The minute we open our mouths we are already translating – a thought process, a visual impression… The minute we start translating, treason creeps in – unfaithfulness, misunderstanding…

Traduttore traditore? Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Babel and its aftermath have taught us that no language is transparent, that no two languages are the same. Translators are tender traitors who betray lovingly, intending no harm. In so doing, they open a space for creation, between a text and its “equivalent” in other languages. It is this very space that we are setting out to explore. We are asking fellow artists and partners in crime to betray knowingly.

This is not a bilingual book, if that means a book with stable content available in two languages. Translation here is not to be taken literally. It is extended and expanded. The bi-lingual nature of the work, with its hopeful symmetries, is the premise of the whole endeavor; its point of departure, rather than an end result. Nothing here is translated into French or into English, après coup. The contributors gathered between the covers of this little book are not professional translators. They are experts, nevertheless, in all kinds of textual and visual transformation. They translate as they breathe. Their whole practice is translational. They move things and ideas around.

English and French are at once close to and distant from one another. To a large extent, they share a common lexicon, but the sharing is rife with confusion and treachery. The apparent similitude is a trompe-l’oeil. Our book purports to be similarly ambiguous, by using and abusing “undecideability”, doubling, mistranslation, false friends, homophonic transformations, and word-and-image conflations. It aims to explore what happens when translation is not ashamed of, but indeed joyfully claims, its treasonous nature.

Such treatment makes source and target irrelevant as such. Meaning slides and seeps through the interstices. The contributors include artists as well as writers. Experiments in visual translation were also carried out: Words into images, images into words, images into other images. Conflation of the literal and the metaphoric, persistent echoes, interplays between French and English typographies, are all traps intended to seduce (and betray) the reader-spectator in a bilingual book where English and French never really match up, or where it is not always clear where one starts and where the other ends. We have commissioned poetry, fiction, theory, visual montage, or a mélange thereof, with a view to assembling our own personal treason treatise.