Speaking into “Archival Silence”: Translating Trauma and Abuse Nestled within the Dream House

Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019) is a lyric memoir through which she goes beyond the usual representations of space and place in women’s writing, refashioning their narratives. By offering a queer geocritical perspective and creating a distinctive space of storytelling, Machado explores abuse between queer women. Drawing on horror and gothic tropes and style, she narrates her personal experience of queer domestic violence, inviting readers to navigate a story that is rarely told, let alone published. In this context, this paper aims to examine the ways Machado employs space, place and spatial narrative strategies and whether and how the embodied experience of space and place transforms itself when a text travels into another culture through a different language. Focusing, as a case study, on the book’s translation in Greek, and considering that Machado herself lacked a language to describe what was happening to her while also having to deal with feelings of disloyalty to the very idea of lesbianism, this paper ultimately explores whether and how women’s experiences and the spaces in which they engage retain their multiplicity in translation.