• Translative transgression in Caroline Bergvall's Drift (2015) and Yousif Qasmiyeh's Writing the Camp (2021)

In an effort to illuminate the vast creative potential of translation in the contemporary literature of human rights, this essay analyzes the translative poetics of Caroline Bergvall’s Drift (2015) and Yousif Qasmiyeh’s Writing the Camp (2021) through the philosophical theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Through both close readings and theoretical analyses of these texts, I argue that Bergvall and Qasmiyeh engage translation as a practice of linguistic free movement, actively transgressing and reimagining concepts of linguistic boundary in order to uncover spaces within language where migrant voices are obscured. This transgression is informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial-linguistic theory and especially their concept of deterritorialization, which Drift and Writing the Camp both use and challenge through their explorations of sound, silence, and obscurity at the border. The first half of the essay focuses on Bergvall’s text, outlining how Bergvall’s translation of Anglo-Saxon source texts works through relationality to transgress linguistic and temporal boundaries. In the essay’s latter half, I move to a discussion of Qasmiyeh’s text, analyzing how the ‘third language’ of his poetry, which is constructed through translation between English and Arabic, destabilizes majoritarian language through the concepts of the fragment and the threshold. Through these analyses, this essay demonstrates the potential of deterritorialization and ‘inventive bordering’ as methods of voicing refugee experiences through the creation of novel linguistic spaces which exist outside of the nation-state.