““Mother,” I slowly repeated in Korean. “I am not a boy. I am a girl. I am transgender.” My face reddened, and tears blurred my vision. I braced myself for her rejection and the end to a relationship that had only begun. Silence again filled the room. I searched my mother’s eyes for any signs of shock, disgust or sadness. But a serene expression lined her face as she sat with ease on the couch. I started to worry that my words had been lost in translation. Then my mother began to speak. “Mommy knew,” she said calmly through my friend, who looked just as dumbfounded as I was by her response. “I was waiting for you to tell me.” “What? How?” “Birth dream,” my mother replied. In Korea some pregnant women still believe that dreams offer a hint about the gender of their unborn child. “I had dreams for each of your siblings, but I had no dream for you. Your gender was always a mystery to me.” I wanted to reply but didn’t know where to begin. My mother instead continued to speak for both of us. “Hyun-gi,” she said, stroking my head. “You are beautiful and precious. I thought I gave birth to a son, but it is OK. I have a daughter instead.””
Sometimes I feel I spend my whole life rewriting the same page. It is a page with “Essay on Translation” at the top and then quite a few paragraphs of good strong prose. These begin to break down toward the middle of the page. Syntax decays. Perforations appear. By the end there is not much left but a few flakes of language roaming near the margins, looking as if they want to become an art of pure shape. Here is another fact about me. Whenever I am engaged on a translation project I experience continually, offside my vision, a sensation of veils flying up. As brightness blows the rising wide cold rush the skull. I’ve come to call the sensation Cassandra because I first noticed it one day in school when I was reading a passage of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon—the passage where Cassandra cries out “OTOTOTOI POPOI DA!,” etc. This cry is famous—it leads into three hundred lines of vision and prophecy in which Cassandra tells the past and future of the house of Atreus, including the fact of her own death. At the midpoint of this telling she utters these lines:
Behold no longer my oracle out from veils shall be glancing like a newly married bride but as brightness blows the rising sun open it will rush my oceans forward onto light— a grief more deep than me.
What is it like to be a prophet? Everywhere Cassandra ran she found she was already there. Everywhere Cassandra ran the glue was coming up off the edge of the page and, when she pulled at it, this page was underneath, this page on which I am telling you that everywhere Cassandra ran she found she could float.
You may think I am making the matter unnecessarily complicated, the matter of Cassandra everywhere she ran. But let’s return to her opening line “OTOTOTOI POPOI DA!” This utterance is a scream. It is untranslatable, yet not meaningless. A scream conveys specific emotion and can make things happen. In this case the scream is also metrically exact, fitted into the scansion of the verses around it. Often in English translation such utterances are rendered by the word Alas! Should Alas! seem inadequate, the translator may choose to transliterate the Greek letters of the scream into English sounds—as I did, when I said “OTOTOTOI POPOI DA"—on the grounds that this is more pure and true. Is it more pure and true? Perhaps a prior question is in order. What is Cassandra doing speaking Greek? She is after all a Trojan princess who has never been away from home before. Now generally we refrain from asking this kind of question about the logic of a play. We don’t really want to listen to Cassandra speaking ancient Trojan for the next half hour and there is a dramaturgic convention called the "willed suspension of disbelief” that makes it okay. But in this play Aeschylus has already punctured the convention. For he begins the Cassandra scene with Cassandra standing silent on stage for 270 lines, then Clytemnestra shouts at her, “What’s the matter, don’t you speak Greek?” Aeschylus would like us to see the veils flying up in Cassandra’s mind, would like us to be wondering at what level of herself she is translating some pure gash of Trojan emotion into a metrically perfect line of Greek tragic verse and what that translation has to do with the arts of prophecy. Because in both cases there is some action of cutting through surfaces to a site that has no business being underneath. What is the future doing underneath the past? Or Greek metrics inside a Trojan silence? And how does it alter you to see it there floating and how can it float?
Anne Carson· “Cassandra Float Can Original Cut.” Float (2016)
going on HRT is a serious decision you should make with the utmost gravity. people might think you’re cool, badass even. You might find yourself happy with your life, approaching the world with newfound wisdom one way or another. It might be what you want. It might get you off. It might just be a cool story to tell people. I, myself, found the initial experience was like I had sleepwalked through a nightmare for a quarter century - and for the first time, not just the first time I could remember but actually the first time, I was awake, and the sun was shining, and the world was beautiful. So obviously all of those are risks
