A Collection of I’s, In Reverse

Abstract: I’d like first to mention the title I gave to my presentation for this program, “A Collection of I’s, In Reverse.” This is a particularly awkward title. I was going to say intentionally awkward, but that would not be exact. What was intentional was to keep it as such because I found this very awkwardness puzzling. Its first part, “A Collection of I’s,” is the oddest one. It is a translation into English of coleção de eus , the title of a volume of poems published by the Brazilian video artist and writer Katia Maciel upon the occasion of the installation of a 2023 work in São Paulo to which she gave the same title. You might notice that I added an indefinite article to the Portuguese title, as well as capital letters, hoping this would reduce the clumsiness, which of course it doesn’t in any way because the problem lies in pluralization of the superlatively singular “I.” (You will notice, as well, that I felt compelled to intersperse an apostrophe between “I” and the pluralizing “s”—as the literal translation of “eus” [eu+s] into “is” [i+s] would automatically be misread as the conjugation of the verb “to be” in the third person singular.) In attempting to translate Maciel’s title into something less inelegant in English, one could opt for “a collection of egos” or “a collection of selves,” but that would entirely miss the point, which is that it is an uttering subject—the I who utters “I” when speaking or writing and not its objective description such as “ego” or “self”—who is serialized and collected. It would be a bit like translating Rimbaud’s famous “Je est un autre” into “I am another” instead of “I is another,” which is the exact translation, as ungrammatical as the French original.