How do we conceptualize text? Is a text a sacrosanct object, generated in mystical circumstances by an all-powerful Author, delivered into a reader’s hands through the powerful machine of print capitalism, or delivered directly into a reader’s cognitive space through a screen? Or is it something more fluid, captured only fleetingly in the network of signs that is language, capable of producing meaning – coming alive – only in the minds of its readers? Or can it be both?

In 21^st century digital culture, text has reached another stage in its evolution. It is no longer bound to just one form, attached to just one author. It can be the image of a meme, shared by thousands around the internet, acquiring new meaning in each context; or it can be a vlog post which consists of someone reciting Beowulf in the original Old English. We have seen how the form and material of the text contributes to its meaning, and therefore “every change in the text’s material body produces new meaning” (Lollini). This remediation is also a form of translation: text that originated in one form is translated into another form, thereby creating a new context in which the reader can forge a new relationship with it, and give it new meaning.

Of course, as Lawrence Venuti (drawing from Derrida) points out in The Translator’s Invisibility, “both foreign text and translation are derivative: both consist of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that neither the foreign writer nor the translator originates, and that destabilize the work of signification, inevitably exceeding and possibly conflicting with their intentions.” I take this as my point of departure when considering my role as translator – there is really no such thing as a ‘fixed,’ authentic, original text that is then distorted by translation. Rather, every text’s ‘meaning’ is contingent upon its specific linguistic and historical context. When I work on a translation of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s text Risposte a nome di Madonna Laura alle Rime di messer Francesco Petrarca in vita della medesima, I do so with an awareness of the fact that I am reconstituting this text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations that preexist in 21^st century English. Therefore I am not under any illusion that I am translating with perfect semantic equivalence, and I try to emphasize the difference of the Italian text without completely ‘domesticating’ it. This is the method Venuti refers to as ‘foreignization’.

At the same time that I am collaboratively translating from Italian to English, I am also translating what was originally a printed text into a digital document, and then turning that document into Tweets. In this process I am essentially rewriting the text into a new linguistic, historical, and formal context. Bongiovanni’s 1763 Petrarchan sonnets are brought onto a 21^st century social media platform. Now, like any text brought into (or originated within) cyberspace, they will become part of our collective conversation, the dialogue that we are constantly part of as wreaders (readers and writers). Digital literature, as Rebecca Walkowitz points out, approaches digitization as “medium and origin rather than as afterthought…it is a condition of [its] production.” (4, Born Translated) Cyberspace is not merely the vessel through which the sacrosanct object of text is transmitted to the reader like the Eucharist passes from the hands of the priest to the tongue of the worshipper, but it an active medium in the text’s production.