Bodies in Translation
From the blazon of Elizabethan poetry to the Human Genome Project, humans have been writing the body for centuries. In his book Barthes, Roland Barthes ponders the translation of the body from flesh to paper, stating, “To write the body. Neither the skin, nor the muscles, nor the bones, nor the nerves, but the rest: an awkward, fibrous, shaggy, raveled thing, a clown’s coat” (180). In his process of writing the body, Barthes strips away surfaces to reveal something other, something that he finds more representative of himself or his essence.