear the small silence of metal waiting to be struck, though the woman holding it owes us neither a performance nor a confession.

In The Forest for the Trees, Chong paints a bespectacled figure among earthenware vessels whose mouths and shadows seem to participate in a conversation without words. The hands attend to a cup as other containers lean or sit at imperfect angles, each possessing its own volume of emptiness. The opaque background offers no stable narrative setting in which to domesticate this strange gathering. Vessels suggest a wonderfully difficult analogy for translation. Something may be carried only because a hollow has been preserved, yet what enters a container is transformed by the shape of its interior. The picture warns against taking that analogy too far. The person at its centre is engaged in an activity we cannot fully identify, and the vessels are real painted things before becoming conceptual equipment for my reading. Chong’s art resists being made useful to theory even as it alters the way theory feels. The Earth and Her Girthbrings the question of reading into literal view. A person sits absorbed in an open book beneath rows of amber bottles, a glass close at hand. The illuminated shelves seem almost aggressively legible, but the reader’s attention bends elsewhere, into a private exchange we cannot overhear. The title opens a vast, planetary scale around a scene whose pleasures remain resolutely situated. Between these paintings, reading moves from gaze to touch and then into an encounter with another text, while each canvas withholds the satisfaction of telling us exactly what has happened.

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Such withholding matters deeply to me as someone who has spent much of his writing life trying to translate music into prose. Music criticism continually confronts an impossible assignment. It must make sentences answerable to sounds without pretending that the sentences can replace them. Listening develops its own memory of what has just vanished. A note dies as the next begins, leaving an afterlife in the ear, while a phrase acquires shape from its disappearance. Fernando seems attuned to this problem when he moves from Barthes’s amorous utterance to pop songs whose lyrics return as involuntary philosophical companions. His gleeful excursions through Foreigner or Haddaway risk absurdity in the most productive sense, refusing to protect philosophy from the embarrassing sincerity of the chorus. The real challenge lies in the temporal grammar of attention, the way a listener can hear a sound only by permitting it to pass. For me, the best criticism preserves the stress of that vanishing without clothing it in a vocabulary of mastery. A translated sentence also has a tempo, a duration through which someone else will enter its thought. Fernando’s own prose moves by sudden acceleration and suspension, circling a term until its apparent stability begins to tremble. Sometimes the circling becomes indulgent, and the accumulation of qualifications threatens to drain a striking insight of force. But even that excess exposes a vulnerability the book is unwilling to conceal. No amount of language can make the loved object stay.

The question of satisfaction gives this refusal a bodily dimension. Fernando turns to Hélène Cixous’s account of trying words in the mouth until one gives pleasure, an almost culinary poetics of revision. I recognise that work intimately. Translating Japanese, I have sometimes spent more time attending to the contour of an English phrase than to its lexical correspondence, knowing that a line can be accurate while remaining uninhabitable. Yet satisfaction, necessary as it is, makes for a dangerous final packaging. A translator may be satisfied because an unfamiliar rhythm has been made reassuringly familiar, or because a disquieting implication has slipped away. The pleasure of the solution can be the very means through which the other is muzzled. Fernando’s taste for irresolution offers a corrective, although his generous willingness to suspend judgement also needs a limit (there are misreadings that cause material harm). Hospitality is not secured by declaring every entrance possible, especially when some visitors already hold the keys. The space between two beings must be defended through choices, including the decision to leave something untranslated or to signal the wound of a compromise. Uncertainty becomes ethically useful when it clarifies where our responsibility begins. It cannot absolve the translator of answering for the words finally printed.

Perhaps this is what the book’s long conversation with mortality most deeply asks of us. Fernando approaches the question of when reading ends and writing begins, then allows it to become almost impossible to locate the border. Marguerite Duras lends him the formulation that reading was writing, while elsewhere the act of writing appears as a kind of listening to words whose origin cannot be secured. The division between those activities proves as unstable as that between the voice that survives and the person who once spoke it. Still, we must resist imagining translation as the resurrection of an original body. Such a miracle would remove the very distance through which care becomes possible. The text remains elsewhere even when its words occupy the page in front of me. My English sentence will go on being read in circumstances I cannot envision, and eventually its maker, too, will be absent. Every translation therefore carries an unfinished appointment with strangers. The page will keep offering a place at the table, with no guarantee that anyone will sit down or that the guest will recognise what has been served.

Near its end, translating love seems to loosen even its own desire to arrive at a conclusion. Fernando dreams of writing something beautiful, and I think the most beautiful thing his book achieves is to expose the incompleteness of that wish. Beauty cannot deliver the other into our hands. At its most generous, it makes an interval perceptible in which another life can continue beyond what we have said about it. Chong’s painted reader remains inside her book. The notes continue their quiet counterpoint. Fernando’s title names a movement whose destination cannot be final, a love that changes as it travels and a translation that cannot tell us in advance what it has carried. Were I permitted one affectionate editorial intervention, I might propose an alternate title, loving translation. It draws the activity away from the hope of capturing love and towards the ongoing labour of caring for what another voice has made possible. A translator may never know whether that love has been returned. Still, the book is open, and somewhere on the facing page, someone has left room for a reply.

^{How to cite: Grillo, Tyran. “The Dead Are Still Addressing Us: On Jeremy Fernando’s translating love.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 20 Oct. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/10/20/translating-love.}

Tyran Grillo holds a PhD in Japanese Literature from Cornell University and is an avid reader, translator, music critic, and photographer. His latest book, Fuzzy Traumas: Animals and Errors in Contemporary Japanese Literature (2024, Cornell East Asia Series), explores complex interspecies relationships through a posthumanist lens. Although he has left academia to pursue a full-time career as a professional editor, he remains deeply engaged with his fields of interest through lived experience and creative practice. [All contributions by Tyran Grillo.]