The Art of Losing Is Very Hard to Master: Utopia, Affect, and the (Im)Possible in Translation

In this essay, we use our experience as coauthors of the Italian translation of Jos�e Esteban Munoz’s ~ Cruising Utopia to theorize and perform the (re)making of futures enabled by queer texts and their worlds in times of trouble. In 2019, marking the tenth anniversary of the text’s first publication, we shared a sense of the need to translate Munoz’s ~ work. The intellectual and affective landscapes conjured by his writing provide pedagogical practices and tools for refusing the injunction to separate, trade in mastery, or celebrate individuality over constitutive vulnerability, marking certain subjects as the “others” of the norm, a process which constitutes the dead end of affect. Much of the work of translation occurred during the COVID-19 crisis. We retrace this process, recalling how we navigated academic burnout, economic precariousness, diagnosed depression, and the loss of mentors and friends. Under these conditions, our daily online translation sessions became spaces of intimacy and care, and translating a practice of attention to the other. Through memorializing interruptions, blockages, and loss in this essay, we also aim to capture Munoz’s ~ poetic, performative, political, and emotional registers. Guided by how translation can form (queer) relations and knowledges and how it illuminates networks of care and connection during crises, we reflect on our affective landscape in translating Cruising Utopia. In this essay, by memorializing loss while scavenging for hope, we cruise the im-possible, rendering the act of translation itself a utopian and collective endeavour.