Do any of you like to sew? Have you ever tried to thread a needle that is just a little bit too small, or where the thread is just a little bit frayed? You keep poking at it and poking at it, trying to get the thread through the needle, perhaps stubbornly refusing to go find your scissors to cut the frayed end, or the beeswax to bring the micro-threads together. You keep poking at it, squinting to try to see the tiny hole of the needle, trying not to drop the millimeter of thread that finally pokes through before you can grab it and pull it all the way.
Transcribing is like this. Sometimes a sentence -- even a paragraph! comes easily. Sometimes the madre enunciates, no trucks drive by, and the neighbor's dog does not bark. Sometimes you thread the needle on the first try.
But sometimes she speaks quickly, her napkin over her mouth, and the neighbor's dog barks twice, loudly, in the middle of the phrase. Sometimes you have to poke the same thread through the needle for minutes and minutes, trying to capture that word. Before we digitized our recordings, when I was transcribing from cassette, I sometimes wore the tape thin from listening to the same 3 second segment over and over and over.
Sometimes as you stare at that tiny needle hole, trying to fit the thread through, there's a tiny hopeful image on the other side. Something went well, someone was released from their capture, someone successfully escaped the country. Something went well.
More often, though, the napkin to the mouth muffles the words being recorded because they are the most painful words. Sometimes the tiny picture just visible through the needle hole is a woman whose teeth were knocked out as she was hit repeatedly while being asked who paid her to become a guerrillera. How is she supposed to answer that question satisfactorily when she is not, in fact, a guerrillera? When everyone in the room knows the gun she was arrested with was planted on her?
Sometimes the tiny picture is a woman whose breast was slowly cut off, one cut to punctuate each question. One cut to punctuate each demand. Each one added up until today, she has no breast. It's gone. It went missing before she escaped, and she escaped without it.
Update: I was looking through my old blog about the project, from when I got a grant through my college for this work. It turns out I've been describing transcribing pretty much the same way for 5 years! Here's what I wrote in 2007:
Transcribing is so hard.
There are the obvious reasons– it’s in Spanish, it’s such a slow and tedious process, it takes so much concentration… I mean really, I don’t think I’ve ever concentrated on anything so hard for such a long period of time. It’s like when you’re trying to thread a needle, and there’s that one little bitty strand that’s [messing] it up and you keep trying and keep trying and it’s not working and you have to squint and get your face up all close because the needle is so small and the thread is so small and if anyone says anything to you you want to scream ’cause you were about to get it but they ruined your concentration and now you have to start all over… are you feeling sufficiently fidgety and drained? Okay, well it’s like threading the impossibly small needle, for hours and hours, every day.
Of course the other reason is that it’s just so damn depressing. Not only are you threading an impossibly small needle, you’re threading an impossibly small needle with a picture of someone being raped or tortured– and you have to keep looking at that little picture because if you take your eyes off the [freaking] needle, well then, how are you going to thread it?
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