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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15503

Translation and national sovereignty. The fragility and bias of theory 1 Rada Iveković ................................. [email protected] Abstract: The author starts by describing her own relationship to language and translation, which is the result of her growing up between languages and among several. She proceeds to explain why she uses elements of “Indian” philosophies to highlight her point about language and translation, just as she uses elements of “continental” philosophy, with the advantage that exposing “our” problems to that “elsewhere” sheds unexpected light on them. She then explains difficulties in language, translation, and understanding as a result of the division between “theory” and “practice,” and gives examples (such as those from ancient Indian languages and writings) of cultures where that division was avoided. The divide takes sharper contours in the relation between the “west” and the “rest.” As- sumptions of superiority are based on the tacit cognitive precondition of separating theory from practice by an insurmountable wall. Historically located polities have each a general corresponding cognitive order and translation regime. Which means that whole genealogies of knowledge have remained invisible to European lan- guages, untranslated, apparently untranslatable to the hegemonic gaze. The con- clusion points to the disaster of national subjectivation in Yugoslavia, in the post-Yugoslav states, and elsewhere. ______________ Translation always raises the question of its politics. I will try to argue for the inevitability of an inter-con-textual and political approach to translation, quite beyond the textual one. I start from the observation that any “origin” is located, therefore oriented, therefore interested, and therefore concealing a politics; that knowledge is historically informed and that so is there- fore translation. Language and translation are not neutral: translata- translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 1 This paper was partly written while i was Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, from February to June 2013. I thank ARI and in particular professor Prasen- jit Duara, ARI’s director, for their input and for giving me the opportunity to carry out this work in excellent conditions. 53  bility, not only as a possibility, but also as a fundamental mecha- nism, is already there in any language capacity, even before we can name the language. Both have associated themselves since moder- nity with the constitution of the nation. Translation is both on the side of a metaphor as well as, lit- erally, of language(s) and of the material production of worlds, in both cases as political. They involve a declared or hidden politics of translation. Languages traverse each other, bear one another, and rub against each other, even beyond our awareness. They are not mutually excluding. No child is born monolingual. Monolingualism is inculcated in and through a national horizon and the definition of a national language. In this sense a world of translation—trans- lational—is still a transnational world. Because languages are com- municating vessels decanting into each other, content is never transferred from a source language into a target language without rest or excess. Translation cannot be reduced to a binary, and it ac- tually precedes the definition or establishment of national and lin- guistic difference. It happens not between but within languages. It is a complex relationship fleeing in various directions, including all the way through languages, and it transforms the translator as well. The writings of protagonists translate to themselves and to others, but above all, to later generations, their lives, imaginaries and historical conditions. Understanding them from outside their context, from a later generation, or from another translation regime requires some ability of brokering between parallel, circulating, and intersecting histories, where everything is moving and changing meaning: translation takes place on uncertain ground, according to uncertain principles, without guarantee, and gives vacillating, un- certain results. Translation is inevitable, although its politics is un- predictable. The question of learning from others’ experience, or from experience tout court arises. How do we translate from one regime of sentences (Wittgenstein, Lyotard), or from one world, into another? But how do we translate from one translation regime to another? An example: the impossibility and difficulty to translate “caste” (as well as many other terms): the concept of caste is a nor- translation / spring / 2014 mative concept of Western sociology for India. How does it trans- late into India, and back to and from India? It is a “travelling” concept, lost between theories and undermining the construction 54 of hegemonic knowledge, which is oblivious of translation regimes or of the politics of translation. The question concerns a minimum rhetorical rule: since we can only speak of language from within language itself, don’t the rules about language also apply to the would-be metalanguage? Lost in languages I was born into Serbo–Croatian which, rather than a clearly and once-and-for-all standardized language, was a constellation consisting of a number of different language feelings, stylistic val- ues, competing standardizations, carrying of course various accents, some syntactical variations, and multiple vocabulary choices. By the accidents of life, i was exposed early on to a series of variants of that language (once going under that common name, though no more). These corresponded to different places in Yugoslavia. The language feeling was regional and local rather than national, be- cause the national/state framework itself was fragmented by ac- cents, syntax, scripts, writing, and various rival standardizations. The language could be “more Croat” or “more Serb,” with a grada- tion and no absolute distinguishing principles. I could read the two scripts before going to school. Across that nébuleuse of multiple possible ways of speaking and writing that were however heavily disputed by politicians and by some language-policing linguists, and that were used to express other political disagreements, i, like everyone else, could find my way at large throughout the country, understand and be understood. Speaking was no issue at all. Pub- lishing was, however, depending on the linguistic politics of your editors, of the journal, the publisher, or the local academy. I was constantly negotiating with editing rereaders—bearers of a great variety of language views and believers in different standardization conventions—about my articles and books. We called them “lec- tors.” Some of them were my great enemies, in general those who were staunch advocates of a strong official codification of separate national languages (whether Serb or Croat). You could tell from their editing (submitted to us before publication for proofreading) not only their linguistic and translation politics most of the time, translation / spring / 2014 but their politics tout court (Iveković 2007a). The result is that i have published, depending on how i man- aged to negotiate my personal language and how my own relation 55  to it evolved, in a great variety of forms of Serbo–Croatian, com- pletely “inconsistently” over time. It was never like French, which you can write in only one way. Not everyone was as fickle as i was, and most probably adopted the language of his or her social context at the time of writing. But i moved a lot between Belgrade and Za- greb and lived in both. You could write according to various codes and in several ways of which each meant a political statement if you stuck to it. That language contained a contested, competing, and disputed inner multiplicity. Yet i couldn’t help but be utterly in- consistent, not out of carelessness, but on the contrary out of a con- stant concern for language, meaning, and translation. Such inconsistency was paradoxically dictated by my continuous con- stancy regarding language. The very spirit and most important fea- ture of that language was that it had plural and inconclusive standardizations as well as plentiful options, and the official rules for writing (pravopis, which included spelling and some additional sets of usages) also changed constantly, sometimes due to political disputes disguised as linguistic disputes. Being consistent either meant being dogmatic about form and sticking to only one way of writing, or being inconsistent with the form but consistent with the spirit of this language that was always in transformation. Great writ- ers such as Miroslav Krleža and Ivo Andrić had written in different modes of the language—ekavski and ijekavski—which have only recently become (and only superficially and, in the final analysis, wrongly, irrespective of language history) identified respectively with Serbian and Croatian. People who had not been exposed, like myself, to various vernaculars and manners of speaking and writing, could stick to one form, although even there official rules changed all the time.2 Since i started publishing predominantly in foreign lan- guages, the fate of my writing is exactly the same: it is corrected, .......................... 2 A number of spellings and writing rules were made official for all during the lifetime of Yugoslavia, and alternative proposals were occasionally issued by nationalist institutions. One spelling (pravopis) was the Novosadski pravopis, or “The Novi Sad writing agreement,” of 1954 (and the revised 1962 version), which focused on similarities, which i had decided to stick to when i started publishing, not so much because it translation / spring / 2014 was midway between Serbian and Croatian, but rather because i thought it would be good to stick to one as the rules kept changing all the time. It was contested by linguistic nationalists. Another attempt in 1967, the Deklaracija o nazivu i položaju hrvatskog književnog jezika, or “Declaration on the name and condition of the Croatian literary language,” insisted on dissimilarities and announced a first nationalist turn a few years later (1971). 56 depending on the sensibility of the reader or reviewer, because it is perceived to be inadequate in terms of an ideal form of the lan- guage. Many were those who refuted that multiplicity, who held monolithic, sovereignist, national politics of language and transla- tion. That language was many languages at once, or in one, always itself in the process of translation. It was both one and many. The comparisons were to me linguistically delectable, ruminating on language was exciting and sometimes frustrating. The one-and- multiple language was fluctuating in its definitions, grammars, spelling, writing codes, and even names, which were occasionally changed and decreed by academies, uncertain to some, loved and disputed by many. All styles were cultivated, from the extreme purism of each “national” language to rather syncretic approaches where “languages” and their accents or vocabularies were mixed.3 Croatian was much more language sensitive at first sight in its national language politics and also more concerned about written form, but it turned out later that Serbian as a national lan- guage (somewhat more at ease with oral expression) was no less dogmatic, including in its apparent carelessness about form. What was later (after the war in the 1990s) called Bosnian was more flex- ible, less standardized, and fluctuating between the two other forms. Yugoslavia was this peculiar country composed of six re- publics, two “autonomous regions,” two scripts, and half a dozen main languages, of which several were Slavic, and where Serbo– Croatian was the most widespread, spoken in four of the federal states (Bosnia–Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia) and taught at school in all. Serbo–Croatian was thus imposed on every- one and was also the lingua franca. All instructions on Yugoslav goods were in all Yugoslav languages, including minority lan- guages. These are now all considered and named as four different national languages, linked to the idea of each national state, and more could appear at any time, with theoretically possible, though .......................... 3 Naoki Sakai (2013): “I do not think that difference at stake in this instance can be subsumed under the concept of species difference.” It is worth emphasizing the fact that the determination of the species dif- translation / spring / 2014 ference is offered as a solution to the initial problem of us being at a loss, in response to the perplexity we come across in such a locale.” “[I]t is imperative to keep in mind that it is not because some person or people are different—in the sense of species difference—from me or us that we are at a loss. On the contrary, it is because we are at a loss or unable to make sense in the first place that we attempt to deter- mine this encounter with difference within the logical economy of species and genus.” 57  now less likely, further partitions. The other two Slavic languages were Slovenian and Macedonian, to a great extent understandable with a little good will at least to neighbors, speakers of Serbo–Croa- tian, who, however, did not learn them at school. Important minor- ity languages were Albanian, Hungarian, Italian, and Romani, and many other languages also circulated. The distinction between Macedonian and neighboring Bulgarian responds to the same pat- tern, and is a matter of convention, a convention governed by the political stand on the nation. In Yugoslavia and successor states, the language of Macedonia was and is Macedonian. But that may change for those Macedonians who now opt for Bulgarian citizen- ship (and get it) because it gives them an easy entrance into Europe. There is no doubt about the hegemony of Serbo–Croatian, which, by the end of Yugoslavia, caused a lot of bitterness in particular with the Slovenes (the small difference) and the Albanians (the big- ger language difference). In Yugoslavia, the languages flanked Yu- goslavia’s constitutive “nations” and “nationalities.” 4 Only where languages are distinguished can the unity of one language be established, says Naoki Sakai (2013). Languages and nations tend to construct each other reciprocally in an endless process (Iveković 2008). I have always doubted the existence of the language i was born into. “Lectors” often made you believe that your own language was violating some “pure” form. Competing and coexisting stan- dardizations did so too. When i started university in Zagreb, i enrolled at a “general linguistics and oriental studies” department where i read “Indian studies,” to a great extent from a linguistic and philological per- spective, quite old-fashioned. I came to philosophy through “In- dian” philosophy, “in the reverse” as it were if compared to a usual European trajectory. The nonaligned political orientation of the country that came to introduce such and similar studies after the 1961 Belgrade first summit of leaders of the Non-Aligned coun- tries, in view of its nonaligned and third-world friendships and pri- .......................... translation / spring / 2014 4 “Nations” and “nationalities” (narodi i narodnosti) were supposed to be constitutive and equal, and most had a federal republic that went by their name, while more-mixed-than-the-others Bosnia-Herzegovina was a conundrum of its own. “Nationalities” (national minorities) had a more complex status: they were supposed to be constitutive in their main national body as nations, in another Yugoslav republic or abroad, as was the case for Albanians in Kosovo or Hungarians in Vojvodina. 58 orities, still relied to a great extent on an Orientalist reading, notwithstanding the decolonization wind blowing in the 1960s that had reached our shores with, especially, much empathy for the Al- gerian war of liberation. We studied Sanskrit, Pāli, and Hindi, among Indian languages, and read secondary literature not only in our language5 but also in German, French, and English, while i soon read Max Weber on Asia in Italian, because that seemed to be the only available edition, or translation. I started translating ancient texts from Sanskrit and Pāli into Serbo–Croatian,6 besides translating contemporary philosophy from European languages. The technical problem of transcription and transliteration presented itself immediately with Indian sources, and came to feed our engagement with scripts, language, writing of foreign names and words (disputes among several options sup- ported diversely by the script). Sanskrit has a declension of eight cases, while Serbo–Croatian has seven. How do you decline a San- skrit noun in Serbo–Croatian? How—and where—do you add suf- fixes from the Serbo–Croatian declension to Sanskrit nouns? There were many different usages and clashes over them. Sanskrit has the sonant “r,” which operates like a syllable-forming vowel, that we also have in our language. But English and French language tran- scription conventions require “ri”: should we do the same, or should we write simply “r” as we do in our language in words like “prst”? In that case we should write (and we did) “sanskrt.” Consider ṛ (“r” with a dot underneath) as is done in some transcriptions? Should we write, as the English transliteration does, ś and sh, or, as the French one does, ç and ṣ? Or should we write, in analogy with our ć and č (two distinct sounds that foreigners usually do not differ- entiate in our names), ś and š, something that speakers of Serbo– Croatian understand immediately by analogy? We used to do the .......................... 5 “Our [language],” naški, has become a most widespread and neutral appellation of the common language without naming it, since the partition of Yugoslavia, with nonnationalists. It indistinctly denotes Bosnian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Croatian, or any future split-off language that may come. The Indian–Pakistani anal- ogy would be de and de i. NB: i deliberately have no use for the word “dialect,” which has no meaning outside a national vertical hierarchy of languages. Languages and dialects are of course the same, as much as nations and ethnicities, fixed constructs within a regime of rigid “identities.” translation / spring / 2014 6 At that time, the correct and official appellation of that language in Croatia, where i studied and started writing (though my first book came out in Sarajevo), was “Croato–Serbian,” simply called “Croatian” in popular parlance, just as “Serbian” was shorthand for “Serbo–Croatian” in the Serbian context. In order to avoid further complication, i do not use the form “Croato–Serbian” when writing in English or French, where it is in fact unknown. 59  latter, and immediately created problems for ourselves with any quotation or reference we introduced from Western Indology, and with local nonacademic usages. The language problems from Sanskrit transposed into Serbo–Croatian were a direct continuation of the language dynamics and complications we had with our own language. Sanskrit and Pāli became for me inner problems of Serbo–Croatian, and of the same kind. And again, i had to deal with more or less understanding rereading and editing. The problems raised by the alternative script, Cyrillic, can be added to these. Cyrillic makes foreign words and, above all, names, unrecognizable, and by the same token it also erases some of the historic depth and traces from the written word. Other subterfuges are needed when writing or publishing in Cyrillic, and they, too, are diversely (non)standardized. So my experience with mediating Indian culture in Yugoslavia and dealing with Indian languages only continued my experience with the now nameless language, one-and-multiple. Since very early infancy, too, and again without any merit, i was deeply exposed to other languages—French and Italian at first as my parents were living in Belgium and Italy. I spoke Serbo–Croa- tian, French, and Italian with different people surrounding me. Those languages never left me, although they went and returned with ab- sences or vacations, and Italian was somewhat neglected. I then went to a French school in Germany, where i spoke French and lis- tened to German. Later at school in Belgrade, from grade 5, i took English as a foreign language. From there on, other European lan- guages came through reading or listening. They also came through the other languages and thanks to them, sometimes weighing against each other. They came particularly thanks to Serbo–Croatian into which i tended to translate the new words and to compare them. The welcome diversity of those languages somehow mirrored my own multiplicity, rather than their “national” limitations. It was only nat- ural for me to continue between languages, understood both as medium and mediator. I believe that the diversity, profusion, exten- sion, complexity, burgeoning, and abundance those languages gave me through their simultaneity and intertwining were suitable pat- translation / spring / 2014 terns structuring my thinking and work, somehow never in straight lines. I could not be disciplined. When writing in French or English, i continued the same passionate relationship to language that i had 60 with Serbo–Croatian, brokering styles and writing conventions with more or less success. The world has changed vertiginously since i was born into Serbo–Croatian. Not only have i been brought to learn other lan- guages, but i have also come to construct with others intersecting spaces of many languages with which i dealt at various levels. It is not my merit. Estranged at a mature age from my first language, es- pecially for publishing and work, since the dismantlement of Yu- goslavia, i am in the—regular—situation of constantly hesitating between languages and always being beside a language, or at a crossroads of several languages. Stumbling, faltering, forgetting, double and even treble consciousness help us overcome the double- talk rhetoric, the frozen language (langue de bois), the officialese of the pensée unique. It is a condition of epistemological diversity and of ontological uncertainty, but it is also some kind of normalcy and way of life. I now write in the language i was asked for a paper, which is mainly French or English, and only rarely Serbo–Croat. The dilemma is devastating not regarding articles, but when it comes to fictional writing: here, no language suits me any more. But why the hesitation, since displacement is the rule? Un- certainty is critical and part of the technology of becoming in dis- placement. It is part of a translated world. It may not be the easiest thing to live and it doesn’t guarantee any progressive politics, but we are lucky it is there and lucky to be able to mold a world without absolute translation (Iveković 2007a, 21–26; 2007b). Stumbling ushers us into the wasteland, the terrain vague, that will give the hors champ, the off camera, the tiers instruit (Serres 1991), the dis- tance necessary for writing, translating and working. Uncertainty comes as the necessary third “language” or other, the third element, an operator and broker. Brahmā’s Net Brahmā’s net is the name Buddhists give to ideology.7 Avijjā, ignorance about both the origin and the functioning of the world, keeps us within that net. In a very early linguistic turn translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 7 Brahmā-jāla: Brahmā’s net is also “the all-embracing net of views,” a hegemonic point of view that, in the eyes of the Buddhist, would be Brahmanistic. There is a speech attributed to the Buddha, Brahmajāla Suttam (Dīgha-nikāya 1, 1), which deconstructs under that name different doctrines, including unorthodox ones, existing at that time. Višṇu, Śiva, Brahm are the Trimūrti, the “troika.” Like all three, Brahm is a 61  in Indian philosophy (6th–7th century BCE), Buddhists discovered that language couldn’t say it all, being itself part of that whole. There is no metalanguage different from language. The “beginning” being unknown, Buddhists cultivated cognitive uncertainty and self-decentering. Let me, however, clarify that i do not take Buddhism as a model to follow, nor do i preach it. I only take it as arguably the clearest example, possibly with Daoism, of a series of ancient “Asian” epistemes having certain characteristics highlighted here through the example of Buddhism. Some of these features are: not cultivating the putative split between subject and object (which is really a capturing apparatus of hegemony), between theory and prac- tice, or between sovereignty and exception—amongst others. This does not mean that Buddhism, much as any other philosophy, cannot be used and misused to enhance nationalistic politics—as it has been in many examples, particularly Japan, or recently more locally in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, if these things can be measured. So Bud- dhism doesn’t give any guarantee for an equitable translation regime, nor should it be idealized. No philosophy carries within it- self the guarantee of its infallibility.8 I use elements of “Indian” philosophies to highlight my point just as i use elements of “continental” philosophy, with the ad- vantage that exposing our problems to that “elsewhere” sheds un- expected light on them. Untranslatability is a paradox: there are untranslatables (Bar- bara Cassin 2004; Lyotard 1983; Balibar 2009); there are also con- ditions of (un)translatability. What is untranslatable according to one translation regime, may be translatable in another. There is no ab- solute translation. There are degrees between untranslatables and translatables (Iveković 2002a, 121–145; also at Iveković 2002b), in- dicative of a multitude of options. There are levels and registers of translation, which all point to the circulation of (non)intended mean- .......................... masculine figure and, although without rites, he is also the anthropomorphic personification of the Brah- manist universalist ideal brahman (n.), the absolute. I distinguish between Brahmanic and Brahmanist, the latter involving ideology and a universalist project. translation / spring / 2014 8 I would like to thank Naoki Sakai for pointing out to me the danger that talking about Buddhism may lead to some kind of its idealization: this is not the intention here, nor am i pleading for any kind of indi- genism. We should also meditate on the fact that this is very difficult to get through under the ordinary hegemonic translation regime. I am not dealing with the existing political instrumentalizations of Buddhism, but with the Buddhist conceptual apparatus. 62 ing and implications, with possible incalculable gaps between the two. Because we have the option between an infinite number of translations (including impossibility and unwillingness), and an equally infinite number of methods, we either translate in sheer ig- norance of our subject-position as translators/mediators, or we must have a politics of translation and know or ignore that we do. Lyotard’s Le Différend (1983) was a turning point in con- tinental philosophies as these opened to the possibility (not the guarantee) of other epistemes in principle. Since any utterance re- leases myriad possible worlds,9 as Lyotard would have it after Wittgenstein; and since a concatenation of sentences is inevitable although there is no guarantee or predictable indication—theoreti- cally—concerning their contents and “sentence regime,”10 we must count with the coexistence (and confusion) not only of sentence regimes, but of “translation regimes” as well. We might be under a sentence regime unwittingly, or apolitically, but we can also form a politics of translation by choosing this or that translation code. There are translation regimes even when there is no “translation” as such, since there is no zero degree of language, of translation, or of the human condition, including in extralinguistic matters. But then, for humans, as Buddhist philosophy knows, there is no ex- tralinguistic condition, except outside Brahmā’s net, a very unlikely although possibly desirable ambition, as in nirvāṇa. Some transla- tion from one condition to another is always at work. The difficulty of theory There is some problem with the concept of theory. One could indeed invoke Kant here, but here is a simpler approach. The problem comes from the paradox of the concept of theory’s origi- nation in the West, yet its propagation everywhere as a normative idea in science especially with modernity, and from its vertical hi- erarchy. Theory is a must. It is a contentious notion dividing the West from the rest (see Sakai 2010a; 2010b; 2011a; 2011b; 2011c; Mignolo 2011; 2012), assigning ideological advantages to the West in keeping the monopoly of theory. .......................... translation / spring / 2014 9 One and the same utterance may open up many diverse universes, as “open the window,” which may be a command or a prayer, may imply that it is cold, that it is hot, that there is an earthquake, that there is a bat in the room, that Romeo is waiting outside etc. 10 Sentence régimes, régimes de phrases: performative, imperative, interrogative etc. 63  How to translate from one episteme to the other without es- sentializing them?11 We may temporarily forego the philosophical self-critical breakthrough achieved in principle regarding the lin- gering, but eventually receding, superciliousness of Western thought, ridden with immunity. In principle, for “Western” philoso- phers, self-critique is self-understood. They have even theorized this self-critique as the achievement of Western modernity, and claimed that theirs is the only self-critical episteme. Non-Western scholars have repeated this, though it may be questionable whether anyone is non-Western at all by now (Chakrabarty 2012). The prob- lem remains. Assumptions of superiority are based on the tacit cog- nitive precondition of separating theory from practice by an insurmountable wall, an abyssal line. This division has a normative function. It grounds the ideology of western superiority but presents this as neutrality. Assumptions of preeminence sharply separate subject from object, theory from practice, “civilized” from “uncivilized,” “us” from “others.” Such divisions are characteristic of modern Western knowledge inasmuch as it is colonial, its coloniality being concomi- tant and coextensive with the historical construction of capitalism. Such bipolar structuring of knowledge serves a predatory purpose, the purpose of appropriative sciences at the service of nations and states. Academic disciplines and status–knowledge, which differ from language to language, are constructed in collusion with hege- monic colonial knowledge, which is still to a great extent operative in spite of the post-Cold War devolution into a network of biopo- litical control through various outsourcings of state prerogatives. Disciplines are circularly based on the nation, and reproduce it. Historically located polities each have a general corresponding cognitive order and translation regime, with variations, intercon- nections, interferences and overlaps. On the other hand, there is in general no separating subject and object, body and soul, theory and practice in most of ancient Asian philosophical systems or other extra-European knowledge translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 11 In the next three paragraphs, i draw on my as yet (2013) unpublished paper “The immunity paradigm’s contradictory / complementary facets” from the conference Except Asia: Agamben’s Work in Transcultural Perspective, Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, June 25–27, 2013. 64 configurations. Something of this cognitive condition is still avail- able culturally although refuted by modern sciences, coming through in various new assemblages—(post)modernity, and “West- ern” hegemony not withstanding. What has been the condition of Western understanding of the relationship sovereignty–subjectivity, namely the separation between subject and object or theory and practice, has been neither the condition of the making of politics in the “rest” nor that of sovereignty, and has not been understood as being at the root of the becoming of political subjects in the “rest.” Which means that whole genealogies of knowledge have been kept invisible to European languages, untranslated, indeed apparently untranslatable to the hegemonic gaze. But untranslatability (like absolute translatability) is also a politics. In another conceptual and translation regime, experience and “practice” can outweigh ontological consideration, theory, the latter being in any case only an attribution, a random predication onto some reified object. The implications of śūnya-vāda (the teach- ing of naught in Buddhism) are even more radical: This “theory” (śūnya-vāda) is really here an antitheory invalidating in advance, by an implacable logic, any economic reason, material interests, selfish vital interests, any speculation trusting language and reason or daring ontological qualifications and metaphysical judgments. But both the Brahmanists, who resorted to the absolute, who believed in unconditional given knowledge (Veda), as well as the philosophically nuanced Buddhists, refused building separately such concepts as “subject” or “object.” This is the advaita, nondu- alism, in both, which however doesn’t amount to monotheism. It is a disposition that is decisive even today, and present in art, liter- ature, aesthetics, much of philosophy, in some political dispensa- tions, in forms of life, and in general culture. The historical distinction subject–object known to the West and disseminated all over the world for modernity-useful purposes, is part of an appro- priating conceptual and language apparatus that always has the ten- dency to reappear. It is part of a pursuit limited and burdened by the vital interest, situated within the horizon of “lower” knowl- edge.12 translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 12 Buddhist philosophers introduced the somewhat problematic but philosophically rich distinction between ordinary and higher knowledge. The two are intertwined and the former leads to the latter, which allows 65  The preoccupation with subject and subjectivation, specific to “Europe” and the “West,” stems from monotheism. It emerges as a Mediterranean particularity, and becomes all-pervasive, through colonial history. But there were originally no comparable monotheisms in Asia (except for a late Islam). Something of the mahāyānian Buddhist philosophy can be extrapolated to most philosophies of Asia: The subject–object relationship together with the realm of politics is part of the experiential, conventional truth, limited by language and within “Brahmā’s net.” We perceive the world as plurality through the appropriational mode. Reluctant theory and unreflected theory. Théorie malgré elle If we agree that “theory” is a normative, somewhat para- doxical concept, difficult to sustain and to prove since subsequent ones will correct any theory, and if we agree that it is a normative concept originating, again, in the conceptual “West,” we then must admit that “theory” is a fragile concept. If there is no neutral theory, the normativity in a theory will be its political bias depending on its ideological, geographical, cul- tural, class, gender etc. interests. It will have an origin in a specific concern that can be defined as political and vital, with a tendency to be universalized if possible and neutralized in order to pass un- noticed. Sundar Sarukkai (2013)13 mentions examples that identify ideological biases of theories, particularly in the area of history and of philosophy of science, and also their critique. We couldn’t agree more with him, principally as he argues “that non-Western philoso- phies might actually contribute more usefully to the understanding of the complex scientific description of reality compared to the tools available in dominant western traditions” (Sarukkai 2013, 6). Indeed, there is a blatant incapacity of philosophy and of history of science to translate from one cultural register to another. I would call this failure political, a politics with a deep historic con- dition. I must quote Sarukkai extensively, before suggesting some comments and complements to his excellent work. translation / spring / 2014 .......................... for an unphilosophical jump to esoteric knowledge in popular Buddhism and elsewhere, later. But it also allows important philosophical speculation. 13 I would like to thank Sundar Sarukkai for letting me engage with his important paper here. 66  What is striking about these [Western or after the Western pattern] discussions is that there is no mention of the non-European traditions in all these debates about H[istory of] S[cience] and P[hilosophy of] S[cience]. Even in the invocations of “tradition” and the “ever-changing fabric of human culture” there is no mention of the possible histories of the non-West which might be of interest to this debate. (Sarukkai 2013, 3) Sarukkai displaces his argument on the political terrain without announcing it. He switches from the HS and PS level to the political. Indeed, silencing a discourse is a political act, besides being a cognitive one. The two registers (scientific and political) come in the same wording, but have different implications. Yet as Sarukkai expects an answer from history of science and philosophy of science, he withdraws from the political register again (although a broader reading would have both history of science and philoso- phy of science as political, but this is not Sarukkai’s option.) Elsharky14 makes the important observation that it was the creation of the new disci- pline of history of science that begins to propagate a global ideology of science based on universal values. This effort, beginning before WW I, began to use a new ideology of internationalism in order to reshape the idea of science. Using notions such as Sci- entific Revolution, this discipline departed from the earlier syncretic model in order to frame the new global science which became synonymous with western science. (Sarukkai 2013, 5) Here, Sarukkai acknowledges a political and ideological dimension to history of science and philosophy of science, and he would be right in expecting an answer in political terms. But he stops short. He fails to acknowledge the national character and framework of the discipline of history of science—part and parcel of the international and colonial configuration of “Western sci- ence.” History, be it of science, was born as the foremost national discipline. If, as enough work in H[istory of] S[cience] clearly shows, colonialism and imperialism influence the very creation of the larger historical and philosophical themes associated with modern science then why is there still appreciable resistance to a critical engage- ment with other scientific traditions in the world? Ignoring them only continues this translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 14 Referenced by Sarukkai as M. Elshakry, “When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections,” Isis 101, 2010. See also Jack Goody (2007). 67  process of colonialism and imperialism and this is more dangerous since it is now done implicitly. (Sarukkai 2013, 5) But the “other scientific traditions in the world” are also national, since the nation has prevailed as an organizational princi- ple even retrospectively, when we say “Indian philosophy” or “Greek philosophy,” meaning antiquity. We are now clearly on po- litical terrain. But where does the identified “resistance to critical engagement with other scientific traditions” occur? Presumably, again in history and philosophy of science only, which are also pointed to by the author as coming from the Western cognitive hegemony. Why not seek alliances where doors are open, in (some) political philosophy? Why not break out of a limiting discipline, discourse, and translation regime? Sarukkai further remarks that philosophy of science ignores Indian logic because the latter doesn’t distinguish between the em- pirical and the formal (Sarukkai 2013, 7), or indeed between theory and practice. This observation is fine, but the problem is now defin- ing “Indian logic” as if it were a fact given once and for all, as some kind of retroactively operating national logic. If we wish to over- come historical unfairness due to the national construction of knowledge and its transmission, the solution cannot be to claim fairness for one nation or “national” science, “ours,” but only to critique that general national blueprint of knowledge construction. In the Indian case, the extensive work on Indian metallurgy, chemistry and mathemat- ics—to give a few examples—have conclusively proved the presence of an active the- oretical and practical engagement with activities that seem to be similar to other such activities in early Greek and later Europe. However, this does not mean that there was a universal way of doing and creating science. (Sarukkai 2013, 7, italics mine) Again—the comparison is national for all examples, and the nations fixed and defined as preexisting the translation opera- tion. More importantly, Sarukkai doesn’t link whatever he notes in the just quoted paragraphs with the absence of divide between the- ory and practice in “Indian” philosophy (reproached by “Western” views to “Indian” thought). Surprisingly, he invokes it without clar- translation / spring / 2014 ifying the relation between “theory” and “practice,” without defin- ing them or tracing their genealogy. But the divide between theory and practice (a marked hierarchy too) is originally a typically mod- 68 ern Western one. Why would it oblige Sarukkai to conform in any way, if he contests the latter’s logic? There is a skewed mainstream history of science which does not take into account non-Western contributions in the creation of science (ironical considering the work in H[istory of] S[cience] which questions this view!). We need to take this ideology of the mainstream history of science seriously for the harm it has created to non-Western societies—the harm extends from their students to government policies and indeed has had a great impact on these cultures. An exclusivist history of science that keeps the possibility of the scientific imagination within a constructed Greek and European history does great violence not only to other non-Western cultures but also to the very spirit of the scien- tific quest. (Sarukkai 2013, 8) It is the national configuration of knowledge that needs to be overcome. One step further is needed. Why not combat Western history and philosophy of science with the help of “Western” and “non-Western” political philosophy and other disciplines of the kind that take into account those other epistemologies? Why not draw a broader picture involving a critique of the logic of the epis- teme? If we do that, we will also find that an episteme is coexten- sive, coexistent, and enmeshed with a mode of production, forms of life, a political regime, a construct of culture and language, and that we need to look for a broader context. As Solomon writes, “One of the qualities that distinguishes the West as a paradigm of the modern apparatus of area is the institutionalization of transla- tion-as-cultural transference through the disciplinary control of bodies of knowledge” (Solomon 2013). [T]he social formation that we have come to know as ‘the West’ is precisely that form of community that reserves for itself, among all other forms of human community, the key position in the speciation of the human, the place where the epistemological project is articulated to the politico-ontological one. Seen in this light, the West aspires to be the sole community that is self-aware, through scientific knowledge, of humanity’s ac- tive participation in its own speciation. Yet it is not simply by virtue of a proprietary claim over knowledge that the West has been able to form itself as the pole or center or model of human population management in general. In order to occupy this position, it has been necessary to construct out of the contingency of historical encounter (colo- nialism) a political system for effective population management (effective from the point of view of capitalist accumulation). (Solomon 2013, n. p.) translation / spring / 2014 I argue that the separation reproduced by Sarukkai between hard sciences on the one hand as well as the social sciences and po- 69  litical philosophy on the other coincides with the problematic dis- tinction between theory and practice mechanically taken over from positivism and from some unsophisticated forms of Marxism. It is itself “Western” in origin and manner, but, what is more important, it belongs to appropriative knowledge. It has also become quite uni- versal by now. History of science still draw[s] on philosophical concepts that are also available in alternate philosophical traditions. There is no reason to believe that these philosophical ideas are irrelevant to these contemporary concerns of philosophy of science. (Sarukkai 2013, 8) I agree. Connective history of science will by necessity have to deal with and incorporate al- ternate worldviews and philosophical concepts. (Sarukkai 2013, 8) I agree, but additional efforts are needed to achieve this and get out of the system. Connective history of science is a move towards a “global history of local science.” (Sarukkai 2013, 9) Agreed, but it is also a move towards a “global history of science” tout court, since the local–global distinction reproduces the other divides that are at the basis of objectal, and eventually predatory knowledge—particularly congenial to globalized capi- talism. Such knowledge was alien to and discarded by ancient “Asian” philosophical systems. Although this has been revised as modernity made its way, refusing objectal, appropriative knowledge instrumental to production has nevertheless persisted as an alter- native scientific temper in “India” and generally in Asia as well as elsewhere. But Sarukkai only insists that Indians did have all the rationality needed for modern industry, and that their knowledge was merely stolen by the British through distinguishing between “theory” and “practice.” That is surely only part of the story. When the British encountered many Indian inventions in science and technology, they translation / spring / 2014 made use of them in order to establish their own industries but refused to acknowledge that these processes were part of scientific rationality. Claims that these Indian inven- tions were more a product of “doing” rather than “knowing,” specifically a theoretical 70  mode of knowing, made it easy for them to reject the claim of science to almost all in- tellectual contributions from India.” (Sarukkai 2013, 9) How can we project India back, a later and national forma- tion, onto ancient science? The fact that Western philosophy has always done exactly that with ancient Greek thought does not jus- tify the mimetic gesture. That would keep us within the system in- stead of showing ways out. We need some other “scientific” and, eventually, political imagination. A useful investigation here, in line with Sarukkai’s attempt, would be to probe into the parallel, inter- twined, interrelated structures of knowledge, power and produc- tion. About the normativity of science and theory: “One of the primary ways by which the title of science is denied to non-Western intellectual traditions is through the invocation of terms such as logic, scientific method, evidence, prediction and so on” (Sarukkai 2013, 9). While discovering the normativity of hegemonic forms of knowledge, Sundar Sarukkai fails to investigate the relationship be- tween knowledge, production and political system, and thus de- prives himself of the help that political thought could bring, including a consideration of the terms of translation. He remains riveted to a world with fixed identities, which reduces translation to a sterile bipolar exercise that ignores the fluidity of relations. Sarukkai further significantly argues that western mathe- matics are irreparably linked to Platonism, unlike Indian mathe- matics. This makes it impossible for the former to recognize the latter. From seeing the trees, Sarukkai doesn’t see the forest! His claim about Platonism is extremely important: It implies the body- and-soul, theory-and-practice divisions. It will become systemic and institutionalized through monotheism (Christianity) among oth- ers, and hence, in modernity, through the grounding of state sover- eignty and all this implies. Platonism will pervade all spheres of life, labor, and culture, not only mathematics, so that understanding and deconstructing it will require social sciences, one step further from the history and philosophy of science because these too need translation / spring / 2014 to be questioned (not that social sciences are in any way a guaran- tee). It is the whole framework, the regime of translation that re- quires interrogation. 71  What is really so mysterious (a word used by Einstein in this context) about the use of mathematics? The major reason for this mystery is Platonism. If mathematical entities exist in a nonspatiotemporal world then how do we spatiotemporal beings have knowl- edge of them? For these scientists, who viewed mathematics along such a nonempirical axis, the use of mathematics was surprising. Its “natural match” with physical concepts was a source of mystery only if we first begin with a clear disjunction between math- ematics and the world.15 (Sarukkai 2005, 11) Very well: a clear disjunction between subject and object, theory and practice, body and soul, man and woman could also be stated in the same line. The disjunction between mathematics and the world corresponds to that between body and soul of the Chris- tian episteme. It has been the main apparatus of capturing the ma- terial world by the vested interests of dominant classes, and thus of hegemony. Sarukkai proceeds: It is precisely this point which Indian mathematics would challenge. Mathematics is essential to this world; it arises from this world and through human action. The puzzle of applicability will take on a completely different form if we begin with the assumption that mathematics is enworlded and embodied. Interestingly, this is a position that has now gained some ground through the framework of cognitive studies but in a pre- dictable replay these approaches also make no mention of such approaches in non- Western traditions. (Sarukkai 2005, 11) The disjunction of mathematics with the world also implies that of theory with practice, of soul with body, of man with woman, as it entails hierarchical normative relations. One could be more ambitious than Sarukkai, while supporting his critique, and claim that it is not only mathematics but the whole episteme which is af- fected by such disjunctions; and that these do not appear, or not to the same extent, in extra-European epistemes—that is, in non hege- monic epistemes (except for the universal divide, diversely imple- mented, between men and women). There is a historic reason for this: these extra-European epistemes, far from being more right- eous, have not been able to impose themselves as hegemonic, con- sidering the colonial leaning and attraction for power involved in any knowledge. No answer can come solely from traditional phi- losophy of science or history of science here, but rather through a translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 15 The author’s reference here is Sarukkai, 2005. 72 more comprehensive approach and critique of translation regimes, by way of political philosophy, or through an all-encompassing ap- proach that will question the whole hegemonic episteme and con- crete national epistemes too, their genealogy and apparatus. Sarukkai convincingly argues that contributions of “Indian philosophies and sciences” to science in general have been occulted and obscured, impoverishing the history of science of important parts of its heritage. He also gives examples of how varied and rich “Indian physics” or metaphysics (considerations of matter, sub- stance, nature, elements, quality, inherence, motion, etc.) have been ignored, how different schools of “Indian logic” have been uncared for, while similar views from “Greek” philosophy have become the only reference and terminus even though “Indian” examples could have been offered. This additionally left out of sight original “In- dian” contributions. Sarukkai therefore proposes the method of a connective history of science which would take into account the philosophical context of the different historic configurations where all contributions to “global science” would be acknowledged, help- ing the advancement of both science and its history. But without an extra step, he will remain within the system he pledges to cri- tique. Sarukkai has the enormous merit of identifying the non-Pla- tonism in “Indian” sciences, which has earned it nonrecognition on the side of “Western” universalized knowledge. Another important characteristic may be mentioned con- comitantly here that added to “Indian” philosophies being rejected by the “Western” ones, and that has been mediated especially through Buddhism: the purposeful nonrecognition of any kind of subject (or any kind of subject/object divide) on the “Indian” side, and thus the not grounding of any kind of (state) sovereignty at the other end of the scale (Iveković, 2014). While i share Sarukkai’s observations about the configuration of “Indian” philosophies and while i think that they can be enlarged and applied to other areas of knowledge, i would also suggest that it would be more than nec- essary to define or discard terms such as “Indian,” “Indian science” etc. in the way of deconstructing the national scaffolding, if we wish to overcome the given national and transnational framework translation / spring / 2014 and inner logic we critique. 73  For a critical (Anti)Theory of Translation: competing transla- tion politics Theories are built by subjects and sovereigns, and when successfully hegemonic, also in support of sovereignties. Sover- eigns need to have a monolithic national language that is also the language of command and of maintaining the system. Theories are linked to conjuncture, to places, to specific and interested readings of history, to fending for the dominant regime of thinking, of lan- guages, of translation, and, once they prevail, for mainstream. Today it is global capitalism. The reluctant “theories” we are nev- ertheless practicing as processes, for better or for worse, can at best attempt to deconstruct the national framework of knowledge as well as of its transmission (theory), through inventing new politics of liberation and new imaginaires of translation. It must be understood that translation does not guarantee freedom of any kind, and that it can be as much a politics of conquest, capture, exploration-and- exploitation,16 and colonialism, whether inner17 or outer. But poli- tics of translation may be invented. Since they will necessarily be forever amendable, such politics of translation may rather not re- spond to the high name of theory. They will be checked by transla- tion practices in view of their resistance to new enclosures within an “unsurpassable” capitalist horizon. Theory tends to correspond within knowledge, in a figure of co-figuration,18 to the sovereignty of the political sphere. It tends to be absolutized, to produce transcendence and an absolute other. It has also been historically self-attributed, self-complacent, and reserved by the West to itself. This construction originally comes from the monotheistic Mediterranean context where god as the supreme subject (sovereign) is the necessary condition to the projection of the human (epi)subject: no god, no subject. The theory has its modern developments and versions. One of the sub- ject’s declensions will be the nation. Theory is a kind of (barely) .......................... 16 One and the same word, exploração appropriately denoting “exploitation” and not “exploring” in Por- tuguese. translation / spring / 2014 17 By inner colonialism i mean the treatment of such groups as women, Roma, migrants, minorities, or whoever the excluded beyond the abyssal lines (Boaventura de Sousa Santos) or subordinated of one time are. See de Sousa Santos (2000) and de Sousa Santos (2007). 18 Sakai’s important term in a slightly different application. See N. Sakai (1997). 74 secularized cognitive variant of divine transcendence.19 “Scientific knowledge” has been intertwined with and in- separable from theology. Theory will sustain the sovereign (whether godly or human) and its emanation, the subject, as well as their separation from life experience. The subject (and, in its/his stead, derivatively, the epi-subject), custodian of Revelation (San- skrit: śruti), kicks a “beginning” as if it were absolute. The multiple genealogies, origins, and inheritances of theory, however carefully hidden and silenced, resurface again and again, disputing its high and unique status. In fact, what is hidden is the whole apparatus of theory-established hierarchies and exclusion—that is, the mecha- nism of its sovereignist claim (see Solomon 2013). Theory’s tools are language and narration, just as in less theoretical matters. In South Asian ancient philosophies in Sanskrit, this corresponds to the hammered—but really constructed and ideological—difference between śruti and smṛti. Theory will also distribute names and set grades, in which its function—as well as that of language through master-narra- tives—is not very different from that of foundational myths (smṛti). The Greek divide and constructed abyssal gap between logos and muthos (taken over into the Christian religion in corresponding form, and parallel to the developing split between theory and prac- tice) reinforces and maintains the coloniality of knowledge and power: all “others,” whether inner or outer, have systematically been reduced to muthos and nontheory (mere “practice”), as irra- tional and incapable of science. This separation, downgrading, ex- ception, is also an exemption from sovereignty. “Others” were deemed bereft of autonomy out of their own limitation: other con- tinents, women, and any other group, form of life, or translation regime under that label. Theory, as much as god, designates the other. There are certainly ways, and historic experiences, of not complying with such a diktat, that amount to “other possibilities of the spirit.” François Jullien says that such “other possibilities” are translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 19 See François Jullien (2012, 107): “[L]es ‘Grecs’ ont-ils jamais existé? N’ont-ils pas été forgés par nos Humanités?” A similar point is made in Prasenjit Duara (forthcoming). I would like to thank Duara for al- lowing me to read chapters of his work in progress. 75  not always played out, and he goes on unveiling them by “compar- ing” Greek, Christian, and Chinese thinking histories: they become particularly visible when various civilizational options are rubbed against each other. We mentioned some, stemming from what would ultimately be known as (ancient) “Indian” philosophies, while Jullien has been showing it for the Chinese worldviews. Chi- nese or “Indian” philosophies did not delve the insuperable gap between logos and muthos, or theory and practice. No grand nar- ratives were therefore constructed in China, according to Jullien: China had no need to posit god, and the word is not foundational there (see Jullien 2012, 68, 69, 70, and 98).20 Jullien pleads in favor of reading a system of thought “from outside,” through “contrasting parallels” (which is not a dichotomic hierarchical comparison of the classical Western type, and does not presuppose prior categorization), through letting go, letting play parallels, through yielding, through detachment from one’s own/unique culture. The contrastivity, letting the effects of a gap work, will shed light on avenues of thought that have not been ful- filled (Jullien 2012, 65 and following). He calls the contrasting of Chinese and Western thought “entering a way of thinking” (entrer dans une pensée). Such an entry is not afforded through a narrative or a subject behind it. It is operated from a declension or inclination of the reader, of the translator, of the one who approaches a “way of thinking,” who is changed in the process: the translator is trans- lated as she discovers the unthought (l’impensé) lying at the base of thought. It would be difficult to translate this into Sakai’s trans- lation theory, but, like the latter, the former doesn’t believe in neu- tral translation or a neutral ground between contrasted elements. In both, this entails concrete political responsibility from case to case. Discarding one’s armature of thinking, deconstructing and dislo- cating the national construction and fixed framework of knowledge (see Iveković 2007b; 2009–2010) is a necessary precondition and way of doing this. Contrasting without establishing categories and hierarchies, without heeding disciplines (molded by national cultures and insti- translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 20 Although an “Asian” disposition, this does not fully correspond to Brahmanic (consider the Veda, Ma- habharata, and Ramayana) or Hindu thought (see Rada Iveković 1992). 76 tutions), may be particularly helpful in highlighting unexpected possibilities, unfulfilled options, or eschewed results. Given that disciplines denote borders of theoretical territories, ignoring them sometimes allows passing beside, below, above, or through dividing lines. This might be a possible way indeed in systems where there is no dominant narrative or vertical epistemological hierarchy, no historic construction of sovereignty and of the concept of a subject (Iveković 2013), such as is sometimes the case in Asia or elsewhere in once colonized continents, or where there has been some consti- tutive (even merely) structural resistance to monolithic national narratives. Times of crises put an accent on the subject’s wavering (Europe today), but can prompt these other thinking options where the concept of a subject was purposely avoided. The great writer and philosopher Radomir Konstantinović wrote about the tension resulting from the inner cleavage of the cit- izen and of the communist, important figures of the subject in twen- tieth-century Yugoslavia (but metaphorically, also elsewhere), ending in the failure of both (Konstantinović 1981).21 Konstantinović’s pessimistic message concerning Western modernity in general was that the political subjectivation of the cit- izen may end in nationalism/Nazism.22 He exemplifies it with the Serbian case. His optimistic message comes with, in principle, open possibilities (the blank of the borderline spirit of the crisis, palanka) and through the split subject. Paradoxically, this is best shown in art, writing, and trans- lation, as in the self-fulfilled prophecy of the novel or drama that can only signal the impossibility of a novel (as the form par excel- lence of national citizenship) or of drama: in the same way in which the only possible subjectivation from perhaps the end of the 1960s is—the impossibility of constituting a subject. Did Yugoslavia not implode because of that impossibility, having no middle class and no nation, supposed to be only a secu- larized administrative, common post-national frame? No drama was to oppress its nonsubject citizens, who were to be spared the .......................... translation / spring / 2014 21 See also French excerpts in Konstantinović (2001a), Konstantinović (2001b), and Konstantinović (2001c). Other French excerpts can also be found in Becket and Konstantinović (2000), and Iveković (1998). 22 Konstantinović talked about modernity as such, irrespective of whether capitalist or socialist: the pattern, for him, was the same, and socialism was a form of modernity. 77  need to engage in politics (my generation), because everything had been taken care of by our revolutionary fathers in the Second World War through resistance to the Nazis? Revolution was “museified,” drama excluded. Radomir Konstantinović tried to think the non- subjectified subject of our times,23 the one incapable of, or refusing translation as exchange and fluidity; the one allowing only for ab- solute translation (see Iveković 2011), entrenching borders, social relations and inequalities.24 Naoki Sakai however deems that nation is not a fatality or a necessity, and that it could have been avoided. What forms in Asia could have helped such an alternative? It is difficult to imagine other options, he insists, from within the prevailing one. We could have had another world, with no nationalities and no nation states. In particular, it was not the destiny of Asia, which took a very long time to adapt to the international world. According to Sakai, na- tionality was not given, being “a restricted and distorted derivative of transnationality.” Like language being the result of translation (and not vice-versa), so is nationality the outcome of transnation- ality that precedes it. “A bordering turn must be accompanied the- oretically by a translational turn: bordering and translation are both problematics projected by the same theoretical perspective” (Sakai 2013). Writing of the scandals with the cartoons of prophet Mo- hammad, Judith Butler analyses the ways in which, according to different frameworks (Christian or Muslim), we may diversely un- derstand the term “blasphemy”: “the translation has to take place within divergent frames of moral evaluation. […] in some ways the conflict that emerged in the wake of the publication of the Danish cartoons is one between competing moral frameworks, understand- ing ‘blasphemy’ as a tense and overdetermined site for the conver- gence of differing schemes of moral value” (Butler 2009, 103–104). .......................... 23 See not only Konstantinović (1981), but also downloadable texts by and on him in Serbo-Croatian, in- cluding Konstantinović (n.d.). The site from which these texts can be downloaded () is an archive of impor- translation / spring / 2014 tant Yugoslav intellectual and political works and is run by Branimir Stojanović Trša. On Konstantinović, see also Sarajevske Sveske, an on-line Serbo–Croat journal. See also Klaus Theweleit (1977 and 1988), and Iveković (2009). 24 On bordering as a process, see Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2003) and (2013). See also Sakai in general, but (2013) in particular. 78 There are thus competing translation codes or regimes, much as Balibar identifies competing universalisms.25 They may go hand in hand. Wendy Brown has it that cri- tique (and theory?) have been identified with secularism. As we know from Balibar (see especially 2012), secularism or cosmopoli- tanism and religion compete on the same terrain. It is all a matter of translation. It is on that contested terrain that various political options for translation can unfold. Alas, there is “normally” no imaginative power or political imagination enabling us to think a world without nations, nationalities and borders, or translating them: in order to do so, we must step without that frame through our mind’s eye. This is a contribution towards an attempt to start thinking one. The question of political translation becomes a concrete one at times of crisis and reshuffling. We are currently in one such age, and trans- lation may well be one of the tools. translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 25 Étienne Balibar, from “Les universels” (1997) through “Sub specie universitatis” (2006), develops the observation of competing universalisms, then, logically, with his paper “Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Controversial Legacies and Prospective Interrogations” (2011), that of competing national sovereignties and competing religions or secularisms. This matter is taken up once again in Balibar (2012). 79  References Balibar, Étienne. 1997. “Les Universels,” in La Crainte des masses. 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From global lines to ecologies of knowl- edges.” Eurozine. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-06-29-santos- en.html Duara, Prasenjit. Forthcoming. Transcendence in a secular world: Asian Traditions and Sustainable Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack. 2007. The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iveković, Rada. 1992. Orients: critique de la raison postmoderne. Paris: Blandin. ———. 1998. “Radomir Konstantinović, La philosophie du bourg, La mort de Descartes.” La République des lettres. 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On (De)Coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience.” eipcp-transversal, unsettling knowledges. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0112/mignolo/en. translation / spring / 2014 Sakai, Naoki. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nation- alism. Minneapolis–London: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2010a. “Theory and Asian Humanity: on the question of humanitas and an- thropos.” Postcolonial Studies 13 (4): 441–464. 81  ———. 2010b. “Translation as a filter.” Transeuropéennes. http://www.transeu- ropeennes.eu/en/articles/200/Translation_as_a_filter/Sakai. ———. 2011a. “Theory and the West: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthro- pos.” Transeuropéennes. http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/arti- cles/316/Theory_and_the_West/Sakai. ———. 2011b.“Le genre, enjeu politique et langage du nationalisme post-colonial japonais.” Cahiers du genre 50 (1): 41–64. ———. 2011c. “The Body of the Nation : the Pastorate, the Emperor System and the Society of Sympathy of Japan’s Intellectual Modernization.” In Biopolitics, Ethics and Subjectivation, edited by A. Brossat, J. C. H. Liu, Y-H. Chu, and R. Iveković. Paris: L’Harmattan. 91–120. ———. 2013. “The Microphysics of Comparison. Towards the Dislocation of the West.” In eipcp-translate, eine kommunalität, die nicht sprechen kann: eu- ropa in übersetzung, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0613/sakai1/en/#_ednref1. Sarajevske Sveske. http://sveske.ba/. Sarukkai, Sundar. 2005. “Revisiting the ‘Unreasonable Effectiveness’ of mathemat- ics.” Current Science 88 (3). 415–423. ———. 2013. “Philosophical Implications of Connective History of Science,” paper at the workshop “The Bright Dark Ages: Comparative and Connective Per- spectives,” organized by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, February. 27–28. Solomon, Jon. 2013. “Another European Crisis?! Myth, translation, and the apparatus of area.” eipcp-transversal, a communality that cannot speak: europe in translation, June. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0613/solomon/en. Theweleit, Klaus. 1977. Männerphantasien. Volume 1. Basel: Verlag Roter Stern/Stroemfeld. ———. 1978. Männerphantasien. Volume 2. Basel: Verlag Roter Stern/Stroemfeld. Rada Iveković lives and works in Paris. She is a philosopher. Articles: “The Watershed of Modernity,” http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/JSKSdg2Ag Taxgvg9V67F/full; “Politiques de la philosophie à partir de la modernité” (in English and French), www.transeuropeennes.eu/fr/articles/113; “For whom the whistle blows: Welcome to the immunity frontier,”; www.africanrhetoric.org/pdf/O%20AYOR %203_1%20Ivekovic.pdf; “Gender and nation” (audio recording in French), http://www. translation / spring / 2014 mondialisations.org/php/public/art.php?id=36101&lan=FR; L’éloquence tempérée du Bouddha. Souverainetés et dépossession de soi (2014); http://eipcp.net /bio/ivekovic. 82 

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At the Borders of Europe From Cosmopolitanism to Cosmopolitics Étienne Balibar ........................... Kingston University, London, UK [email protected] Abstract: The essay addresses uses of “cosmopolitanism” and “cosmopolitics” in the current global political conjuncture, from a European point of view. Against the assumption (by Jürgen Habermas in particular) that Europe could become the typical cosmopolitan continent through a natural continuation of its uni- versalist traditions, it argues that the universal exists only in the form of con- flicting universalities. Eurocentrism therefore deserves not only a refutation, but a genuine deconstruction. Expanding on previous contributions, I focus on the historical transformation or the “border” as a quasi-transcendental condition for the constitution of the political, which is paradoxically reflected in its center. The “central” character of the “periphery” acquires a new visibility in the con- temporary period. A “phenomenology of the border” becomes a prerequisite for an analysis of the citizen. I examine tentatively three moments: first, the antithesis of war and translation as contradictory overlapping models of the Political, which I call “polemological” and “philological” respectively; second, the equivocality of the category of the stranger, who tends to become reduced to the enemy in the crisis of the nation-state; third, the cosmopolitical difficulty of Europe to deal with its double otherness, regarding other Europeans and non-Europeans who are targeted by complementary forms of xenophobia. ______________ In this essay, I want to address questions of common inter- est about the use and relevance of such notions as “cosmopoli- tanism” and “cosmopolitics” in the current global political conjuncture, and I will do so mainly from a European point of view. This might seem a contradiction in terms, since the overcoming of a certain Eurocentrism forms one of the preconditions for the de- velopment of a cosmopolitical discourse. I have two reasons for doing so, both linked to a certain practice of critical theorizing. The first is that—in spite of some very interesting refer- translation / spring / 2014 ences to the idea of cosmopolitanism, or its transformation, in so- called postcolonial discourse—the continuous reference to cosmopolitanism today seems largely a product of the self-con- 83  sciousness of Europeans seeking to understand, if not to promote, Europe’s autonomous contribution to the regulation of conflicts in the new Global order. Habermas’s “return to Kant” (and others as well, from which I do not except myself) is typical in this respect. It is as if, after becoming the first imperial “center” of modern his- tory, Europe could become the typical cosmopolitan continent through a natural continuation, or perhaps a dialectical reversal, building its new political figure in this perspective. This implicit claim, shared by many of us, has to be compared with realities, and examined as a discursive formation. The second reason refers to an even more general perspec- tives of “politics of the universal,” which would take into account the conflictual character of universality as such, or the fact that the universal historically exists only in the form of conflicting univer- salities, both inseparable and incompatible. Universalities become conflictual because they are built on the absolutization of antithetic values, but also because they are enunciated in different places by different actors in the concrete process of world history. From this point of view, “Eurocentrism” has a paradoxical, if not unique, po- sition: it is the discourse whose pretense at incarnating universalism in the name of reason, or culture, or legal principles, is most likely to become increasingly challenged and refuted, as the history of the European and “new European” conquest of the world becomes re- examined from a critical point of view. But it is also a symbolic or conceptual pattern which is likely to remain untouched while re- jected or reversed or to become transferred to other imagined com- munities. As a consequence, Eurocentrism deserves not only a rejection or a refutation, but a genuine deconstruction—that is, a critique which dissolves and transforms it from the inside, in order to produce a self-understanding of its premises and functions. In this sense, a deconstruction of Eurocentrism performed by the Eu- ropeans themselves—with the help of many others—is not only a precondition for the undertaking of any postimperial “cosmopoli- tics,” it is part of its construction itself. A distinction of cosmopolitan discourse (or theory) and practical cosmopolitics seems now to have gained a very wide ac- translation / spring / 2014 ceptance, and, while I make use of it, I certainly claim no particular originality. It apparently results from three interrelated considera- tions. First, from the idea of reversing utopia into practice, or re- 84 turning from the elaboration of a cosmopolitan idea (which could serve as a regulatory model for the development of institutions) to the programs, instruments, objectives, of a politics whose actors, be they states or other social individualities, immediately operate and become interrelated at the world level. Note that such an idea can be associated with the consideration of globalized processes in the field of economy, strategy, communications, in opposite ways. It can be argued that the overcoming of the utopian moment of cos- mopolitanism arises as a consequence of the globalizing phenom- ena themselves. The material conditions would now exist for cosmopolitanism to pass from utopia into reality, if not “science.” There would even exist already something like an “actually existing cosmopolitanism,” to recall the title of one of the sections in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins’s influential anthology (1998), which could become politicized or provide a cosmopolitics or Weltinnen- politik with its practical and affective support. But it can be argued also that globalization destroys the possibility of a cosmopolitan utopia, or deprives it of any nonideological function, because cos- mopolitanism was only possible as an idealized counterpart for the fact that, however global or transnational its objectives might be, which is particularly the case of socialist internationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, actual politics remained rooted in local, and particularly national, communities (see Balibar 2006a). This ideal projects a solution or final settlement for the actual con- flicts, and for that reason would grant a foundational value to the prospect or project of peace, in particular the establishment of peace through the implementation of law. This leads us to another powerful reason for the substitution of a practical notion of cosmopolitics for the classical ideal of cos- mopolitanism, which has to do with the broadly shared idea that the proper realm of politics is conflict. What Globalization has mainly achieved is a generalization of conflicts of multiple forms, reviving old ones (for example, between religious and secular forces) and perpetuating recent ones, displaying them all at the level of the whole world: and so the ultimate horizon of politics in the global age, with no predictable end, would be the fighting of con- translation / spring / 2014 flicts or the attempt at regulating them, but never putting an end to them. Such an idea is common to many authors today, albeit with important nuances: it is there in Ulrich Beck’s thesis that the “cos- 85  mopolitical gaze” presupposes that “war is peace” or their respec- tive realms are no longer fully discernible (Beck 2006). It is there also in Chantal Mouffe’s representation of an “agonistic pluralism” that informs the macropolarities of the progressively emerging post- national political sphere (see Moufffe 2000). And it is there in Eti- enne Tassin, who along Arendtian lines, but also drawing the consequences from a postmodernist critique of the notions of po- litical consensus and collective identities, seeks to articulate differ- ent concepts of resistance to the destruction of the “common world” which results from the uncontrolled processes of capitalist global- ization (see Tassin 2003). But again there is a wide range of dis- cursive positions here, including a certain equivocity of the use of the category “conflict.” At one end we have conflict understood as a specific form of political practice, in a tradition that could be Marxist but also Weberian and, indeed, Schmittian; at the other, we have the idea of conflict as matter or object of political intervention, which takes the form of regulation or, to use the now fashionable terminology, “governance.” The core of contemporary politics, which pushes it to the level of “cosmopolitics,” would be to find how to keep regulating or governing conflict, that is ultimately es- tablish consensus and hegemonies, beyond the declining monopoly of the nation–state in its violent or legal capacity to create peace and order within certain territorial boundaries. Such is clearly the prospect evoked in the work of David Held, with its opposition be- tween a growing state of injustices, disorders, and inequalities cre- ated by Globalization as a counterpart for the universalization of exchanges and communications, and a global “social-democratic governance,” whose quasi-legal instrument would be a “planetary contract” among states and social actors (see Held 2013). But it is also the horizon of Mary Kaldor’s (2013) idea of the “Global Civil Society” and its politicization as “an answer to war,” although in a more nuanced and empirical style. And finally this leads us to the third interrelated motive that I believe underlies the current insistence on “cosmopolitics” as the concrete form of cosmopolitanism or an alternative to its utopian character, which lies in the primacy of the issue of insecurity or— translation / spring / 2014 to put it again in Ulrich Beck’s terms—“risk society” at the global level. This is an additional element because the issue here is not simply to confront alternative replies to the same insecurity, or to 86 the same dominant form of insecurity (be it terrorism, war, eco- nomic instability, mass poverty, the destruction of the environment, and so forth), but more fundamentally, in a sort of generalized Hobbesian problematic, to define and hierarchize the different forms of “insecurity” which are perceived and expressed by actors and power structures in today’s world. It is this second degree in the political contest on insecurity that, far from remaining purely theoretical, directly impacts the antithetic positions on the function of international institutions, inherited from the ancient cosmopoli- tan ideal, as was plainly illustrated by the controversy between George Bush and Kofi Annan in 2003 at the opening of the United Nations’ General Assembly, just before the invasion of Iraq. Again, I claim no originality in my discussion of these themes. My specific contribution, which I have been trying to elab- orate in a more or less explicit manner in the last two decades, has progressively focused on the historical transformation or the “bor- der” (or the “frontier”) as a concrete institution which, far from forming simply an external condition for the constitution of the po- litical, empirically associated with the hegemony of the territorial nation–state, represents an internal, quasi-transcendental condition of possibility for the definition of the citizen and the community of citizens, or the combination of inclusion and exclusion which de- termines what Arendt called the “intermediary space,” or Zwischen- raum, of political action and contestation, where the right to have rights becomes formulated. In this sense, the border is only seem- ingly an external limit: in reality it is always already interiorized or displaced towards the center of the political space. This could be considered since the origins—even before the emergence of the modern Nation–State—a “cosmopolitical” element, which pro- foundly transformed the meaning and institution of borders but did not invent them. The question then becomes how to understand why this paradoxically “central” character of the “periphery” ac- quires a new visibility and a more controversial status in the con- temporary period, in any case in Europe. The same kind of issue is currently being discussed and investigated in depth, especially in Italy, by Sandro Mezzadra and Enrica Rigo from a more juridical translation / spring / 2014 and constitutional point of view (see Rigo 2006). But I also try to develop what I call a “phenomenology of the border” as prerequi- site of an analysis of the globalized citizen, which combines sub- 87  jective experiences with objective structural transformations in a highly unstable, overdetermined manner. It is this kind of phenom- enology that I would like to evoke now, by sketching three devel- opments: first, on the antithesis of war and translation, or polemological and philological models of the border; second, on the equivocity of the category of the stranger and the tendency to reduce it to a figure of the enemy through the development of bor- der wars against migrants; and third, on what I call the “double oth- erness” affecting the status and representation of foreigners in today’s Europe, to reach a final interrogation on the paradoxical identity of what we might call the “subject of cosmopolitics,” as a figure determined locally as well as globally. But before that, I must return, as briefly as possible, to some considerations concerning Europe, “Eurocentrism,” and the cosmopolitical issue. It will be easier and also politically revealing, I believe, to refer here to some well-known propositions by Jürgen Habermas and the way they have progressively evolved under the impact of the recent “war on terror.” This is not only a way to pay a well de- served tribute to a great living philosopher, whose questions and interventions continuously inform our reflection even when we dis- agree with his premises or depart from his conclusions, but also a way to illustrate this self-critical, internal relationship to the “Eu- ropean” definition of cosmopolitanism that I mentioned at the be- ginning. It did not remain unnoticed that Habermas’s positions concerning cosmopolitanism had significantly changed in the last period, before and after 9/11 and the subsequent new wave of US military interventions in the world, especially the unilateral inva- sion of Iraq in 2003 without a warrant from the Security Council. Many of his declarations and contributions have been internation- ally widespread, including the declaration from May 2003 reacting to the statement by European States supporting the US invasion, which was also endorsed by Jacques Derrida, with the title “After the War: Europe’s Renaissance,” in which he hailed the simultane- ous anti-war demonstrations in various European countries as a mo- ment of emergence of the long-awaited European public sphere (see translation / spring / 2014 Habermas and Derrida 2003). This was later developed in the ac- knowledgement of a “split” within the Western liberal–democratic alliance, arising from the antitotalitarian commitment in the post- 88 World War II period, which separated the unilateralist power poli- tics of the US from the orientation of the European “core states” (Kerneuropa) which was supposed to act in the direction of the con- stitution of a “global domestic politics without a global govern- ment” (Weltinnenpolitik ohne Welregierung) in the Kantian spirit (see Habermas 2006). This involved not only a limitation of na- tional claims to absolute sovereignty, but the equivalent of a “con- stitutionalization of international law,” subjecting and transforming the national politics of states through the self-imposed recognition of the primacy of universal legal and moral rules forming a politics of human rights. More recently, Habermas has expressed disappointment and skepticism with respect to this cosmopolitan function attributed to Europe, or its historical avant-garde, but he has maintained the commitment to the same general objective (see Habermas 2009). This amounted to granting a practical reality and effectivity, in a critical situation which would appear as a turning point in Modern history, to the more speculative idea already explained at length in Habermas’s “post national constellation” essays from the previous decade: the constitution of a supranational European ensemble, lim- iting the sovereignty of its member–states without giving rise to a new imperial superstate, was presented there as a form of “transi- tion” between the old power politics of states based on their iden- tification as substantial historical communities, in other terms the hegemony of nationalism, and the coming of the new cosmopolitan order where the relationship of individuals to their communities and allegiances is subjected to the formal and ethical recognition of universal legal norms. The argument bears analogies with the manner in which, in Kant’s practical philosophy, the respect for the moral law or categorical imperative is supposed to impose a con- straint on the “pathological” affective element of individual per- sonality, or in Kant’s own terms, to permanently “humiliate” its power. Accordingly, we would have the unmistakable sign of a shift from nationalism to the dominance of a pure “patriotism of the con- stitution” (Verfassungspatriotismus), intrinsically governing the de- velopment of the European Union, and conferring upon it a translation / spring / 2014 meaning and an influence widely superseding its local function. Now, it would be too easy to dismiss Habermas’s views as utopian and grossly overestimating the cosmopolitan content and 89  capacities of the European construction, and to call for a sobering return to the facts, showing that the Weltpolitik of the European Union, or perhaps we should say, rather, its lack of a Global project of its own in the last period, has patently refuted any illusion of a progressive function, especially with respect to the creation of a Global order and a system of international law genuinely independ- ent from power interests. I believe that a more interesting series of remarks can be proposed. With a nasty spirit, I was always tempted to draw a formal analogy between the way Habermas presented the European construction as an intermediary step between nationalism and the coming cosmopolitical juridical order and the way, after the adoption of the idea of “socialism in one country” around which the world revolutionary movement should gather and redefine its strategy, the construction of the Soviet Union and the Socialist camp was presented as a “transitional phase” in the long process of political transition from capitalism to communism. This is only a formal analogy indeed, but that testifies to the extent to which teleological models of historical progress arising ultimately from the Enlightenment permeate both the cosmopolitan and the inter- nationalist discourses, or dominate their concepts of history in a manner that is relatively independent from the divisions between rival political ideologies. It testifies also to the extent to which such discourses are inseparable from a deep Eurocentric representation of history, even when they claim to be critical of something like a “European nationalism,” or “pan-European ideology.” But there is more to be said, and namely that such a paradox also affects discourses which, in the same circumstances, tried to be more critical with respect to the achievements of the European construction. I am thinking of the way in which, in their book on “cosmopolitical Europe,” Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande (2004) described the European construction as a “reflective moment” or the emergence of a “politics of politics” in which the feedback ef- fect of globalization and its specific problems associated with “global risks” would progressively transform the very idea of a na- tional interest and allow Europe to correct its own Eurocentrism and lack of cosmopolitanism. Accordingly, the intermediary posi- translation / spring / 2014 tion in which Europe finds itself would dialectically foster its own internal transformation and allow it to play a crucial role in the transformation of the global distribution and definition of power. 90 And, if I may invoke my own elaborations here, I am even thinking of the manner in which, borrowing the dialectical image of the “vanishing mediator,” I tried to explain in 2003 that Europe as a society, a new moment in the history of political forms, could only exist on the condition of becoming the instrument of a resistance to the polarizations of the War on Terror as well as a multilateral competition between Grossräume or geopolitical rival entities, which is centered on a combination of state power and cultural ex- ceptionalism. It should “decenter” its self-consciousness and ac- knowledge the extent to which it had become itself transformed and reshaped by the aftereffects of its violent interaction with the world, particularly through the postcolonial transformation of its population and culture (see Balibar 2003a). However “dialectical” this presentation of Europe may appear (as a potential vanishing mediator in contemporary politics, which could transform others on the condition of becoming transformed itself by the others), it clearly contained an element of European messianism which I shared with many others. It is perhaps owing to my self-critical reflection on the ex- tent to which the messianic idea of Europe as the “vanishing medi- ator” in fact reproduces or pushes to the extreme the Eurocentric scheme inherent in other contemporary uses of the cosmopolitan ideal that I can put into question what I believe is one of the deep philosophical structures underlying the combination of universal- ism and Eurocentrism in the cosmopolitan tradition: namely, the idea that the transformation of the local, particular, national citizen into a “citizen of the world” through a relativization of member- ships and borders requires a singular mediation (or even a media- tor), which turns the empirical interest against itself, performing the negation of particularity from the inside. There is no doubt to my mind that the cosmopolitical discourse in its classical form, as it was elaborated philosophically in Kant and others—including Marx, in his own way—formed a conceptual system organized around the transcendental dualism of the empirical individual and the universal person, or the “generic individual” (as Hegel, Feuer- bach, and the young Marx would reformulate it), namely the indi- translation / spring / 2014 vidual who carries within themselves a representation of the species, therefore also a commitment to the superior interest of the human community as such. The universal subject can be a “univer- 91  sal class,” or a “universal political project” called post national con- stellation. In any case the mediation has to be performed by a mem- bership or a community endowed with the character of a self-negating subject, which means a community (of citizens) with- out a “communitarian” collective identity, or not reducible to it, therefore without exclusionary effects, and with a revolutionary po- tential of universalization. Such is the case of “cosmopolitan Eu- rope” in the discourses that I was quoting. What I am suggesting is, in fact, a reversal of this pattern (which perhaps in the end will prove to be again one of its metonymic reformulations). At the same time I am admitting that the incapacity of Europe to emerge as a cosmopolitical mediation is not to be separated from its only too obvious current stalemate as a political project. There is something intrinsically contradictory in the idea of framing a postnational Europe which is a public space of conflicts, regulations, and civic participation, although it does not take the form of constructing a superstate—perhaps especially if it does not take that form. In a moment I will try to indicate that this intrinsic contradiction can be linked to the fact that the Euro- pean construction as such emphasizes all the elements of otherness inherent in the representation of Europe as a whole, or simply as an ensemble. But this requires a detour through the consideration of the role of borders, from which I hope to gain a metamorphosis in the self-perception of Europe, in which its definition never sim- ply comes from its own history, but returns to it from outside, from the consequences of its externalization. This is a point of view that seems more likely to become adopted in what constitutes the pe- ripheries of Europe in the broad sense: cultural and political zones of interpenetration with the rest of the world—Britain or Turkey or Spain, say, rather than France or Germany, where Habermas im- plicitly localized the European “core states.” But in reality, owing to the consequences of colonialism, and later postcolonial migra- tions and hybridization of cultures, it is also a possibility open for the whole of Europe that should be discussed in common, passing from one country to the other and one language to the other. translation / spring / 2014 Let me now concentrate on what I called a “phenomeno- logical approach” of the border as institution—and in a sense an institution of institutions, whose fundamental characteristics appear 92 historically when it determines specific political practices, setting their quasi-transcendental conditions, as it were. In the the past, an- alyzing the repressive functions performed by the border especially with respect to some strangers, but also some nationals, I coined the formula “a nondemocratic condition of democracy” (Balibar 2003b). I now want to emphasize the ambivalent characteristics of this condition, which represents both closeness and aperture, or their permanent dialectical interplay. Thus, a phenomenology of the border is a very complex undertaking. It is now becoming one of the major objects of reflection and points of interdisciplinary co- operation for anthropologists, historians, geographers, political the- orists, and so on. Even philosophers may have something to say from within their intellectual tradition and disciplinary logic (see Balibar, Mezzadra, and Samaddar 2012, and Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). To take the institution of the border as privileged vantage point in the discussion on cosmopolitics and its tensions does not produce the same effect as adopting, say, the point of view of cul- ture, or territory, or urban society—although there clearly are rec- iprocities between these different paradigms. In previous essays I suggested, following a suggestion from Kant’s early Latin disser- tation on the “regions of space,” that borders are never purely local or bilateral institutions, reducible to a simple history of conflicts and agreements between neighboring powers and groups, which would concern only them, but are always already “global”—that is, a way of dividing the world itself into places, a way of config- uring the world or making it “representable” (as the history of maps and mapping techniques testifies). Hence the development of a “mapping imaginary” which has as much anthropological impor- tance as the imagination of historical time and is not to be separated from it. I should add that borders are, therefore, constitutive of the transindividual relationship to the world, or “being in the world” when it is predicated on a plurality of subjects. This might already explain why the imagination of borders has a privileged relation- ship with utopias, albeit in a very contradictory manner. Either it works through the assumption of their closure, when utopian soci- eties are imagined as isolated from the world, or it works through translation / spring / 2014 the anticipation of their suppression, their withering away giving rise to a “borderless world” for the whole of mankind. But the bor- ders are not only structures of the imagination; they are a very real 93  institution, albeit not with a fixed function and status. And as con- ditions for the construction of a collective experience, they are char- acterized by their intrinsic ambivalence. Here I generalize a reflection on the category of the for- eigner and “foreignness” that I find in particular in Bonnie Honig’s excellent book (2001), to which I will return. This ambivalence be- gins with the fact that borders are both internal and external, or subjective and objective. They are imposed by state policies, ju- ridical constraints, and controls over human mobility and commu- nication, but they are also deeply rooted in collective identifications and a common sense of belonging. We may continue with the fact that borders are at work within opposite paradigms of the political, particularly what I call the paradigm of war and the paradigm of translation, with antithetic models for the construction of the “stranger,” or the institution of difference between the “us” and the “them,” which are both exclusive and nonexclusive. As a conse- quence, while recognizing the importance of the border in the de- velopment of utopian discourses, I prefer to consider that the border as such is a heteroropia or a “heterotopic” place in Foucault’s sense—that is, both a place of exception where the conditions of normality and everyday life are “normally suspended,” so to speak; and a place where the antinomies of the political are manifested and become an object of politics itself. It is borders, the drawing and the enforcing of borders, their interpretations and negotiations that “make” or “create” peoples, languages, races, and genealo- gies… Let me try to indicate three moments of this heterotopic phe- nomenon of borders from the point of view of their current transformations, especially across and beyond Europe. The emer- gence of “European borders” which need to be constantly displaced or redrawn is indeed one of the main concerns underlying this very sketchy theorization. The first element I want to emphasize is the fact that bor- ders and frontiers are simultaneously defined as functions of war- fare (or the interruption of warfare in the form of territorial settlements and an equilibrium of power codified by international law), and as functions of translation, or linguistic exchange: I call translation / spring / 2014 this second aspect a philological model of the construction of the political space—particularly the nation in modern history—where the appropriation of a collective identity and its equivalence with 94 others mainly rests on establishing a correspondence as tight and effective as possible between linguistic communities and political communities. They must have the same boundaries, which are en- forced and developed through education, literature, journalism, and communication (as Benedict Anderson famously demonstrated in his study of “imagined communities” and the becoming hegemonic of the national form of the state—see Anderson 1983). The con- struction of borders through war and the suspension of war, and their interiorization through the community of language and the possibility of translation (namely the activity that takes place when one stands on the border itself, either very briefly or for a long pe- riod, sometimes coinciding with the whole life), are clearly anti- thetic, but it does not mean that the two models are completely external to one another. On the contrary they are bound to contin- uously interfere and merge. In a sense, or in specific circumstances, war arises about translation and translation remains a war—because it involves a confrontation with the conflictual difference, or the ir- reducible “differend” with the other (in Lyotard’s terminology) that can be displaced but not abolished, returning under the very ap- pearance of consensus and communication. This reciprocity of war and translation within the establishment of lasting cultural power structures or hegemonies has been particularly emphasized by post- colonial studies which concern both the old peripheries and the old “centers,” where so called “universal” or “international” languages have been created and institutionalized, and more recently by critics of the idea of a “world literature” (see, for example, Apter 2005). This is one of the major themes in Chakrabarty’s work, Provincial- izing Europe (2000), where he insists on the conflict between an- tagonistic ways of “translating” life worlds, or the experience of the world, into labor (that is, abstraction in the merchant and capi- talistic sense), and history (that is, majoritarian and minoritarian traditions and belonging). Perhaps we could suggest that what char- acterizes our experience of the globalized world, both virtually common and divided among incompatible representations of the sense of history, is a new intensity of this overlapping or undecid- ability of the relationship between war and translation. This would translation / spring / 2014 come also, on the side of war, from the fact that war has become immersed in a much more general economy of global violence, which is not less but more murderous, and in fact includes perma- 95  nent aspects of extermination. Ethnocide or culture wars are part of this economy. The pattern of a “global civil war” that is looming in such diverse interpretations as those proposed by Hans Magnus Enzens- berger, Negri and Hardt, or Agamben, is useful here but it is also misleading because it tends to quickly reduce to unity the enormous heterogeneity of the violent processes overlapping in this global economy, ranging from so-called “new wars” which involve state and nonstate actors, and subvert international law, to the seemingly natural catastrophes which foremost affect the populations targeted by mass impoverishment and made “superfluous” from the point of view of the capitalist rationality. On the other side the labor of translation which permanently confronts the antinomy of equiva- lence and difference, is a way of acknowledging the irreducible na- ture of the untranslatable elements: through its confrontation with this “impossible” task it produces a universal community of lan- guages, or a “pure language,” as Benjamin explained in somewhat messianic terms in his famous essay on “The task of the translator” (on this point, see Balibar 2006b). With the process of globalization, especially as it is seen “from below”—that is, not from the global Republic of Letters, but from the working populations themselves, this labor has also become much more complex and conflictual. In a postcolonial world the hierarchy of idioms, therefore of possibil- ities of translation towards the same “languages of reference,” which serve as general equivalent for all the others, is becoming less and less indisputable and unilateral; it is therefore continuously enforced in a brutally simplified manner through the monolinguistic discipline of internet communication. The association of linguistic hierarchies with borders and collective identities appears much more clearly as a structure of national and transnational power: there is as much violence and latent political conflict, as much ques- tioning of established sovereignties, in the possibility for Algerian citizens to simultaneously use their three historical languages (in- cluding Arabic, French, and Amazigh), as there is for Urdu, Turkish, Arab, and African languages to become recognized as equal parts of the “conversation” among the populations of multinational and translation / spring / 2014 multicultural Europe, therefore granted the same educational and administrative status as the “genuinely European” national or re- gional languages (some of which have for centuries been ex-pro- 96 priated—that is, they no longer “belong” to the populations of Eu- ropean descent). I suspect that similar problems could be raised with respect to Spanish and Asian languages in the North American realm. This brings me to the second aspect of a phenomenology of borders as preliminary to the cosmopolitical issue. Zygmunt Bauman, who is certainly one of the great anthropologists of the cultural side of “globalization” today, emphasized that “all societies produce strangers, but each kind of society produces its own kind of strangers, and produces them in its own inimitable way” (Bau- man 1997). I take this phrase to mark an important step in a story of sociological and philosophical reflections on the figure of the stranger and the foreigner (the duality of categories already marking the difficulty in assessing the priority of the interior or the exterior, the juridical or the cultural aspect), which derive from the famous essays by Simmel and Alfred Schutz, and continues today with Gilroy, Babha, Honig, Spivak. Whether it was the existence of bor- ders that created the stranger, imposing an institutional mark of oth- erness on the complexity of cultural and local differences, or the preexisting difference among nations and genealogies that led to the institution of borders and the closure of territories, is a question that was never completely solved. It would seem that the establish- ment of the new borders of Europe, and the way they are enforced against the self-determination and the right of circulation of migrant and refugee populations, with the continuous relocation of these police demarcations, sheds a brutal light on this issue because of its discretionary character, as embodied in the Schengen rules. In previous essays, I intentionally gave a provocative di- mension to this discussion by suggesting that the introduction of a notion of European citizenship based on national memberships within the European Union produces something like a European apartheid, a reverse side of the emerging of a European community of citizens, by incorporating anybody who is already a national cit- izen in any of the member states, and excluding anybody, however permanently settled and economically or culturally integrated, who comes from extra-Communitarian spaces. The exclusionary aspect translation / spring / 2014 arises from the simple fact that differences of nationality, distin- guishing the national and the foreigner, which formerly applied in the same manner to all aliens within each nation state, now institute 97  a discrimination: some foreigners (“fellow Europeans”) have be- come less than foreigners, in terms of rights and social status (they are no longer exactly strangers), while other foreigners, the “extra- Communitarians,” and especially immigrant workers and refugees from the South, are now more than foreigners, as it were—they are the absolute aliens subjected to institutional and cultural racism. To this general idea, Alessandro Dal Lago and Sandro Mezzadra (2002), Didier Bigo (2005), and other sociologists or politologists who work on the “normalized state of exception” to which migrants are increasingly subjected in order to uphold the distinction between legal and illegal categories of immigrants, have added another ele- ment: the violent police operations (including the establishment of camps) performed by some European states on behalf of the whole community (with the help of neighboring client States, such as Libya or Morocco), amount to a kind of permanent border war against migrants (see, also, Balibar 2003c). The extent to which this policy is an intentional one can be disputed, but what I draw from their analysis is especially the growing indiscernibility of the concepts of police and war (also present in other forms of sovereign violence in today’s world): hence the tendency towards a reduction of the foreigner, or the “real stranger,” to a notion of virtual enemy, which pertains to a power permanently running behind a lost sov- ereignty, or the possibility of controlling populations and territories in a completely independent manner (see Brown 2010). Reducing the figure of the stranger to that of the enemy is one of the clearest signs of the crisis of the nation–state, or the his- torical national form of the state, as was already signaled by Han- nah Arendt (1951). It shows that the crisis of the nation–state, focusing on its borders but also continuously dislocating these bor- ders, does not coincide with a linear process of withering away. On the contrary, it makes the nation–state, or any combination of na- tion–states, return to a relatively lawless mode of exercising power, which strongly suggests a comparison with the early modern mo- ments in the construction of the monopoly of violence that Marx interpreted as “primitive accumulation.” They probably have to do with a new phase of primitive accumulation of capitalism on a translation / spring / 2014 global scale. But, as Bonnie Honig (2001) rightly suggests, they also testify for an extremely ambivalent character of the political process itself: in fact, whole populations of strangers are now os- 98 cillating between a condition of outsiders and insiders in the con- struction of a postnational and postcolonial order, for which Europe appears as a violent, conflictual “laboratory.” Strangers could be- come (and very often actually become), either internal enemies, who are looked upon with suspicion and fear by the state and the “majoritarian” population, or additional citizens, whose very dif- ference enlarges the fabric of rights and the democratic legitimacy of the institutions. Their inclusion in the domain of the “right to have rights” would illustrate what French political philosopher Jacques Rancière called granting the shareless their share (Ran- cière 1998). Indeed, this symmetry is heavily unbalanced yet never completely destroyed, or it is at stake in the daily resistances and vindications of basic rights on the part of the foreigners, making them members of an active community of citizens even before they are granted formal citizenship, thus concretely anticipating a cos- mopolitical transformation of the political. This consideration may sound very optimistic indeed, and I will qualify it through adding a third and last point. I became aware of this when I started reflecting on the consequences of the failed attempt at establishing a European Constitution in 2005, and its relationship to the development of so-called “populist” attitudes in Europe, in fact a revival of nationalist feelings, of which the strangers are the inevitable victims—not only when they come from outside Europe, but between its own “peoples.” What is cause and what is effect in this matter can be disputed, but perhaps it does not matter so much, and we must develop a symptomatic interpretation. The French and the Dutch played the role of the bad Europeans in the story, but shortly after the even former German Chancellor Hel- mut Schmidt—not a bad connoisseur—expressed his conviction that, if popular referendums had been called everywhere in Europe, the result would probably have been a “no” in a majority of coun- tries, including Germany. I don’t believe this to illustrate the per- petual conflict between reactionary nationalism and enlightened cosmopolitanism. I also don’t think that the reason for the failure of the “federal” project entirely lies in the social and economic causes that were emphasized by the French Left, when it insisted translation / spring / 2014 that the draft constitution had been rejected because it completely endorsed a legitimization of the neoliberal conception of the public sphere, and a dismantling of collective social rights. Even if this is 99  largely true, which I tend to believe it is, it would not produce a na- tionalist revival on its own. It could also—at least ideally—foster the development of pan-European social movements, for which democratic advances written into the Constitution (notably in the Charter of fundamental rights) could serve as an instrument. Some- thing else must be acting as well. I believe this might lie in a vicious circle created by the addition of different kinds of xenophobia: on the one hand, negative feelings toward other European peoples, or “fellow Europeans,” in each European country; and on the other hand the xenophobia directed against non-European populations of migrants (or of migrant descent)—with such highly ambivalent cases as Romanians, Turks, Balkan peoples, or populations of North African descent who have been part of “European history” for centuries in a colonial or semicolonial framework. This is what I call the cosmopolitical difficulty of Europe to deal with its double otherness, an internal and an external other- ness which are no longer confronted in absolutely separated spaces. This is also the difficulty of Europe to completely distinguish be- tween internal borders (between member states) and external bor- ders (with the rest of the world, and especially the South), or abolish this distinction and return to a classical status of the national border and the definition of the stranger. To put it in one phrase, European racism directed against immigrant “extra-European” pop- ulations, which hampers the development of social movements against neoliberal policies, also results from a projection of the na- tionalist feeling opposing European nations to one another, which the European construction in its current form has only superficially cloaked. It forms a derivative for a repressed mutual xenophobia. But the reverse is also true: it is the incapacity of European nations, and the unwillingness of European states, to grant migrants and populations of migrant descent equal rights and recognition, as well as the permanent temptation from populist parties and leaders to exploit antimigrant fears and hatreds for domestic purposes, which prevents Europeans from imagining that they could address their most urgent common social and political problems as a single con- stituency, thus giving rise to a new more “cosmopolitical” moment translation / spring / 2014 in the history of democratic citizenship. There is something like a “missing nation” in the middle of Europe, a nation made of several long-established migrant communities with different histories but 100 a similar final destiny, and also some common cultural characters easily seen as threats to European culture. Once it might have been called the “sixteenth nation” when there were fifteen official mem- ber states, now it could be called the “twenty-sixth nation” (an idea already proposed by Catherine di Wenden—see Wenden 1997; with more recent admissions to the EU, including Croatia, one should perhaps more accurately say “the twenty-ninth state”). And it is this missing nation in the middle returning in a fantastic manner as a virtual internal enemy that makes it so difficult for all the other na- tions to perceive themselves as building a single constituency, au- tomatically depriving them of the capacity of collectively influencing the global trends of politics, culture, and the economy. translation / spring / 2014 101  References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. New York–London: Verso. Apter, Emily. 2005. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1951. “The decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man,” chapter 9 of The origins of Totalitarianism (Part II: Imperialism), New Edition, Harvest Books: New York, 1994, 267–303. Balibar, Étienne. 2003a. L’Europe, l’Amérique, la guerre. Paris: Éditions la Décou- verte. ———. 2003b. “World Borders, Political Borders.” We, the People of Europe? Re- flections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2003c. “Europe, An ‘Unimagined’ Frontier of Democracy.” Translated by Frank Collins. diacritics 33 (3/4): 36–44. ———. 2006a. “Cosmopolitisme et internationalisme: deux modèles, deux héritages.” Philosophie politique et horizon cosmopolitique. La Mondialisation et les apories d’une cosmopolitique de la paix, de la citoyenneté et des actions, under the direction de Francisco Naishtat. Paris: UNESCO. ———. 2006b. “Sub specie universitatis.” Topoi 25 (1–2): 3–16. Special issue Phi- losophy: What is to be done? Berlin–Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. ———. 2010. “Europe: final crisis?” Theory and Event, 13 (2). http://muse. jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/summary/v013/13.2.balibar.html. ———. 2011. “Our European Incapacity.” opendemocracy, May 16. http://www.open- democracy.net/etienne-balibar/our-european-incapacity. ———. 2013a. “Out of the Interregnum.” opendemocracy, May 16. http://www.open- democracy.net/can-europe-make-it/etienne-balibar/out-of-interregnum. ———. 2013b. “How can the aporia of the ‘European people’ be resolved?” Radical Philosophy 181: 13–17. Balibar, Étienne, Sandro Mezzadra, and Ranabir Samaddar (eds.). 2012. Borders of Justice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1997. Postmodernity and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2006. Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich, and Edgar Grande. 2004. Das kosmopolitische Europa. Gesellschaft und Politik in der zweiten Moderne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bigo, Didier, Elspeth Guild (Ed.) (2005). Controlling Frontiers. Free Movement into and within Europe. Hants and Burlington: Ashgate. Brown, Wendy. 2010. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek. 2000. Contingency, Hegemony, Uni- versality. New York–London: Verso. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and His- translation / spring / 2014 torical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins. 1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dal Lago, Alessandro, and Mezzadra, Sandro. 2002. “I confini impensati dell’Europa”, 102  published in the collective volume Europa politica. Ragioni di una necessità, edited by H. Friese, A. Negri and P. Wagner. Roma: Manifestolibri. de Wenden, Catherine. 1997. La Citoyenneté. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Habermas, Jürgen. 2006. The Divided West. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2009. Europe: The Faltering Project. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, Jürgen, and Jacques Derrida. 2003. “Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 31. http://www.faz.net/ak- tuell/feuilleton/habermas-und-derrida-nach-dem-krieg-die-wiedergeburt- europas-1103893.html. Held, David. 2013. Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Wash- ington Consensus. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Honig, Bonnie. 2001. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kaldor, Mary. 2013. Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, Or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. New York–London: Verso. Rancière, Jacques. 1998. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: Uni- versity of Minnesota Press. Rigo, Enrica. 2006. Europa di confine. Trasformazioni della cittadinanza nell’Unione allargata. Roma: Meltemi. Tassin, Étienne. 2003. Un monde commun. Pour une cosmopolitique des conflits. Paris: Seuil. Étienne Balibar was born in 1942. He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne in Paris, and then obtained his PhD from the University of Nijmegen. After having taught in Algeria and France, he is currently Anniversary Chair of Contem- porary European Philosophy at Kingston University, London, and Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York. His books include Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser) (1965), Race, Nation, Class. translation / spring / 2014 Ambiguous Identities (with Immanuel Wallerstein) (1991), Masses, Classes, Ideas (1994), The Philosophy of Marx (1995), Spinoza and Politics (1998), We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2004), and Identity and Difference (2013). 103 

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Knowledge on the Move: Between Logistics and Translation Brett Neilson ............................ University of Western Sydney, Australia. [email protected] Abstract: Translation and logistics are often considered distinct and opposed ac- tivities. The former is a social practice that produces boundaries and connections between languages, cultures and forms of life. The latter is a technical operation that contributes to the production of value by creating efficiencies of communi- cation and transport. This paper takes translation and logistics as twin analytical pincers in which to examine the changing politics and economy of knowledge in the contemporary capitalist world. Particular attention is given to the socio- technical systems that enable practices of translation and the role of social and cultural negotiation in facilitating movement along the logistical chains that sup- port global production. By examining the terms and the limits of the overlap between translation and logistics, the paper investigates its implications for the global arrangement of space and time as well as the subjective stakes of labor in the production of knowledge. ______________ How does knowledge travel? The question is profound to the point of being banal. Movement is intrinsic to knowing. Whether the passage is between subject and object, through space and time, or across the boundaries of disciplines or other gardens of knowledge, knowledge seems unable to submit to stillness. The present essay investigates two dimensions of knowledge movement that have come to the fore under conditions of capitalism and glob- alization: the first associated with logistical operations and the sec- ond deriving from translation. The aim is to show the intertwining and interdependence of these different aspects of knowledge move- ment, despite the seeming tension between them in terms of open- ness to political and cultural life, subordination to technological processes and coordination with economic activity. Logistics organizes and produces the heterogeneity of translation / spring / 2014 global space and time. Tuned to the turnover of capital, it mobilizes material and infrastructural implementations to produce communi- cation, transport, and economic efficiencies. With its origins in mil- 129  itary supply, it has, since the 1960s, become a software-driven process that coordinates production and assembly processes across planetary expanses. No longer an exercise in cost reduction, it has become integral to the maximization of profit. Essential to its op- erations is the governance of supply or commodity chains. Logis- tical networks rely on internal standards and protocols to establish interoperability between systems and facilitate the movement of people, goods, and things. Attention to the logistics of knowledge movement thus requires awareness of techniques and technologies that enable sorting, classification, distribution, and storage. Increas- ingly these processes are inseparable from the production of knowl- edge itself, making it unfeasible to consider them post hoc arrangements that pertain merely to the movement of already formed or commodified knowledge. The metaphor of knowledge transfer, which circulates widely in academic and commercial con- texts, registers some of the limits and dilemmas associated with such an approach to knowledge. It signals at once the dream that knowledge might travel efficiently and unaltered between a source and a target and the reality that such movement is always inter- rupted by social and cultural factors. In other words, it shows how the logistics of knowledge movement is always entangled with the politics of translation. Translation is a privileged cultural operation and social practice that produces bridges and barriers between languages, civ- ilizations, and forms of life. It is an iterative operation that facili- tates movement through an active process of mutation in which difference and incommensurability tend to win over standardization and protocols. This is to say it is a vernacular or idiomatic practice that creates social relations within a force field marked by differ- entials of power, culture, and economy. At once sparking connec- tions and active in processes of domination, not least those associated with modern colonialism and global capitalist expansion, translation is an inherently double-sided political concept and prac- tice. It can open channels of communication and understanding be- tween communities and cultures but only at the risk of establishing boundaries in ways that further a politics of rigidified identity. His- translation / spring / 2014 torically this has been one of its major functions. When the practice of translation establishes equivalence between languages or groups of people, it enforces the idea of distinct communities, nations, or 130 civilizations traveling coevally through time. It thus contributes to the creation of dominant geopolitical constructs: the West and the rest, center and periphery, and so on. In the contemporary world, where such an approach to translation remains prevalent, it plays a part in dividing the planet into blocs or regions and producing nor- mative figures of continentalization: the European, the Asian, the African, et cetera. Yet, as several critical scholars (Sakai 1997, Iveković 2010, Mezzadra 2010) have emphasized, translation con- tinues to hold a potential for radical subversion or the unsettling of established identities, boundaries, and the social relation of capital. Here is the dilemma. Translation is seen as the cultural op- eration par excellence, a creative act with the power to rearrange social relations whether in politically liberating or constraining ways. By contrast, logistics is widely understood as a set of tech- nical operations driven by algorithmic processes and subordinated to the imperatives of capital or war. Attempting to shift these es- tablished views is perhaps a futile exercise. The current paper holds these shibboleths in place, even as it questions them by probing the borders between the cultural and the economic, and querying the separability of the creative and the technical. The argument is de- ceptively simple: without logistics no translation, and without trans- lation no logistics. This is an analytical and political claim rather than a logical proposition or dialectical formulation. The intertwin- ing of translation and logistics comes into view with the histori- cization of these practices. Particularly in current conditions of capitalism (where cooperative networks are crucial to systems of production, and value creation depends ever more on distribution and access to knowledge), translation and logistics have developed in ways that make them increasingly indistinguishable. This article explores the terms and limits of this overlap, investigating its im- plications for the global arrangement of space and time as well as the subjective stakes of labor in the production of knowledge. Traveling Theory In an article entitled “Traveling Theory” (1983, 226), Ed- ward Said identifies “a discernible and recurrent pattern to the translation / spring / 2014 movement” of ideas and theories. Although widely read within crit- ical and postcolonial circles, the paper’s delineation of four distinct stages of “travel” reads like a familiar narrative of immigration and 131  acculturation: First, there is a point of origin, or what seems like one, a set of initial circumstances in which the idea came to birth or entered discourse. Second, there is the distance trans- ferred, a passage through the pressure of various contexts as the idea moves from an earlier point to another time and place where it will come into a new prominence. Third, there is a set of conditions—call them conditions of acceptance or, as an inevitable part of acceptance, resistances—which then confronts the transplanted theory or idea, mak- ing possible its introduction or toleration, however alien it may appear to be. Fourth, the now full (or partly) accommodated (or incorporated) idea is to some extent trans- formed by its new uses, its new position in a new time and place. (Said 1983, 226–227) Said’s essay focuses on the geographical movement of ideas and theories, which, although part of knowledge, are not the whole of it. Yet the typology he offers provides a schema by which to assess the evolution of knowledge movements across the past three decades. A distinct absence from his analysis is an account of the material forces and technical factors that compel knowledge to move. Said recognizes a “commerce of theories and ideas” but does not interrogate the economic and material processes that underlie this trade or exchange (226). The movement of knowledge, in this account, seems almost disconnected from economic forces or tech- nical parameters. It is the result of patterns of influence between prominent thinkers. Said’s primary example is the transfer of Lukács’s concept of reification into the works of Lucien Goldmann and from there into the writings of Raymond Williams. Although he examines the conditions of acceptance, pressures, and resistances that surround this transplantation of ideas, he does not explore the material con- duits that make it possible. The movement of knowledge between the works of these figures is attributed to patterns of “indebtedness” and “use” (235, 242). There is little attention to histories of publi- cation, translation, or dissemination—say, in the manner of Franco Moretti’s (1999) rewriting of the history of the European novel. Said mentions that Goldmann was Lukács’s student and that Williams heard Goldmann deliver two lectures in 1970. But in his account, the transfer of knowledge is almost entirely restricted to translation / spring / 2014 philological and hermeneutic concerns. As a result “Traveling The- ory” has little to say about how the movement of knowledge is linked to infrastructural conditions of transport, communication, 132 memory, or economy. Implicit in Said’s argument is the claim that Lukács’s concept loses its revolutionary potential as it travels, a po- sition he revises in a later essay entitled “Traveling Theory Recon- sidered” (1994) by considering Frantz Fanon’s reception of Lukács. In both of these pieces, however, the focus is on matters of concept production, reading, and reception. Transplanted knowledge is sub- jected to pressures of context and interpretation but the exact man- ner in which it moves through space and time remains obscure. This is surprising given Said’s (1978) writings on how ori- entalist knowledge practices have shaped and in turn been shaped by colonial adventures in Asia and the Islamic world. Following from this work, there has been an ongoing concern across a number of disciplines with the material and discursive practices that have led to the emergence (and maintenance) of a distinction between the West and the rest. One result of this is a/the growing attention to how the practice of translation facilitates the circulation of knowledge across geopolitical and social boundaries. As Irrera (2013, 2) explains, the “notion of translation, although rarely men- tioned by Said, is actually at the very heart of the cultural practices of Saidian humanism.” At stake is partly an emphasis on transla- tion’s capacity to create mutual understanding and reciprocity be- tween human groups. In a late article published in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, for instance, Said (2001) argues against a campaign to stop the translation of Arabic books into Hebrew on the grounds that greater availability of Arabic writings in Israel will better enable Israelis to understand Arabs “as a people.” But as a practitioner of comparative literature, a discipline that maps lin- guistic differences over bodies of expression and thought, Said would have been aware of the ambivalent position of translation as both a border-breaking and border-making practice. Although com- mitted to humanist precepts and the opening of world-historical horizons, he remained acutely aware of the politics of cultural im- perialism and the capacity for translation to serve the ends of dom- ination and separate populations into distinct identity groups. The limit of Said’s work for understanding current knowl- edge movements lies less in its muted engagement with translation translation / spring / 2014 than its neglect of what today is called knowledge management— that is, the codification and collection of processes and devices for governing the production, circulation, and utilization of knowledge. 133  “Traveling Theory” was written at a time when the rise of a knowl- edge economy oriented toward services, intellectual property rights, innovation and information technology was just getting underway. Thirty years later, the implication of translation in practices of lo- gistical calculation that pertain to the production and transfer of knowledge has become a crucial part of globalizing capitalism. There is a need to move beyond the paradigm of traveling theory with its cultural and exegetical bias and to probe translation’s role in the production of subjectivity and the making and unmaking of worlds. This means investigating translation’s entanglement with operations of capitalism. The capacity of capital to translate het- erogeneous forms of life into the homogenous language of value is only one aspect of this entanglement. Efforts to make capital’s turnover productive also invest practices of translation, whether they take a linguistic, cultural, or more generally social form. Only by disentangling translation from these efforts can we begin to dis- cern a knowledge politics adequate to the invention of new modes of social cooperation. The Logistics Revolution If Said’s “Traveling Theory” supplies an icon of thinking about knowledge movements and translation without a developed account of relevant logistical arrangements, there is a plethora of approaches that do the opposite. Logistics is a technological and pragmatic field, increasingly driven by computational modes of control and forever pushing deadlines. It is hard to imagine logis- ticians entertaining an interest in the subtleties of translation theory or its implications for issues of economy and politics. Nonetheless the transfer and sharing of knowledge is crucial to logistical processes, particularly when they connect up supply chains in which efficiencies can be established through the implementation of standards or other mechanisms of internal governance. Accord- ing to Ballou (1992, 5), the “mission of logistics is to get the right goods or services to the right place at the right time, and in the de- sired (right) condition, while making the greatest contribution to the firm.” This definition, with its identification of the firm as the translation / spring / 2014 exemplary logistical subject, registers the commercial imperatives that drive contemporary logistical practices. Yet this was not always the case. Until the mid twentieth century, logistics was primarily a 134 military practice associated with the supply of food and arms to fighting forces. This is not the occasion to explore the history of military logistics and its implications for the relation of war to politics (Neil- son 2012). Suffice it to say that logistics was considered one of the three arts of war alongside strategy and tactics. Prominent nine- teenth-century military thinkers such as Carl von Clausewitz (2007) attributed a lesser role to logistics insofar as it was understood as a preparatory exercise that established the conditions for these more warlike arts. As technological innovations such as the introduction of railways and the use of fossil fuels changed military campaigns, logistics became a central part of modern warfare. Meanwhile, with the spread of the industrial revolution, practices of transport and spatial economics drew mounting interest in the civilian sphere. In seminal publications such The Theory of the Trace (1900), the Ger- man civil engineer Wilhelm Launhardt built on the mathematical formulations of Pierre de Fermat to derive efficiency criteria for commercial transport networks with regard to topography. This work was replicated and extended by Alfred Weber, the younger brother of Max, in his Theory of the Location of Industries (1929). Weber’s book closed with a mathematical appendix, written with Georg Pick, which offered a formula purporting to derive the opti- mal location for an industrial plant based on variables such as the cost of transport, the agglomeration of industrial facilities and the cost of labor across different sites. These are among the earliest precedents for a mathematical approach to logistics. It is not until the 1960s, however, that the introduction of a systems analysis ap- proach to transport and distribution management began to remake geographies of production and circulation at the global scale, giving rise to the distinct economic sector of logistics. Scholars who study the evolution of the field call this the logistics revolution (Allen 1997). Changes in this period and its af- termath include the spatial reorganization of the firm, the perform- ance monitoring of labor, the interlinking of logistics science with computing and software design, the introduction of the shipping container, the formation of business organizations and academic translation / spring / 2014 programs for the production and dissemination of logistical knowl- edge, the building of global supply chains, and the search for cheap labor rates in poorer areas of the world. Logistics moved from being 135  an effort of cost minimization to become an integrated part of global production systems and a means of maximizing profit. The myth that production stopped at the factory gates, challenged in feminist theory and politics, was shattered in the mainstream world with the evolution of more efficient transport and communication systems. The assembly of goods across different global locations, with objects and knowledge constantly moving between them, served to blur the processes of production and distribution. Logis- tics also made the organization of global space more complicated and differentiated. Geographical entities such as special economic zones and logistics hubs sprang up to attract investment and organ- ize the business of global production. Increasingly, logistics also came to play a role in service economies and production processes not involving the manufacture of material goods. From financial operations to television production, translation services to the for- mation of global care chains, the logistical organization of work and mobility became central to the expansion of capitalist markets and logic. The technological and representational systems that en- abled this shift have seen vast changes since the 1960s. The evolu- tion of supply chain management and just-in-time production would have been impossible without the controlled feedback of lo- gistical data into production and distribution systems. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) software platforms aided efforts to digitally record, communicate, and analyze every aspect of production, transport, display, and sales. This resulted in more expansive and articulated logistical sys- tems that sought to continuously map out the position and trajectory of objects in motion. The real-time integration of these systems pro- vided an unprecedented ability to rationalize labor at every point along the chain, intensifying the pace and squeezing workers for greater productivity. But the desire to match ideals of lean produc- tion to agile and adaptable logistical processes proved elusive. The reduction of costs, elimination of waste, and optimization of flow could only be pushed so far without jeopardizing the robustness and flexibility of production systems. Issues of supply chain re- translation / spring / 2014 silience sparked efforts to minimize contingency by simulating the decisions of actors on both supply and demand sides of the equa- tion. Today complex techniques of scenario planning, sometimes 136 involving the use of software adapted from financial market appli- cations, are deployed to smooth out discrepancies and interruptions. The challenge of achieving interoperability between systems and building “fault tolerance” into them has underscored the difficulties that underlie programs of standardization. Nonetheless, the internal governance of supply chains continues to demand protocols of hi- erarchy, codifiability, capability, and coordination (Gereffi, Hum- phrey, and Sturgeon 2005). To some extent, the problem of interoperability can be con- ceived as one of translation. The attempt to coordinate discrepant systems, smooth out glitches, and exchange data via common for- mats means working across gaps and connections to relationally produce, arrange, and conceptualize information. Often this in- volves the creation of standards to which different systems must conform to enable the transfer of information between them. In such instances, translation is flattened out and directed toward a single and tightly controlled set of protocols. But such standards are hard to create, technically and in terms of the time, labor, and resources that must be invested in them. They also tend to prolifer- ate, leading to a situation where standards conflict with other stan- dards. Even in cases where technical interoperability has been established, social and cultural factors tend to interfere, making the task of translation tricky and unstable. This is not an observation made only by social and cultural thinkers such as the anthropologist Anna Tsing (2005), who writes about the “friction” that inhabits the global supply chains of contemporary capitalism. Engineers also recognize the cultural and social barriers to interoperability, writing of the need to establish “cultural interoperability” and of the imperative to establish “supply chain integration” by facilitating “the exchange of knowledge across dissimilar cultures and in dif- ferent native languages” (Whitman and Panetto 2006, 235-36). It is in this sense that logistics must reckon with the politics of trans- lation. The question is whether such a politics provides resources for smoothing out the operations of capital or whether it supplies methods for organizing against current practices of exploitation and dispossession. translation / spring / 2014 137  In the Translation Machine The proximity of the social practice of translation to the worlds of the technologist, engineer, and logistician is evident not only in discourses about “cultural interoperability” and supply chain integration. It is also present in processes of translation them- selves, which are increasingly powered by algorithmic technologies and codes. Any attempt to reckon with the politics of translation must confront the rising prevalence of machine translation, which submits the social practice of translation to logistical protocols and software routines that purport to accomplish direct transfers be- tween languages. Think of the interface of online translation plat- forms such as Babelfish or Google Translate. Two text boxes of the same size face each other. One can write (or more usually cut and paste) into the first, choose the language into which the text is to be translated, and click the button. The program has the capacity to detect the input language. Such a technique of translation pow- erfully reinforces what Sakai (1997) calls the schema of cofigura- tion. The copresence and equal size of the text boxes suggests a parallel between languages that are conceived as separate prior to and independently of the act of translation. Rhetoric and context fall away. The screen divides source from target, incomprehensible from comprehensible. As the user’s eyes are drawn from left to right, she is sealed as member of one language community as op- posed to another. As much as this is a machine for translation, it is also a machine for the production of what Jon Solomon (2013) calls the “speciation of the human”—the division of the genus human into distinct and fixed blocs of identity and culture. From philology to imperialism, comparative literature to algorithms, the movement is seamless and seemingly instantaneous. Yet there is a glitch. As anyone who has used these plat- forms knows, the results are patchy. Machine translation offers an antidote to dreams of a pure or universal language, such as that of- fered by Walter Benjamin (1968, 80) when he describes the trans- lator’s task as releasing “in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another.” Benjamin’s impulse is theolog- ical, but the dream of machine translation has equally been driven translation / spring / 2014 by a vision of universal language, albeit one that is much more in- strumental. The cyberneticist Warren Weaver (1955), a pioneer in the field, writes: “When I look at an article in Russian, I say: ‘This 138 is written in English, but it has been coded in some strange sym- bols. I will now proceed to decode’” (18). He also described the need to “descend, from each language, down to the common base of all human communication—the real but as yet undiscovered uni- versal language—and then re-emerge by whatever route is conven- ient” (23). Such an approach, which treats language as code, has proved a dead end in machine translation (see Kay 2003, Neilson 2010). Today rule-based methods have all but been replaced with corpus-based approaches, which deploy statistical techniques and huge libraries of translated texts to move between languages. The results are sketchy and often only partly legible. It as if culture has taken its revenge against logistics. But what is the politics of all this? Benjamin’s vision of a universal language may have been undermined by machine translation techniques but his writing sup- plies us with at least one powerful image to describe the fate of contemporary translation. In the first of his “Theses on the Philos- ophy of History” (1968, 253), he writes of an “automaton” that can play a winning game of chess. The contraption, which makes it ap- pear as if the game is being played by a “puppet in Turkish attire,” actually conceals an “expert chess player” who guides “the puppet’s hand by means of strings.” Benjamin uses this image to argue for the role of theology in supporting and driving historical material- ism. Today, when the theological drive toward a universal language has been displaced by machine translation, this image of the me- chanical Turk has a much more cynical connection to the business of translation. In 2005, Amazon opened its platform Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/), a web-based service that of- fers users the possibility to bid to perform paid work by completing various tasks that cannot be fulfilled by artificial intelligence. As the FAQ for the site explains, “[t]oday, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as iden- translation / spring / 2014 tifying objects in photographs—something children can do even before they learn to speak.” Not surprisingly, this model of micro- contracting, pioneered by Mechanical Turk, has also found its ap- 139  plication in the translation world, particularly via sites such as http://ProZ.com, which allow translators to submit quotes to per- form translation jobs, often cleaning up the results of machine translations. The site claims to serve “the world’s largest commu- nity of translators” and to be the “number one source of new client’s for translators.” In this way, the glitches in machine translation rou- tines have become occasions for the crowd sourcing of labor in the most precarious and flexible of circumstances. In his article “The Freelance Translation Machine,” Scott Kushner (2013, 2) explores how online translation platforms such as ProZ.com negotiate “the encounter between the computational and the human in the service of capital.” He is interested in how “algorithmic power” harnesses “human thought, precisely because it does not conform to machine logic.” The task of the translator, in the context of sites like this, is to “complete the algorithm” in a way that obscures the act of translation or makes it appear auto- mated, despite the fact that the translator exists in a social world (4). Kushner explains that ProZ features social networking tools that allow clients to rate the work of translators. The 300,000 free- lance translators who work on the platform pay for membership, bid for jobs, accumulate a record of ratings and have the opportu- nity to display credentials and qualifications on the site. Vendors are granted easy access to a global workforce by filling out a sub- mission form that specifies language pairs, number of words, and deadlines. This has allowed ProZ to emerge “as a temporary stand- in for the ultimate translation dream: friction-free machine transla- tion” (12). Platforms like ProZ reinforce what Sakai (1997) calls ho- molingual address, posing as if it is possible to translate seamlessly between languages that are conceived as always already separate entities. At stake is “the idea of the unity of language,” which makes it possible “to systematically organize knowledge about languages in a modern, scientific manner” (Sakai 2009, 73). In observing that “such an idea is essential for any standardized, automated, algo- rithmic approach to translation,” Kushner (2013) draws an inter- esting parallel. ProZ, he comments, is interested not in the contents translation / spring / 2014 of translation but rather in the protocols that allow it to occur in as frictionless a manner as possible. To this extent, translation be- comes a logistical proposition: “ProZ.com is no more interested in 140 a translation project’s contents than a barge captain is in the con- tents of the shipping containers piled upon his deck.” Furthermore, the “smooth functioning of the translation industry under global- ization demands conceptual containers (‘unified languages’) just as transoceanic transport requires uniform containers.” With this parallel between container shipping and the workings of online translation platforms, Kushner suggests a strong relation between the protocols and algorithms of the global logistics industries and the protocols and algorithms that facilitate the “do loops” of con- temporary freelance translation practice. He is fully aware, how- ever, that platforms like ProZ require humans to tease out “the finer points of language and its social wrappings” and recognizes that these “social wrappings are the stuff of Sakai’s (1997) ‘heterolin- gual address.’” He thus understands the freelance translation ma- chine to develop “an interface connecting (and simultaneously separating) the homolingual and the heterolingual, the machine and the human” (Kushner 2013, 13). But what are the politics of this implied association of the homolingual with the machine and the heterolingual with the human? Is the politics of heterolingual ad- dress something more or less than an attempt to salvage humanitas from logistical operations? On Seamlessness Writing with Sandro Mezzadra, I have posed the question of the politics of translation as one of the rubbing up of concepts against material circumstances. Taking our cue from a comment by Gramsci on a speech delivered by Lenin in 1922, Sandro and I seek to derive a political concept of translation that reaches beyond the linguistic and cultural dynamics usually implied by the term. In particular, we are interested in how the question of translation be- comes constitutive for political organization in a globalized world—an aspect of translation that is strongly evident in political struggles concerning migration and border crossing. We also seek to understand “the role of translation in the operations of capital” to provide a “framework for analysing the conditions under which translation can become a tool for the invention of a common lan- translation / spring / 2014 guage for contesting capital” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013a, 276). Capital is a social relation that reduces all differences to a homo- geneous measure of value, and, to this extent, it functions like a 141  regime of homolingual translation. The heterogeneity of labor— which means its fragmentation beyond the figure of the waged in- dustrial worker—offers a counterpoint to this homogeneity but also poses the problem of organization across different borders and so- cial, cultural, and economic boundaries. The challenge of translat- ing between disparate and divergent struggles is one of the most pressing political tasks of the day. Logistical supply chains provide a privileged point of in- tervention for this challenge. This is because they organize and con- nect labor forces in the name of capital. The aim of supply chain management is to make the operations of such chains as efficient as possible. Software optimization is a crucial part of these efforts, which must continually balance the leanness of the chain, or its ability to eliminate redundancies and function in a responsive just- in-time manner, against its agility, or capacity to route around dis- turbances such as resource shortages or labor strikes. As Tsing (2009) writes, supply chains focus “our attention on questions of diversity within structures of power” (149). They link up dissimilar firms, distant locations, and distinct labor forces, showing “that di- versity forms a part of the structure of capitalism rather than an inessential appendage” (150). Logisticians dream of creating a seamless world, where borders and differences become not barriers to be overcome but parameters within which to establish efficien- cies. In practice, however, they know that designs and programs encounter obstacles and frictions of all kinds and even contribute to their creation, from traffic bottlenecks to unruly workforces. The analytical temptation is to associate such disturbance with the human element in logistical transactions. Society and culture be- come interruptive forces that disrupt the efficiency of capital’s lo- gistical operations, playing havoc with relations of interoperability and value creation. Earlier I outlined how the question of interoperability re- lates to that of translation, but it is important also to register the link between translation and the production of value. In the Grun- drisse, Marx famously draws a parallel between translation and the role of money in facilitating circulation and making possible the translation / spring / 2014 universal exchange of commodities. He writes about “ideas which first have to be translated out of their mother tongue into a foreign language in order to circulate, in order to become exchangeable” 142 (1973, 163). This is a familiar metaphor but it is worth considering how this logic of exchange relates to the question of capital’s turnover, or the process of circulation by which it turns through commodity production to resume its original monetary form. It is this process of turnover that logistics seeks to optimize or render more profitable. The dream of seamless production is strongly linked to that of smooth and efficient circulation. Indeed, in con- temporary global production networks, where objects and knowl- edge move constantly between distant sites, these processes become ever more indistinguishable. It thus seems to make sense to equate or draw a parallel between the homogenizing logic of capital’s ex- change and the creation of logistical standards and protocols that facilitate its turnover. The concept of homolingual translation pro- vides a powerful tool for understanding both of these movements. There is limited analytical grip, however, in equating ho- molingual translation with a mechanical action that is upset by the unpredictability of the human. The example of translation platforms like ProZ, already discussed above, shows how the social context of translation can contribute precisely to the appearance of a seam- less movement between supposedly distinct and comparable lan- guages. Perhaps here the Deleuzian notion of the machine, which describes a complex assemblage that crosses the human and the technical, is more applicable than that of the mechanism, which designates a technical apparatus. In any case, the social dynamics of translation and logistical operations appear inextricably linked. This link becomes evident in the historical context of contemporary capitalism, in which the production and transfer of knowledge is a privileged domain of value creation. I do not wish to suggest that logistics provides the primary or the only ambit of contemporary capital’s operations. As I have argued with Sandro Mezzadra (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013b), it is crucial to approach the logistical dimension of global capitalism in the context of its financial and extractive operations, which inter- sect the logistical domain in complex ways. This article points to a privileged link between the dynamics of translation and those of logistics. Doubtless it would be possible to make a similar argument translation / spring / 2014 about the workings of finance or extraction. But the case of logistics is interesting in this regard because it is a practice that enables and drives the material forms of global mobility that have made trans- 143  lation a pressing social and cultural issue. To insist on a relation between translation and subjectivity in the context of logistics is to raise the question of the labor of translation. It is to highlight the unrest, energy, and movement that are constitutive of translation as well as the bodily and cognitive relations that make it possible. It is also to emphasize the susceptibility of such labor to processes of abstraction and measure which are enmeshed in capital, state, and law. The tension between such abstraction and what Marx calls labor’s “form-giving fire” (1973, 361) not only crosses bodies and minds but also shapes the heterogeneity of global space and time. Piecing apart these tensions and uncovering their political poten- tialities requires an analytical attention to the intersection of trans- lation and logistics. translation / spring / 2014 144 References Allen, W. B. 1997. “The Logistics Revolution and Transportation.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 553: 106–116. Ballou, R. H. 2007. “The Evolution and Future of Logistics and Supply Chain Man- agement.” European Business Review 19 (4): 332–348. Benjamin, W. 1968. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations, edited by H. Arendt, 253–264. New York: Schocken Books. Gereffi, G., J. Humphrey, and T. Sturgeon. 2005. “The Governance of Global Value Chains.” Review of International Political Economy 12 (1): 78–104. Ierrera, O. 2013. “Edward Said’s Humanism.” Transeuropéennes. http://www.transeu- ropeennes.eu/en/articles/voir_pdf/94. Iveković, R. 2010. “The Watershed of Modernity: Translation and the Epistemological Revolution.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11 (1): 45–63. Kay, M. 2003. “The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Machine Translation.” Readings in Machine Translation, edited by S. Nirenburg, H. Somers, and Y. Wilks, 221–232. Cambridge: MIT Press. Kushner, S. 2013. “The Freelance Translation Machine: Algorithmic Culture and the Invisible Industry.” New Media & Society 0 (0): 1–13. Published online be- fore print. Launhardt, W. 1900. The Theory of the Trace: Being a Discussion of the Principles of Location. Madras: Lawrence Asylum Press. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mezzadra, S. 2010. “Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Mul- titude.” The Politics of Culture: Around the Work of Naoki Sakai, edited by R. F. Calichman and J. N. Kim, 121–137. Abingdon: Routledge. Mezzadra, S., and B. Neilson. 2013a. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2013b. “Extraction, Logistics, Finance: Global Crisis and the Politics of Op- erations.” Radical Philosophy 178: 8–18. Moretti, F. 1999. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso. Neilson, B. 2010. “Opening Translation.” Transeuropéennes. http://www.transeu- ropeennes.eu/en/articles/voir_pdf/107. ———. 2012. “Five Theses on Understanding Logistics as Power.” Distinktion: Scan- dinavian Journal of Social Theory 13 (3): 323–340. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. “Traveling Theory.” In The World, The Text, and the Critic, 226–247. Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1994. “Traveling Theory Reconsidered.” In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, 436–452. London: Granta Books. translation / spring / 2014 ———. 2001. “Defiance, Dignity and the Rule of Dogma.” Al-Ahram Weekly. May 17–23. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/534/op1.htm. Sakai, N. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 145  ———. 2009. “How Do We Count a Language? Translation and Discontinuity.” Translation Studies 2 (1): 71–88. Solomon, J. 2013. “Another European Crisis?! Myth, Translation, and the Apparatus of Area.” Transversal. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0613/solomon/en. Tsing, A. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. “Supply Chains and the Human Condition.” Rethinking Marxism 21 (2): 148–176. von Clausewitz, Carl. 2007. On War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weaver, W. 1955. “Translation.” Machine Translation of Languages: Fourteen Essays, edited by W. N. Locke and A. D. Booth, 15–23. Cambridge: MIT Press. Weber, A. 1929. Theory of the Location of Industries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whitman, L. E. and H. Panetto. 2006. “The Missing Link: Culture and Language Bar- riers to Interoperability.” IFAC Annual Reviews in Control 30 (2): 233–241. Brett Neilson is Professor and Research Director at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney. With Sandro Mezzadra he is author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013). He is currently collaborating with Ned Rossiter in coordinating a large transnational research project translation / spring / 2014 entitled Logistical Worlds: Infrastructure, Software, Labour (http://logisticalworlds.org). 146 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15508

The Eventfulness of Translation: Temporality, Difference, and Competing Universals Lydia H. Liu ........................ Columbia University, USA [email protected] Abstract: The article seeks to develop a new angel for translation studies by re- thinking its relationship to the political. It begins with the question “Can the eventfulness of translation itself be thought?” Since neither the familiar model of communication (translatable and untranslatable) nor the biblical model of the Tower of Babel (the promise or withdrawal of meaning) can help us work out a suitable answer to that question, the author proposes an alternative method that incorporates the notions of temporality, difference, and competing universals in the reframing of translation. This method requires close attention to the multiple temporalities of translation in concrete analyses of translingual practices, or what the author calls “differentially distributed discursive practices across languages.” The author’s textual analysis focuses on a few pivotal moments of translation in global history—chosen for their world transforming influences or actual and potential global impact—to demonstrate what is meant by the “event- fulness of translation.” These include, for example, the nineteenth-century Chi- nese translation of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law or Wanguo gongfa, the post-World War II multilingual fashioning of the Universal Declara- tion of Human Rights with a focus on P. C. Chang’s unique contribution, and the Afro-Asian writers’ translation project during the Cold War. ______________ Imagine a poem fluttering down from the sky and somehow falling into your hands like snowflakes. You might think that this scenario comes from a surrealist movie, but I am referring to neither surrealist fantasy nor a writer’s delirium. It is related to one of the scandals of translation in modern history. The scandal gripped my attention when I first learned that the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States had prepared a Russian translation of T. S. Eliot’s poem Four Quartets and airdropped it onto the territory of translation / spring / 2014 the Soviet Union in the Cold War (see Stonor Saunders 2001, 248). This minor escapade quickly passed into oblivion, but the CIA’s and IRD’s (Information Research Department of the British spy 147  agency) worldwide promotion of post-War modernist art and liter- ature appears singularly effective in hindsight—so effective, in fact, that Frances Stonor Saunders, who researched the CIA archives, came to the conclusion that the West won the Cold War mainly by conquering the world of arts and letters with weapons of the mind rather than with the arms race or economic sanctions that allegedly brought down the Socialist bloc. Critics need not accept Saunders’s conclusion to heed a few curious consequences of the cultural Cold War. One of them is that the majority of CIA-backed artists and writers—and there is a long list of them—have made their way into the modernist literary and artistic canon of the West and have systematically been translated as “world literature” around the globe where, for instance, George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm are read and taught in more lan- guages than Michail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, even though the latter, in the opinion of a literary critic like myself, is a superior writer. And as we turn to twentieth-century poets, T. S. Eliot is perhaps taught in more languages of the world than are Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Nâzım Hikmet, and Bei Dao combined. It seems that the bets the CIA placed on Eliot, Orwell, abstract expressionists, and other writers or artists they fa- vored—airborne or subterranean—paid off handsomely. Critics sometimes attribute their success to the sophisticated taste and fore- sight of CIA and IRD covert operators and their collaborators. There may be some truth to this, but taste or aesthetic judgment can be mystifying. It cannot explain, for example, the remarkable co- incidence whereby many of the writers blacklisted by Senator Mc- Carthy and disfavored by the CIA on non-artistic grounds during the Cold War have simultaneously been marginalized in contem- porary literary studies or dropped out of the canon altogether after World War II (see, for example, Goldstein 2001, and, on blacklist- ing in the UK, Hollingsworth and Norton-Taylor 1988). Why is it, then, that aesthetic judgment takes a backseat when it comes to ex- cluding certain writers but would play a decisive role when it comes to including other writers in the literary canon? This begs the fur- ther question of where politics stands in regard to literature, an old translation / spring / 2014 or perhaps not so old a question. Is the making of the literary canon fundamentally political? Or is it merely a case of politics interfering with literature? What role, if any, does global politics play in the 148 struggle over literary productions and their chances of survival in the modern world?1 Can such politics throw fresh light on some of the blind spots in the field of translation studies? These questions have prompted my study of translation as a political problem in this article as well as in my earlier work. The more I learn about the cultural politics of the Cold War, the less I feel inclined to treat global politics as outside interferences. Rather than closing off the boundaries of literature and politics and ren- dering them external to each other, I propose that, first, we examine the dynamic interplay of forces and circumstances that precipitate the act of translation as an act of inclusion and exclusion. Such forces and circumstances are not so much external to translation as prior to any translator’s determination of texts to be chosen and translated while excluding other works. To anticipate my argument, the study of these processes can help illuminate the meaning of the political better than citing the intentions of writers and translators, or their idiosyncratic tastes. Secondly, there is a formidable obstacle to overcome if we decide to undertake this line of investigation in translation studies. The obstacle, which often stands in the way of our understanding of the political, is the familiar mental image of translation as a process of verbal transfer or communication, linguistic reciprocity or equivalences, or an issue of commensurability or incommensu- rability. It is almost as if the promise of meaning or its withdrawal among languages were the only possible thing—blessing or catas- trophe—that could happen to the act of translation.2 I have critiqued these logocentric assumptions in translation studies elsewhere (Liu 1995, 1–42; Liu 1999, 13–41) and will not reiterate my position here. To do so would take us through another round of critiques of linguistics, philology, theology, the philosophy of language, and cultural anthropology which would take us too far afield. I should .......................... 1 Most scholars of literature who are familiar with Pierre Bourdieu’s work would probably concur that canon formation cannot but be political. I find Bourdieu’s notion of the lit- erary field useful in a national setting but limited for thinking across national borders, especially when it comes to international politics in cultural life. See Bourdieu 1993. translation / spring / 2014 2 Although more sophisticated than that of other theorists, Walter Benjamin’s concep- tion of translation in “The Task of the Translator” ultimately endorses this manner of reasoning. In his notion of Pure Language, translation holds out a promise of meaning in messianic time, if not in secular temporality. See my critique, in Liu 1995, 14-16. 149  mention briefly, though, that when I proposed the idea of translin- gual practices twenty years ago, I was grappling with epistemolog- ical issues about how we study translation and deal with conceptual pitfalls in philological methods (see Liu 1995). One question I came very close to asking but did not ask in the mid-1990s was “Can the eventfulness of translation itself be thought?” This question, as it now appears to me, may lead to a more promising approach to the study of translation than either the communication model or the biblical model.3 And in the context of my essay in this special issue on translation and politics, such a question allows me to develop a new critical method for discerning and analyzing the political in regard to translation. I have long felt that a new method and a new conceptual framework are necessary because the problem of translation trou- bles not only the study of language, literature, philosophy, and cul- tural anthropology but also cuts across other disciplines and fields. In molecular biology, for example, the idea of translation is ubiq- uitous and appears in the guise of a metaphor—unquestioned and under-theorized—that is used to conceptualize the biochemical processes of DNA and RNA. The mobility of this metaphor in the hands of scientists and social scientists has greatly outpaced our ability to think clearly about the idea, much less come up with a method to analyze its discursive behavior across the disciplines. In short, translation is no more just a linguistic matter than can lin- guistic differences be reduced to cultural differences. I believe we have reached the point where the eventfulness of translation itself must be interrogated.4 In the first section, below, I introduce my methodological reflections and try to develop some ideas about the multiple tem- poralities of translation in what I call differentially distributed dis- cursive practices across languages. This analysis leads to a discussion of universalism and cultural difference in the second sec- .......................... 3 The story of the Tower of Babel has hitherto dominated our framing of translation as a theoretical problem. I am doubtful that an endless rehashing or deconstruction of this biblical story will get us any closer to a better understanding of translation. For earlier translation / spring / 2014 critiques of the biblical story, see George Steiner 1978; Paul de Man 1986, 73–105; and Derrida 1985, 165–208. 4 In recent decades, new approaches have been developed here and there to open up the field beyond established translation studies. See, for example, Naoki Sakai 1997 and Liu 1995. 150 tion, which focuses on the multilingual making of one of the best- known documents of the post-War period: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (hereafter, UDHR) of the United Nations. Here I examine P. C. Chang’s contribution as Vice-Chair on the Drafting Committee of the UDHR document—along with Chair Eleanor Roosevelt and other members—and analyze his philosophical con- testation of parochial universalism at the UN in 1947–1948. I turn next to a remarkable vision of competing universalisms with a focus on Afro-Asian Writers, Conferences and their translation projects in the 1950s. The third section shows how some of these projects were organized and pursued in response to the post-War geopolitics of that time. I conclude with some final reflections on translation, and literary diplomacy and internationalism in the Cold War. 1. In light of my initial question—“Can the eventfulness of translation be thought?”—I would say yes, but not until we begin rethinking the relationship amongst text, interpretation, and event. If all acts of translation—and by extension, all textual work—take place within specific registers of temporality and spatiality, do all translated texts qualify as events? The answer hinges on how the idea of “event” is defined or philosophically worked out, but such is not the task of the present essay (I assume that the reader is fa- miliar with Alain Badiou’s rigorous philosophical work on the sub- ject—see, especially, Badiou 2005 and 2009). Instead of indulging in exercises of pure thought or compulsive definitions which belong elsewhere, I choose to focus on the multiplicity of differentially distributed discursive fields as the site—spatiality and mobility— of any translated text and explore their temporalities as instances of events. For no event that is worthy of the name—as naming is always part of the process—could possibly exist outside of the dis- cursive practices that organize it and make it emerge as such, much less the event of translation which always presupposes the multi- plicity of discursive fields across different languages. The first step toward a fruitful understanding of the eventfulness of translation, therefore, is to develop a conceptual framework to analyze the in- terplay of temporality and discursive practices across languages. translation / spring / 2014 Before we contemplate the possibility of such a framework, we must address a potential objection: What is to be achieved with the proposed study of the eventfulness of translation? Why not be 151  content with our good old philological methods? Is it not sufficient to analyze, say, a word for word rendering of a poem from English to Russian, or the case of a mismatched verb in translated text? I would not rule out the value of this kind of philological work so long as it does not limit our understanding of how a work of trans- lation is brought into being in the first place and why a writer is deemed worthy of translation into foreign languages more than other writers. As a matter of fact, T. S. Eliot found himself com- pelled to address these issues when he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his acceptance speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stock- holm in 1948, Eliot states: If this were simply the recognition of merit, or of the fact that an author’s reputation has passed the boundaries of his own country and his own language, we could say that hardly any one of us at any time is, more than others, worthy of being so distinguished. But I find in the Nobel Award something more and something different from such recognition. It seems to me more the election of an individual, chosen from time to time from one nation or another, and selected by something like an act of grace, to fill a peculiar role and to become a peculiar symbol. A ceremony takes place, by which a man is suddenly endowed with some function which he did not fill before. So the ques- tion is not whether he was worthy to be so singled out, but whether he can perform the function which you have assigned to him: the function of serving as a representative, so far as any man can be of thing of far greater importance than the value of what he himself has written. (Eliot 1948) Eliot’s disavowal of his unique accomplishment as a poet could have been motivated by real modesty but it inadvertently touches on the truth of what it means to “fill a peculiar role and to become a peculiar symbol” or to “perform a function” and serve “as a representative.” And of what is he a representative? When the poem Four Quartets leapt over the spatial, linguistic, and ideolog- ical divide of the Cold War to fall from the sky—let’s hope not di- rectly into rivers— the Russian translation was probably taken by covert operators to represent good poetry from the Free World as opposed to the dogma of socialist realism. In that case, the poet could do very little about the idiosyncratic decisions of those oper- ators who instrumentalized his work under the circumstances. It is interesting that Eliot is keenly aware of his own pas- translation / spring / 2014 sivity when it comes to being selected, being endowed, being sin- gled out, being assigned by others, and so on. To emphasize his passive role is not to extricate him from the complicity with the CIA 152 but to point out that, in spite of himself, Eliot’s name and poetry do indeed float around like a symbol, perhaps more mobile and air- borne than other symbols, but nevertheless a symbol, which is often beyond his control but which he must live up to. Furthermore, the symbol called T. S. Eliot is assigned to function in a multiplicity of languages and discursive fields that inevitably mark a literary work for translation and international distribution. This preferential mark- ing, I emphasize, holds the potential of turning a symbol into an event, or an event into a symbol, back and forth. In this sense, the question as to which translated or trans- latable text qualifies as an event, or even a global event, depends very much on the ways in which we analyze the temporality and spatiality of its discursive mobility, hence its historicity. To bring the eventfulness of translation into critical view, one must stop thinking about translation as a volitional act of matching words or building equivalences of meanings between languages; rather we should start by taking it as a precarious wager that enables the dis- cursive mobility of a text or a symbol, for better or for worse. The wager releases the multiplicity of the text and opens it up to an un- certain future, more often than not to an uncertain political future. The confluence of forces that enable the discursive mobility of a text or those forces that can mobilize the energy of translators or cause a poem to be airdropped from the sky should give us the first clue regarding the political in translation. This is something I have learned from my previous study of the first Chinese translation of international law—Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law (1836)—by the American missionary W. A. P. Martin and his Chinese collaborators in 1863- 1864. In The Clash of Empires, I analyzed the military and political conflicts of the Second Opium War to understand who determined the selection of Wheaton’s text and how its translation Wangguo gongfa (literally, “Public law of ten thousand countries”) was brought to fruition in 1863–1864 (see Liu 2006, Chapter Four). Re- flecting on the temporalities of this translation and its dissemination, I was immediately struck by its peculiar eventfulness and realized that this translated text was by no means a singular event—I saw at translation / spring / 2014 least a triple event at the moment of its creation. What do I mean, though, by the triple event of the Wangguo gongfa? The first and immediate event was the creation of the Chi- 153  nese text itself, a textual event that required a great deal of negotia- tion and compromise among the Chinese translators and the Amer- ican missionary. Words and their meanings were made up, suspended, substituted, or banished in the course of translation. Next came the diplomatic event. As a matter of fact, the textual and diplo- matic events became inextricably entangled before there was even a translated text. For example, the act of preferential marking in regard to which text of international law ought to be selected and which ex- cluded from translation mirrored the diplomatic conflicts among the imperial powers in China. The timely interventions made by the American ministers William B. Reed and Anson Burlingame and by Sir Robert Hart—the second British Inspector-General of the Impe- rial Maritime Custom Service of the Qing—all played into the hands of Prince Gong and his Foreign Office Zongli yamen in Beijing, who agreed to sponsor the translation project. Even more interesting is the third aspect of this happening, which I have called the epistemo- logical event, because the historical unfolding of the Wangguo gongfa was predicated on a certain view of the global that was yet to come. That process requires a somewhat different temporality— spanning the late Qing through the Republican era up to our own time—before the geopolitical consciousness could emerge among the Chinese elite. I attribute the rise of so-called global (and belatedly national) consciousness in East Asia to this triple event. In this sense, the multiple temporalities of the Wangguo gongfa as one of many translations of Elements of International Law vastly complicate our understanding of translation and its historicity. These temporalities were thoroughly embedded in the precarious wager I suggested ear- lier. Through the discursive mobility of the Wangguo gongfa, the wager in the realm of international politics unleashed the linguistic multiplicity of Wheaton’s text from English to Chinese, then from Chinese to Japanese, and so on to open it up to an uncertain political future. That future, in hindsight, converged in the Japanese annexa- tion of Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and other colonial enterprises, all worked out in the legal terms of the Wangguo gongfa or Bankoku kōhō (Japanese pronunciation for the kanji characters). But what about cultural differences? Are cultural differ- translation / spring / 2014 ences not more central to the work of translation than the problem of temporality and spatiality? Do these differences matter? My an- swer is yes, they do matter, but no more and no less than the uni- 154 versalist aspirations that inspire any acts of translation or episte- mological crossings through languages in the first place. As I ar- gued elsewhere (Liu 1999, Introduction), universalism thrives on difference; it does not negate difference so much as absorb it into its familiar orbit of antithesis and dialectic. The situated articulation of cultural difference has been embedded in the universalizing processes of past and present all along, which determine what counts as difference and why it should matter. Such processes can indeed tell us a great deal about how cultural differences are dif- ferentially distributed through the eventfulness of translation and how these differences undergo discursive markings—inclusion, ex- clusion, comparison, dispersion, cutting, abstraction, et cetera— before they appear as such from the vantage point of the universal. Indeed, it is the struggle over the universal where the political as- serts itself persistently with respect to cultural differences. And as we turn our attention to the twentieth century, what could be more universal than the claims of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? In the next section, I discuss the drafting of this important document at the United Nations in 1947–1948 to illustrate how the dialectic of universalism and cultural differences is played out in translations where the struggle over words and concepts across lan- guages becomes the very site of international politics. 2. The UN Commission on Human Rights began its discus- sion informally in the spring of 1947. John P. Humphrey (1905– 1995), the first Director of the UN Secretariat’s Division on Human Rights, recalls that the Chairman of the Human Rights Commis- sion, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, undertook the task of formulating a preliminary draft international bill of human rights, working with elected Vice-Chairman Peng-chun Chang (1892–1957) and the Rapporteur Charles Habib Malik (1906–1987) with the assistance of the Secretariat. On Sunday February 17, 1947, Mrs. Roosevelt invited Chang, Malik and Humphrey to meet in her Washington Square apartment for tea and discuss the preparation of the first draft of the UDHR by the Secretariat. Humphrey records a snippet of their conversation below: translation / spring / 2014 There was a good deal of talk, but we were getting nowhere. Then, after still another cup of tea, Chang suggested that I put my other duties aside for six months and study Chinese philosophy, after which I might be able to prepare a text for the Committee. 155  This was his way of saying that Western influences might be too great, and he was look- ing at Malik as he spoke. He had already, in the Commission, urged the importance of historical perspective. There was some more discussion mainly of a philosophical char- acter, Mrs. Roosevelt saying little and continuing to pour tea. (Humphrey 1984, 29) This seems to be the uncertain first moment of what would become decades of conversations and intellectual debates that even- tually gave birth to the International Bill of Human Rights in three landmark documents in the history of mankind: the UDHR (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966). Malik was a Lebanese Christian and Thomist philosopher. He had studied philosophy in Europe before World War II working briefly with Heidegger before arriving in the United States to com- plete his doctoral degree in philosophy at Harvard University. Malik was a man of strong convictions, and his Christian person- alism was the main source of his universalism, even though his life- long passion was anticommunism.5 By contrast, Chang was a secular humanist, musician, and a man of letters. Educated in China and the United States, he was thoroughly bilingual and bicultural.6 Chang and Malik had different upbringings and were steeped in very different intellectual traditions, but they both were scholar– diplomats and hailed from the non-Western world. At the UN, they were joined by other non-Western members of the eighteen-mem- ber Commission on Human Rights, including Filipino diplomat Carlos Romulo, Indian feminist educator Hansa Mehta, and Latin American delegates who made important contributions to the con- ceptualization of the International Bill of Human Rights (see Glen- don 2002, and Morsink 1999, 2245-2248). .......................... 5 Malik was Edward Said’s uncle by way of his marriage to Said’s mother’s first cousin. Said’s reminiscences show some mixed feelings about Malik’s politics and personality. See Edward Said 2000. translation / spring / 2014 6 P. C. Chang (or Zhang Pengchun, in the pinyin Romanization system) was born on April 22, 1892, in Tianjin. He was the younger brother of P. L. Chang (Zhang Boling), who was the founder of Nankai University and one of the most preeminent educators in the Re- public of China. Both brothers studied at Columbia University. For Chang’s life, see Cui Guoliang and Cui Hong 2004, 615–710. 156  Upon his election as Vice-Chairman of the UN Human Rights Commission, Chang resolved to refashion the idea of “human rights” into a universal principle—more universal than ever before—and he envisioned the ground of that universalism somewhere between classical Chinese thought and the European Enlightenment. Records of the drafting processes involving the Declaration suggest that Chang was impatient with cultural rela- tivism and engaged in a relentless negotiation of competing uni- versals between Chinese and European philosophical traditions. His method was that of a translingual reworking of ideas across these traditions—a constant back and forth—to open up the uni- versal ground for human rights. And he did so by crossing the con- ceptual threshold of linguistic differences in the face of an old conundrum of incommensurability: Does the idea of the “human” in English mean the same thing in a language that does not share its linguistic roots or philosophical traditions? On the one hand, Chang takes a pragmatic approach to the question of cultural dif- ference and incommensurability in order to bring about consensus among member states on the Human Rights Commission and on the other hand—philosophically more interesting for us—he makes a wager of commensurability through a mode of intellectual per- suasion and translation that required an unwavering commitment to his vision of universalism. The numerous interventions Chang made in the drafting of the UDHR illustrate this commitment very well. Take Article 1, for example. The language of this article reads: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” This statement is deceptively straightfor- ward; in actuality, the finalized words are the outcome of one of the most contentious debates on the Third Committee concerning God and religion. In what is known as the Geneva draft, which was produced by the Second Session of the Commission on Human Rights in the Geneva meetings on December 2–December 17, 1947, the draft article states: “All men are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed by nature with reason and translation / spring / 2014 conscience and should act towards one another like brothers” (ital- ics mine; see Glendon 2002, 289). The words “by nature” in the Geneva draft were introduced by the Filipino delegate as a deistic 157  reference to natural law.7 While the Lebanese philosopher Malik wanted to substitute the words “by their Creator” for “by nature,” other delegates tried to introduce similar references to God in the UDHR (see Glendon 2002, 89). Johannes Morsink’s study shows that when the Third Committee began its meeting in the fall of 1948, two amendments were proposed to insert overt references to God in Article 1. The Brazilian delegation proposed to start the sec- ond sentence of Article 1 thus: “Created in the image and likeness of God, they are endowed with reason and conscience.” The Dutch delegation came up with a similar assertion of religious faith: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family, based on man’s divine origin and immortal destiny, is the foundation of free- dom, justice and peace in the world.” These amendments led to in- tense debates. In the end, neither of the amendments was voted on, although the Third Committee did vote to remove “by nature” from Article 1 (the proposal was approved 26 to 4, with 9 abstentions— see Morsink 1999, 287). Mary Ann Glendon has noted (2002, 146) that on that oc- casion it was Chang who carried the majority by reminding every- one that the Declaration was designed to be universally applicable. His intervention and reasoning were essential to the decision of the Third Committee to remove the phrase “by nature” from the Geneva draft. Chang’s argument was that the Chinese “population had ideals and traditions different from that of the Christian West. Yet [...] the Chinese representative would refrain from proposing that mention of them should be made in the declaration. He hoped that his colleagues would show equal consideration and withdraw some of the amendments to article 1which raised metaphysical problems. For Western civilization, too, the time for religious in- tolerance was over.” The first line of Article 1, he suggested, should refer neither to nature nor to God. But those who believed in God could still find the idea of God in the strong assertions that all human beings are born free and equal and endowed with reason .......................... translation / spring / 2014 7 The same theological reference also framed the language of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) and the American Declaration of Independence (1776), as well as nu- merous other documents on the rights of men which were promulgated before World War II and served as templates for the UDHR. 158 and conscience, but others should be allowed to interpret the lan- guage differently. (See Third Committee, Ninety-sixth meeting on October 7, 1948, 98 and Third Committee, Ninety-eighth Meeting on October 9, 1948, 114) Obviously, Mrs. Roosevelt was per- suaded by his argument, for she adopted the same language when she had to explain to her American audience why the Declaration contained no reference to the Creator (Glendon 2002, 147). Chang urged the Third Committee not to indulge in meta- physical arguments and succeeded in sparing the Committee from having to vote on theological questions. Rather than debating on human nature again, he asked the Committee to build on the work of eighteenth-century European philosophers and ancient Chinese philosophy. From this, Morsink (1999, 287) speculates that the motivation behind Chang’s support for the deletion of “by nature” was that some delegates understood the phrase as underscoring a materialistic rather than a spiritual or even humanistic conception of human nature. I am inclined to think that Chang’s argument is remarkably consistent with what he had termed the “aspiration for a new humanism” (Twiss 2009, 110). His new humanism goes so far as to attempt to overcome the conceptual opposition be- tween the religious and the secular and that between spiritualism and materialism. That vision emerged early on in one of the most interesting interventions Chang made to the Cassin draft of the UDHR. The Cassin draft was based on the first draft of the Declaration written by Humphrey the Secretariat. Article 1 of the Cassin draft was very different from what it has since become. It states: “All men, being members of one family, are free, possess equal dignity and rights, and shall regard each other as brothers” (consult “The ‘Cassin Draft,’” in Glendon 2002, 276). In June 1947, when the French del- egate René Cassin presented this draft to the Drafting Committee, the group revised the language of Article 1 to read: “All men are brothers. Being endowed with reason and members of one family, they are free and equal in dignity and rights.” In the course of dis- cussion, Chang found the implied concept of human nature limited and biased, so he proposed that Article 1 should include another translation / spring / 2014 concept as an essential human attribute next to “reason.” He came up with a literal translation of the Confucian concept he had in mind, namely ren 仁 which he rendered as “two-man-mindedness” 159  (Glendon 2002, 67).8 Drawing implicitly on classical Chinese sources, Chang glossed this written character as a composite of the radical for “human” 人 and the written character for number “two” 二 . Interpreting ren as “two-man-mindedness” through his epi- graphic analysis of the discrete parts of the written character, Chang sought to transform the concept of “human” for human rights by regrounding that idea in the originary plurality of humanity rather than in the concept of the individual. Yes, no equivalents of this classical Confucian concept ex- isted in English or French to help Chang explicate the meaning of this important concept which can be traced back through the mil- lennia-long philosophical tradition in China. That tradition, in my view, has produced an overly abundant discourse on the concept of “human,” its ethical being, and so on, but had almost nothing to say about “rights” until the second half of the nineteenth century.9 Chang, straddling both traditions, found himself in a strange, pre- carious situation of having to use words like “sympathy” and “con- sciousness of his fellow men” to convey what he had in mind (see Commission on Human Rights 20 June 1947). That effort misfired, and it certainly fell flat on Cassin, Mrs. Roosevelt, and all other members of the drafting committee who promptly accepted Chang’s proposal but agreed to let the word “conscience” translate the idea of ren. That word was added to the word “reason” to make the sec- ond line of Article 1 read: “They are endowed with reason and con- science…” With great insight, Glendon writes that “that unhappy word choice not only obscured Chang’s meaning, but gave ‘con- science’ a far from obvious sense, quite different from its normal usage in phrases such as ‘freedom of conscience’” (Glendon 2002, 67–68). Not surprisingly, the metropolitan languages were not about to surrender themselves to the Confucian term to produce a novel concept in English or French, thus missing an extraordinary oppor- tunity to reimagine what it means to be “human” in other terms.10 .......................... 8 Chang’s epigraphic reading derived from the Shuowen jiezi (100 CE), the first dictionary of Chinese written characters compiled by the Han dynasty scholar Xu Shen. translation / spring / 2014 9 The language of “rights” and “human rights,” like “sovereignty,” was first introduced to China via the 1864 translation of Wheaton’s Elements of International Law discussed above. 10 I used the word “surrender” in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s sense. In “The Politics 160  Perhaps all is not lost in translation. Anyone who has had the opportunity to peruse the Chinese version of UDHR prepared by the United Nations will be surprised to learn that the Confucian concept has somehow worked its way back into the document through the delegation of another term, liangxin (see http://www. un.org/zh/documents/udhr/). The word liangxin is made up of two written characters 良心 , the character liang for “innate goodness” and the character xin for the “mind/heart.” This translation openly takes the place of “conscience” and interprets the English word back into Chang’s classical term ren, which articulates a more fun- damental sense of what makes a human being moral than the idea of “conscience.”11 The concept liangxin is closely associated with that of ren in Confucian moral philosophy, denoting the empathetic endowment of the human psyche toward another human being prior to the formation of individual conscience. In the Chinese version of the UDHR, Chang’s original explication of ren as “two-men- mindedness”—though lost to the English and French texts—is re- found through an associated concept.12 I have covered only one of numerous textual examples to be gleaned in the multilingual making of that historic document. In fact, a good number of languages besides Mandarin and classical Chinese contributed to the making of the UDHR, and these lan- guages opened the document to the radical multiplicity and translin- gual plurality of the philosophies and cultures of the world, first in its moment of genesis and then in subsequent translations. If we but lend an ear to the plurality of voices and substitutions across numerous multilingual editions of this document, we are bound to encounter other temporalities and universals that are waiting to be rediscovered and mobilized for the benefit of future politics. The fact that Chang’s pluralist vision of the universal “human” fails to register in the texts of hegemonic metropolitan languages and .......................... of Translation,” she argues that the translator must “surrender to the [original] text.” See Spivak 1993, 179–200. 11 The notion liangxin was elaborated by ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius (ca. 372– ca. 289 BCE) to explicate Confucius’s concept ren and was subsequently developed translation / spring / 2014 by Song dynasty philosophers for the Neo-Confucian theory of moral personhood. 12 The official languages at the UN were initially English and French, while Russian, Chi- nese, and a couple of other languages were soon added to the list of official languages, rendering the linguistic landscape extremely variegated. 161  philosophical traditions suggests that it will take more than indi- vidual scholar–diplomats, no matter how resourceful they are, to overcome the tremendous odds of East–West or South–North dis- parity in the arbitration of moral discourse. Within less than a decade after the UN adopted the UDHR, however, self-determina- tion or national independence movements swept across the globe and, suddenly, another extraordinary opportunity emerged where- upon the peoples of Asia and Africa began to stage their competing universals worldwide. Following the 1955 Bandung Conference, a number of worldwide events played a critical role in this episode of Afro-Asian solidarity to which we now turn. 3. I first developed an interest in Afro-Asian Writers, Confer- ences while researching the origins of the literary journal Shijie wenxue [World Literature] that began publication in the People’s Re- public of China in 1959.13 As I was going through the past issues of Chinese translations of poets and writers from around the world, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s name caught my attention im- mediately. His novel Things Fall Apart (1958) was printed in the February issue of 1963 (select chapters) and was read in Chinese translation long before this novel became known to the mainstream readership of the West, and certainly long before Achebe’s works were relegated to so-called Anglophone literature. I was struck by the fact that Achebe had been recognized first as a distinguished Afro-Asian writer in China, Egypt, India, the Soviet Union, and other countries before he became a postcolonial Anglophone (African) writer, as he is currently known and taught in the English depart- ments of American academia and elsewhere. And there is a world of difference between these two modes of recognition. To my mind, that difference lies mainly in the forgotten history of post-Bandung Afro-Asian writers’ interactions and solidarity in 1958–1970. I should emphasize that a great deal of its politics lies in the work of translation and its organization in the name of world literature. The first of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences—an off- shoot of the newly formed Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organi- translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 13 The journal was originally called Yiwen [Translations] when it was founded in 1953 and changed its name to Shijie wenxue in 1959 after the first Afro-Asian Writers’ Con- ference in Tashkent in 1958. 162 zation which had been inspired by the Bandung Conference and met in Cairo on December 26, 195714—took place in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in Soviet Central Asia in October 1958. Asian and African delegates and Western observers flew in from all directions and landed in the new airport of Tashkent. Reporting on the arrival of these airborne poets and novelists, one journalist observed: “[W]e had come to meet the writers of Asia and Africa, gathering for the first time. A new airport; a smiling reception committee; a drive along avenues of acacia and poplar hung with coloured lamps and banners lettered in Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi” (Parker 1959, 107–111).15 The conference was attended by leading writers of thirty-six countries, including renowned Turkish poet Nâzım Hik- met, Yashpal, Mulk Raj Anand and Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay of India, Ananta Toer Pramoedya of Indonesia, Burma’s U Kyaw Lin Hyun, Cambodia’s Ly Theam Teng, Vietnam’s Pham Huy Thong, African American writer W. E. B. Du Bois, and Mao Dun and Zhou Yang who led a delegation of twenty-one members from China. Interestingly, W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife Shirley were invited to Tashkent as the honored guests of the first Afro-Asian conference in October 1958. Long deemed a dangerous radical in the eyes of the US government, Du Bois drew the only standing ovation to an individual from the Asian and African authors at the conference. In an informal discussion of African unification prob- lems with writers from Nigeria, Madagascar, Ghana, Somaliland, Senegal, and Angola, Du Bois told them that “a socialist Africa was inevitable” (Horne 1985, 321). Such was the optimism of the Tashkent conference. Still, the Third World delegates represented a broad spec- trum of literary and political persuasions. They came together not to debate about their national or political priorities but to discuss an agenda that concerned them all. First, what role would the de- velopment of literatures and cultures in different Asian and African countries play in the progress of mankind, for national independ- .......................... 14 On the history of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization and China’s role in it, see Neuhauser 1968. translation / spring / 2014 15 For the day-to-day events, see the diaries of Guo Xiaochuan, who served on the preparatory committee of the Tashkent conference in Guo Xiaochuan in 2000. See also Sh ichi Kat ’s (1999) reminiscence of his representation of Japan on the same prepara- tory committee. 163  ence against colonialism, for peace and freedom throughout the world? Many writers commented on how colonialism has destroyed traditional cultural ties between Asia and Africa. Efua Theodora Sutherland, representing the Ghana Society of Writers, saw that oc- casion as “a step towards the reunification of the disrupted soul of mankind,” further remarking that It is up to us to seek practical ways and means of strengthening our cultural links. There is a need to channel to our continent some of your best literary contributions. We need to know the works of Asian and African writers, to be in touch with the wider horizon which those works represent, and which have hitherto been unavailable in our country. (quoted in Parker 1959, 109) Her enthusiasm was shared by all and it was decided that a Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers would be set up for the purpose of maintaining future interaction and activities and that its headquarters would be located in Sri Lanka, then still known as Ceylon (these were moved to Cairo a few years later). Unlike the scholar–diplomat P. C. Chang, who staged a lone battle at the UN to recast the moral concept of “human” on the basis of plurality (ren, “two-human-mindedness”) before granting uni- versal validity to the concept of human rights, the Asian and African writers pursued a much more ambitious course of action. They mounted a full range of activities, forming international alliances, setting up transnational institutions, and creating journals to educate themselves and educate each other through translations, conversa- tion, and so on. In the following decades, for example, the Bureau coordinated numerous meetings, translations, and publications. There were, no doubt, attempts made by the Soviet Union and China to set the political agenda, either for the purpose of pushing the world revolution or undermining each other when the relation- ship between the Kremlin and Beijing deteriorated. But, just as in the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization over the years, these attempts often met with resistance from the United Arab Re- public (Egypt), India, and other Third World countries (on this his- tory, see Shinn and Eisenman 2012, 60–61, and Larkin 1971). Clearly, no one wanted a USSR-front organization. Egypt and India translation / spring / 2014 played a central role in the Permanent Bureau. After the second Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Cairo, the Bureau started a quar- terly called Lotus in Arabic, English and French and launched a 164 prize for African and Asian literature—named the Lotus Prize—to honor distinguished poets and writers from Asia and Africa. Nov- elists and poets honored by this prize include Chinua Achebe from Nigeria, Ousmane Sembène from Senegal, Ngugu wa Thiong’o from Kenya, Malek Haddad from Algeria, and Mahmoud Darwish from Palestine. It is often forgotten that that these Afro-Asian writ- ers—now thoroughly canonized as Anglophone or postcolonial writers in English Departments across North America and else- where after the Cold War—first emerged within a global socialist intellectual network where their recognition by the West as “post- colonial” writers was neither necessary nor important. Instead, the Afro-Asian writers were striving toward a new humanism—a uni- versalism about life and liberty—that was pitted against colonial violence. This was unequivocally expressed by Mulk Raj Anand who led the Indian delegation to the second Afro-Asian Writers’ confer- ence in 1962. In his speech, Anand elaborated the new humanism as follows: Our literatures and arts are thus the weapons of a new concept of man—that the sup- pressed, the disinherited and the insulted of Asia and Africa can rise to live, in broth- erhood with other men, but in the enjoyment of freedom and equality and justice, as more truly human beings, individuals, entering from object history, into the great history when there will be no war, but when love will rule the world, enabling man to bring the whole of nature under self-conscious control for the uses of happiness, as against despair. (Arora 2007, 17–18) Interestingly, Garcia Lorca’s poem “Ode to Walt Whitman” was evoked to express the sentiment of the socially engaged writers from Asia and Africa: I want the strong air of the most profound night to remove flowers and words from the arch where you sleep, and a black child to announce to the gold-craving whites the arrival of the reign of the ear of corn.16 Anand states that the mission of the writer is to translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 16 Here I have substituted a translation of this poem by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili, in Lorca and Allen 1995, 135. 165  act as the conscience of the people aware of their pain. To have a creative vision of all that affords joy in life, to release the vital rhythms in the personality, to make man more human, to seek apperceptions of freedom from all forms of slavery and to give this freedom to other people throughout the world—in fact to awaken men to the love of liberty, which brings life and more life. (Arora 2007, 18) This call for freedom was not empty rhetoric but was echoed by writers from the socialist bloc as well as from the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa. To those who had person- ally experienced slavery and racial and economic exploitation under colonialism, liberty had a specific meaning: it meant decol- onization, national liberation, and world peace in the spirit of the Bandung Conference. The Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Tashkent made a tremendous impact on China. Almost immediately, the journal Yiwen (Translations), which used to predominantly feature Soviet and Western authors, began to shift focus and publish works by Iran- ian, Iraqi, Egyptian, and Mozambique writers. In January 1959, the journal was renamed Shijie wenxue [World literature] and began to devote its bimonthly issues to systematic translations of Afro-Asian writers, African American writers, and, later, Latin American writ- ers. By 1962, more than 380 titles from over thirty Asian and African countries had been printed in its pages. Irene Eber’s survey indicates that by 1964 and 1965, Afro-Asian and Latin American writers began to outnumber Western authors. The October 1964 issue was specifically dedicated to black literature, which included African writers as well as African American writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Margaret Walker (on this, see Eber 1994, 34–54). Following the Tashkent conference, the Chinese Writers Union extended invitations to their Afro-Asian friends and, over the years, many of them visited China more than once. The great Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer made his second trip to China after the Tashkent conference. His interactions with Ding Ling, Mao Dun, Guo Moruo, Zhou Yang, and other Chinese writers were frequent and helped transform his ideas about what a writer’s responsibility was toward society. Hong Liu’s study suggests that translation / spring / 2014 Pramoedya’s contact with the Chinese delegation and the Chinese embassy goes back to as early as the 1955 Bandung Conference. After that, Pramoedya began to follow the works of Chinese writers 166 and came to admire the social prestige enjoyed by socialist writers in the PRC, “where literature is considered to be one of the political and economic forces” and where writers were paid generously for their publications, in stark contrast with conditions in Indonesia (see Liu 1996, 124). Pramoedya regarded Mao Dun and Lu Xun as the foremost writers of modern China, and he not only translated some portions of Lu Xun’s short story collection Diary of a Madman but also pub- lished his translation of one of Ding Ling’s long articles, “Life and Creative Writing.”17 Perhaps more than anyone else in Indonesia, Pramoedya took the socialist credo of “living with peasants and workers” to heart and fervently believed that writers should go into social life and live with the people. He himself “went down” to the countryside of the Banten area to investigate the lives of peasants and miners. Conclusion I began my discussion by trying to raise some new ques- tions about translation and its relationship to the political. My ap- proach has been to work through the ideas of event, temporality, difference, and competing universals as a conceptual alternative to the familiar model of linguistic communication or the theological model with which we are all familiar in translation studies. The al- ternative method I have developed involves analyzing the multiple temporalities of translation in differentially distributed discursive practices across languages. To bring such a method to bear on con- crete analyses of the eventfulness of translation, I have taken the reader through the nineteenth-century translation of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law in Chinese, the post- World War II multilingual fashioning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a focus on P. C. Chang’s contribution as well as the Afro-Asian writers’ collective translation projects during the Cold War. .......................... translation / spring / 2014 17 See “Duer Fanwen Ji” (An interview with Toer), Hsin Pao (Jakarta), November 17, 1956; cited in Liu 1996, 125. It is unclear if Pramoedya’s translation of Lu Xun’s short story collection (Catatan Harian Orang Gila) was published, although his translation of Ding Ling’s “Hidup dan Penulisan Kreatif” did appear in the journal Indonesia 7,3 (March 1956): 102-110. 167  Just as I was about to bring my reflections to a close, one of Benedict Anderson’s observations about Pramoedya came back to haunt me. Anderson has been familiar with Pramoedya’s work and communicated with this Indonesian writer on numerous occa- sions. One afternoon, as I was reading Anderson’s discussion of Pramoedya in Language and Power, I was struck by this statement: “More broadly, Pramoedya gave me an inkling of how one might fruitfully link the shapes of literature with the political imagination” (Anderson 1990, 10). What could Anderson have meant by “the political imagination”? This question has led me to speculate whether Anderson’s personal correspondence with Pramoedya had touched upon the Afro-Asian Conference in Tashkent, where Pramoedya had been the leader of the Indonesian delegation. I wonder further if Ander- son became aware of Pramoedya’s extensive interactions with Mao Dun and Ding Ling and of his published translation of the Chinese writers. It is interesting that Anderson has translated Pramoedya for the English-speaking audience just as the latter had translated Ding Ling or Lu Xun for his Indonesian audience. These unexpected crossings of translations suggest that the future itself might be the ultimate preserve of multiple temporalities. I am hopeful that the legacies of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences— their political imagination, their encouragement to think differently about the fu- ture of universalism, their ambitious translation projects along with their reinvention of world literature—will live on through the tem- poralities of potential translations yet to come. translation / spring / 2014 168 References Anderson, Benedict R. O’g. 1990. Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Arora, Neena. 2007. The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand: A Study of His Hero. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors Pty. Ltd. Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. New York: Con- tinuum. Badiou, Alain. 2009. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event. Volume 2. Translated by Al- berto Toscano. New York: Continuum. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press. Commission on Human Rights, Drafting Committee, First Session, Summary Record Of the Eighth Meeting at Lake Success, New York, on Tuesday, June 17, 1947 at 2:30 p.m. E/CN.4/AC.1/SR.8. Cui Guoliang and Cui Hong, eds. 2003. Zhang Pengchun lun jiaoyu yu xiju yishu [P. C. Chang on education and theatrical arts]. Tianjin: Nankai daxue chuban- she. de Man, Paul. 1986. “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator.’” In Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1985. “Les Tours de Babel.” In Difference in Translation, translated and edited by Graham F. Joseph. London: Cornwell University Press. Eber, Irene. 1994. “Western Literature In Chinese Translation, 1949–1979.” Asian and African Studies 3 (1): 34–54. Eliot, T. S. 1948. Banquet Speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laure- ates/1948/eliot-speech.html. Accessed September 21, 2013. Glendon, Mary Ann. 2002. A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York: Random House. Goldstein, Robert Justin. 2001. Political Repression in Modern America: FROM 1870 TO 1976. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Guo Xiaochuan. 2000. Guo Xiaochuan quanji [Complete works of Guo Xiaochuan]. Volume 9. Guilin: Guangqi shifan daxue chubanshe. Hollingsworth, Mark, and Richard Norton-Taylor. 1988. Blacklist: The Inside Story of Political Vetting. London: The Hogarth Press Ltd. Horne, Gerald. 1985. Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Re- sponse to the Cold War, 1944–1963. Albany: State University of New York Press. Humphrey, John P. 1984. Human Rights and the United Nations: A Great Adventure. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational. Katō, Shūichi. 1999. A Sheep’s Song: A Writer’s Reminiscences of Japan and the World. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. translation / spring / 2014 Larkin, Bruce D. 1971. China and Africa: 1949–1970: The Foreign Policy of the Peo- ple’s Republic of China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Liu, Hong. 1996. “Pramoedya Ananta Toer and China: The Transformation of a Cul- tural Intellectual.” Indonesia 61 (April): 124. 169  Liu, Lydia H. 1995. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Trans- lated Modernity, China 1900–1936. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2006. The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Mak- ing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Liu, Lydia H., ed. 1999. Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham: Duke University Press. Lorca, Francisco Garcia, and Donald Allen, eds. 1995. The Selected Poems of Fed- erico Garcia Lorca. New York: New Directions. Morsink, Johannes. 1999. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Neuhauser, Charles. 1968. Third World Politics: China and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization 1957–1967. Harvard East Asian Monographs. Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parker, Ralph. 1959. “The Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference.” Meanjin Quarterly, 18 (April): 107–111. Said, Edward. 2000. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. Sakai, Naoki. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity. Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press. Shinn, David H., and Joshua Eisenman. 2012. China and Africa: A Century of En- gagement. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. Outside the Teaching Machine. London: Rout- ledge. Steiner, George. 1978. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stonor Saunders, Frances. 2001. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New Press. Third Social and Humanitarian Committee of the UN General Assembly. 1948. “Draft International Declaration of Human Rights (E/800) (continued).” Ninety- sixth meeting, October 7, 1948, 98; Ninety-Eighth Meeting, October 9, 1948, 114; Ninety-Eighth Meeting, October 9, 1948, 114. Summary records, Official Records of the Fifth Session of the General Assembly. Lake Success, N.Y. Twiss, Sumner B. 2009. “Confucian contributions to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Historical and Philosophical perspective.” In The World’s Religions After September 11: Volume 2 Religion and Human Rights, edited by Arvind Sharma, 153–173 Westport, CT, and London: Praeger. Lydia H. Liu is a theorist of media and translation living in New York. She is Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and has published on literary theory, translation, digital media, Chinese feminism, and empire in English and Chinese. Her English works include The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Un- translation / spring / 2014 conscious (2010), The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Mak- ing (2004) and, more recently, a coedited translation with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko called The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (2013). 170 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15511

The Postimperial Etiquette and the Affective Structure of Areas Jon Solomon ............................. University of Lyon, France [email protected] Abstract: This essay examines the role of translation in building the affective structure of postcolonial/postimperial areas, identifying ressentiment, erudition and disavowal, and homolingual address as the three main aspects to be studied. The postimperial etiquette is an agreement concerning the recognition of “le- gitimate” subjects and objects formed in the crucible of the apparatus of area in- herited from the imperial–colonial modernity. This agreement functions as an ideology for contemporary cognitive capitalism. The essay ends by suggesting strategies for transforming the postimperial etiquette and proposes that energy be redirected away from both resubstantialized objects and anthropocentric sub- jects towards social relations that are both the point of departure for and the final determination of intellectual work. ______________ Translation as a “Bridging Technology” with Ideological Functions There is a series of terms beginning with translation that needs to be mapped out and connected, end-to-end. This is the se- ries that runs through translation–culture–nation–race/species and can be rehearsed as follows: Translation is what enables people from different cultures to bridge the gaps that separate them, yet in the age of nation–states, culture has been appropriated by the prac- tices and discourse of national identity. As for the modern nation itself, none of its claims to natural, organic status can hide its birth in colonial theories of race and species (which I shall denote by the term “anthropological difference”). Though translation therefore bears some intrinsic historical connection to anthropological dif- ference, how are we to understand it today? The culture–nation–race/species nexus takes us directly to translation / spring / 2014 the heart of historical capitalism. If we follow Elsa Dorlin as she charts the birth of the French nation in colonial theories and prac- tices of anthropological difference, then we will agree that these 171  theories arose principally as a historical response to the new and accelerated practices of human migration growing out of mercan- tilism and colonial conquest (Dorlin 2009, 211). Dorlin’s analysis, which is too interested in bringing our attention to the sadly over- looked connection between gender and race to make room for a full consideration of capitalism, draws my attention for one further rea- son whose importance to this essay will become greater as we pro- ceed: the role of the body. The transition from royal to popular sovereignty was accomplished, according to Dorlin, by substituting the body of the nation, composed of supposedly natural traits (what would later be called “national character”), for the royal individual. The need for these nationalized traits to be “natural” unleashes an essential imbrication between race and gender that forms the core of Dorlin’s important account, leading her to conclude that “[t]he question of the nation constantly refers back to its corporeality” (Dorlin 2009, 208). My interest in citing this passage will be to show how translation operates today as a somatic technology, teth- ering bodies to the apparatus of area that hides the matrix of an- thropological difference by naturalizing the nation–state. Following the new and growing visibility of the “constant crisis” that is the state at the end of the twentieth century, a broad spectrum of theorists, activists, and artists have been interested in exploring the potential of a nonrepresentational politics. My interest in nonrepresentational politics is limited exclusively to its potential ramifications for disrupting the schema of anthropological differ- ence that forms the backbone of our common, global modernity. This article assumes that representational politics, that is, the poli- tics of identity, is invariably tied to the state. The state is the point of reference that makes it possible to imagine complete congruence between taxonomies of anthropological difference, social organi- zation, and divisions of knowledge without which identity politics would be meaningless. Hence, a nonrepresentational politics is by nature insurrectional, which means that it must fight against the “agents and agencies active in the invention of the ideological prac- tices of everyday life in support of the reproduction of state power” (Kapferer 2010, 5). In relation to translation I would argue, in other translation / spring / 2014 words, that it must be considered in light of the reproduction of stateness (which is a way of producing and managing “anthropo- logical difference” for the sake of capital accumulation), and that 172 it (translation) plays a crucial role in the management of the tran- sition to a new type of world order based on the “corporate–state.” While an analysis of the world order imposed among and by corporate–states is beyond the purview of this essay, it will be helpful to offer a quick review of the period prior to this time, the period of a world order constructed around the nation–state. If we follow Antony Anghie’s work on the colonial origins of the modern world system based upon state sovereignty, we are struck by his assertion that international law instantiates or “postulates” a “gap” within the global human population and then, having naturalized this gap, proceeds to enumerate for itself the task of developing all manner of techniques to bridge the gap (Anghie 2004, 37). Of course, you will immediately see the irony of a technique that is it- self responsible for the problem that it is supposed to solve. (Per- haps Anghie has found the most economical definition of humanism around.) The reason that irony has remained largely hid- den, we may conclude after reading Anghie, is to be found, with regard to the discipline or field of international law, in the ideology of cultural difference. As long as the “gap” of cultural difference was assumed, as the field of international law asserted, to preexist the practices of colonial encounter (just as the practices and insti- tution of modern state sovereignty supposedly developed in Europe were assumed to preexist colonialism), the only viable question left for the development of that field of practice concerned the appro- priate types of political and social technologies to bridge that gap. Now, this is exactly the role that translation has been called upon to play in the modern era of nation–states. Operating at a quotidian level, with a reach equal to or perhaps greater than law, translation has been a crucial technique for the establishment and consolidation of areas—that quintessential apparatus of modernity that correlates via a system of geo-mapping subjective formation to hierarchical taxonomies of knowledge and social organization. I say it is a quintessentially modern apparatus precisely be- cause of its importance to the fundamental project of modernity. According to modernity’s self-definition, the “modernity-project” should be defined through the principles of liberty, equality, and translation / spring / 2014 reason, but I think that we are now ready to admit that there is an- other side to the project of modernity, the succinct definition of which would be: a belief that technological progress and aesthetics 173  can be joined together in a single effort to develop the perfect race/species. Modernity is thus a project in species–being the work of which is manifested or located exactly in the body. This body should ideally be understood as the physical manifestation of an area, which is neither climate (Hippocrates) nor temperature (Aris- totle), but is rather an instrument of endogenous genotechnology (Dorlin 2009, 209). This “area” is hardly a unitary phenomenon, but rather a series of nodal points relayed in constantly shifting as- semblages among bodies, tongues, and minds. These assemblages are then grouped into populations. Hence, the project of perfecting the species through a concrete population of bodies grouped into areas invariably has to posit a split within the human species. This split, which was also present in Kant’s contradictory definition of “humanity” as both a universal quality shared by all members of a species and an ideal that was nevertheless unequally realized by different members or populations, has been a core component of the “modernity-project” throughout its history. I see a precursor of this Kantian strategy in Anghie’s description of Vitoria’s charac- terization of native peoples, who share universal reason but are bur- dened by a “personality” (which will later be called, once again, “national character”) that causes them to deviate from the universal norm. I do not wish to dwell on this history, but merely call atten- tion to the need to provide a critical counterhistory that will provide an account of the political and governmental technologies invented and mobilized, as translation has been, “to bridge the gap,” when they were in fact participating in the consolidation and prolongation of the entire anthropological edifice of the colonial/imperial moder- nity (a racism vaster than any phenomenon known by that name today, for it includes virtually all other manner of social difference). It is my hypothesis that we do not see (or at least have not seen up to now) the ideological effects of these technologies precisely be- cause we are (or at least have so far been) so deeply invested in the apparatus of area. These technologies, such as translation and in- ternational law, hide the essential strangeness of the areas into which the globe has been divided, as a means of population man- agement for the benefit of capital accumulation, through the history translation / spring / 2014 of colonial/imperial modernity. Ostensibly resembling the latter-day inheritors of premod- ern empires, kingdoms, feudalities, et cetera, these areas (typified 174 by the nation–state) could best be understood as an enormous ap- paratus of capture designed to subsume the productive capacity of society into the needs of capital. Within the organizational structure of the nation–state, the work of perfecting the race/species is always an aesthetic question as much as a technological one. Hence, we might refer to the anthropological work of modernity as perfiction- ing (a neologism that combines the two words “perfection” and “fiction”) inasmuch as it invariably involves a typology of fanta- sized images concentrated around, or projected upon, the link be- tween bodies and nations. As capitalism transitions to a new historical form, the role of the area–apparatus is undergoing a concomitant change. Today’s areas are designed not so much to capture as to “pool” populations within. As capitalism moves from its industrial phase to a cognitive phase, the “pooling” of population takes on its greatest significance within the emerging bioeconomy of semiocapitalism and the cor- porate surveillance state. The call-word of this configuration is “life is code, primed for transaction.” 1 Although the contemporary con- figuration draws its symbolic resources from the cultural imaginary of the imperial–colonial modernity, its greatest ideological use is to cover up the total subsumption of population into the bioinfor- matic economy. No longer a source of surplus value simply through its role as labor, population is becoming a source of value through its role as an inexhaustibly mutable source of bioinformatic code. Population is, other words, pooled not just as labor—that is, pro- ducers—nor even just as consumers, but also for its role as source- code. The reason why the corporate-state “needs” to put just about everybody under surveillance ultimately amounts to the potential of all source-code to be “pirated.” Translation today continues to play the role of ideology, preventing us from seeing how the “bridging technologies” are in fact prolonging the agony of the domination under which we live, labor, and perish. In the hope of providing elements for a critique of this ideology, I attempt in this essay to describe the affective structure of area, typified today by what I call the postimperial eti- translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 1 My thanks to Julian Elam for this phrase, which he developed in our seminar “The Ap- paratus of Anthropological Difference and the Subjective Technologies of Speciation,” held at Université Jean Moulin (spring, 2013). 175  quette. I propose that one part of the insurrection-to-come against the postimperial etiquette of the corporate surveillance state will emerge out of the subjectivity of the translator–subaltern. Translation and Subjectivity Naoki Sakai has been telling us for a long time that trans- lation is a social practice (Sakai 1997). In it, the essential indeter- minacy, hybridity, and openness of social relations is evident. Yet, Sakai also tells us, the dominant form of sociality established through the regime of translation in the modern era deliberately ef- faces such originary hybridity. The technical term that is used by Sakai to denote this form of sociality is the “schema of cofigura- tion,” which is premised upon the representational practices of the “homolingual address.” The identities created out of cofiguration are posterior to the translational encounter and mutually codepen- dent, yet claim to be anterior and autonomous. This is the form of sociality that is essentially codified in the homogenizing machine of the nation–state, which would always like to present itself as an organic, historical entity when it is in fact an apparatus of posterior superimposition. The reason Sakai uses the term figuration is be- cause the figure stands for an absent totality that cannot be grasped experientially and for which the imagination substitutes a schematic figure, like a map, that is essentially aesthetic. It is important to re- member that in Sakai’s account the totality does not correspond to anything other than the schema itself. Rather than absent, it is fic- tive, in an active, generative sense. The power of this fiction is that it enables originary difference to be captured and plotted onto a grid of identifiable positions. Hence the schema of cofiguration is much more about establishing a field of representation in which identities are constructed in such a way that they appear to precede the establishment of the representational field upon which they de- pend (and within which they will certainly be organized in hierar- chical fashion) rather than being about the content of specific identities. Against representation, Sakai invites us to engage in the “heterolingual address.” Seen in light of Sakai’s critique, the dif- translation / spring / 2014 ference between the hetero- and homolingual forms of address as- sumes the character of a political choice, bearing clear ethical dimensions. The ethics of national language, which Sakai identifies 176 with racism, exemplifies the stakes involved. It might be useful to point out, however, that the ethics of national language is not a char- acteristic unique to this or that particular language but rather a com- mon denominator shared by all languages when they are “counted” according to a “Romantic Ideology” (Agamben 2000, 65) of cul- tural individuation (Sakai 2009). This understanding views both language and people as individualized, determinate entities, and as- sumes an organic link of equivalency between the two. The “schema of cofiguration,” as described by Sakai, is precisely the means by which the “Romantic ideology” of language and people is transformed into an ethics and an aesthetics of everyday, lived experience. To engage in the practice of heterolingual address con- stitutes a refusal of the aesthetico-ethical constellation of cofigura- tion and a desire for liberation from it. The Affective Structure of Area and the Postimperial Etiquette If, as Balibar writes, “the emancipation of the oppressed can only be their own work, which emphasizes its immediately eth- ical signification” (Balibar 1994, 49), then the emancipation from the apparatus of area, which oppresses all or else oppresses none, can only be undertaken collectively. Yet by the same logic, the re- pression of emancipatory movements against the apparatus of area can be expected to have a definite collective face as well. This is the difference between complicity and cooperation. Bearing in mind recent discussions that underscore the displacement of this problem at an ontological level by contrasting different forms of collectivity (often positing the state/people pairing against that of the Common/singular), I would like to direct our attention to the problem of affect, where it immediately becomes evident that the practice of ressentiment is by far the most ubiquitous response on both sides of the colonial/imperial divide to a refusal of cofiguration and an exodus from the apparatus of area. The phenomenologist Max Scheler, who devoted a mono- graph to the subject of ressentiment, argues that one of the reasons it arises is because one side or the other in a typical social dyad (such as Master and Slave, or Male and Female) experiences the translation / spring / 2014 existence of the other in terms of existential foreclosure: since I can never have/be/feel what the other has/is/feels, I am motivated by an insatiable rancor. The critique of “egalitarianism” at the heart of 177  Scheler’s work, which mistakes social equality for exchange value 2 rather than indeterminacy (and leads Scheler to see Jews, women, and socialists as representative sources of ressentiment), is not the subject of my concern here. Rather, I would like to suggest that there is another form of ressentiment undetected by Scheler, the type that arises not between the terms of a dyadic pair, but in the relation of complicity that unites them. In the midst of their differ- ence and relative struggle, they nevertheless work together. Al- though their mutual fear is undeniably real and strong, it is not as strong as their mutual fear and anticipation of the emergence of something new, something that neither falls within the dyadic pair nor is part of its trajectory. It is, rather, this form of ressentiment— a form of crisis management that aims to sustain a certain regime of biopolitical production—that is most common today. Ressenti- ment is not a personal psychological problem; it is an affective structure peculiar to the institutions of national translation in which we work, and it opens up subject positions for bodies placed within. Those who pretend that they are free from this structure are pre- cisely the ones who contribute, through their disavowal, to the structure’s reproduction—even when they are deemed to be “fight- ing the good fight.” The reasons why this form of ressentiment is now evident but was not yet visible a century ago when Scheler was writing are as much historical as methodological. Besides the revolution within phenomenology led by Martin Heidegger in the first part of the twentieth century that led to the rise of the philosophies of differ- ence in its latter half (paving the way, in effect, for the ontological shift to which we alluded above), there is also the progression of geopolitical events that brought a formal end to colonialism and destabilized the sovereignty of the nation–state, gradually replacing it with the transnational corporate–state. As the philosophies of dif- ference began to infiltrate humanistic disciplines outside of philos- ophy, the foundational oppositions of civilizational difference and national sovereignty were being thrown into disarray by the col- lapse of the Eurocentric system of international law that had dom- translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 2 Ironic, since Scheler bemoans the effect that exchange value has wrought upon social relations. To understand how equality can be understood as a form of indeterminacy in the social, it is necessary to link it to liberty, forming an inherently contradictory and unstable pair that Étienne Balibar calls the proposition of equaliberty. See Balibar 1994. 178 inated the world system throughout several centuries of colonial/ imperial modernity. In other words, the “constant crisis” that is the state (Kapferer 2010) became visible. With the visibility of this cri- sis it suddenly became possible to imagine, in the concrete arena of history, subjectivities and relations that were completely unfore- seen by the old oppositions between the “West” and the non- “West,” or between the native and the foreign. Yet alongside these historical openings, we also undoubt- edly see today a reinforcement of those anachronistic oppositions that take the form of complicity. A particular feature of capitalism, one which was undoubtedly present throughout its history but which has become easily visible today, lies in its penchant for cre- ating profitable crisis. Under neoliberal “biocapitalism,” crisis has become a more or less permanent mode of operation for capitalist accumulation, so much so that there is a greater interest in the pro- longation of crisis through regimes of permanent crisis manage- ment than there is in the resolution of crisis. Within that context, academic exchange and the modes of address in today’s world are characterized by a relation that I would like to call the postimperial etiquette.3 My hypothesis is that the postimperial etiquette constitutes an affective structure, or subjec- tive technology, that plays a crucial role in the contemporary biopo- litical production. Ressentiment, as I have proposed, is the first of its essential affective structures. The second element essential to the affective structure of postcolonial etiquette is an investment in the homolin- gual address, such as I have previously analyzed in twentieth cen- tury thinkers such as Michel Foucault (Solomon 2010, Solomon 2011), Jean-Luc Nancy (Solomon 2013), Giorgio Agamben (Solomon 2014), and Ernst Cassirer (Solomon 2009). The regime of translation constructed through the homolingual address lures even these great figures of twentieth century thought into projecting between retroactive and proactive alternatives: the images of a past- that-never-happened and those of a future-that-will-have-to-be- abandoned—that is, the West as both a tradition and a destiny. translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 3 Although it is a postcolonial/postimperial phenomenon, for the sake of convenience I will use the term postimperial. 179  Recently, I have been trying to work out the implications of Sakai’s critique of translation with respect to a phenomenon, which I call speculative superimposition, that is characteristic of modern postcolonial/postimperial societies in general (Solomon 2012). Here, we may refer to the affective trait of mournfulness ex- pressed by deconstructive authors such as Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe when faced with a world beyond the apparatus of area. In a 1992 conference in Strasbourg, “Thinking Europe at Its Borders,” Lacoue-Labarthe centers his intervention on the question of “after- wardsness” (l’après-coup 4): “In its most abrupt, and hence most paradoxical, definition, afterwardsness designates the belated—but recognized—manifestation of something that did not happen or did not have even the slightest chance of happening. Of something that took place, thus, without taking place” (Collectif Géophilosophie de l’Europe 1992, 74). I am hardly persuaded that the “retroactive” quality identified by Lacoue-Labarthe as the philosophically essen- tial movement of European modernity can be simply contained within and ascribed exclusively to an area called “Europe.” On the contrary, this is, I would argue, a characteristic of the modern logic of area in general. As much as the modern nation–state would like to claim organic anteriority, it is always both an internal imposition and an expropriation from the outside. (This predicament is what eventually disqualifies the distinction between constituent and con- stituting powers, forcing the search for “destitute” powers instead— see Nowotny 2007.) The same “afterwardsness” is evident in the construction of the “West,” which relies on translation to superim- pose upon the image of spatiality a temporal process that leads to “exceptionally universal,” metaphysical subjects. The deconstruc- tive school of the postwar philosophies of difference that formed the locus in which Lacoue-Labarthe and other philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, worked was steeped in an historical awareness of the “end” of the “West.” Hence it is no won- der that Lacoue-Labarthe warns us (or is it invites us to lament?): “afterwardsness can also, quite simply, take the form of regret or repentance” (Collectif Géophilosophie de l’Europe 1992, 76). Re- translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 4 Lacoue-Labarthe explicitly takes up the Freudian–Lacanian theme of Nachträglichkeit. English translations of this term are either “deferral” or “afterwardsness,” neither of which is fully satisfactory. 180 gret differs from repentance with regards to the recognition of guilt and the desire for repetition. One may regret the past not just be- cause of some regrettable action, but simply because it is past, or has been fantasized as past, and hence desire its repetition without the slightest iota of contrition, much less repentance. Nostalgia for the bonds of a fantasized “lost community” that never really existed (or has been idealized and turned into an image) forms, according to Jean-Luc Nancy (1991, 9), one of the essential structures of modernity. The phenomenon of “afterwardsness” through which areas are constructed finds expression in the postimperial etiquette through the affective quality of ressentiment. The reason why we use the French term, instead of an English translation such as “re- sentment,” is because of the etymological structure of the French word, which emphasizes a temporal dimension (re-) of repetition. Re-sentir: to feel again and again what one has not really experi- enced (which is the same as turning experience into a phenomeno- logical fetish). Ressentiment plays such an important role in the affective structure of the postimperial etiquette precisely because it is intrinsically related to the temporal construction of the modern area–apparatus. The regime of translation constructed through the homolin- gual address lures subjects into projecting between retroactive and proactive alternatives: the images of a past-that-never-happened and those of a future-that-will-have-to-be-abandoned. The past-that-never-happened refers to the representation of translation as an encounter between two discrete languages. Sakai shows how this idea can only be retrospectively superim- posed upon the translational exchange as a schema or an image. What this superimposition effaces is the essential hybridity and in- determinacy seen in the position of the translator, as well as the pe- culiar interruption of linear temporality in translation. This aspect of the translator corresponds to the problem of individuation, which makes it impossible to speak of language(s) as one would speak of countable nouns (Sakai 2009). The future-that-will-have-to-be-abandoned refers to the translation / spring / 2014 way that the homolingual address guides action towards the future. Sakai explains: 181  By the schema of cofiguration, I want to point out the essentially “imaginary” nature of the comparative framework of Japan and the West, since the figure in cofiguration is imaginary in the sense that it is a sensible image on the one hand, and practical in its ability to evoke one to act toward the future on the other. (Sakai 1997, 52) The “future” that is thereby constituted is reduced, accord- ing to the figural logic of the schematism, to a spatialized repre- sentation. The dimension of future temporality as irruptive discontinuity is effaced. “This is why,” writes Sakai, “difference in or of language that incites the act of translation comes as a repre- sentation only after the process of translation. Involved in transla- tion is a paradox of temporality that cannot be accommodated in the worldly time of the past, the present and the future” (Sakai 2009, 86). Acting toward the future according to the schema of cofiguration constituted by the homolingual address produces a spatialized representation that effectively cuts off the temporality of the future as unrepresentable negation and creation. It eliminates, in other words, the possibility for new subjectivities that do not cor- respond to the oppositions installed by the schema of cofiguration. As an affective structure, the homolingual address operates exactly like that “angel of history” seen in Paul Klee’s painting and fa- mously described by Walter Benjamin as being propelled “into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward” (Benjamin 1969, 258). The “future” promised by this form of sociality, typical of the apparatus of area, is a future of ruins. One of the characteristic symptoms of this mode of cap- turing the future particular to the apparatus of area is the peculiar dialectic between historical preservation and environmental de- struction everywhere in evidence today. One does not have to look to ancient Mayan temples in the Guatemalan rain forests, regularly “mined” for gravel by developers to see the concrete nexus of this opposition. A much more potent example could be seen, for in- stance, in postwar France, one of the active world-leaders in the in- stitutionalization of historical monument preservation and which holds it to be an absolute human value essential to collective iden- tity. Yet as a nation that derives ¾ of its energy needs from nuclear translation / spring / 2014 power and is one of the main exporters of nuclear technology around the globe, France can be said to be playing an active, if ironic, role in the production of the ultimate form of “preserva- 182 tion”—the radioactively contaminated wasteland. The third element in the affective structure of area to which I would like to draw attention is erudition. In the meaning to which I would like to ascribe to this term, it refers not just to the problems of access and class mobility, but also more generally to the socially meaningful qualification of “knowledge” and the distribution of it among bodily bearers. Erudition operates through division—the di- vision of labor, to begin with, but also the disciplinary divisions of knowledge, the economic divisions of affect, and finally the indi- viduating divisions of the body. Translation and address play an important role here, too, as erudition excludes or devalorizes certain kinds of knowledge that cannot be “translated” into the quantitative forms and standardized denominations to which the definition of “knowledge” is limited. In today’s neoliberal regime, such exclu- sion is exercised through the standards set by financially motivated evaluation bureaucracies. In today’s neoliberal regime, such exclu- sion is exercised through the standards set by financially motivated evaluation/surveillance bureaucracies, intellectual property regimes, and disciplinary boundaries. Erudition is time-consuming. It signals both an unprece- dented expropriation of the intellectual worker’s time, such that one is never fully off work, as well as a consumption of time by making affective experience a direct source of value (“consumers hungry for new experience”). Working-too-much, often under precarious conditions, is fast becoming the main way in which subjective dis- avowal, a fetishism of the object under the sign of erudition, is in- stituted, even among those of us who would otherwise like to be alert to the problem of disavowal. The technical term that Marx uses for “working-too-much” is absolute surplus value, typically produced by extending the worker’s labor time. Several decades ago, Gayatri Spivak used Marx’s technical term globally to char- acterize relations between the West and the non-West in the post- colonial era (Spivak 2009b, 123). Today, it would appear that the extraction of absolute surplus value through excessive labor time is fast becoming one of the principal ways to assure not just a hier- archy of relations but the unquestioned acceptance of the field of translation / spring / 2014 oppositional terms through which hierarchies are constructed and reversed. What is being forgotten is that the terms of specific dif- ference, such as the West and the non-West, always contain a core 183  component of negativity, freedom, indeterminacy, and antagonism, and are never simply given. Due to a Cartesian habit, we might not think of erudition in terms of affect, but under the definition that I would ascribe to it, affect “sneaks” into erudition through the particular way it indi- viduates the body. Erudition constitutes a singular appropriation of the relation between body and knowledge by granting exclusive le- gitimacy to the abstract, accumulational form that we call, in Eng- lish, the body of knowledge. The affective form that is closely related to this appropriation of the multiplicity of the body is the sense of knowing. Nationalism is precisely the modern political form that turns knowing into affect. While foreigners can know about the other nation, they cannot understand it in the same way as nationals; they cannot, in other words, partake in knowledge as an affective structure of feeling that is based in “experience” and shared among members of an imaginary community. Yet the cate- gory of experience-that-can-be-shared-sympathetically is deter- mined in advance by the arena that capitalism, in the process of appropriating the state, establishes for the process of valorization. This is the arena of exchange value. Sympathetic knowledge, or national knowledge, is the form of exchange value that is being ap- plied to the act of knowing understood in terms of fantasy—the fantasy of shared experience reflected in knowledge. As an apparatus of fantasy, erudition’s most important role is found in recoding the body. It is not simply that distantiation, based on the Cartesian stance of objectivity, becomes the principle mode of relation, with all of its known symptoms. Erudition is also a means of maintaining an attitude of indifference or disavowal. The most common form of this attitude of indifference with regard to knowledge in the postimperial configuration can be seen in the institutionally sanctioned assumption that issues related to anthro- pological difference fall under the purview of specific disciplines or fields within the human sciences—what are commonly termed “area studies” in North America. The matrix of anthropological dif- ference per se as an organizing principle for the human sciences must never be brought into question at an organizational level. The translation / spring / 2014 organization must be naturalized so that participants never see their own disciplinary commitments, including language and object- choice, in terms of the history of social relations under conditions 184 of colonial population management. It is not simply that objects re- flect the desires and tastes of certain kinds of subjectivity (forming in effect a socially instituted form of prejudgment or simply preju- dice), but rather that objects become means of disavowal by which people can ignore and forget the mediations and negations that con- stitute subjectivity as a social practice. As an affective form, erudition is thus characterized by ob- ject-obsession and subjective disavowal. It is globally institution- alized and legitimized through the supposedly “natural” correspondence between disciplinary divisions in the order of knowledge and various social divisions in the order of political or- ganization. And while it may look as if the university institutions in North America, in which greater anxiety about the status of ob- jects is often seen (accompanied by all kinds of institutional inno- vations to accommodate interdisciplinary approaches), has an advantage in this respect, the truth is rather that an imperial nation- alism, such as seen today in the United States, invariably calls forth performative gestures, such as transdisciplinary object-anxiety, in order to garner the sacrifice of minority populations for the benefit of the capital-state nexus. Disciplinary rigidity and obsession with the legitimacy of “pure” objects as seen in the other nations today outside North American high academia is not a sign of their “back- wardness,” but simply the function of cultural nationalism formed in relation to imperial nationalism. In short, the regime of erudition oversees the silent articu- lation of the reproduction of cleavages (reason vs. myth, speech vs. writing) and identities inherited from the imperial/colonial moder- nity to the neoliberal production of value through affect. The bearer of various forms (racial, ethnic, national, gendered, sexual, linguis- tic, et cetera) of social domination and exploitation that have ac- companied modernity, erudition is above all concerned with bodies of accumulation. Whereas capitalist accumulation produces the bodies coded by political economy and translational accumulation produces bodies coded by civilizational and anthropological differ- ence, erudite accumulation produces normalized bodies of knowl- edge as well as bodies normalized by knowledge. translation / spring / 2014 It is through a process of identification with the body of knowledge as a site of accumulation associated with specific “areas” that intellectuals continually abstract themselves from the 185  production of knowledge as translational, social practice. In the postimperial scholar, this is seen most readily in the prolongation of disciplinary divisions and linguistic competencies and homolin- gual modes of address that form the obverse complement of the postimperial area studies specialist. The postimperial specialist of philosophy, for instance, is not expected to acquire linguistic and affective competencies associated with postcolonial areas, and typ- ically relies on the homolingual address to negotiate anthropolog- ical difference. Or again, the postimperialist specialist of racism studies does not have to negotiate the composition of her classes and articles in relation to the demands of an academia-publishing industry complex in a postcolonial language organized by a post- colonial state that is itself composed through various forms of in- stitutionalized racism. Given the recent demonstrations of admiration for public intellectuals in the “West” whose politics are characterized by their admirers with epithets such as “fuck off!” (Rancière),5 or who gain notoriety for scandalously scatological humor (Žižek), it might be necessary to explain just what we intend to get at by a critique of “etiquette.” Etiquette is part of the “immunitarian” apparatus de- scribed by Alain Brossat in his critique of modern liberal democ- racy. The English usage of the word, which is associated with “good breeding” (Merriam–Webster), underscores its relation to the theme of racial exclusion that forms the hidden backbone of liberalism (Cole 2000)—and modern sociality in general (Quijano 2000). As such, it is a biopolitical technology, for which Brossat offers a won- derfully succinct description: “the distribution of bodies in a dense space, via the mediation [truchement] of a system of rules named etiquette” (Brossat 2003, 36). In the dense space of knowledge, the trio of erudition, homolingual address, and ressentiment constitutes the affective structure according to which bodies of knowledge are constituted and areas populated. It is immunitarian to the extent that it protects the anthropological matrix that supports capitalist accumulation in the colonial–imperial modernity from being over- turned. translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 5 http://critical-theory.com/who-the-fuck-is-jacques-ranciere/ accessed on May 20, 2013. 186  Brossat uses the French word truchement to speak of a me- diating role played by a “system of rules.” Although the term’s usage here certainly refers to a general effect of mediation, it is worth noting an older, yet still current, literary usage of the term that refers to a translator and translation. We might thus take this usage as an invitation to think about what would happen were we to substitute traduction for truchement—that is, “translation” for “mediation.” Doing so, we would find that etiquette is precisely the governmental technology that uses translation as a means of dis- tributing bodies across dense space—that is, the space delineated by the apparatus of area. This definition of etiquette approximates Naoki Sakai’s understanding of translation based on homolingual address. As such, it constitutes the main operation of capture exer- cised by the apparatus of area. Can the Subaltern Translate? The importance of subjective transformation in the postim- perial/postcolonial age was highlighted at the beginning of North American postcolonial studies in 1988 by Gayatri Spivak in her fa- mous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak 2009a). In that work, Spivak deftly displaces the practice of cultural knowledge production in the wake of colonialism and capitalism away from the image of objects, no matter how marginalized or “illegitimate” in the eyes of dominant representations they may be, towards the production of subjectivity. It is the role of intellectual elites—on both sides of the imperial/colonial divide—that is targeted by the critique of subjectivity in Spivak’s essay. As usual, translations of the postimperial discourse into a postcolonial context can be extremely helpful for understanding the stakes involved. In the discussions of Spivak’s article in Taiwan, two of the most common translations of “subaltern” are 庶 民 (shu4min2) and 賤民 (jian4min2). These are classical terms that both share the same cognate min2 as part of there two-character com- pound. Skipping over the possible parallels between min2 and the Latin-derived word “people,” what the two Chinese terms share in common is a description of the people as common or low. In other translation / spring / 2014 words, what we have here are translations that add a biopolitical el- ement to the original term subaltern (which describes not a people but a quality of subjugation, and is hence technically limited to the 187  element of politics). The biopolitical translation risks resubstantial- izing the term “subaltern” through the matrix of anthropological difference—which, as I will show, is precisely what Spivak fights against. Needless to say, this resubstantialization has received priv- ileged institutionalization in the postimperial academic world, and it is precisely here that a look at translation becomes especially in- formative. Let me explain this message by citing another variant trans- lation of the term “subaltern” that I have seen circulating within Taiwan: 從屬階級 (cong2shu3 jie1ji2) , the “class of subordinates.” Once again, this translation runs afoul of the reading of Spivak’s article that I favor. The inclusion of the word “class” (jie1ji2) in the translated term effectively reintroduces the very point that Spivak’s essay problematizes: people are something else before they are a class or a type or a figure—before they are a people, which is al- ways what the state elites and their prefab minorities want them to be. “Subalterns” share aspects of the “unrepresentable”—except that they do not stand heroically “outside” the register of represen- tation guaranteed by the state form of social organization, but are rather hidden or silenced in the biopolitical warehouse of the indus- trial reserve army, the “pool” of a genetic population, or the sweat- shops and brothels of illegal migrant labor. Here, representation is not a formalistic problem, but a practice connected to capital’s ap- propriation of species–being precisely at the point where the mode of production meets the mode of subjection. Hence the necessity Spivak felt to remind her readers of the difference between relations of domination and relations of exploitation, and the need to read across both registers without conflating the two in a schema of rep- resentation. Needless to say, a recuperative reading of the subaltern that reinstates the original Gramscian formula (“subaltern class”) that Spivak had explicitly attempted to rework (by eliminating, first of all, the term “class,” which always refers us back to the state), is hardly a problem limited to Chinese translations. Indeed, the exis- tence of such a translation can only be explained by the realization that it is, of course, a translation not of “the text itself,” but rather of the way in which the North American university-publishing com- translation / spring / 2014 plex has bestowed upon it the honor of domestication by canoniza- tion. So, it is not a mistranslation at all, but a translation that is coldly accurate. The subjective effects of this domesticating canon- 188 ization become all too apparent when one considers the frequency with which the term “subaltern” becomes conflated with or simply substitutes for “the non-West,” leading to the use of nonsensical terms such as “the non-subaltern” to refer to the West. For Spivak, the precise location of this appropriation cannot be identified, it can only be reconstructed as it were, on the basis of a rift in subjective formation. Through a series of brilliant readings of Marx, Foucault, and Deleuze, Spivak shows that there exists a split in subjective formation that corresponds to the two meanings of the English term to represent (which are treated, in the vocabu- lary of German philosophy utilized by Marx, through the two verbs vertreten and darstellen). These two meanings correspond to the difference between the subjects formed in relations of domination and those formed in the relations of exploitation. The former re- quires an analysis of relations to power, the latter an analysis of re- lations to production. It is the modern state—which of course can now include suprastate organisms and nonstate ones as well—that offers the promise of “fixing” the relation between the two, offering a precise location, as it were, such that two projected images seem to merge, just as happens in the optical viewfinder of a coincident rangefinder camera. The image, or fiction, of this “place” in which location and identity, past and future, language and people coincide is an essential feature of the aesthetic representation crucial to the modern apparatus of area. Spivak’s essay thus contributes to the classic Marxist notion of class, which is summarized, as Jacques Bidet would say, by the formula “the state is always a state of class.” Spivak shows, by displacing domination and exploitation, that the notion of “class” must be expanded (without losing the specificity of “class”) far beyond the limits of political economy to accommo- date a vast tableau of dynamic, minoritarian relations (of which gen- der is only the tip of the iceberg) within the construction of anthropological difference. The “subaltern” is thus the name for the spacing that is undecidably both the concrete body of this or that downtrodden and marginalized individual and the possibility of a being that can no longer be configured through the matrix of an- thropological difference. Not “humanity,” not species–being, not an translation / spring / 2014 inheritor of the entire anthropological project of the colonial–im- perial modernity devoted to perfictioning, but a true (and truly car- ing) stranger. 189  From the perspective of a concern with translation, the rea- sons for the necessity of this expansive analytic find themselves in the correlation between the history of linguistic transformations under the auspices of the modern nation–state and the transitions of capitalist “development.” Although the creation of national lan- guage in Europe was linked to class through the rise of the bour- geoisie and their need to create a political community opposed to that of a kingdom, this narrative obfuscates that part of the Euro- pean nation that was forged, as Elsa Dorlin shows, in the colonies. There, the class element was concomitantly fused to an anthropo- logical element (beginning with race and gender). “Europe” and its nations only became “European” through this process of fusion (be- tween gender, race, class, language, ethnicity, sexuality, et cetera) that established the anthropological matrix of modernity and natu- ralized it via the apparatus of area. The crux of Spivak’s essay lies, as we have said, not with the identification of objects and their historical deconstruction, but rather with the constitution of subjects, particularly the subjects of knowledge forming under the shadow of capital and the state in the apparatus of area. For this reason, I must confess that the one thing that is strangest to me in the extraordinary reception this widely circulated essay has received is that so many commentators have looked at the subaltern as a problem to be solved or an idea to be applied, rather than, as Spivak writes in an entirely different context (one that is actually about translation), a locus to inhabit (Spivak 2005, 95)—or, as an invitation to cohabitation. We need, in other words, to develop practices of “being there” that are different from those normally catalogued under the Apparatus of Area.6 This is not a call for a new aesthetic piety of place, but rather a plea to de- finitively end the essential project of modernity: the idea that tech- nological progress and aesthetics could be allied together in the creation of a perfect species—what I want to name by the neolo- gism “perfictioning.” .......................... translation / spring / 2014 6 I do not think that I have yet compiled a complete catalogue, but there are several se- ries whose importance is evident: 1) typology: character–figure–image; 2) ontology: ori- gin–individuation–hylomorphism; 3) anthropology: animal–human–milieu; 4) economy: production–exploitation–accumulation; 5) statistics and logistics: temporality–event– control 190  While her emphasis on unrepresentability leads Spivak to conclude that the subaltern by definition cannot speak (which means that the subaltern always disappears under the weight of rep- resentation when subjects are made to conform to identities that ig- nore their constitutive, originary difference), she does not consider her startling answer from the perspective of translation. Or, more precisely, the position of the translator. The translator, of course, is in the position of someone who speaks without ever meaning any- thing herself. She is never authorized to say “I.” Strategies based on the disclosure of the “invisibility of the translator” (Venuti 1995) are important to the politics of translation, and for that very reason they ultimately amount to a reinvestment in the nexus between modes of production and modes of subjectification through the cat- egory of identity. In lieu of invisibility, Sakai (1997) calls attention to the hybridity and indeterminacy of the translator, and he proposes a practice of heterolingual address that accounts for discontinuity as a constitutive moment of the social. This outline of the position of the translator leads me to suggest that for the professional uni- versity-based intellectual the ethical response to the problem of subalternity will not be found in speaking or listening, but rather in “translating.” To suggest that an ethics of subalternity can be found in translation is quite different from suggesting either that the subal- tern “herself” translate or that intellectuals translate “for the subal- tern.” A negative example will help to illustrate my point, and prevent the confusion that might occur by modifying an idea that was first described in a remarkable text by a North American grad- uate researcher in political science, Jay Maggio, titled “Can the Subaltern Be Heard?” (Maggio 2007). This article, which demon- strates formidable familiarity with Spivak’s oeuvre, proposes trans- lation as a viable means of displacing Spivak’s original question. The genius of Maggio’s formula is, however, not well served by its elaboration. Symptomatically, the article falls into the well–populated ranks of those respectables who have assigned themselves the task of finding “a possible solution to the Spivakian puzzle” (Maggio 2007, 438). More disturbingly, the author relies translation / spring / 2014 upon a notion of cultural translation, whose presuppositions of ho- molingual address we do not share, to “advocate a benevolent trans- lator in the West who offers a sympathetic reading of the subaltern” 191  (Maggio 2007, 437). Although the rhetoric of benevolence and sympathy—as well as “respect” (Maggio 2007, 435)—offers a fine opportunity to remind ourselves about the merits of Christiane Vol- laire’s (2007) more materialist analysis of the politics and aesthetics of humanitarian aid in its relation to war, the arms trade, and the politics of “regime change,” I would like to focus our attention on this idea of being “in the West.” In spite of the unmistakable spirit of charity and humility that characterizes this text, the one reform that is not contemplated is subjective—the crucial one, as far as subalternity is concerned. If “the translator must recognize the im- plicated relationship of the Westerner and the subaltern” (Maggio 2007, 434), the translator in Maggio’s text never dislodges itself from its self-assurance about identity. In order to get a sense of the magnitude of this self-assurance, I would ask the reader to bear with a lengthy list of textual citations that refer to the “West,” in- cluding: “Western discourse,” “the Western translator,” “the West- ern academy,” “Western thought,” “the intellectual Western scholar,” “a Western critic (citizen),” “Western philosophical tra- ditions,” “the Western approach,” the “Western viewer,” “the West- ern self,” “the modern Western subject,” “Western metanarratives,” “a uniquely Western notion of the subject,” “the very Western con- cept of an active speaker,” “the careful Western [sic.],” et cetera. Such self-assurance might be taken in this postimperial era as the sign of humility and respect; countless theorists of much greater sophistication than myself and Maggio have been known to engage in the same repetitive obsession. Essentially a catalogue of trans- lational tropes, this manner of invoking the West inevitably leads the author to ask, halfway through the article, “how can the Western scholar study the subaltern?” (Maggio 2007, 431). My response to this question is to repeat the mantra “away from the study of objects and back to the formation of subjects and social composition.” The lessons that the subaltern has to teach us about representation and its objects extend equally to the translator. Even the longest list of supposed civilizational traits combined with the most well-intentioned discourse that “recognizes the conditional nature of the constitution of both the dominant group as well as the translation / spring / 2014 subaltern” (Maggio 2007, 436) cannot immunize the translator against her own essential hybridity—much less against what Fou- cault dryly terms the “form of a relation with power” (Foucault 192 2000, 162). Hence it is no surprise to find discussions of subalter- nity, among those who would like to treat it as an ethical relation to objects of study, conducted in a confessional mode whose ulti- mate effect is to reinstantiate identity as a subject of representation. Undoubtedly, there is a postimperial etiquette at work here. Given that the history of colonialism is seen as a massive project of ex- propriation, the postimperial scholar signs on to a pact (the postim- perial etiquette), in which his identification with the West is to be taken as the sign of a historic eschewal of the politics of imperialist expropriation. An overwhelming proportion of today’s postimperial scholars—even the ones who specialize in postcolonialism—have embraced this ethics of positionality associated with their respectful acceptance of the area in which they are supposed to be assigned. It is precisely at this point that Naoki Sakai’s unique ac- count of the position of the translator really shines. What is revealed here is an essential, original hybridity and indeterminacy, present in every social relation, yet whose presence can never be fully rep- resented or conveyed or captured. I would like to suggest that it is this “position” that is the only viable option for the intellectual of any location on today’s postcolonial/postimperial geocultural map who is concerned about the ethics of subalternity. So, for profes- sional intellectuals, it is a question of becoming subaltern with re- gard to the postimperial etiquette, and then of using this process of becoming to expand the ranks of subalternity without end. This process of becoming must not be viewed through the terms of sym- pathy, much less appropriation; it must not, in other words, become an aesthetic project of mimesis and figuration through which the modern project of perfictioning, or fabricating racial/species per- fection, can be realized technologically! Instead, the process of be- coming subaltern has to be directly aimed at the apparatus of area, which is the main impediment to the maximization of subalternity without end. That injunction means that intellectuals will have to undertake or commit to a series of revolutionary changes in the op- positions that structure the “area–institutions” in which they work, beginning, in the context of a discussion about translation, with the valorization of authorship over that of translation, and extending translation / spring / 2014 beyond that specific context to the affective economy that is mobi- lized in support of the apparatus of area. The invention of new forms of inhabitance outside of the apparatus of area—or, to use a 193  less jargonistic language, the abandonment of the postimperial/ postcolonial, civilizational state and the exodus from the future- ruins and past-images in which it has trapped us—is, to my mind, the only way to “adequately address the damage done by colonial- ism” (Maggio 2007, 431). Which is to say, of course, that the only form of reparation that makes any sense in the face of that unre- payable debt is to recyle the affective debris of area into a being that does not accumulate, but grows through shedding. Transforming the Postimperial Etiquette A collective pact concluded precisely over the apparatus of area could never function without an affective component. In a re- cent work, Franco “Bifo” Berardi has described what he sees as the major affective traits of “semiocapitalism” (Berardi 2009a). Chief among them is the pendulum that swings between depression and panic, from bear market to bull market. Berardi talks about in- terrupting the obsessive repetitions in order to create alternate re- frains. My very un-Spinozist response to Bifo is that we replace depression with sadness. In the context of this essay, I will define this as the positive affirmation associated with carefully observing the way in which the trio of homolingual address, ressentiment, and erudition entraps us and prevents our liberation from the ap- paratus of area. Such sadness becomes the platform not for reject- ing the affective structure of area, perhaps claiming ourselves to be liberated from it while others languish (or revel) within, but for embracing it within the transformations of the collective bodies– tongues–minds assemblage(s). In other words, while depression is individual, sadness is transindividual. Depression is the form that sadness takes as it goads us into individuating in the retroactive– proactive way that is typical of the apparatus of area. Sadness is affirmative in the sense that it restores depression to its transindi- vidual element. Undoubtedly, this transformation of affect from the indi- vidual to the noncollective transindividual is part of an ontological shift. Scheler’s text on ressentiment, for example, can be read, as Olivier Agard’s neat analysis of Scheler shows (Agard 2009), translation / spring / 2014 through the twin themes of an antihumanist problematization of hy- lomorphic anthropology and resistance to capitalist modernity. First published in 1912 and rereleased in an expanded, revised edition 194 in 1915, Scheler’s work in this text presages his incursions in the 1920s into the debates over philosophical anthropology taking place in the Weimar Republic. Agard’s excavation of Scheler’s work reveals a philosopher who stands, problematically, at the cen- ter of a paradox between an “anthropocentric tendency” and an “in- verse tendency towards a rupture with anthropomorphism” (Agard 2009, 185). As both the “measure of every reality” and a “cultural construction” or bit of “stardust,” summarizes Agard, “man is both central and decentered at the same time” (Agard 2009, 185). In Res- sentiment, Scheler bemoans the way in which modern capitalist so- ciety perverts the Christian notion of love, directing it towards humanity in its generic qualification as a species (Scheler 1994, 99). Under capitalism, “the will of the species” substitutes itself for the good, which is reduced to a function of utility. As a result, a “new man” is produced. The new man is a hylomorphic type, de- fined by his relation to animality (not God). For Scheler, it is pre- cisely this sort of hylomorphism (a word that he does not use, as far as I am aware) that creates of man a figure that oscillates be- tween the “overman” and the “overanimal” (Scheler 1994, 105; my translation of Übertier). Even as Agard warns against conflating Scheler’s antihumanist problematization of anthropology with the likes of Michel Foucault (leaving aside the details of Agard’s fas- cinating, yet brief, comparison between the two thinkers), his de- scription of Scheler implicitly recalls the Foucaultian critique of man as an empirico-transcendental doublet. Agard concludes that “[t]his dilemma remains valid today” (Agard 2009, 185). The con- clusion I take from his analysis is that, at its base, ressentiment arises when the nonhylomorphic pair “Common/singular” (Virno 2009) is diverted to serve the interest of accumulation, becoming a state–people nexus instead. When Scheler speaks of affect in terms of a contrast between being a “passive feeling” (what is translated into French as a “state”) as opposed to an “action” and “movement” (Scheler 1994, 93), he betrays the productive negativity in his an- tihumanism and falls back into anthropology. The vocabulary of state, act, and movement is political as well as physical. Behind this physics of power lies a Hobbesian anthropology. In place of translation / spring / 2014 this classical political physics and its attendant anthropology, it would be well to recall what Bifo says about power: it is not a force, but a field of relations (Berardi 2009b, 118). 195  With regard to reclaiming erudition, the most stubborn ob- stacle to a reappropriation of this relationship today is the coloniza- tion of time. I feel embarrassed to admit that the only strategies I can propose in the face of this time-consumption system are the re- fusal of work and volunteerism. The latter is undoubtedly a com- promise, and bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to the way in which “free” labor is an integral part of the neoliberal model of labor management. The former is simply not an option for many— work, in the capitalist logic of surplus population, refuses them. For these reasons and others, the liberation from the colonization of time through the refusal of work is only the beginning, and could never be an end in itself. The most important ways of reappropri- ating erudition will have to come from transformations in the rela- tion between knowledge and the body. This is another facet of permanently leaving behind the anthropological project modernity. We start by refusing to adopt an exceptional position, such as seen in the Cartesian split. For professional intellectuals, this means first and foremost that the construction of disciplinary objects must al- ways be contested, if not refused. First, by questioning codes of domination in the objects presently considered “legitimate”; sec- ond, by questioning and rejecting the institutional imperative to de- vote one’s work to disciplinary objects at all. In place of disciplines devoted to objects that accumulate in the body of knowledge, we need disciplines devoted to knowledgeable practices of subjective transformation. By way of conclusion to this section, let me quote a passage from a fascinating work on the capitalist mobilization of affect by a member of the French Regulation School, Frédéric Lordon: “[I]t is once again Spinoza who gives us perhaps the definition of true communism: exploitation of affect will come to an end when men know to direct their common desires—and form an enterprise, yet a communist one—towards objects that are no longer material for unilateral capture, or, in other words, when they understand that the true good is that which wishes that others possess it at the same time as I” (Lordon 2010, 195–196). Lordon is expressing nothing less than an ontological revolution away from possessive individualism. translation / spring / 2014 For Lordon, this means going beyond the notion of objects as “ma- terial for unilateral capture.” Yet, based on my experience engaging in and reading through a critique of the apparatus of area, Lordon’s 196 formula still leaves too much room for the subjective investment in objects that is known as disavowal. No longer taking the individual as the legitimate unit of analysis means precisely rethinking the na- ture and status of objects. Ultimately, the constative part of the in- tellectual sphere rejoins the performative part. Social relations enjoy the singular position of being the nonrepesentable, practical fulcrum between those two moments: they are both the originary point of departure and the element of determination-in-the-last instance. Armed with this sort of awareness, our interest in objects, be they disciplinary or transdisciplinary, pales in comparison to our eager- ness to embrace the realm of cooriented ontology, “neither a return to the substantial object nor a so-called necessary anthropocentrism [but] an existentialism resolutely opposed to all homogeneity, to all ontological flattening as to all foreclosure of the common—an ex- istentialism without reserve” (Neyrat 2013, 25). The critique of area studies shows that what is crucial to the transition to a world that has nothing to do with colonialism, and perhaps capitalism, is nei- ther the accumulation of critically powerful troves of knowledge about specific objects nor so-called maturation and growth in the sphere of the subject, but rather the simplicity of thinking relation before the emergence of the two terms of which it is supposedly the expression—something like what the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls Mitdasein.7 Once we focus firmly on relations, all those “bridging tech- nologies” can no longer operate their ideological functions. Just as the citation above is a passage from Spinoza to Lordon, now it be- comes here a passage of mine and yours. The wish to be as numer- ous as possible in the sharing of indeterminate relations is a vow that befits the practice of the translator–subaltern, and the multi- tude(s). Areas in the Age of the Logistical Population The postimperial etiquette’s function is to leave the appa- ratus of area intact. This is what “being tactful” in the era of post- colonial/postimperial globalization means: it is an affective translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 7 Unfortunately, it is precisely in the relation between the constative and the performa- tive elements that Nancy’s philosophical writings sometimes most grievously betray his ontological discovery of the importance of being-in-common. See Solomon 2013. 197  economy that obviates the need to link a radical reorganization in the mechanisms of accumulation to subjective transformation. This understanding of the postimperial etiquette is corroborated by Gay- atri Spivak’s observation that “a hyperreal class of consolidated so- called international civil society is now being produced to secure the post-statist conjuncture” (Spivak 1999, 399). Although the postimperial etiquette promises to mitigate the possibility that his- torical resentment will break out into open struggle, it does so at the cost of instituting a highly normative regime. Clothed in an os- tensibly ethical discourse of respect for “cultural difference,” the postimperial etiquette prolongs racism, in the broadest sense of the term, by naturalizing the apparatus of area. Transnational complicity is acquiring a new face in the age of global semiocapitalism and biocapitalism, while the institutions and practices that constitute areas are changing rapidly. As we move from the age of the nation–state to the corporate–state, fueled by unprecedented privatizations of state functions, one has to be con- cerned that the postimperial etiquette today may well be operating as an ideological “justification” for the political legitimacy of the neoliberal corporate–state. Given the increasing integration of biotechnology, information technology, and nanotechnology within the context of capitalist accumulation, the meaning and role of pop- ulation is undergoing vast change. The shift from “statistical pop- ulations” to “logistical populations” (Harney 2010) takes on its greatest significance, to my mind, in the apprehension of population in terms of a “pool.” As biocapitalism identifies life with code and code with value, populations themselves essentially become ware- houses of value–code available for the development of virtually un- limited new products to be advanced by biocapitalism. Genetic code, as seen in the expression “DNA pool,” is thus the first level of meaning that I would ascribe to the “pooling” effect of logistical populations. The second and third levels occur in the moments of production and consumption. As the products of biocapitalism will be marketed directly back to the populations from which the value– code was originally sourced, logistical populations are also com- posed of a “consumer pool” and a “labor pool,” both of which are translation / spring / 2014 essentially held captive to, or made targets for, the extraction of surplus value out of the bioeconomy. Needless to say, the mainte- nance of discipline and control within each of these pools requires 198 an elaborate security apparatus capable of monitoring in real time the movements and borders that constitute pooling as such. The utopian vision behind logistical populations considers the possibil- ity of aligning in perfect synchronicity the global supply chain with the food chain of the global biosphere, thereby realizing the tran- shumanist dream of overcoming the limits of the individual body to create the perfect species–being. Yet within the context of social action motivated by the pursuit of surplus value, this utopian vision functions in the mode of ideological alienation, covering up the separation between a present and a future whose real function is to be found not in the promised alignment of cosmic supply and de- mand, but in the temporal circulation of the capitalist circuit that transforms money into commodities and then back into money. In order to see the ways in which logistical populations function as transactionable pools for the corporate surveillance state, we will unquestionably need to develops ways of looking be- yond the ideology of cultural difference and identity that naturalizes the pooling effect. Even as the state moves away from a classic na- tional form of organization, the ideology of the nation–state con- tinues to play an enormously influential role in the mobilization of affect and the short-circuiting of collective transnational resistance to the corporate surveillance machine. In view of this situation, I expect that translation and the heterolingual form of address will play an increasingly important role in the insurrections-to-come for a coinhabitable planet. translation / spring / 2014 199  References Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means Without End. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Agard, Olivier. 2009. “La question de l’humanisme chez Max Scheler.” Revue germanique internationale. http://rgi.revues.org/331. Accessed November 26, 2012. Anghie, Antony. 2004. Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Balibar, Étienne. 1994. Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx. Translated by James Swenson. London and New York: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. Berardi, Franco. 2009a. Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation. Translated by Arianna Bove et al. London: Minor Compositions. ———. 2009b. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Translated by Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia. New York: Semiotext(e). Cole, Phillip. 2000. Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immi- gration. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University. Dorlin, Elsa. 2009. La Matrice de la race: Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la Na- tion française. Paris: Éditions la Découverte. Foucault, Michel. 2000. Essential Works of Foucault (1954–1984), Volume 3: Power. Translated by Robert Hurley, edited by James Faubion. New York: New Press. Géophilosophie de l’Europe. 1992. Penser l’Europe à ses frontières. Paris: Éditions de l’aube. Harney, Stefano. 2010. “From Statistical to Logistical Populations.” http://transit- labour.asia/blogs/statistical-logistical-populations. Accessed May 29, 2013. Kapferer, Bruce. 2010. “The Crisis of Power and the Emergence of the Corporate State in Globalizing Realities.” Paper presented at James Cook University, Australia. Video: http://www.jcu.edu.au/cairnsinstitute/info/resources/ JCUPRD1_061065.html. PDF: http://www.jcu.edu.au/cairnsinstitute/pub- lic/groups/everyone/documents/audio_object/jcuprd1_061188.pdf. Maggio, J. 2007. “Can the Subaltern Be Heard? Political Theory, Translation, Repre- sentation, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32 (4): 419–444. Lordon, Frédéric. 2010. Capitalism, désir et servitude: Marx et Spinoza. Paris: La Fabrique. Merriam–Webster. Dictionary of the English Language. http://www.merriam-web- ster.com/dictionary/etiquette. Accessed June 9, 2013. Neyrat, Frédéric. 2013. Le Communisme existentiel de Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Lignes. Nowotny, Stefan. 2007. “The Double Meaning of Destitution.“ Transversal. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0507/nowotny/en. Accessed September 24, 2011. translation / spring / 2014 Quijano, Anibal. 2000. “The Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.“ Nepantla: View from the South 1: 3. Sakai, Naoki. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 200 ———. 2009. “How do we count a language? Translation and discontinuity.” Trans- lation Studies 2: 1, 71–88. Scheler, Max. 1994. Ressentiment. Translated by William W. Holdheim. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Solomon, Jon. 2009. “The Proactive Echo: Ernst Cassirer’s ‘Myth of the State’ and the Biopolitics of Global English”, Translation Studies (New York & Lon- don: Routledge) Vol. 2 No. 1, Jan. 2009. 52-70. ———. 2010. “The Experience of Culture : Eurocentric Limits and Openings in Fou- cault”, Transeuropéenes, No. 1, Vol. 1, 2010. http://www.transeuropeennes. eu/en/articles/108/The_Experience_of_Culture_Eurocentric_Limits_and_O penings_in_Foucault. ———. 2011. “Saving Population from Governmentality Studies: Translating Be- tween Archaeology and Biopolitics.” 2011. In eds. Deotte, Brossat, Liu & Chu. Biopolitics, Ethics and Subjectivation Paris: L’Harmattan. 191-206. ———. 2012. “Another European Crisis? Myth, Translation, and the Apparatus of Area.” http://eipcp.net/transversal/0613/solomon/en. Accessed June 5, 2013. ———. 2013. “Zai shijie shuju yushang gongcundashi: ping Nonxi ‘Lun sixiang de jiaoyi’” [Meeting the Master of “Being-In-Common” at the World Book- store: A Review of Jean-Luc Nancy’s On The Commerce of Thinking”]. Router: a journal of cultural studies 15: 498–515. ———. 2014. “Invoking the West: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Romantic Ideology’ and the Problems of Civilizational Transference.” Forthcoming. Eds. Huang, Cory and Jon Solomon. Concentric. Spivak, Gayatri. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. “Translating into English.” Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. Edited by S. Bermann and M. Wood, 93–110. Princeton: Princeton University. ———. 2009a. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana and Chicago: Uni- versity of Illinois Press. ———. 2009b. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Lon- don and New York: Routledge. Virno, Paolo. 2009. “Angels and the General Intellect: Individuation in Duns Scotus and Gilbert Simondon.” Translated by Nick Heron. Parrehsia 7: 58–67. Vollaire, Christiane. 2007. L’Humanitaire, le coeur de la guerre. Paris: L’Insulaire. Jon Solomon was born in the United States and trained at Cornell University. He lived in east Asia for twenty-five years before relocating to Europe to assume a position as professor in the Institute of Transtextual and Transcultural Studies, Université Jean Moulin, Lyon, France. His extracurricular interests include backpacking and Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhism. His current project is to develop a discussion of “area” as an es- sential operation for the governing capacity of the state in parallel to the question of translation / spring / 2014 “population,” a form of the investment of state power within life, what might be re- ferred to as "biopower," following Foucault. Within this project, an examination of the biopolitics of translation occupies a privileged place for understanding the relations be- tween anthropological difference, geocultural area, and regimes of accumulation. 201 

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Beyond the Regime of Fidelity ............................ Bauhaus University, Germany. Boris Buden [email protected] Abstract: The case of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, accused of treason by the United States, reveals its true political meaning in the context of a problem with which the traditional theory of translation is so obsessively concerned—the quasi dialectics between fidelity and betrayal. To put it more simply: to betray in trans- lation always means to break a contract in which modern society and its political container, the nation–state, is ideologically grounded, namely the so-called social contract. It is because the commonsense concept of translation, whose meaning Naoki Sakai epitomized in the notion of homolingual address, not only concep- tually parallels the social contract theory, but is, even in its most recent versions (Rawls, Habermas), directly involved in the construction of the bourgeois polit- ical sphere and the modern liberal democratic state. For the same reason, an abandoning of the regime of homolinguality—that is, traditional understanding of translation with its crude binarism and its obsession with the question of fi- delity—cannot be reduced to a simple shift in the paradigm within translation theory. It implies an agonistic—and therefore genuinely political—act of chal- lenging the very mode of sociality that is reproduced by the modern liberal dem- ocratic state. In short, it implies the traumatic betrayal of the very regime of fidelity on which it is based. ______________ Treason It didn’t take long for the infamous T-word to appear. Not only were notorious American conservatives like Dick Cheney quick to accuse the NSA leaker Edward Snowden of treason, but they were promptly joined by Democrats like California Senator Dianne Feinstein and the most prominent John Kerry, Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Those rightly shocked by the use of such a scary word in a public discourse supposed to be governed by rational argument, a word that not only moralistically sabotages a possible debate on the problem but is itself heavily charged with translation / spring / 2014 almost mystical dimensions of guilt, crime, and punishment, just as quickly responded with a no less irrational rejection of the accusa- tion of treason. An article in The New Yorker (Herzberg 2013) pro- 104 vides a good example of how desperate such justification strategy is: first, Snowden has committed no crime. According to the Con- stitution (Article III, Section 3), the treason against United States consists only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, which, as it can be easily proved, he hasn’t done. Sec- ondly, even if he has violated a law (“he is manifestly a law- breaker”), Snowden is not a traitor. The proof: his intentions were innocent. Not only did he never intend to damage national security, but he acted, rather, on the basis of a belief that he was serving the true interests and highest values of his country. Thus, regardless of whether he has broken the law or betrayed his country, Snowden is a true patriot. And finally, guilty or not—a lawbreaker, a traitor, a patriot or not—he has already been severely punished by sentencing himself to perpetual exile. However helpless in its attempt to rationally reject the ac- cusation, this argumentation succeeds perfectly in foreclosing the problem it has touched upon. It deals with the symptoms of the in- toxication caused by the public use of the world “treason”—“the word is pure poison,” writes Herzberg in the same article—not with the toxic substance itself. What is actually so poisonous about the word “treason” is precisely the fact that its meaning transcends far beyond the moral–juridical discourse that reigns over the public of today’s liberal democratic regime. The motif of treason and fi- delity—which is intrinsically tied to it—evokes fundamental ques- tions on the formation of the social. More than a hundred years ago, the sociologist Georg Sim- mel stated that society would not be able to exist for any time at all without the phenomenon of fidelity, or Treue (Simmel 1908). He understood fidelity as a “sociological affect” that aims to foster the persistence of social relations. His favorite example is the well- known expression “faithful love.” Why is there a need for fidelity, Simmel asks, if love that once brought two people together still per- sists in their long-lasting relationship? Fidelity is obviously needed when the cause that initiated the relationship at the very beginning has in the meantime disappeared. It is, for instance, what makes an erotic relationship survive even if the physical beauty that brought translation / spring / 2014 it about diminishes and turns into ugliness. This is why Simmel sug- gests that the notion of “faithful love” simply be replaced by a more appropriate one: “enduring love.” It is precisely because of the mat- 105  ter of time, or, rather, of endurance that “fidelity and its opposite become important […] as the bearer of the existing and self-pre- serving kinds of relationship among members.” It is “one of the most universal patterns of action significant for the most diverse in- teractions among the people” (Simmel 2009, 517). “Fidelity and its opposite,” writes Simmel, where by “its opposite” he obviously means “betrayal,” which in this context ac- quires an unexpected meaning. To stay within Simmels’s example: the expression “betrayal of love” makes no more sense than the al- ready mentioned “faithful love.” Behavior that appears to us, and is often described, as “betrayal of love” is nothing other than an ef- fect of the simple absence of love. How can we say that a person who leaves his or her partner, or begins a love relationship with an- other, has betrayed the love of this person, if the fact that this love vanished before is precisely what brought about the demise of the relationship? Paradoxically, one can betray only a former love, or, more precisely, one can betray what has been brought into existence by this love—be it marriage, family, children, friendship, or similar. It is in this context that Simmel questions the well-known truism “that it is easier to destroy than to build.” It doesn’t actually hold for certain human relationships. While it is true for a relationship that it requires certain conditions to come into existence, this doesn’t mean that the subsequent loss of these conditions will necessarily cause its collapse. Once it has begun, it doesn’t permanently rely on the feeling or practical occasion without which it would not have arisen in the first place—as long as it relies on the fidelity that com- pensates for the absence of these conditions and keeps the relation unchanged in its social structure. This is why it is sometimes harder to destroy than to build. But what does this tell us about the case of Snowden’s “trea- son,” which has shocked public opinion the world over? First of all, it tells us that the whole juridical dimension of the accusation of treason, including its rejection, completely misses the point—its temporal meaning. Although juridical discourse correctly addresses the agonistic character of the problem by situating it in the relation between friends and enemies—“Treason against the United States, translation / spring / 2014 shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort,” states Article Three of the United States Constitution—it understands treason and im- 106 plicitly addresses fidelity primarily in terms of belonging to a friendly inside that automatically presupposes loyalty and is op- posed to a hostile outside that deserves no such feelings. This quasi dialectic between fidelity and treason is based on a spatial percep- tion of political and cultural entities. Precisely as such, it reminds us directly of the commonsense view of translation and its obsession with the same subject. According to this view, translation takes place between two already existing languages that automatically imply two different cultures, respectively two separate social and political entities— mostly a nation and a nation–state—each enclosed in a homoge- neous, often also clearly demarcated space. The task of translation in this situation is then to bridge linguistic and other differences so as to facilitate communication between the two entities. Once we have accepted this view, the proper position of translational practice becomes problematic. It can, in fact, never occupy a location equi- distant from the two sides, one of which is always defined as orig- inal while the other is a sort of secondary production—that is, its translation.1 This circumstance is the source of an endless discussion about which side to adhere to—either the linguistic and cultural realm of the original, or the respective one of its translation. Since in either case there is always at stake more than a simple correspon- dence of linguistic meaning—namely cultural but above all social and political effects of translational practice—such discussion as- sumes dimensions of much greater importance that go back to the very formation of the social. The already-mentioned quasi dialectic between fidelity and treason is nothing but a moralistic—and in this sense ideological—expression of a simple truth according to which translation has always been more than a purely linguistic issue, and namely a social and political act. As in the case of the accusation of treason leveled against Snowden, this endless moralistic discussion about whom a transla- .......................... 1 One of today’s widely preferred solutions to this problem is to declare “inbetween- ness” as a cultural space in its own right, endowed with authentic emancipatory po- translation / spring / 2014 tential. Precisely in promising an easy escape from the crude binarism of the traditional concept of (cultural) translation, it fosters the illusion of an emancipation without a rad- ical conflict with the powers that have themselves generated this same binarism. To challenge an imposed “either/or” implies an even more decisive “either/or,” of which the case of Edward Snowden is the most cogent proof. 107  tor should be faithful to has an ideological function, which is to sup- press the problem it tackles, and in this way support the social re- lations that inform the existing reality. Security or Freedom As is well known, the public debate surrounding recent cases of leaking classified information—not only in Snowdon’s case, and not only in the USA—is generally framed by the alterna- tive “security or freedom” that is typical for the whole debate on “terrorism.” Rastko Močnik 2 compared it with Lacan’s concept of vel, or a “forced choice” (Močnik 2003, ix). Confronted with some- one who says “your money or your life,” we actually have no alter- native. If we choose money we lose both. So there is no other option than to choose life (without money). Something similar happens in the “security or freedom” alternative. If we choose security, we will have security without freedom; if we choose freedom, we will lose both. In the case of Edward Snowden, it seems at first sight that he has crossed a fine line that demarcates a proper relation between freedom and limitations to this freedom imposed in the name of se- curity. In a democratic society, such a line is supposed to be drawn as a result of a rational public debate, which cannot be decided a priori and is in itself endless. Yet we have seen that such a debate was quickly interrupted by the accusation of treason and deterio- rated into an a posteriori sophistry on individual guilt and inno- cence. So it seems that Snowden mistook “security or freedom” for a true alternative, while it was, in fact, a vel—a non alternative. .......................... 2 At this point, an editor at a typical publisher’s or journal would ask me to further specify who this name actually refers to, expecting me to provide additional information usually comprising profession and geopolitical location. In this particular case, this information would probably read “Slovenian philosopher.” This would most certainly help readers quickly orientate themselves on the map of today’s global production of knowledge, yet the question is, what sort of orientation is this in point of actual fact? It opportunis- tically follows the model of representation and classification of epistemological subjects that is fully in accordance with today’s still dominant picture of the world as a colorful translation / spring / 2014 cluster of nations and ethnicities located in their own, clearly demarcated linguistic, cul- tural, and political spaces. But this is precisely the model that supports—and is sup- ported by—the traditional concept of translation and the corresponding regime of fidelity, which are the object of criticism here. This is why I refuse—at least in the main text—to provide any such “stylistic” specification. 108 By choosing freedom, it had to end in treason. But why was his the wrong choice? The answer seems obvious: Snowden seems to be a naive essentialist. In his decision to reveal to the general public clas- sified details of the mass surveillance programs put in place by the US and UK governments, he actually addressed and claimed a value—freedom manifested as civil liberty—for which he believed to be the very essence of the society and the state he served, or as we would rather put it today, an essential part of the US American identity. The fact that the addressee responded with the accusation of treason proves that this value has already evacuated its political embodiment, the institution of the state as well as the decisive part of civil society both still claiming to have originated in this value. This is the reason why there is a need for fidelity. It alone is capable of preserving the duration of a social relation beyond the presence of the values and forces that once initiated it. Fidelity assures that this social relation, including the whole institutional edifice built on it, will outlive these values and forces with the same synthesizing effect. What Snowden did not know is that by choosing freedom instead of security he has claimed a former freedom whose place within the American imaginary has in the meantime been occupied by security. By the same token, we might say more generally that the accusation of betraying the so-called American values—or, for ex- ample, “Western values”—does not make much sense. One can only betray what has been created by and built upon those values and now persists after they have passed. The same applies to the accu- sations of betraying love of country as well as the attempts to justify such a betrayal—a claim, for instance, that Snowden in his “wrong- doings” was actually motivated by a genuine love for his country. The moment a patriotic feeling becomes a matter of fidelity, then the so-called love of country has already vanished. This, however, does not mean that an endless public debate over the proper dose of love of country or a harmonic coexistence of freedom and security makes no sense whatsoever. Such discus- sions, as Močnik argues, have a clear ideological function—to re- produce the relation between the state and individual in the translation / spring / 2014 immediacy of this relation. At stake is a situation that has been con- ceptualized in the grounding myth of the modern bourgeois state, in the so-called social contract theory. As is well known, it explains 109  the establishment of political order, above all of its most important institutional form, the state, as a result of a contract among individ- uals. It also presupposes that these individuals, before they enter into the contract, were not bound by any social relation. They enter into the contract directly, as it were, from the state of nature, as purely natural beings, so that the social character of their mutual re- lations is nothing but a retroactive effect of the contract itself. There is also an element of gain and loss in the social contract, at least in its Hobbesian form, where individuals have to surrender some of their freedoms to their ruler in exchange for protection of their re- maining rights, a meaning that brings us back to the topic of free- dom and security, or, respectively, of treason and fidelity. Seen from this perspective, treason is simply a violation of that original con- tract by which an individual egoistically usurps too much freedom, thus jeopardizing the security of others. As a response, society can- cels the contract with this particular individual and excludes him.3 Translation and Social Contract: a Parallel At this point, we should draw a parallel between the theory of social contract and the already mentioned commonsense concept of translation, whose meaning Naoki Sakai has epitomized in the notion of homolingual address (Sakai 1997, 1–17). Sakai shifted at- tention from the paradigm of communication in which translation appears as the transferring of a message from one language to an- other to the problem of address, which reveals the linguistic en- counter that takes place in translation as essentially a social relation. What he calls the regime of homolingual address is a particular rep- resentation of translation in which one side of the translational en- counter addresses the other as though both are representatives of different linguistic communities. It reduces the initial situation of not understanding, which prompts translation, to one single differ- ence between two language societies. Thus, the already mentioned commonsense notion of translation according to which translation always takes place between two separate languages perceived as enclosed, homogeneous, internally transparent linguistico-cultural spaces—and necessarily implies the whole drama of fidelity and translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 3 It either prosecutes a traitor like Bradley Manning, or leaves him in a quasi-stateless limbo by canceling his travel documents, as in the case of Snowden. 110 treason—is in fact a retroactive effect of the homolingual mode of address. At stake is a constellation that, as mentioned above, is rem- iniscent of the social contract, that fairytale regarding the formation of state and society. First of all, the relation between languages and language communities, as structured under the regime of homolin- gual address, resembles the relation between individuals in the so- cial contract. As is well known, individuals enter into the original contract directly, as it were, from the state of nature—that is, as though they have never before been involved in any sort of social relation. In other words, they become social beings only and for the first time at the moment of entering into the contract. Is this not sim- ilar to the perception of languages and language communities that enter into translational encounter? It makes an impression that they have never encountered each other before and have no traces of for- mer relations, no shared experiences, no history of mutual hy- bridizations, no memories of being in the past mere moments of same linguistic continuities. Like individuals at the moment of en- tering into the social contract, languages and language communities appear at the moment of translation in their absolute isolation and solitude, a condition that is constantly reproduced under the regime of homolingual address. It is therefore probably even wrong to say that this regime suppresses the fact that translation is a social relation. Rather, it completely usurps and monopolizes the very sociality of linguistic practice. Translation appears as the only social relation a language is able to articulate, but as a relation between languages not between humans. Now there are languages that, as isolated monads, socialize freely among themselves thanks to translation. Humans who speak these languages, who understand, misunderstand, or do not under- stand them, who therefore cannot but constantly translate and hence reproduce their linguistic praxis (a praxis of which translation is an unavoidable element) and themselves through it, are supposed to socialize too—but only within the enclosed space of one single “own” language. Do they have any social life beyond that? No. Out- side of this space there is nothing but a (linguistic) wilderness, a translation / spring / 2014 presocial state of language qua nature. Once again, we are describ- ing a reality that is retroactively structured as such through a certain, historically particular, and ideologically framed perception of trans- 111  lation based on the paradigm of homolingual address. It would be wrong to say that it simply desocializes translational praxis. Rather, it seizes the social truth of translation and redistributes it according to its ideological function. Its modus operandi is dehistoricization. In order to achieve its ideological goals, the homolingual address imposes a sort of structural oblivion on the translational praxis. It is only after having got rid of its history, which is the his- tory of its social relations, that translation in the homolingual mode of address can feature its three main characteristics, typical of a commonsense understanding of translation. The first is its posteri- ority, the impression that translation enters the scene only after the two languages have already completed their development and reached their final form—that is, as though they meet for the first time without having had anything to do with each other before. This automatically has another effect: the externality of translation. It appears that it confronts an already existing, enclosed, and internally homogenous linguistic space from its outside. So the perception of such a language–space excludes translational praxis in both way temporally and spatially. Finally, these two features merge into one for the traditional understanding of translation’s essential feature, its secondary character. At stake is the notorious binary relation be- tween the so-called source and target language, which implies a qualitative difference between the original in one language and its secondary production in another. It is also on the grounds of this same dehistoricization that the regime of homolingual address in principle doesn’t recognize any qualitative difference between and among languages. Rather, it presupposes an abstract equality of all of them and grants each the freedom to enter into relation with any other language according to its own need or will. In this sense, too, it repeats the logic of the modern bourgeois political sphere that is imagined as emerging out of the social contract and consisting of abstract, mutually separated individuals that are all “free and equal.” In fact, we can think of the regime of homolingual address as a linguistic pendent to the bour- geois political sphere. It also creates a homogeneous space, clearly differentiated from other spheres of life, in which, instead of indi- translation / spring / 2014 viduals, languages and respective language societies appear in trans- lational encounter as free and equal—only after and because they have been radically separated from each other, which actually 112 means separated from their social relations and the history of their social interactions. But beyond the abstract postulate of equality among lan- guages, the reality of translational praxis looks quite different. The statistical data on international flows of translated books show how the world system of translation is hierarchically organized (see, on this point, Heilbron 2010). The so-called hypercentral position is occupied by one single language. Almost sixty percent of all trans- lated books in the world are translations from English. Only two languages, German and French, have a central position each with a share of about ten percent of the global translation market. It is fol- lowed by seven to eight languages in a semicentral position, each with one to three percent of all translated books (Spanish, Russian, Italian, etc). The remainder of almost two hundred languages, among which quite large ones such as Chinese or Arabic (from which less than one percent of all translations worldwide are un- dertaken), are peripheral (Heilbron 2010, 2). As in the case of the social contract, the regime of homolin- gual address does not simply hide the reality of hierarchies, hege- monies, and relations of domination and submission. It is, in fact, like the bourgeois political sphere that is retroactively constructed by the social contract, an institution of domination itself. The rela- tion of domination is intrinsic to the very formation of such a sep- arate homogeneous sphere of abstract linguistic equality, which is why there is no space for an alternative within its horizon. Good, Bad, Faithful The conceptual and ideological alliance between the regime of homolingual address and the social contract theory can also be historically traced down to German Romantic translation theory. As is well know, it is still praised for its so-called welcoming of the foreign (see Berman 1992). In the perspective of German Roman- tics, the foreign (das Fremde), which should be clearly perceptible in translation, is a sort of added value that is supposed to refine the language of the translator and the spirit of his or her nation, or as we would say today, its culture. Concretely, in their case it was a translation / spring / 2014 classical quality that German originally lacks and can acquire only through translations from the classical languages—Greek and Latin. This, however, implies a certain original form of the German lan- 113  guage that could be imagined as a kind of linguistic state of nature, a condition of language before its first encounter with other lan- guages. We can think of it as a state of language prior to its first translation. Precisely as such it again clearly resembles the concept of an individual existing before its first encounter with other indi- viduals in the abstractness from any social relations, that is, before the emergence of society—a constellation akin to the concept of the social contract. In relation to the principle of fidelity that implies a for- eignizing of the language and culture of translation, both emphati- cally preferred by German translation theorists—in contrast to the so-called French school, which proclaimed the principle of license and domestication—the German Romantic concept of translation operates according to the following scenario: a language, respec- tively a language community, represented through the figure of the translator, gives up a part of its natural originality and accepts con- tamination by the foreign in order to achieve the state of culture. But the translator, in accomplishing this cultural mission, must therefore also sacrifice part of his or her freedom and stay faithful to a certain cultural task, which is always already a social and po- litical one—the task of nation-building. Accordingly, the fidelity of translation is not a matter of its quality in terms of a degree of faith- fulness to the original, but, rather, a matter of loyalty to the linguistic community, and, concretely, to the nation. It refers directly to a so- cial relation that must be preserved and developed beyond any given essence, or to recur to Simmel’s notion of fidelity, it refers to a social relation that must be constantly cultivated after the pregiven origi- nality—as it is retroactively projected into the state of nature—has been replaced by culturally generated sociality. Thus, not being faithful in translation does not mean betraying the original text, or any sort of original essence, but betraying the social relation that has been cultivated upon and beyond this originality. In the final analysis, this means betraying a very specific and a very specifically binding political commitment. The consequences of such a betrayal, of course, run far deeper than the consequences of an inaccurate or bad translation. translation / spring / 2014 In fact, the differentiation between a good and a bad translation is itself ultimately a political issue. So, Antoine Berman (1992, 5) de- fines bad translation as an ethnocentric translation that systemati- 114 cally negates the strangeness of the foreign work. It is clearly the fidelity to a particular political cause—here, obviously, a commit- ment to what we may call liberal inclusivism—that makes such an assessment possible. However, Berman cannot admit a political and ideological bias. Rather, he insists on a purely ethical position, ar- guing that translation gets its true sense only from the ethical aim by which it is governed. Moreover, he is convinced that defining this ethical aim will liberate translation from “its ideological ghetto,” which is for him one of the tasks of a theory of translation. For Berman, ethics is what translation is all about, not politics or ideology. What he calls the “ethics of translation” consists of deter- mining the pure aim of translation as such. It consists, finally, “of defining what ‘fidelity’ is” (Berman 1992, 5). That such an expansion of the ethical dimension of transla- tion has itself an ideological function, namely to avoid confrontation with the political meaning of translational praxis and the role fi- delity plays in it, is already revealed by opening the historical di- mension of translation. Referring to Leonard Forster’s research on multilingualism in literature, Antoine Berman reminds us himself that the lettered public of the sixteenth century used to read a literary work in its different linguistic variants, which is why it ignored the issue of fidelity and treason (Berman 1992, 4). How, then, has this issue become, since the eighteen century, of such crucial importance for different translation theories and is even believed to determine the very essence of translational praxis? People started to hold their mother tongue sacred, says Berman. Not only that, we can add. Peo- ple began to think of the origins of their social order, the state, and their very sociality in terms of contractual relationships, which sig- nificantly raised the importance of the ethical dimension of social and political life including the issue of fidelity and treason. More- over, people started to imagine their common being in cultural terms. They began to create nations, unique national cultures, and languages enclosed in homogeneous, clearly differentiated spaces. It was in the age of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth century that the ground was laid for the most important political in- stitution of our time, the nation–state, and for the political structure translation / spring / 2014 of the modern world, the so-called Westphalian order. Needless to say, both translation and fidelity have important roles in this process, which they have played up to the present. The best example 115  is one of the most prominent political philosophies of the liberal age—John Rawls’s theory of justice, a modern revival of the clas- sical social contract theory. No Justice Without Translation: a Proviso John Rawls introduces the notion of translation at the most traumatic point of his concept of a liberal democratic society, at the dividing line between the private and the public, which in our age of radical desecularization has become a true frontline along which today’s societies threaten to break apart and fall back into the con- stant war of all against all, as is the case today with the sinister af- termaths of the so-called Arab spring. This historical event is in a way a double failure of transla- tion. First, the translation of an allegedly universal concept of West- ern democracy into a local, “predemocratic” idiom of a non-Western world, supposed to be deeply contaminated by tribalism, ethnocen- trism, religious fundamentalism, and authoritarianism—a transla- tion that undoubtedly follows the track of the old imperialist expansionism—resulted in chaos and violence. It only rearticulated this particular non-Western location as historically belated, con- cretely, not yet mature for democracy. But at the same time the po- litical concept of translation that was built into the very project of Western liberal democracy as the instrument of its universal trans- latability, designed to deal with particular claims of all sorts, espe- cially with those of different religious communities, has also failed, revealing a corrupt element within the original itself that renders its translation impossible. As is well known, in his conceptual reenactment of the old social contract theory, Rawls constructed the so-called original po- sition, an imaginary standpoint projected behind what he calls “the veil of ignorance,” an imagined boundary that makes all particular facts like ethnicity, gender, class, religion, and so forth external to our reasoning that now, protected from and cleansed of all the par- ticularities, can arbitrate between rival parties out of the only knowl- edge available within this sphere—the knowledge of the general principle of justice. translation / spring / 2014 Rawls later revised this argument—making concessions to the ever stronger ideology of liberal multiculturalism—and included the so-called proviso, which allows for the expression of religious 116 arguments in public debates so long as they can be translated into the language of public reason (see Rawls 1997). Thus, the bourgeois political sphere falls apart into two lin- guistic spaces that are at the same time separated and connected through translation, which articulates and controls the divide within this sphere and at the same time provides for its homogeneity. In his own dealing with the problem of desecularization, Jürgen Habermas (1989) basically adopted Rawls’s “translational proviso.” He, too, believes that religious citizens—whom he calls “monolingual citizens” (!) since their religious language is the only one they understand—should be allowed to use their religious ar- guments in the public sphere as long as these are translated into a language that is accessible to all citizens. But he also explicitly states who is supposed to undertake this translation, namely the sec- ular citizens, and precisely where it should occur—at what he calls the “institutional threshold,” a boundary that separates the so-called informal public sphere, which allows for articulation of religious arguments and which is therefore contaminated with private rea- sons, from another that informs a sort of pure, or primal, public sphere, the sphere of parliaments, courts of justice, ministries, pub- lic administrations, et cetera. Within the informal public, which we can imagine after the multicultural model as a sphere of linguistic diversity, prevails a ca- cophony (Habermas calls it the “babble of voices” of public com- munication) of mutually incomprehensible languages of different religions, or, as Rawls would put it, comprehensive doctrines. Placed on the threshold to the institutional part of the public sphere, where no religious arguments are allowed, translation, which Habermas explicitly compares with a filter, lets pass only secular inputs, cleansing the language of religious particularities and turning it into a homogenous, totally transparent language of the secular state. The political sphere of a bourgeois democratic society is thus multilingual. It speaks many languages, of which only one is considered to be its original language—the mother tongue of a lib- eral secular state. From the point of view of this proper language of the state and society, all its other languages appear foreign, which translation / spring / 2014 is why they must be translated. And yet this translation is a one- way translation. Is the proper language of the public sphere sup- posed to be accessible to all, thus requiring no translation? 117  The source of this ambiguity actually lies in the fact that Habermas understands translation according to an a priori, given homolinguality—that is, in terms of a preexisting linguistic unity. He thus reduces its meaning to the function of linguistic purification and homogenization. This is only possible on the assumption of a homogenous target language, the language of a public reduced to an exclusively institutional realm. However, this language doesn’t seem to preexist translation. Rather, it appears to be its product, a performative result of the homolingual address, in which Haber- mas’s idea of translation is grounded. This is why this ultimate lan- guage of the political public—purified from any sort of religious or doctrinaire particularity, a language into which all the languages of the “informal public” can be and should be translated—itself eludes any further translation. It is a language in which all foreignness is finally sublated, which makes it the mother tongue of a society en- closed in a democratic, secular state. It alone is able to generate a total transparency of the political public in which, in the sense of an act of self-reflection, society as society is grounded. We should not forget that Habermas, in his Structural Transformation (1989, 24–29), already starts from the assumption that public debates are fully comprehensible and linguistically transparent. On the other hand, the linguistic heterogeneity that is as- cribed to the informal public turns out to be a mere plurality of the already existing, homogenous languages of a particular religion, a political doctrine, or a Weltanschauung. From the point of view of the mother tongue of the society—that is, on the part of a presumed total transparency of the proper, institutional political public—the linguistic diversity of the informal public appears as a domain of a specific clandestinity, the clandestinity of the so-called alien word. Translation: a Return of the Repressed We should, at this point, recall the “grandiose organizing role of the alien word” of which Vološinov writes in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1973).4 He defines the “alien word,” or the “foreign-language word,” primarily as a word that eludes gen- translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 4 In this section, I rely on Nowotny’s “Kontinua der Verwandlung. Sprachphilosophische und linguistische Aspekte der Übersetzung.” See Nowotny 2008, 95–131. 118 eral use; it hides within itself a secret that can be deciphered and is administrated by “rulers” or “priests” who alone have at their com- mand its “true meaning.” It is not difficult to recognize here a ho- mogenous religious language of Habermas’s informal public. This also explains his translational proviso. What religion has alienated from general use must now be made “generally accessible” again through translation at the institutional threshold. This becomes clear if we remember that Habermas, in fact, conceives of translation according to the psychoanalytic model (see Habermas 1987, and, for a more detailed consideration, Buden 2005, 85–89). Its primal task is not simply to enable understanding between two partners who speak different languages, but rather to sublate the suppression (Verdrängung), which he understands as the splitting-off of one part of the language from public communica- tion—in other words, the privatization of one part of its meaning.5 The goal of psychoanalytic cure, which Freud already explicitly compares with translation, (see Freud 280) is to enable the self-re- flection, that is the reappropriation, of a previously privatized part of public language—made foreign and clandestine due to mental illness—so that the self can restore itself in its totality and trans- parency. This generally explains Habermas’s model of seculariza- tion: religious language is allowed to take part in the articulation of the public sphere because it is in principle understood as a split-off part of this same public sphere, a language that is alienated from society, which, precisely as such, obscures one part of the social self-formation process (Bidlungsprozess) that is closely connected with the public sphere. Just as the patient reappropriates alienated parts of the history of her development in performing translation/ self-reflection together with the analyst, so too does society recon- struct its own self-formation process in performing translation/self- reflection cooperatively via secular and nonsecular citizens, thus establishing itself in its totality and transparency. This clearly confirms that translation for Habermas has a primarily socially formative function, concretely playing a crucial translation / spring / 2014 .......................... 5 Here, we should not forget that psychoanalysis is not an auxiliary means of commu- nication for Habermas, but rather the paradigm of communicative self-reflexion. 119  role in the Bildungsprozess—not only a process of both collective and individual self-creation, but also a process in which society and culture inextricably merge. However, precisely in fulfilling its social function, transla- tion opens up a paradox similar to the one of the theories of the so- called social contract, in which liberal political concepts still try to ground society. Louis Althusser has pointed to this problem in deal- ing with Rousseau’s contrat social concept: at the moment of the conclusion of the contract, as a contract between individuals and the community, the second contractual partner, the community, doesn’t exist since it is only its product (Althusser 1987, 146 and following pages). Thus, the result of the contract—the community that does not preexist the contract—is preinscribed in the very con- dition of the contract. This completely applies to Habermas’s translational pro- viso, which presupposes that translation occurs between two lan- guages—a religious language articulated in the so-called informal public and the language of the proper political public that is spoken behind the institutional threshold. Namely, at the moment of trans- lation one of these languages, the “mother tongue” of the liberal, democratic state, does not exist yet since it should first emerge as the product of this translation. In terms of the filter metaphor—as has been said before, Habermas explicitly compares the institutional translation with a filter that extracts only secular reasons—this lan- guage has the form of a “language filtrate.” The perception that it was already there before the translation is, in fact, an effect of a par- ticular representation of translation that necessarily compels us to the assumption of preexisting, distinct, and closed linguistic enti- ties—in short, the performative effect of what Sakai calls the ho- molingual address.6 So both the existence of homogenous religious communities and the existence of a secular, liberal democratic so- ciety are grounded in the ideological perception of a homogenous linguistic unity. This is the reason why we say that translation has .......................... translation / spring / 2014 6 See Nakai (1997, 2): “[I]t is not because two different language unities are given that we have to translate (or interpret) one text into another; it is because translation artic- ulates languages so that we may postulate the two unities of the translating and the translated languages as if they were autonomous and closed entities through a certain representation of translation.” 120 a socially formative function. It is translation that finally makes out of a diversity of different, religious, ethnic, doctrinaire, and so forth, linguistic communities a homogenous secular society. This society, too, is a linguistic community, yet it does not originate in “natural”—or, from the perspective of the secular state, alienated, privatized—languages, but in a linguistic extract filtered out of these natural languages, which is considered the mother tongue of a liberal democratic society enclosed in the secular state. The nature–culture difference, which is clearly heard here, again evokes the theory of the social contract. One can easily imagine what Habermas and liberal theory would expect to happen to a so- ciety that ignores the translational proviso and does not properly guard the boundary between private and public—a regression into the state of nature, into a Babylonian confusion of tongues and lin- guistic communities that can no longer agree on any common in- terest, since they only speak languages that are foreign to one other. In short, a society without the internal border between private and public, without a borderline drawn by the translation–filter would collapse and end in some sort of Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes. Come Home and Face the Consequences Referring to the impossibility of literally translating the fa- mous Italian aphorism on translation traduttore traditore into Eng- lish as “the translator is a betrayer,” Roman Jakobson suggests that this rhyming epigram be translated in the form of “a more explicit statement and to answer the questions: translator of what messages? betrayer of what values?” (Jakobson 2000, 143). Let us avoid being seduced by the allegedly high stakes of “messages and values.” There is more at stake here: fidelity and be- trayal in translation refer directly to the socially formative role of this linguistic practice. As we have tried to show here, under the regime of homolingual address—which is precisely the name for a historically contingent, ideologically functional, and politically pragmatic form of translational practice—the meaning of linguistic translation, as well as the meaning of fidelity and betrayal in trans- translation / spring / 2014 lation, cannot be separated from the concept of social contract. To betray in a translation does not mean to send a wrong message or to violate a precious value but to break a social contract and in this 121  way jeopardize the existing form of social being—that is, con- cretely, a particular society enclosed in a nation–state and defined primarily through its identity that implies a unique culture, history, ethnicity, and language. The regime of homolingual address, which almost uncon- testedly dominates present-day understanding of translation, struc- turally and historically corresponds to the formation of the bourgeois political sphere, which still provides the backbone for the system of actually existing democracy. Moreover, the concept of translation, forged under the same regime, plays a crucial role—as we have seen in Rawls’s and Habermas’s theories of the secular state—in the way this system creates and maintains the values in which it sees itself grounded: the rule of law, civil liberties, legal equality, secularity, human rights, et cetera. In other words, what is at stake is not only how the concept of translation based on homolin- gual address performatively reproduces the social and political con- ditions of its possibility, the “objective reality” of separate languages, linguistic communities, and nation states, but rather how the system of actually existing democracy—which implies this “ob- jective reality” of separate languages, linguistic communities, and nation–states as the condition of its possibility—ideologically re- produces itself through this same concept of translation. It plays a crucial role in the strategy of its self-legitimation. We would prob- ably not be exaggerating if we were to say that removing this con- cept of translation from the ideological construction of the liberal democratic state—abandoning, for instance, the homolingual mode of address implied in it—would bring the whole edifice down. Can we imagine a secular democratic state without translation at the threshold between its separate spheres that is a necessary precondi- tion for its values claims? Can we imagine a democracy without the claim to transparency and rationality of its political sphere that is provided through translational filtering on its boundaries? Can we imagine a society and its nation–state without its mother tongue that is created through homolingual translation, both in linguistic and political terms? And, finally, can we imagine a democracy, or what- ever might replace it for the better, beyond the homosociality of the translation / spring / 2014 nation–state and its claims to a unique cultural, linguistic, or ethnic identity? No we cannot—as long as we obey the regime of homolin- gual address. It has captured our (political!) imagination, disguised 122 as a natural, self-explanatory concept of a relative humble form of linguistic practice called translation. It has also morally blackmailed our political will, pressing it into the irrational and terrifying limbo between fidelity and treason. There is therefore no other escape but to betray it. And face the consequences. This is precisely what American television journalist Bob Schieffer said in his commentary on CBS News to Edward Snow- den: “Come home and face the consequences.” In his view, Snow- den is not a hero like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. who led the civil rights movement, broke the law, and suffered the con- sequences. They didn’t put the nation’s security at risk, run away and hide in a foreign country, like Snowden did. For Schieffer, there is no value—such as civil rights for in- stance—without “home.” One cannot claim one without claiming the other. His heroes of the civil rights movement sacrificed them- selves for their home, or more precisely for a value they believed would make this home better. For them, therefore, the whole drama of fidelity and treason was not an issue. But it has now become an issue in the case of Snowden, where the value he claimed has de- tached itself from “its” home. Now fidelity is needed—to preserve a home without value, or, as Georg Simmel once put it, to preserve a social relation after the reasons that initiated it have disappeared. This is why Schieffer calls on Snowden to come home. He wants him to reconcile value and home and to revive the old harmonic unity of both from the time of the American civil rights movement. And this is also why Schieffer maliciously accuses Snowden of being motivated by his private pathology: he is “just a narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us.” Not only does he deny any social relevance to Snowden’s act, he sees nothing socially relevant outside of home. So he could easily stage the drama of fidelity and treason and cast the NSA leaker in the role of repentant traitor. “Come home and face the consequences” is merely an empty, moralistic blackmailing ploy that relies on no val- ues whatsoever, except on an equally empty appeal to honor. Yet, brought together, honor and fidelity make for a poisonous mixture: Meine Ehre heißt Treue (“My honor is fidelity”) was the motto of translation / spring / 2014 the Nazi Waffen Schutzstaffel (SS) organization, and was engraved on its members’ belt buckles. 123  Dare to Betray! Before bringing this story to an end, we should not forget to ask ourselves what actually made Snowden a traitor. Was he truly a freak who naively mistook public transparency for an essential American value? In fact, as a person working for state institutions (the NSA and the CIA) he occupied—in terms of the languages spo- ken in the public sphere—a contradictory position. On the one hand, he was clearly situated in the midst of what we have called the mother tongue of the liberal democratic state, the language of the state institutions that is, according to Habermas, supposed to be un- derstandable by all citizens. At the same time, it was a place of total clandestinity, of a language that is completely excluded from public use since it originates in a secret that can be administrated only by the rulers themselves, regardless of whether they are democratically elected or not. Kant was already familiar with the contradictory character of such a position. In his famous essay on the nature of the Enlight- enment (Kant 1996), he states that those who occupy a civil post or office entrusted to them are actually destined to use their reason pri- vately, meaning not freely, since they are bound by the interest of the community whose affairs they have to deal with. So it is pre- cisely the position within a state institution that automatically pre- vents a person from using their reason publicly. What Kant calls the public use of one’s reason takes place only when a person as a scholar (Gelehrter) makes use of it before the entire public of the world of readers (Leserwelt). Only this public use of reason is free, precisely in terms of a freedom that is required for the Enlighten- ment. But the difference between private and public use of reason can also be understood in terms of a difference in the mode of ad- dress. One makes private use of reason insofar as one addresses one’s own political community and its particular interests. In polit- ical terms, we might call it a homosocial mode of address, and it consequently implies its linguistic correlate, homolingual address. The use of reason in this case is limited within the scope of one par- ticular society that is almost automatically perceived as a particular translation / spring / 2014 language society. So it is limited within one—mostly national— language and within the idea of its exclusive transparency as well as its exclusive political impact. In other words, one addresses the 124 public privately when, in doing so, one assumes a position that is representative of a particular political and linguistic community. It is this limit that not only renders our addressing the public private, but also deprives it of freedom. A public use of reason, on the contrary, knows no such lim- its. We use our reason publicly when we address the world of read- ers beyond any particular society or language. And we do so, as scholars, not as representatives of this or that political or linguistic community, and not even as representatives of this or that academic community. It is the mode of address here that defines scholar, not a particular professional competence. A scholar is someone who ad- dresses an entire world whose boundaries are drawn only by liter- acy. Since the literacy in this case is supposed to transcend all linguistic and cultural differences as well as political demarcations, it obviously presupposes the praxis of translation. This then also means that we have to deal, here, with some sort of translational lit- eracy that is performatively evoked in the scholar’s mode of ad- dress. This throws new light on Snowden’s treason. It certainly consists in his breaking the social contract in which today’s norma- tively dominant political form of sociality—the liberal democratic nation–state—is still ideologically rooted. The question is, however, how has he done it? Obviously, by performing another mode of ad- dressing the public that transcends the limits of his own political community and its interests as well as the limits of one single lan- guage. Concretely, Snowden has addressed a value, which has aban- doned that particular universe called home—a transparency that has spilt over from the enclosed space of a single society, from a clearly demarcated area of an alleged cultural originality, from the concep- tual frame of a democracy locked up within the container of the na- tion state, from the vocabulary and the grammar of a single national language and its respective community. But he has addressed a transparency, too, that has liberated itself from the quasi-dialectical clinch with its “mirror-value,” the secrecy that is constitutive of any institutional articulation of the so-called national interests; a trans- parency that at the same time liberates both him as the addresser translation / spring / 2014 and his addressee, the Kantian “world of readers” or what Naoki Sakai nowadays calls the “nonaggregate community of foreigners,” from the confines of a privately enclosed public. 125  In radically going public, Snowden’s treason also clearly consists in his using reason publicly in the original Kantian sense. Does this then mean that precisely in committing his treason he also acted as a Kantian scholar? Why not? His treason is a political act par excellence, yet such that it simultaneously produces and dis- seminates knowledge. It implies and fosters an emancipatory hy- bridization of a radical democratic politics and knowledge production whose effects recall the forgotten ideals of the Enlight- enment. It is a treason that performatively evokes what it norma- tively addresses—a translational literacy: an ability to act politically and comprehend cognitively beyond the homosociality of the na- tion–state, beyond the homolinguality of a language society but also beyond the gated communities of cognitive competence. As is well known, for the Enlightenment project to work, it had to rely on what Kant called maturity (Mündigkeit). He defined it as the emergence from self-imposed immaturity and dependence whose cause lies not in a lack of intelligence but in a lack of deter- mination and courage to use one’s own intellect freely and inde- pendently, without the direction of another. Kant summed up this idea in the famous slogan of the Enlightenment: Sapere aude!, or “Dare to know! Dare to think independently!” It is precisely in terms of Kant’s maturity that we should think of Edward Snowden’s treason. It presupposes his liberation from a self-imposed regime of fidelity. However, to accomplish it, determination and courage are needed. The slogan of the emanci- patory transformation the leakers like Manning and Snowden have announced would therefore read: Prodere Aude!—“Dare to betray!” (see Buden 2008). translation / spring / 2014 126 References Althusser, Louis. 1987. “Über Jean-Jacques Rousseaus ‘Gesellschaftsvertrag’. Die Verschiebungen.” In Machiavelli - Montesquieu - Rousseau. Zur politischen Philosophie der Neuzeit, Schriften volume II, translated by Henning Ritter and Frieder Otto Wolf, 131–172. Berlin: Argument. Berman, Antoine. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Translated by S. Heyvaert. Albany: State University of New York Press. “Bob Schieffer To Snowden: Come Home And Face The Consequences.” 2013. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/06/16/bob_schieffer_to_snow- den_come_home_and_face_the_consequences.html. Accessed August 2013. Buden, Boris. 2005. Der Schacht von Babel. Ist Kultur übersetzbar? Berlin: Kadmos. ———. 2009. “A Tangent that Betrayed the Circle: On the Limits of Fidelity in Trans- lation.” http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/0608/buden/en. Accessed Au- gust 2013. Freud, Sigmund. 1982. Traumdeutung. Studienausgabe Band II, edited by Thure von Uexküll and Ilse Grubrich-Simitis. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. Knowledge and Human Interest. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. ———. 1989. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heilbron, Johan. 2010. “Structure and Dynamics of the World System of Translation.” http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/files/40619/12684038723Heilbron.pdf/H eilbron.pdf. Accessed May 10, 2013. Herzberg, Hendrik. 2013. “Some Dare Call It Treason.” The New Yorker, June 28. Jakobson, Roman. 2000 [1959]. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In The Trans- lation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 138–143. Oxon–New York: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” In Im- manuel Kant. Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. http://www.marxists.org/ref- erence/subject/ethics/kant/enlightenment.htm. Močnik, Rastko. 2003. Tri teorije: Ideologija, nacija, institucija. Translated by Branka Dimitrijević. Beograd: Vesela nauka. Nowotny, Stefan. 2008. “Kontinua der Verwandlung. Sprachphilosophische und lin- guistische Aspekte der Übersetzung.” In Boris Buden and Stefan Nowotny, Übersetzung: das Versprechen eines Begriffs, 95–131. Vienna: Turia und Kant. Rawls, John. 1997. “The idea of public reason revisited.” The University of Chicago Law Review 64 (3): 765–807. Sakai, Naoki. 1997. “Introduction: Writing for Multiple Audiences and the Heterolin- translation / spring / 2014 gual Address.” In Translation and Subjectivity. On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism, 1–17. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simmel, Georg. 1908. “Treue: Ein sozialpsychologischer Versuch.” Der Tag n. 225, Erster Teil: Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin), June 10. 127  ———. 2009. Sociology: Inquiries Into the Construction of Social Forms. Translated and edited by Anthony J. Blasi, Anton K. Jacobs, and Mathew Kanjira- thinkal. Leiden: Brill NV. Vološinov, V. N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boris Buden is a writer, cultural critic, and translator based in Berlin. He studied philos- ophy in Zagreb (Croatia) and received his Ph.D. in cultural theory from Humboldt Uni- versity, Berlin. His essays and articles cover topics relating to philosophy and politics as well as art and cultural criticism. He has translated some of Freud’s most significant works into Croatian, and has authored several books, including Der Schacht von Babel [The Pit of Babel] (2005) and Zone des Übergangs [The Zone of Transition] (2009). Buden translation / spring / 2014 is currently visiting professor at the Faculty of Art and Design, Bauhaus University, Weimar. 128 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15512

translation speaks to Vicente L. Rafael translation editor Siri Nergaard met with Vicente Rafael in Misano Adriatico, Italy in May 2013 at the Nida School of Translation Studies where he gave a series of three lectures. During the conversation, Rafael explains how he, as a historian, became interested in translation and how he sees translation in connection to war and weaponization. The imperial ideology of translation to gain control over linguistic plurality and diversity is threatening translation, he says, and can be seen as a war of both and on translation. The control over linguistic plurality through English is our own contemporary example of the United States’ imperial project of dominating the world, according to Rafael. The conversation continues with Rafael’s telling about his interest in translation play as an opposite mechanism to war, enabling an undoing and reconfiguration of the power relations between languages and cultures. Via the example of the Philippines, the talk touches upon the role colonial education plays in regulating language, creating a linguistic hierarchy, and how translation nevertheless appears in surprising forms and expressions. The interview with Rafael was recorded and can be accessed at the journal’s website: http://translation.fusp.it/interviews NERGAARD: Hello, Vicente RAFAEL: Good Morning NERGAARD: Since our journal translation has the subtitle “a transdisciplinary journal,” you are really the perfect person for us to talk to in this interview for our journal: you are not a traditional scholar of translation studies, but you work deeply on translation from your perspective as a historian. Translation offers a unique perspective on, or a new way to analyze, colo- nialism, power, and language, especially in the Philippines, and even today in the United States. I would like you to tell the story of how trans- lation became such a central theme for you. RAFAEL: Well, like all good things in life it happened quite accidentally. By accident I mean that when I was in graduate school two things—one I [was] looking for a topic to do and I got interested in the early modern period, sixteenth century, looking at the Spanish colonization of the Philippines among other things. I noticed that there were very, very few sources written by colo- nized natives themselves. Most of the history was written by Spanish missionaries. I was also quite surprised to see that a lot of the writings of Spanish missionaries had to do with problems translation / spring / 2014 of translating the gospel because they had to preach in the native languages in order to be understood, which is much easier than translating the native languages into Spanish. It is much easier for the missionaries to learn the local languages than for the na- 203  tives to learn Spanish. And this is, of course, a practice consistent with what they had been doing in Latin America, so I got very interested in this topic and asked myself what would happen if one were to take a look at native languages as historical agents. Because we often think of historical agents as human beings, but there is a certain way in which you can also think of language as a historical agent that is somehow free of human control, in excess of human control, and that’s exactly what happened. One result is that I wrote my book, Contracting Colonialism, where I talked about the centrality not just of translation, but the relationship between translation and Christian conversion. And it turns out that in the missionary tradition the two are in fact almost syn- onymous. To translate and to convert are very closely related. And these in turn were absolutely essential for carrying out a kind of imperial project of colonization. So from then on it seemed like translation, conversion, and colonization seemed to all resonate with each other as part of a continuum, and that has been a re- curring obsession on my part, where I started looking at my sub- sequent work. In my later work I started looking at the American empire and the American colonization of the Philippines. But I also became very, very interested lately in the emergence of Eng- lish as a kind of hegemonic language. So those are the things that have led to my becoming very interested in translation. Origi- nally, the interest in translation grew out of my interest in larger historical issues relating to empire and colonialism. NERGAARD: As a historian this attention to language and translation in relation to history became a kind of obsession, as you said. How did the institu- tions, the universities react to this? The departments of history have not paid so much attention to language—the role of language and translation. So how was your work accepted, how was it received in the universi- ties? RAFAEL: First of all I think you are absolutely right. Not just history, but in many other Social Sciences, even in the Humanities, trans- lation has been ignored. NERGAARD: Even Comparative Literature ignored translation for many years… RAFAEL: It is for the same reason that there is a tendency to see language in purely instrumental terms, as a means to an end, as if thought was possible without language—as if actions were possible with- out language. I was very, very lucky again to be at the conjunction translation / spring / 2014 of things. I started my graduate training in the late ’70s and I went to Cornell, which is in upstate New York, and at that time the United States was just opening up to a fresh wave of Conti- nental theory, mostly from France and Germany. Everything 204  ranging from Hermeneutics to Deconstruction, to French Fem- inism—all of which paid close attention to the workings of lan- guage. So it was a time that was very hospitable to what they used to call the Linguistic Turn and so it allowed me space and re- sources to do my own work. But it is still a struggle. In other words, the question of language is not something that is easily thought about in the historical profession. In that sense, my work is still sort of idiosyncratic, but that is OK because then I always feel like I have something different to say than what most other historians have to say. I am not doing the same old thing. I have got something different to contribute. There are certain advan- tages to being on the margins. One just has to know how to take advantage of that position. NERGAARD: You are speaking about a period in which the so-called Linguistic Turn took place in philosophy, but it also ignored translation. RAFAEL: There is another aspect in my case to what I was doing that made translation absolutely essential—that I was involved in the US in what was called Area Studies, which is this thing that emerged in the post-Cold War period. The United States was very interested in competing with the Soviet Union, and one of the things that they did was try to extend not just their military influence, but their cultural influence around the world. Part of that was to fund universities to put up what they called Area Studies so they would study different regions of the world and develop a kind of scholarly expertise in these areas. Very similar to what Britain and France and Holland and all the other Euro- pean countries had done. And in the process of funding these Area Studies programs they began to emphasize language training and of course that brought out the question of translation. So people became very adept, or at least there was a whole generation of Area Studies experts that emerged from these centers that de- veloped fluency in the languages and some of them became in- terested in the problem of translation. This included two of my advisors at Cornell—one of whom was Benedict Anderson, an- other of whom was James Siegel—and they had written particu- larly on problems of translation around the emergence of things like nationalism, the emergence of authoritarianism in various parts of Southeast Asia. So, in a way, again I was very fortunate to be working with people who already assumed the importance of translation. In my case, as I said, translation emerges organi- cally from the very sense of the problems I was looking at, be- translation / spring / 2014 ginning with religious conversion and then later on with... more lately thinking about problems of counterinsurgency and milita- rization and so forth, where once again language and the attempt to tame language through translation becomes absolutely crucial. 205  NERGAARD: In the last works you mentioned, you introduced new terms and a new vocabulary with which to discuss translation studies. War of trans- lation, translation in wartime, weaponization of translation, targeting translation in the counterinsurgency. This is really a new vocabulary and it is quite strong. RAFAEL: Well it’s not so much that it is new. The other day I was reread- ing The Translation Studies Reader by Lawrence Venuti. It is very interesting to read his historical introduction about translation studies in which he talks about, for example, Roman Antiquity and the status of translation as it was understood by the late Roman writers—Cicero and Horace and others. I am not very familiar with that history, but I was very surprised to realize that even then there were competing notions of translation. For ex- ample, a part of the idea of translating Greek authors into Latin in part had to do with the late Roman desire to rival the legacy of Greece. Not only were they appropriating Greek literature and Greek writing and Greek thought, they also wanted to, as it were, conquer it in the sort of imperial vein and so you realize that the idea of translation, at least in the West, was always implicated in the idea of rivalry, competition—which is another word for war. Not only that, but there has always been a contest between rhetorical approaches to translation and grammatical approaches to translation—word-for-word, sense-for-sense—and that ten- sion has animated, for example, translations of the Bible from St. Jerome to Luther. And, of course, it has figured in the history of missionary translations of the gospel all the way up to today. At the Nida School of Translation Studies we are talking about this. So it is not surprising translation should figure in imperial proj- ects of all sorts including the latest one, which is the United States’ project to maintain their dominant position in the world. So in a sense what I am doing is simply reminding people of a feature of translation that tends to get lost, which is it tends to turn on not just the transfer of meaning, but also on the struggle to control that process of transferring meaning. It relates to all sorts of tensions around procedures, around the limits of what can be translated. In that sense, translation is always fraught, so it is always at war, as it were. And, finally, something I was trying to talk about yesterday is that there is what Derrida calls a kind of logocentric tradition in Western thinking, which tends to priv- ilege thought over speech and then, of course, speech over writing and so, for instance, there is this hierarchical chain of signs. And translation figures very prominently there because within the lo- translation / spring / 2014 gocentric context, as I have tried to argue, translation becomes a means to an end. And that end, at least in the Western logocen- tric context, is the end of translation, so you can say the end of translation is the literal end of translation—the point where peo- 206  ple will feel like everything is so transparent that there is no need to translate. That itself is part of this war of domination that is going on. NERGAARD: And it is almost always there as a ghost, as if that transparency was the ideal, where translation is not necessary any more. RAFAEL: Yes, exactly. NERGAARD: With that transparency—the end of translation—we would lose everything. We would lose plurality. We would lose meaning. We would lose everything. Nevertheless, that’s the kind of ideal ghost right there. RAFAEL: Right. NERGAARD: As if we could avoid difference. RAFAEL: And it not so much, really, to avoid difference or to avoid plu- rality. It is to be able to have total control over linguistic plurality, to make this control totally mechanical. And that is the dream, for example, of automatic translation systems. Now, the attempt to develop automatic translation systems, which I have also writ- ten about, is precisely to make everything perfectly equivalent to everything else, which of course is the dream of capitalism. This would be a perfectly capitalized world where everything could be exchanged for a single medium and measure of exchange, and in this case that medium and measure of exchange is increasingly English. English is now becoming the equivalent of the dollar, the capitalist “sign par excellence.” So, again, it is not so much the disappearance of difference—it is about the ability to control the production and circulation of differences that this imperial ideology of translation, in my opinion, has set out to do. And, of course, there are all kinds of resistances to that, and that is part of the story that I am very, very interested in: to try and plot the way in which not only this war on translation is progressing— that is, the war of as well as on translation—but also the way in which this war is being evaded, the way this war is being dis- placed, the different responses to this war in such a way as to make the kind of final victory impossible. So what you get, in- stead, is the emergence of what I call ongoing insurgency, lin- guistic insurgencies of all sorts: puns, jokes, the creation of slang. And there is, of course, the most important arena for linguistic insurgency, which I believe to be literature. So long as you have translation / spring / 2014 literature you have hope. Because so long as you have literature, you have the need for translation. It works both ways: to the ex- tent that you have translation, literature becomes possible, and to the extent you have literature, translation becomes essential. 207  NERGAARD: Necessary and essential. RAFAEL: Right, to that extent you cannot have a single ideology of trans- lation controlling the production of difference, because differ- ence will always proliferate beyond the control of any particular translation ideology, thanks to literature. NERGAARD: Thanks to literature… RAFAEL: Yes, so literature is a principle of hope as far as I am concerned, or I should say a resource, a resource of hope in a world where translation tends to get reduced to merely instrumental terms, such as, for example, when the US Department of State calls translation a complex weapons system. NERGAARD: Very interesting. And the connections to other areas in translation studies becomes clear. But I still suggest that you introduce a new vo- cabulary. With postcolonial criticism we are familiar with concepts like “power” and “conflict,” but you use “war.” You use other concepts, too, such as “weaponization”... RAFAEL: In part, that grows out of the influence of the events of the last ten years, including the “Global Wars on Terror,” the kind of brazen attempt at colonial occupation on the part of the United States in Afghanistan and in Iraq as well as interventions in places like Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and so forth. Not to mention, of course, the occupation of the Palestinian territories by Israel, which would not be possible without the aid of the United States. All of that has placed the question of war, I think, in a lot of peo- ple’s minds, and my attempt to talk about translation in terms of war grows out of my concern with more recent events. There is also another aspect to it, which is that there is a way in which war has always played a central part in the formation of social re- lations and the formations of society. When you think about how, for example, modern national states have arisen, almost every sin- gle modern state has arisen precisely in the wake of, or in the process of, engaging in war both against other nation–states, as well as against certain peoples within that particular nation–state. So I would think that, to the extent that war is constitutive of social relations, it would then also have a constitutive role in the processes of translation, as indeed one can see by looking at the history of translation, showing how it is always fraught, it is al- ways involved in all sorts of conflict. That there is, just as Derrida translation / spring / 2014 many years ago said about the violence of writing, so too I think there is a violence that is intrinsic to every act of translation. I think in certain cases it helps to think about translation in those terms. I do not, of course, assume it is an appropriate way to 208  think about translation in every possible context, but, especially in contexts I have been looking at, I think the connection be- tween translation and war is very useful. NERGAARD: You probably could relate this to what Antoine Berman says— that all translation is naturally ethnocentric. So you sense this violence again, because you want to change what is foreign and make it look more like what you are familiar with. RAFAEL: I mean, I agree with that to a certain extent in that the trans- lation might begin in a sort of ethnocentric vein, but to the extent that translation also signals a kind of ineluctable opening to the other, it also initiates a kind of ongoing alterity. Its war-making powers, as it were, invariably become attenuated. Again, as I sug- gested yesterday in my talk, the other possibility in thinking about translation as war is translation as play, and the question of play then turns conflict, violence, and so forth in a different direction. It is about the displacement of conflict. It is not the banishment of conflict, but the reformulation of conflict as a kind of indeterminate, ceaseless displacement that allows for the desta- bilization of any particular power relations. And play, this is something I would like to explore further. I have only just begun to think about this question of play and of course there is an enormous literature about this. But the question of play as that which attenuates, not just a particular kind of dialectical conflict, which is at the heart of war, but the question of play is that which opens up into other possibilities, the possibilities of the literary, for example, as I was trying to suggest yesterday. Play as that which is connected to the question of freedom. Why do we play? We play because in some sense play offers a kind of escape. It of- fers a kind of release. It opens up an alternative world where noth- ing is stable, where no one is permanently on top, no one is permanently on the bottom, where there is a certain kind of joy and happiness in being able to not just control the world, but also in allowing oneself, as it were, to be controlled by the world; so there is a kind of delight in the loss of identity, or the fluidity of identity. NERGAARD: But you have to be empowered with language before you can allow yourself to play in such a fashion. RAFAEL: Well, you have to know the rules, of course, you have to know the rules before you can play the game, so it also brings in a cer- translation / spring / 2014 tain kind of discipline, but a discipline that is not about surveil- lance. It is a discipline that is not about submitting to a particular power. It is a discipline that enables you precisely to participate in the loss of power, if you will. So much of play is predicated on 209  this loss of power, and, as I said, a kind of opening up to a certain kind of freedom. It is to think about translation as that which is connected to an emancipatory project. That is the other side. So on the one hand translation is war, which is to think of transla- tion as ineluctably implicated in power relations, but on the other side of it is translation as play, which is to think of translation as that which also has the potential to undo and reconfigure, and perhaps do away with these power relations in the name of a more just and a more free world. NERGAARD: Yesterday, during your talk at The Nida School in Misano Adriatico, you were discussing the school system back in the Philippines. Can you tell us a bit more about that situation in which local languages are pro- hibited and the use of a foreign language is imposed? RAFAEL: What I was talking about yesterday was colonial education and the role colonial education plays in regulating language and in the creation of what I have been calling a linguistic hierarchy. I think this is typical with all, not just in a colonial context. I think this is typical of all schools, the majority of schools, where the idea of going to school, among other things, is the idea of learn- ing how to behave in a certain socially acceptable way. And in- trinsic to that mode of behavior is the ability to be able to speak in a certain accessible way. So one is educated, but one is educated in a particular way, so one becomes recognizably “grown up,” be- comes developed. There is this whole developmentalist philoso- phy that is, I think, intrinsic in all modern educational systems, colonial and postcolonial. And that has to do with being able to speak in a certain way. Speaking in a certain way, speaking in a way that is educated, as they say, and this is something that can be empirically verified in lots and lots of different situations. But this idea of appearing to be, or sounding to be, educated means being able to speak language in a kind of standardized conven- tional way. That often entails repressing the more idiomatic, more colloquial, more dialectical versions of that language. So one speaks Italian correctly, which means not speaking the local di- alects. This is intensified and amplified in the colonial situation. The colonial situation I was talking about yesterday, where Fil- ipino students were expected to speak English, but in the process of speaking English, they were expected to repress the vernacular. And then, of course, the question becomes to what extent is this repression successful? Or does the repressed always return? And obviously in the case of the Philippines that is what happens. It translation / spring / 2014 returns to haunt, as it were, various attempts to speak in a stan- dardized conventional fashion. How do we know this? Very sim- ply, we know this because of the persistence of accents. To the extent that people still speak with accents is the extent to which 210  their speech is always marked by the very thing they were sup- posed to suppress. And what is that very thing they were sup- posed to suppress? They were supposed to suppress their mother tongue, which is their origin, right? So the origin always comes back, as it were, in displaced fashion. In the form of an accent, and I think this is true every time people speak, they always speak with accents and those accents always betray where they came from, their accents always betray another speech. Deleuze has this wonderful short essay called “He Stuttered,” where what he says about stuttering we can say about accents. Stuttering, he says, re- veals the existence of another language within language. And he goes on to talk about this in another register when he talks about style. He says style is the foreign language that dwells within con- ventional speech, and to the extent that we all have our own style of speaking, that we try to develop our own style of speaking when we speak with an accent, is the extent that we are always speaking another language within the language that is socially ac- ceptable. So that means we are always translating whenever we speak, whether our own or another’s language. NERGAARD: And can I use the accent because I want to keep my identity, too? It is not that I am not able to speak proper English, but I keep my accent because that is part of my origin. RAFAEL: Yes, perhaps, perhaps. As you know the sounding of accents is always the sign of translation at work, so another way of thinking about accents is that accents are always the points where transla- tion occurs, where it fails or it succeeds, right? Now, I don’t know how you do this, but for example in my case, my English would be standard American English, but when I go to the Philippines I cannot speak like this. If I spoke like this people would have difficulty understanding me, or they would think that I was put- ting on airs, that I was trying to be better than them because I spoke a different, more Americanized English, and so they would expect me to speak in the local register. I would have to change accents and usually within a day or two I am speaking entirely, as it were, “native.” I have to “go native,” right? Perhaps this hap- pens to you too when you go to Norway? And this usually is the case, so we are always translating back and forth, not only be- tween languages, but between accents, because accents are ways of marking our identity, which is to say, difference, right? NERGAARD: Exactly, exactly. I was thinking about the history of Norway when translation / spring / 2014 the Danish dominated Norway and the official language was Danish. Our written language was Danish, but the accent persisted: no Norwegian speaker used the Danish pronunciation. These languages are very close, so you have the language, the nonlanguage and the in-between, and the 211  Norwegians were still always in-between—they wrote in Danish, but the pronunciation was Norwegian. RAFAEL: Fantastic, fantastic. And there is a question of whether or not it is a matter of intention. We like to think it is a matter of in- tention. We like to think we are in control of our accents, but in fact, to the extent that we always speak with an accent, is the ex- tent that we cannot help but speak with an accent. That suggests that there is something physiological about speech that is beyond intentionality. Which is to suggest, if you take it one step further, that there is something about translation that is beyond our in- tention. There are different ways to think about it. One can think maybe translation is hardwired into our body. We must translate, we have no choice but to translate within language, across lan- guages, within accents, across accents. It is precisely something that we are compelled to do, which is to say it is compulsive. It is beyond our intentionality. That is the other interesting thing, too, about accents: we find it is not just the sign of translation at work, it is also the sign of a certain kind of resistance to inten- tionality. Right? NERGAARD: That’s very interesting. That’s another area that has not been ex- plored in translation studies at all. The psychological aspect of it, too, de- serves study, so I will look forward to your next book, Vicente. RAFAEL: It will be on accents. NERGAARD: Of course. Thank you very much. RAFAEL: You are very welcome. It has been a pleasure. NERGAARD: Thank you. Vicente L. Rafael, is Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle. Much of his work has focused on such topics as comparative colonialism and national- ism, translation, language and power, and the cultural histories of analog and digital media especially in the context of Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and the United translation / spring / 2014 States. His books include Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (1993); White Love and Other Events in Filipino Histories (2000), and The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (2005). 212 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15515

Introduction After an interruption of almost two years, due to a change of pub-lisher and additional complications, I am delighted to announce that translation: A transdisciplinary journal is back— stronger and better than before. Thanks to a collaboration with the publisher Eurilink University Press located in Rome in Italy, we are finally able to take up all the threads we had fashioned and, more importantly, are creating anew. We owe all our readers sincere apologies for the inconvenience this delay has caused many of you—readers who have been wait- ing for new articles and issues to peruse; authors who have been waiting to see their articles published; subscribers who have paid to receive the journal in print, online, or both; the community fol- lowing us online. Thank you for your patience and faith in our shared project that is translation. To get back on schedule as soon as possible, we will be pub- lishing issue 6—a special issue devoted to Memory and guest edit- ed by Bella Brodzki and Cristina Demaria—immediately after the present one. Before I introduce the exciting content of this issue, let me pres- ent a few new entries and changes in the journal’s staff. Carolyn Shread (Mount Holyoke College, USA) is the journal’s new assis- tant editor, and Giuliana Schiavi and Salvatore Mele (both Scuo- la Superiore Mediatori Linguistici, Vicenza, Italy and members of FUSP—Fondazione Universitaria San Pellegrino) are new mem- bers of the editorial board. In truth, they are not really new, since all three have served at the journal since 2014; but this is the first time they are officially connected to a new issue of the journal, and are presented to the readers. It is also thanks to Carolyn, Giuliana, and Salvatore that the journal is now reappearing. Loc Pham Quoc (Hoa Sen University, Vietnam), who has al- ready appeared in the journal as author, will in the future serve as translation / 9  the journal’s new reviews editor. He will be responsible for the reviews published on the journal’s website (translation.fusp.it). Reviews will include not only books, but also events, conferences, and other initiatives and publications related to translation. I look forward to a stimulating collaboration with these four fine scholars and friends. (Please find their bio presentations in the last pages of this issue, and on the journal’s website. A journal’s board is important to establish its editorial identity, to guarantee continuity, and to conceive innovative and original issues, but what gives a journal its body is its content. This is en- sured by the authors and their articles and contributions, and I am proud to present this new issue’s particularly strong and innovative content. First of all, we are happy to continue the tradition of hosting lectures presented at the yearly Nida Translation Studies Research Symposium in New York. The current issue is therefore publish- ing Bella Brodzki’s “Autobiography, Memory, and Translation” and Suzanne Jill Levine’s response, “Autobiography/Translation: Memory’s Losses or Narrative’s Gains?” It is a particular pleasure to include these two scholars’ contributions, since both serve on the journal’s advisory board and have sustained the journal since its foundation. From the same symposium, we also publish an article by Christi Merrill presented below. Bella Brodzki’s point of departure is a strong statement: She argues that “autobiography is a modality of translation” since it translates “experience.” The autobiographer, in other words, is a “translator of her own life experience or past, whose meaning is created through the interpretive act of remembering.” Brodzki’s essay develops ideas presented in her groundbreaking Can These Bones Live?: Translation, Survival and Cultural Memory (2007), in which she so convincingly demonstrates how connected mem- ory and translation are, since all translations reconfigure, redefine, and excavate a past, relying on memory and remembering. As mentioned above, Brodzki will be developing the theme of Mem- ory for our next issue as guest editor with Cristina Demaria. In this issue she looks at one special form of memory—autobiogra- phy—and analyzes three very different examples of autobiography translation / and their special mode of creating a memoir, conceived here as a self-reflexive mode of translation. The subject of autobiography is 10 therefore both a translator and a translation; the autobiographee is being displaced, carried over, “shifting shape and form, becoming other to herself.” As the translation process of the psychic content of self-re- flection and memory is a characteristic for autobiography, and “all memory is mediated and motivated,” Brodzki turns to Freud, electing him as a guiding spirit in her inquiry. Freud, himself a paradigmatic figure of translation, provides an interpretive frame- work for her analysis. The role of autobiography and translation in Freud is present in the essay as a kind of fil rouge, and, as Suzanne Jill Levine puts it in her response to Brodzki, “Autobiography and Translation come together logically and intuitively in Freud whose early work as a translator helped create his career as a scientist and hence the persona whose theoretical work was practically based on autobiographical as well as clinical reflection.” Brodzki’s first example is Nabokov’s Speak Memory, a book that in itself is particularly interesting also because it is a result of multiple translation processes between Russian and English. Brodzki’s next example is the Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé, whose texts are translated into English by her transla- tor–husband Richard Philcox. Here, Brodzki demonstrates how the couple “enact the ongoing, defining, and productive tension within translation studies, of the paradox of untranslatability on the one hand, and translatability on the other.” Alison Bech- del’s graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) is Brodzki’s final example of another variation on the theme of “how techniques of translation are implicated in the act of mate- rializing, textualizing, and visualizing the autobiographical sub- ject.” In her response to Brodzki’s lecture, Levine draws attention to parallels between autobiography and biography, asking wheth- er both of these forms of biographical writing, as well as other forms of narrative—fictional and nonfictional—can be considered as having a translational nature. “Are we perhaps speaking of a translational paradigm for narrative in general?” she asks. Analyzing the case of Dalit literature, “a phenomenon in and of translation,” Christi Merrill suggests we “think more carefully about the relationship of translation studies to postcolonial theo- ry.” Her article explores the ways Dalit consciousness is a multi- translation / 11  lingual issue, connecting it to the multilingualism that is so central in India that one can speak about a “translating consciousness” consisting in an “‘open’ daily negotiation along a continuum of mutual understanding.” Let me add a personal note here: for me, as a European grow- ing up in an ideologically monolingual society, going to India for the first time last year to attend the international conference on Plurilingualism and Orality at the Indraprastha College for Wom- en, University of Delhi, organized by Babli Moitra Saraf, one of our board members, and with the participation of this journal, it was an incredible surprise to experience how people used several languages simultaneously in a continuous translation movement. It struck me that if the dominating Eurocentric Translation Studies discourse had looked further outside its boundaries, and specifical- ly to the Indian tradition, it would have developed very differently and might have freed itself from the shackles of a binary hierarchy grounded in monolingualism, and the very idea of one necessary original of which any translation is derivative would not have had such a dominating position. The “translating consciousness” of which Merrill speaks is inherently multilingual, which automati- cally opens an alternative vision of what translation is about. In regard to Dalit literature, Merrill demonstrates how this multilingual negotiation is all but simple and peaceful; rather, it is connected to domination and repression. Since the language of dominance is predicated on caste, Merrill agues the translating consciousness is a more complex one then the colonizer–colonized binary. Merrill’s interesting contribution originated as a response to Robert Young’s lecture “Freud on Translation and Cultural Trans- lation” at the same New York symposium at which Bella Brodzki presented her paper. Young’s lecture—not included in this issue since it was committed to another publication—was dedicated to the concept of translation in Sigmund Freud’s work. Merrill works Young’s thematics into the problematic of the translating con- sciousness of Dalit literature in fascinating ways. For instance, in discussing catharsis as a multilingual project, she creates a parallel to Freud’s idea of psychoanalysis as a translation not only into an- translation / other language, but as a translation of the unknown. If the job of the psyche is to “translate” or displace traumatic 12 experience into a language foreign to the individual subject, the work of psychoanalysis is then to interpret that idiosyncratic lan- guage and “de-translate” it back into a language shared with the analyst. Merrill also sees clear parallels between the idea of cultural translation as explained by Young and Dalit literature, in that “it offers, for example, a possible way of reading the invisible, the subaltern.” Valeria Luiselli’s essay “Translating Talkies in Modernist Mexico. The Language of Cinemas and the Politics of the Sound Film Industry” represents a new and innovative way of looking at how translation may occur through cultural models such as ar- chitecture and movies, and how different “translation practices” represent cultural production and exchange. She tells the story of when the first talkies appeared in Mexico, and analyzes the way in which the introduction of sound movies represented a twofold translation, both spatial and cultural. In examining the arrival of sound film technology, Luiselli looks at the relationship between “the modern architectural language of movie theaters and some of the dominating cultural politics of the burgeoning sound film industry in Mexico.” Her question is whether there was a conso- nance or a dissonance in the relation to the discourse of modernity between sound film technology and architectural perspective, and how they contributed to the formation of ideas of modernity. What emerges is that modernist translation was actually “a way of ap- propriating new forms and thus a creative locus of innovation.” Luiselli discusses different forms of translation, from dubbing and the politics of film translation to the movie theaters as concrete spaces of translation, or even as translators, thus operating with a refreshingly broad concept of translation. Although Luiselli’s essay does not discuss this theme, I would suggest that this modernist translation practice was particularly prosperous in South America. The parallels between the thinking on translation expressed by authors such as Borges, De Paz, and especially Haroldo de Campos with his idea of translation as tran- creation and even “irreverently amorous devouring,” invite further investigation. Luiselli describes the fascinating story of how Spanish-speak- ing dubbers and voice actors were introduced in Hollywood films translation / 13  to counter the threat of English-language domination not only with their voices but also with “their entire body.” The introduction of American films in Mexico was complicated, however, and all man- ner of different options were explored in the process—including subtitling, dubbing, simultaneous “remakes,” and printouts of film dialogue. All of this cinematic innovation took place in buildings that were also subject to translational practices, such as the famous Teatro–Cinema Olimpia, for example, which was originally a con- vent. This movie theater plays a central role in the introduction— translation—of the modern experience to the Mexican audience, and was, in Luiselli’s words, a “translator made of concrete and stone.” Luiselli’s essay anticipates and opens a discussion that will be pursued in the future issue of this journal devoted to spaces and places, guest edited by Sherry Simon and Federico Montanari. Enquiries about translation in connection to places are also present in Sherry Simon’s essay “At the Edge of Empire: Rose Ausländer and Olha Kobylianska,” in which she examines “the work of translation at the edge of empire” through the two Czer- nowitz authors—the Ukrainian Olha Kobylianska (1863–1942) and the German–Jewish Rose Ausländer (1901–1988) viewed as translators of their border city. Luiselli’s broad concept of transla- tion, applied to cultural practices and movements, are developed by Simon in other both social and physical directions, for instance in the political and geographical borders of a multilingual city. To translate at the edge of empire—of which Czernowitz is an example in relation to the translational relationships developed through German—is to be especially aware of the ways in which boundaries can accentuate or attenuate difference. Political borders hypostatize cultural and linguistic differences, while geographical borders often show difference to be gradual. The multilingual- ism of border zones problematizes the activities of translation as source–target transactions. Drawing on a suggestion in Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, in which the distinction between enemy and citizen, alien and human beings is blurred, Simon looks at “another site of translation at the edge of empire,” a border city that has represent- ed a wall against the alien, discovering similar elusiveness and in- translation / stability of the borders. Czernowitz is intensely multilingual with the particularity of German as prominent and autonomous, and no 14 language apparently dominating over the others. In the search of a more realistic—and less idealized—understanding of the multilin- gualism of Czernowitz, Simon starts by defining it as translation- al, thus underscoring the “connections and convergences across language and communities” that might be much less peaceful and friendly than expected. Literary transactions express this translational terrain, and one of them is the tendency among many authors at the beginning of the twentieth century to move away from German to other minor languages. One such writer is Olha Kobylianska, who embraced the Ukrainian national cause and translated her texts from German. Her writing can be referred to as “translational writing—a product of the particular mélange of cultures particular to the Bukovina and Czernowitz.” The other author analyzed by Simon, Rose Ausländer, on the contrary, “returns” to German after her permanence in the writing in English. But this choice “is less a one-way and definitive em- brace of the authentic tongue than a renewed practice of translation, as she brings back to Germany the long experience of exile, expe- riencing new forms of displacement within the German-speaking world.” The eternal question of the relation between original and trans- lation is discussed in Alfred Mac Adam’s “Translating Ruins.” In an interesting perspective, he analyzes three sonnets that are direct or indirect derivations of Ianus Vitalis’ (1485–1560) epigram De Roma (1552) on the theme of Rome’s ruins. The “poem is a fasci- nating irony,” Mac Adam argues: “A poem in Latin on mutability that seeks to avoid the mutability of vernacular tongues” results in vernacular translations and imitations of which there exist over a dozen. The three sonnets compared by Mac Adam are Joachim du Bel- lay’s 1558 version and the two of which is progenitor or source, namely Edmund Spenser’s 1591 version of Joachim du Bellay and Francisco de Quevedo’s 1648 sonnet. The three sonnets are “si- multaneously the same and different, translations and originals” while they are in different relations to the distinction between translation and adaptation. They are all new poems, “appropriate for their language and culture, but none replicates De Roma in a vernacular language.” translation / 15  Each of translation’s issues includes an interview. We are hap- py to continue this tradition since interviews permit a different form of reflection from essays in that they are dialogic, “thinking- out-loud” texts. Lydia Liu—who has already published an article with us in our special issue on Politics guest edited by Sandro Mezzadra and Naoki Sakai (issue 4) and who will be present in a future issue (issue 7) with the lecture she gave at last year’s New York symposium—was interviewed by Carolyn Shread, transla- tion’s assistant editor. In the course of their conversation, Liu’s work against nationalism emerges as a strong starting point for her thinking on translation, which in many respects runs count- er to current ideas circulating in translation studies. Not only vo- cabulary, but intellectual discourse, political theory, and script are among the “foreign” elements that interrogate national literature and national identities in general. Script, and the technology con- nected to its reproduction such as the telegraph and the typewriter, actually “put pressure on all East Asian societies to reform their scripts.” The paradox consists in the fact that the typewriters’ lim- itations “[l]ed to campaigns that targeted the native script [. . .] as a backward writing system.” In regards to Liu’s ideas on the political dimension of trans- lation, this conversation with Liu offers an excellent explanation of the ideas she expressed in her article in issue 4 of this journal: Liu recalls her research on the Opium Wars through which she discovered how translation “could provide an illuminating angle for understanding international politics.” Contrary to what people generally think, Liu argues that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a Western docu- ment. It is, rather, a document that registers “competing univer- sals.” According to Liu, translation is an event, not just reduced to one instance of textual transfer, and needs to be reconceptualized in terms of situatedness in time and place. “Eventfulness allows temporalities to give any particular text a new mode of life in a new language,” she argues. I hope you enjoy reading this issue’s articles! SN translation / 16 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15516

Autobiography, Memory, and Translation Bella Brodzki Sarah Lawrence College, USA Abstract: The article traces a range of ways in which autobiography (self/life/ writing) and translation are mutually implicated in processes of displacement, recontextualization, mediation, and even comparison. Freud, paradigmatic fig- ure of translation and archeologist of memory, is the guiding spirit of this study. Its broad psychoanalytic framework situates three exemplary autobiographi- cal narratives and the modes of translation they perform: Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Maryse Condé’s La vie sans fards, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. The point of departure of my talk today is that autobiography is a modality of translation. Both autobiography and translation propel change, involve movement, recontextualization, mediation, even comparison. What is aptly named and fits under the rubric of auto- biography—meaning self/life/writing—refers to a broad range of self-referential maneuvers and practices, and is at base a Western genre predicated on a notion of the individual self as at once au- tonomous and relational, and capable of being both “the observing subject and the object of investigation” (Smith and Watson 1998, 4). Autobiography claims a venerable and variable tradition that begins roughly with St. Augustine’s conversion narrative Confes- sions and includes slave narratives, testimonios, and such recent examples of the Küntzlerroman as Patti Smith’s Just Kids. A useful working definition (if joyfully and consistently revised) of autobi- ography for scholars in the field comes from Philip Lejeune: “a ret- rospective narration produced by a real person concerning her/his own existence, focusing on the development of her/his own life, in particular the development of her/his personality” (Lejeune 1989, 4). What the French theorist calls “the autobiographical pact” is the assurance given the reader by the signature on the autobiogra- translation / 17  phy’s cover that the author, the narrator, and the protagonist of this narration share a common identity. Autobiography—or what is re- ferred to quite commonly, in the wake of post-Enlightenment the- ories of the subject and postcolonial discourse, as “life writing” or “life narrative”—is, in any case, not limited to the written, but can be performative, visual, filmic, or digital. What is interesting in all modes of life narrative is that the referential relationship between the origin and the translation, as it were—as well as between the autobiographer and the reader—is contractual. Please keep in mind as well that even, or especially, in autobi- ography studies, the very elements that comprise the constellation of self/life/writing are all culturally contested and problematized today. Put another way, and critical rigor notwithstanding, the va- lence of the various theoretical terms relevant to the autobiograph- ical enterprise, including such marketplace labels as “memoir,” changes depending on the specific discursive context. Much can be at stake ideologically, at least for literary critics and scholars of autobiography; what is a nuanced distinction in one instance is a major conceptual marker in another, a most obvious example of which being the ontological/epistemological difference between a “self” and a “subject”. The former term has metaphysical conno- tations, the latter is a discursive construction, and my view lies somewhere between the two—I don’t link “selfhood” with pleni- tude, transcendence, or authenticity, but nor do I consider the “I” to be merely a linguistic effect. How terms are implemented and in- terpreted, then, is itself a matter of translation, and heavily depen- dent on reception, on audience, on readership. Though I will use a variety of terms today, most of which are modifiers of “self,” this is not an indication of their interchangeability within a prescribed category or lexical field; rather it is an effort on my part to gesture towards the richness of the genre and its ongoing generativity. Returning to my opening assertion that autobiography is a modality of translation, let us consider that the autobiographer or producer of an autobiographical event is engaged in a process of subjective displacement, a carrying over of an idea or a notion of a life and/or selfhood. In the act of being inscribed or narra- tivized, the autobiographer is being translated. Being translated translation / for an autobiographer means shifting shape and form, becoming other to her/himself, as s/he distinguishes her/himself from others 18 through language. Another critical dimension of the autobiogra- phy/translation nexus is that translators inscribe their subjectivity into their versions, most acutely, into the views on translation they espouse and the strategies they deploy. Just as the autobiographer is reading herself/himself otherwise, so is the translator inscribing herself/himself through an other’s voice and text, into another lin- guistic or signifying form. To write is to be written, to narrate is to be narrated, to translate is to be translated. In my talk I shall be exploring a few of the myriad ways a subject verbalizes, materializes, and textualizes the process of self-analysis, self-reflection, and self-inscription in both autobiog- raphy and translation, as reflections on each other. I do not mean to suggest, however, that the self—as source material—is a giv- en, that it is transparent to itself, or that it is anterior to any act of interpretation. Precisely, I shall explore how various facets of the translation complex play out in three dissimilar and distinctive autobiographical projects. My literary examples are modern and contemporary, yet they differ widely from each other. As a com- paratist, I take seriously the conceit that seemingly strange juxta- positions can be most productive and illuminating. My first liter- ary example is text based: Russian polyglot Vladimir Nabokov’s exemplary, self-translated autobiography Speak, Memory (1947). The second concerns the intriguing and divergent autobiographical positions of Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé and her British translator–husband Richard Philcox regarding their embedded sit- uation (although I will make some reference to La vie sans fards, published in 2012, her most recent, and as yet untranslated autobi- ography), where most of my commentary will concern them as a translation couple and its implications for the global literary mar- ketplace. The third is also text based, but transgeneric: American cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home (2006). In each case, the autobiographer is implicitly, and often explicitly— depending on the various modes and languages involved—a trans- lator of his or her own “life experience” or past whose meaning is created through the interpretive act of remembering. As a paradigmatic figure of translation, Freud is my guiding or informing spirit into this area of inquiry: Freud as an object of translation; as a translator himself; and as a theorist, especially in the early essay “Screen Memories” (1899), in itself a selection translation / 19  of his own childhood recollections, disguised in dialogic form. The translation history of the writings of Sigmund Freud is one of the most fascinating, controversial, and overdetermined instanc- es of the power of a particular translator to influence indefinitely a target culture’s reception of a major body of thought. As some Anglophone readers of Freud are aware, the copyright on James Strachey’s twenty-four volume Standard Edition expired in 1989, provoking debates worldwide on the consequences of retranslating Freud’s works, not only for those reading in English, but in all foreign versions, since many are translations from the English and not the original German. On the one hand, Strachey’s monumen- tal endeavor has been admired for its homogeneous lucidity and consistency; on the other, it has been excoriated for effectively in- tegrating and synthesizing what Freud left fragmentary and “pro- cessive,” most glaringly for imposing Ancient Greek and Latin ter- minology onto everyday German words in the service of making Freudian discourse sound more “scientific.” Even as Freud (and his daughter Anna) approved of Alix and James Strachey’s, along with Ernest Jones and A. A. Brill’s, systematizing of psychoanalyt- ic terminology, however, he continued up until his death to use the same rich range and variety of ambiguous, and often contradictory, terms to describe the most elusive and intimate workings of “psy- chic life”—as he had always done. At the risk of committing the intentional fallacy, can we in- fer that Freud privileged dissemination over fidelity in translation, that his conception of language as figurative and fluid, and transla- tion as a pervasive medium of human experience, was broadly in- tercultural and transhistorical, consonant with his desire to attract the widest possible foreign readership for his radical creation— psychoanalysis—thus securing its status in history, as he put it, as the third revolution, after those of Copernicus and Darwin? As we well know, if it is almost impossible to overstate Freud’s influence on modernity, it is not in the realm of science that he made his im- pact (though this may be changing again, as neuroscientists uncov- er the brain’s relationship to the unconscious), but in the domain of culture, and the individual’s relation to it, as evidenced by the way those very archaisms for which Strachey was criticized have infil- translation / trated every aspect of our speech. All the more interesting, then, that the Freud who is universally invoked is, in fact, linguistical- 20 ly and culturally specific. As the essays in Darius Gray Ornston Jr.’s edited study Translating Freud show, many of the challenges raised by translating Freud are not only theoretical or conceptual in nature, but have to do with his extraordinary gifts as a stylist who enjoyed and exploited the rhetorical, aesthetic, and expressive qualities of language, especially that of his native German, which was inflected by his inveterate erudition and cosmopolitanism. Freud was an autobiographer, too, drawing on his own inte- riority as a source text to be interpreted and analyzed as he wres- tled with his developing “science of the mind“ (Freud 1995a, 30), whose purview, he claimed, was no longer only psychopathology, but its relevance to what we now call “the neurotic normal.” He wrote “An Autobiographical Study” in 1924, at the age of six- ty-eight. An account of the internal development of psychoanal- ysis as well as its external history (Freud 1995a, 30), the autobi- ographical essay was published as a contribution to a volume of “self-portraits” by prominent physicians. Far less personal than his case studies, his correspondence with Fleiss, the seemingly minor “Screen Memories” (1899), the monumental The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), or The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), “An Autobiographical Study” is nonetheless a revealing document and has substantial explanatory power. Freud used this essay as an occasion to present an introduction or overview of his ideas as they evolved, and of their reception in the international scientific com- munity. As a self-portrait of the investigator, it tempts the reader to surmise that in Freud’s mind “la psychanalyse, c’est moi!” Translation is central to the story Freud tells. In the early days of his career, he recounts, the planes shifted considerably when, as a foreign student and auditor in Paris, he offered to translate “a new volume of [Charcot’s] lectures into German.” Freud translated not only the third volume of Charcot’s Lessons on Diseases of the Nervous System (1886) and Tuesday’s Lessons at the Salpêtrière (1887–1888), but five entire books in all, from French and English into German. Though he had a position as a lecturer in pathology in Vienna, it was his work as a translator that gained him entry into Charcot’s circle of personal acquaintances and full participation in the activities at Salpêtière Clinic (Freud 1995a, 6). According to Patrick Mahony, “Freud made translation a uni- fied field concept” (Mahony 2001, 837). Mahony elaborates that translation / 21  in psychoanalysis the patient may be psychically conceived as a succession or accumulation of translations, with the analyst as- suming the complementary role of a translator. By means of trans- lations—psychic material is itself already a translation in need of a second order translation—“the analyst effects a translation of what is unconscious into consciousness” (Mahony 2001, 837); that is, dreams translate what the dreamer dreams to what the dreamer re- members and reports, translates from mental image to verbal nar- ration. Mahony also gives the following specific examples of what Freud deemed to be translations: dreams; generalized hysterical, obsessive, and phobic symptomatology; parapraxis (this term for a slip of the tongue is itself a wonderful example of a Strachey clas- sical archaism); fetishes; the choice of suicidal means; and the an- alyst’s interpretations (Mahony 2001, 837). Freud’s autobiograph- ical study is also a form of translation of his life and career as a scientist and a defense, even an apologia, of his intellectual legacy. I hope that these broad psychoanalytic insights will provide us with an interpretive framework for thinking figuratively and rhe- torically about the autobiographers and translators we are about to discuss. Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1947) is a virtuosic synesthetic, trans- lingual, transmodal, transcultural performance. I will barely pierce the surface of its many layers and textures today. By making the reader of the foreword privy to the many stages of rewriting, reframing, and recasting of what he calls “a systematically cor- related assemblage of personal recollections ranging geographi- cally from St. Petersburg to St. Nazaire, and covering thirty-sev- en years, from August 1903 to May 1940” (Nabokov 1947, 9), Nabokov might be giving us too much, before the first page of the autobiography proper has even been accessed. The detailed paratextual information, much like the exquisite meditation on the nature of a privileged life as only a consummately privileged polyglot consciousness could render it, is daunting and some- what overwrought. Translated into French, German, Spanish, and Italian by other translators, Nabokov explains that “for the translation / present, final edition […] I have availed myself of the correc- tions I made while turning it into Russian. This re-Englishing of 22 a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place” (Nabokov 1947, 12–13) is likened to the kinds of multiple metamorphoses familiar to but- terflies, but previously untried by humans. If in the foreword he posits himself as remarkable among his species, those very liter- ary and linguistic feats are grounded in a principle of translation that treats every change in form as a new thing to be celebrated, but not at the expense of preserving or immortalizing moments or stages of perfection. And yet, the exiled writer’s essay on the challenges of translating Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin into English reveals a translator hostile to a free-form, target-friendly version of a classic. His rarefied, academic, heavily annotated translation privileged its own elite audience, reflecting, as Lawrence Venuti puts it, Nabokov’s “deep nostalgic investment in the Russian lan- guage and in canonical works of Russian literature while disdain- ing the homogenizing tendencies of American consumer culture” (Venuti 2012, 110–111). Is there a connection between Nabokov’s protectionist views of the role of a literary translator and the way he translated his own life? A self-declared “chronophobiac” (Nabokov 1947, 19), his disclaimer about any affection for the psychoanalytic method might suggest there is: I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues—and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols… and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents. (Nabokov 1947, 20) Doth he protest too much? It is not my intention here to put little Vladimir’s psyche on the couch, despite the wealth of ma- terial he provides throughout this text (and elsewhere in his oeu- vre), only to indicate that while Nabokov is reacting to the most reductive and vulgar version of Freud in terms of symbolic con- tent, he is also using hermeneutic instruments in ways that strongly resemble Freud’s methods. Each embodies qualities of both the scientist and the poet, and both are formalists of the first order. Indeed, as masterful interpreters of signs and symptoms, and de- coders of patterns, both are drawn to structural repetitions, as well as to what escapes those structures and strictures. Critics, among them Jeffrey Berman and Jenefer Shute, have addressed why the translation / 23  figure of Freud looms so large—and so negatively—for Nabokov, as well as the implications for an understanding of his fiction, es- pecially Lolita. It seems to me that what Nabokov rejects in Freud is his primordial pessimism about human nature, and that what he negates is the general principle that he—that is, Nabokov—might not be master of his own mind. If the opening chapter of Speak, Memory is about anything, it is the eros/thanatos dialectic, as is the book’s final chapter, which focuses on intergenerational transmission and the transcendent or redemptive power of the aesthetic imagination. But my aim now is to direct attention to the associative method of forming com- posite events that Freud and Nabokov share, and which serves as Nabokov’s template or creed for turning one’s life into a work of art. What Nabokov calls “the match theme”—the Freudian germ of which is a verbal or imagistic link revealing a thematic or sym- bolic correspondence—is exemplified in two fabulously dramatic events drawn from his childhood. One of those themes is the tragic irony of history, as illustrated in the destiny of a certain General Kuropatkin, a friend of Nabokov’s father, who in one scene, while playing a “match” game with young Vladimir in which he “depicts the sea in calm and stormy weather,” (Nabokov 1947, 27) is in- formed that he will lead the Russian Army against the Japanese in the 1905 War. Fifteen years later, disguised as a peasant, he comes across Nabokov’s father in flight from the Bolsheviks, and asks him for a match. Though his childhood was indeed blessed, Nabokov’s message to his attentive reader above all is that the art of living is less a mat- ter of being endowed with rich original content than it is a matter of a perceiving intelligence imposing sensorial and cognitive mas- tery over the flux and chaos of the world. “The match theme” is a lesson in how to work with one’s source material: tracking, tracing, and linking across time and space seemingly unrelated episodes or events through a metonymic/metaphorical leap that brings them together and thereby raises them to a higher level of meaning, a threshold for further reflection, interpretation, and commentary. (It is, for example, a lesson in linking the moves on a chessboard with the assassination of his beloved father, not as the outcome of translation / a duel the child dreads, but at a public lecture, when it was least expected and he was shielding the body of a more likely politi- 24 cal target.) Nabokov’s technique for critical reading is the model for translating a life, and it is, then, primarily aesthetic in nature. That is, it foregrounds the structural and formal aspects of even the most spectacular and catastrophic of human experiences without divesting the events of any of their wondrous or devastating force, identifying—or, rather, creating—patterns, establishing affinities and thematic correspondences amidst/across what would other- wise remain inchoate, separate, isolated ephemera. “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography” (Nabokov 1974, 21). After Speak, Memory, not only is it impossible to read autobiography the same way again, but it is impossible to live autobiographically—that is, to think about one’s life as a thematic design—in the same fashion once one has internalized Nabokov’s model. The opening passage of Speak, Memory—beginning with “The cradle rocks above an abyss” on page 19—offers one of the most striking images and meditations on mortality to be found in the annals of autobiography. Yet the genesis of Speak, Memory was what is now the book’s fifth chapter, written originally in French and titled “Mademoiselle O.” That Nabokov was both worldly lit- erate and deeply imprinted by Russian literature is made manifest in the portrait which serves as the premise for this chapter. Its de- clared purpose is to reclaim through memory the destiny of his old French governess, whom he felt he had betrayed by having previously turned her into a fictional character, thus denying her the independent existence that rightfully belonged to her. Nabokov’s revisitation of the Swiss governess “Mademoi- selle” begins with her arrival by sleigh to the Russian country- side in the winter of 1905–1906. Though of his many tutors and governesses she was the object of some ridicule and derision, he now pays selective tribute to her “lovely” French and its impact on his appreciation for French literature. I have chosen to focus on this recontextualized portrait of the hapless, enormous, miserable figure, because indeed she may not be substantial enough on her own terms to support the attempt “to salvage her from fiction” (Nabokov 1947, 117). And this is not, despite the reasons he ini- tially gives, Nabokov’s prime motive for memorializing her. The autobiographer announces straight away that he is imagining the scene, that he is seeking recourse in fiction once again: “I was not translation / 25  there to greet her; but I do so now as I try to imagine what she saw and felt at that last stage of her fabulous and ill-timed journey” (Nabokov 1947, 98). The memorialist’s conjuring of poor Mademoiselle—who remains a rather disdained and pathetic character in this portray- al—has been culturally, linguistically, and, of course, physically displaced to the Russian steppes from her native Switzerland. The overarching image is of snow. Very lovely, very lonesome. But what am I doing in this stereoscopic dreamland? How did I get here? Somehow, the two sleighs have slipped away, leaving be- hind a passportless spy standing on the blue-white road in his New England snow- boots and stormcoat. The vibration in my ears is no longer their receding bells, but only my old blood singing. All is still spellbound, enthralled by the moon, fancy’s rear-vision mirror. The snow is real, though, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, sixty years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers. (Nabokov 1947, 100) A symbolic identification grounds Nabokov’s authorial/auto- biographical position in this classic Russian novelistic scene in which, laying his devices bare, he inserts himself at the end as both observing subject (“passportless spy”) and object of reflec- tion (“But what am I doing […] ? How did I get here?”) through the temporal and spatial displacement of “snow,” and Nabokov and Mademoiselle, who now occupy virtually equivalent or trans- posable positions in relation to the other’s estrangement. His un- derlying resistance to the idea that perhaps there was more to Ma- demoiselle than her lack if finesse is made clear to him belatedly, through his own experience of exile and loss, primarily as a result of the Russian Revolution. In an act of literary mediation and em- pathic projection he comes to understand the gravitas of her life story as a key to understanding his own. With retrospective insight he says at another point in the chapter that this is something “I could appreciate only after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart” (Nabokov 1947, 117). Nabokov’s insight, shared with Freud, is that all memory is mediated and motivated, and dependent on a dynamic imagina- translation / tion; because the psychic content of original memory is not avail- able, whether because of absence or inaccessibility, it cannot be 26 restored without being translated to later experiences, desires, and needs. Maryse Condé Maryse Condé, Guadeloupean author of several novels about Ca- ribbean heroines in Africa, slavery in the Antilles, the Salem witch trials, and even a revisionary reading of Wuthering Heights, has written two autobiographies: Tales from the Heart: True Stories From My Childhood,1 and the recently published—but still un- translated—La vie sans fards (2012). Self-identified as a classical- ly-schooled Francophone Caribbean writer, by which I mean that her readership would typically comprise Continental French and Antillean readers, she has attained preeminent status in the literary marketplace as a global Caribbean writer—in the company of Der- ek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Rafael Confiant, and Edwidge Danticat—as a result of translation. Being translated, especially into English, has enabled Condé’s work—albeit in altered form—to exceed its linguistic and cultural boundaries and live beyond its own spatial and temporal borders, however they have been constituted. In short, it has brought her the widest possible reception. And yet Condé’s translation complex is of a special order, espe- cially when read in a context—familial and erotic—that so readily invites a psychoanalytic interpretation; I am not going to undertake such a reading here. La vie sans fards is devoted primarily to the years she spent in West Africa during the politically promising pe- riod of decolonization, and then the corruption, hypocrisy, and re- pression of the postindependence regimes. This experience, which she consistently recounts in amatory language, “occupied a central place in my life and in my imagination” (Condé 2012, 16; transla- tion mine); but it was a painful disappointment, a doomed affair. Her less than positive depiction of African life, as seen in both her fiction and memoir, has made her a provocative and somewhat controver- sial figure in postcolonial literary circles. The continent couldn’t at- tract her sufficiently or compel her enough—despite long and varied opportunities during her sojourns in Guinea, Ghana, Ivory Coast, 1 Originally published in French in 1999; translated into English by Richard Philcox in 2001. In-text reference will be to the 2001 English edition. translation / 27  and Senegal—to learn to speak Malinké, Fulani, Peulh, or Wolof. In this failed intercultural encounter in which France, the Caribbean, and Africa are not reduced to the points they occupy in a colonial constellation, Condé represents herself as untranslatable, unable to be taken on her own terms in a different context. Conversely, her inability to find reflections of herself in Africa, to be recognized as herself and not a “toubabesse” [white woman, because Antillaise, for example], reinforces her sense of isolation and exclusion, wheth- er it be a result of history, racial identity, and/or cultural and class values. It is an otherness to which she clings and which she reads as immutable. This paradoxical sense of her own untranslatability drives the narrative, as the autobiographer depicts herself struggling against forces and structures that threaten her integrity, as metaphorically and literally understood. The critical matter pertaining to translation and memory here is not the authenticity or veracity of the self-por- trait as the autobiographer renders it, but the conditions of its re- ception, as she has experienced it. Distinguishing her motivations from the idealizing ones most often attributed to the conventions of recounting a life, Condé proclaims her passion for “unvarnished” truth-telling in the introduction, as she stakes a claim for her sin- gularity while also invoking a more abstract, albeit gendered, uni- versality. She inscribes herself squarely within the French Enlight- enment and Romantic traditions from the outset: “I want to display to my kind a woman in every way true to nature, and the woman I portray shall be myself” (Condé 2012, 12; translation mine). Despite Condé’s resolute individualism, feisty independence, and political risk-taking, her lively and sometimes harrowing nar- rative is framed, on its first and last pages, by her two husbands, the Guinean Mamadou Condé and the English Richard Philcox, whom she met in Senegal. Her marriage to Philcox will take place out- side the narrative, but she pays homage to their first meeting and telegraphs what is to follow. “He was the one who would change my life. He would take me to Europe and then to Guadeloupe. We would discover America together. He would help me gently sep- arate from my children and resume my studies. Above all, thanks to him, I would begin my career as a writer” (Condé 2012, 334; translation / translation mine). Condé herself is an accomplished English speaker and scholar 28 of English literature, who taught for many years at Columbia and other esteemed universities; but she seems to consider translation at best as a mechanistic exercise or practical necessity, not a cre- ative practice worthy of her critical attention. Her manifest lack of interest in translations of her work, when the stakes are, ironically, so high, sound disingenuous for many reasons—not the least of which is that she lives on such intimate and privileged terms with her translator. One could conceive such indifference as a matter of blind trust, and a convenient division of labor, since—in addition to being her translator—Philcox also handles all of her negotia- tions. Ironically, however, their embedded relation seems to ensure that instead of being on the same page regarding translation, their perspectives as a translational couple remain absolutely divergent. As is evidenced in a fascinating 1996 interview with Doris Kadish and Françoise Massardier (the authors of Translating Slav- ery) conducted in French with Philcox (with Condé present) in which he describes his training, strategy, and evolution as a trans- lator, Philcox sees his role as quite important. He valorizes the complex process of “recreating” a text and bringing the writer to a different cultural—that is, Anglophone—audience (Kadish and Massardier, 751). Not only does he believe there is an affinity be- tween the original and the translation, but he also maintains that he is “communicating the author’s writing in another language, in another culture” (Kadish and Massardier, 751; translation mine). Moreover, his translation practice is patently target-oriented; he seeks to make the author, as he says, more “transparent” to the reader, but not at the price of displacing “the geography of the text,” whatever it may be. The challenge for him may be less a question of linguistic specificity than of Condé’s “esoteric” cul- tural references; he even acknowledges being “market-driven” on her behalf. Rather than feeling diminished or constrained, Phil- cox concedes that he feels liberated by Condé’s indifference to his practice, as well as his product (Kadish and Massardier, 755). And he ultimately attributes his progress over the course of his career as a translator, interestingly enough, not to years of living with Condé, his author–wife, or to the cumulative experience of translating her work, but to studying translation theory (Kadish and Massardier, 755–756). That Philcox is sensitive to the gender question—“Do I have the right to translate a novel written by a translation / 29  woman? This question has greatly haunted me” (Kadish and Mas- sardier, 756)—reveals not only a great deal about his own refined and acute sensibility, but also attests to the primacy of gender as a marker of identity for Condé; whereas race seems to figure little, if at all, as a factor of difference for either of them. It is, of course, quite possible that Condé’s antitranslation posture is purely performative; but, if so, what is its value and what are its implications? What Condé stands for in this trans- lation couple is the irreducible difference between languages. Thus, whereas the translator, invested in global transmission and reception, considers his work to be coextensive with the origi- nal author’s work, she—dedicated to perfecting her own liter- ary style in her own tongue—considers them to be distinct. As I have said, Condé has stated her position on many occasions: that translation, being a transforming principle, doesn’t regard her, that she is “othered” in translation, both culturally and linguis- tically. Her insistence on this fact is consonant with what would seem to be the overarching message of her autobiographical oeu- vre. In a conversation with Emily Apter, which was conducted in French—“transposed,” not “transcribed” (Apter’s words) and translated into English, and which appeared in 2001—Condé puts a fine point on what I have described above: I have never read any of my books in translation… In translation, the play of lan- guages is destroyed. Of course, I recognize that my works have to be translated, but they are really not me. Only the original really counts for me. Some people say that translation adds to the original. For me, it is another work, perhaps an interesting one, but very distant from the original. (Apter, 92) Beyond the intriguing and alluring personal and domestic im- plications of Condé and Philcox as a translation couple, together they enact the ongoing, defining, and productive tension within translation studies, especially in relation to world literature and the global marketplace. Whatever the psychological source of Condé’s alienation or iconoclastic individualism, her view of translation as (1) radical difference and of untranslatability as (2) an act of per- sonal or even political resistance, actually coexists, of course—as it has throughout history—with the enduring, competing reality translation / of multilingualism. The inherent paradox of untranslatability in translation is what makes cultural memory possible. What this 30 translation couple reminds us of is that we must remain vigilant in the face of world literature’s instrumentalist, ever-serviceable view of translatability as an unproblematic given. Alison Bechdel Translation is the major operative principle in comics, defined for our purposes today as a juxtaposition of words and images that create a sustained narrative within deliberately sequenced bor- dered panels. In its particular interplay of the visual and the verbal, comics are not the verbal representation of visual art—ekphrasis— nor a representation of the world, but an interpretation; indeed, as Douglas Wolk puts it in Reading Comics, “Cartooning is a meta- phor for the subjectivity of perception” (21). Perhaps it is the pre- mium placed on personal drawing style, indeed of handwriting, in comics that makes it an especially interesting instance of autobi- ographical memory as a process of translation; since the object of our attention is self-perception and self-inscription across different cultural, social, and discursive contexts. I shall not be discussing comics or graphic narrative generally here, but graphic memoir, or what Gillian Whitlock calls “autographics” or “autographies” (Whitlock 2006, 966) as yet another variation on the theme of how techniques of translation are implicated in the act of materializing, textualizing, and visualizing the autobiographical subject. In chapter 4, which is roughly the center of Alison Bechdel’s critically acclaimed, densely and riveting inter/intratextual graph- ic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), the author foregrounds the book’s metaperformative processes, making ex- plicit what W. J. T. Mitchell describes as “the relation between the seeable and the sayable, display and discourse, showing and telling” (Mitchell 1986, 47). The astute reader already recognizes that comics are a language; this chapter declares that the memoir is a self-reflexive mode of translation, which also situates its autobi- ographical project within a comparative network of signifying sys- tems, most overtly Modernist literature and family photographs, but also the künstlerroman and lesbian coming-out stories. The canon of references comprises Camus, Fitzgerald, James, Stevens, Wilde, Joyce, Colette, and Proust. What characterizes such a nar- rative as “intra-” as well as “inter-” textual is that the images do not only transact with words, but they also engage with each other. translation / 31  In what Hillary Chute describes as a “cross-discursive” medium, intertextuality itself is rendered figuratively/pictorially as well as literally/verbally, showing how textual and visual forms and rhe- torical strategies interact to make latent psychic matter manifest, as in dreamwork. With her deft deployment of displacement and condensation, metaphor and metonymy, Bechdel makes the reader wonder, in the spirit of Jacques Lacan, if the unconscious isn’t structured like a cartoon. Bechdel’s intricately drawn, hyperliterary account of growing up in Middle America in a hothouse of aesthetic expression and erotic repression is constructed around her complex, ambivalent relationship with her authoritarian, fastidious, secretive father who bonded with her over books—while he slyly eludes another primal identification they also shared. An expert in historic architectural preservation, director of a family funeral home business, and high school English teacher, her father Bruce died when Bechdel was nineteen, leaving her to decipher the rich but troubling legacy of similarity and difference that defined their relationship—left her, in other words, to translate the scrambled codes she inherited from him. Indeed, Bruce’s closeted homosexuality and the circumstanc- es surrounding his ambiguous death—was it an accident or sui- cide?—generate this multilayered work. If in verbal autobiography “a lived life” as mediated through memory is the source text, in an autographic work—because its medium is patently visual—the source text would be assumed to be the same; however the relation between content and form is not integrated, synchronous, or organic in comics. If anything, the contiguity between content and form calls attention to the gap between them, to the space between image and words. Indeed, a graphic memoir challenges the primacy of verbal language as the source material, however coded or abstruse, or conveyer of both self-referential and extrareferential truth about that life. Comics are certainly a form of intersemiotic translation, as defined by Ro- man Jacobson: “transposition from one system of signs into an- other, e.g. from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting” (Venuti 2012, 118). But that formulation seems too one-sided for this case. Though there are clearly two systems of signs, it may translation / be impossible to determine which is the source text and which the target, on the level of verbal versus visual signs. 32  Understanding the deceptive simplicity of comics is counter- intuitive for serious readers of literature who are unaccustomed to having to process words and images within the same bounded space in a self-conscious, extensive fashion. What determines the order of reading of the panels, and how does size and shape matter? Horizontal or vertical? What about the blanks between the panels? How are they to be understood? While not exactly functioning as negative space, these blanks, called “gutters,” are also the borders outlining the images. What happens in that space? And, how is that space to be filled in? These elements are—pardon, the expres- sion—graphic reminders that comics, like verbal narrative, leave out more than they put in. It may initially seem as though the pic- tures are easier to grasp than the text, thus requiring less critical scrutiny, but this assumption does not take into account the density of information the pictures actually convey, some of which might be purely aesthetic or formalist in nature, and not content-driven or plot-enhancing at all. (No less so than in literature, virtuosity is a virtue in comics.) Thus the reader of comics who privileges the words at the expense of the images has failed to understand what is intrinsically, internally translative about comics; and, conversely, though it is necessary to possess what is known as “visual litera- cy,” that alone is also terribly insufficient for understanding com- ics. Comics are dependent on the dynamic, irreducible interplay between its verbal and visual components. Bechdel’s precise, fine-line, cross-hatch pictorial style, espe- cially her drawing of interiors, corresponds to her verbal dexterity. In terms of overall conceptual structure and design, the autobi- ography is relentlessly interpretive; experiences presented as dis- tilled or symbolic abstractions are mined not for their retrospective meaning, but for their present value as sources of speculative po- tential. “What if” begins many a sentence. Critics Hillary Chute and Julia Watson call Bechdel’s narrative strategy “recursive,” meaning that it is distinctly nonlinear, turning back in on itself, finding its closure in reversals, transversals, and coincidences (Chaney 2011, 149). In the service of creating a sustained narra- tive, not to mention a satisfying story, an autography selects and combines the panels that relate to one another associatively (that is, metaphorically) and/or temporally (that is, metonymically), as in memory. Following a series of events that Bechdel recalls, one translation / 33  of which includes an encounter with an actual snake, a panel in which she ponders the symbolism of phalluses and their creative and destructive powers, leads next to the scene, as she imagines it, of her father’s death, which occurred as he crossed Route 150 carrying a large bundle of brush and was hit by an oncoming truck. The image in the wide panel is of lush foliage—foliage is perva- sive in this narrative—lining an empty stretch of road with one lone leaf lying in the middle, suggesting her father’s last trace. The text box reads, “…You could say that my father’s end was my beginning. Or more precisely, that the end of his lie coincided with my truth” (Bechdel 2007, 117). In an interview with Hilary Chute, Bechdel refers to the entire enterprise of Fun Home as “involuted introspection,” pointing out that with the exception of the subplot of her own coming out story, “the sole dramatic incident in the book is that my dad dies” (Chute and Bechdel 2006, 1008). In other words, “the end of his li[f]e” compels a psychic and artistic internalizing process of ghostly re- membrance that can be regarded as a “retranslation of the self.” As I have elaborated elsewhere, translation in such a context of intergenerational transmission, whose knowledge is posthumous and always belated is, in the Benjaminian and Derridean sense, a passing down, a passing away, and a passing over of the foreign as well as the familiar, a living on through others, differently. The panel below the drawing of the road invoking her father’s death shows Alison and her father traveling in the family car (which is a hearse); Bruce’s eyes are on the road, while Alison’s head is barely visible as she peers out the window. The caption or text box reads, “Because I’d been lying too, for a long time. Since I was four or five” (Bechdel 2007, 117). What is the connection between these two panels? Everything hinges on the word “be- cause,” suggesting both causality and motivation. Bechdel’s mem- ory of accompanying her father on a business trip to Philadelphia, and stopping at a luncheonette, is a motivated one because, as she says, “WE [emphasis mine] saw a most unsettling sight.” Initially deprived of authorial perspective, the reader/viewer has no idea what the object of their gaze might be. On the following page, there are two unequally-sized panels. The dominant one shows translation / a masculine-looking woman wearing men’s clothes. Both father and daughter gaze at her; Alison expresses to the reader/viewer 34 the great surprise she experienced at this phenomenon. The text box below turns it into an instance of uncanny translation: “But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home—someone they’ve never spoken to, but know by sight—I recognized her with a surge of joy.” In the panel below, Bechdel recounts, “Dad recognized her too.” In her memory, he challenges her: “Is that [author’s emphasis] what you want to look like?” (Be- chdel 2007, 118). In the next panel, on the following page, with the image of the woman writ large, she asks rhetorically, “What could I say?” But to her father, she replies, “No.” This is followed by a panel in which father drags daughter, who is still looking back, out of the luncheonette. This instance of perfect translatability—a memory trace in which both Alison and Bruce, displaced from their own familiar/ familial context, recognize another outsider not as a stranger but as someone familiar to them on the basis of an implicit, shared sexu- al/gender difference—is reconstituted as a primal scene from Be- chdel’s childhood, and one of the most charged in the entire auto- biography. The cartoonist puts a fine point on it in the next panel when she discloses to the reader, “But the vision of that truck-driv- ing bulldyke sustained me through the years” (Bechdel 2007, 119). At the moment of Alison’s “recognition,” she didn’t know what a bulldyke was; the signifier may have “sustained” her, but its sig- nification eluded her until later in life. Of course, Bechdel is pro- jecting backward: her superimposition of the term bulldyke onto the genre-bending truck-trucker announces itself as belonging to a cur- rent linguistic/cultural/political context in which gender identity is understood to be performative and provocatively appropriated. This is a current context her father did not live to fully appreciate, but one she wishes him to assume now. As Madelon Sprengnether puts it, in- voking Freud, “[M]emories from childhood vividly recalled in adult life bear no specific relation to what happened in the past. Rather, they are composite formations—elements of childhood experiences as represented through the distorting lens of adult wishes, fantasies, and desires” (Sprengnether 2012, 215). Freud’s final paragraph in “Screen Memories,” which is an in- ternal dialogue or self-analysis, an example of life-writing mas- querading as a narrative with an interlocutor, views memory as a process of construction: translation / 35  the concept of a “screen memory” as one which owes its value as a memory not to its own content but to the relation existing between some other that has been sup- pressed… It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood; memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves. (Freud 1995b, 126) What is at stake in this primal scene which Bechdel has recon- structed because it comes to play a determining role in her com- ing-out story, is relationality of all kinds, grounding all autobiogra- phy and translation: the relation between the visual and the verbal (between what is seen and what is not said); between a father and a daughter who witness together, and who share a sense of complic- ity, but then suppress that bond of knowledge and affinity; between recognition and self-recognition; between lying and truth-telling. It is above all the circuits of deception and self-deception that Be- chdel seeks to rewire and overwrite. Coyly titled “In the shadow of young girls in flower,” after the French title of the second volume of Proust’s Recherche, the end of the chapter calls the reader’s attention to the fact that the previous translation of À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs— Within a Budding Grove—shifts the emphasis from the botanical to the erotic. However, Bechdel interjects, “As Proust himself so lavishly illustrates, the two are pretty much the same thing” (Bechdel 2007, 109). That cavalier conflation serves Bechdel as a metaphor for her father’s love for flowers and her own devel- oping identity as a lesbian, unleashing a cluster of critical con- vergences interpreted from a current vantage point. Chapter 4, in as much as it invokes Proust’s term “inversion,” is about reading generic and gender indeterminacy, but if Proust serves as the the- matic intertext, Freud has certainly provided us with the method for understanding how the bulldyke scene functions in the nar- rative and why resurrecting this memory now is so critical for Bechdel’s enterprise. Bechdel’s father started reading Proust the year before he died, translation / and it was after his death that Lydia Davis’s retranslation of À la recherche du temps perdu came out; though she prefers the “liter- 36 alness” of In Search of Lost Time, Bechdel laments the fact that perdu and lost are not simple equivalents: that perdu also connotes “ruined, undone, wasted, wrecked, and spoiled” (Bechdel 2007, 119). Bechdel’s point about what is literally as well as figurative- ly “lost in translation” when this source word in French is trans- ferred to English, is a metacommentary on what is irretrievable. “The complexity of loss itself” (Bechdel 2007, 120) is lost, despite translation’s capacity to recuperate and redeem difference over time and even space. Some differences are irreducible variants; they belong to the realm of the untranslatable. The translation strategy that propels Fun Home, however, ul- timately valorizes affinity and proximity by domesticating differ- ence through regeneration. The last page of chapter 4 comprises two unequally sized panels, both devoted to drawings taken from a box marked “family photographs” that Bechdel found after her father’s death, including one revealing her father’s transgressive past activities with a former male babysitter. (In her interview with Chute, she attributes the genesis of this book to the discovery of this photograph.) The reader remembers the smaller top photo- graph as the snapshot of an adolescent girl posing in a bathing suit which is the chapter head image; it serves as a kind of illustration of its title, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.” This time, however, Bechdel alerts the reader that the image in the redrawn photo is not of a girl (Alison, one might have speculated), but of her young father in drag, and looking, as she says, “not mincing or silly at all. He’s lissome, elegant” (Bechdel 2007, 120). In the large panel, that top photo is mostly obscured by the text box. What grabs the reader’s attention is the juxtaposition of two portraits, and their striking similarities: one of her twenty-two- year-old father sunbathing on the roof of his frat house, the other of Alison on a fire escape on her twenty-first birthday. She won- ders if this was taken by his lover, as hers was. For Bechdel, the autographer, the uncanny resemblance between the two figures and their two poses—“the exterior setting, the pained grin, the flexible wrists, even the angle of shadow falling across our fac- es”—is “about as close as a translation can get” (Bechdel 2007, 120). Where is the original or source? What, about the structur- al or formal aspects of this strategic arrangement, calls up an act of translation, one in which the points of contact are so acutely translation / 37  identifiable? Obviously, in this visual commentary there is some- thing beyond a merely shared physical, familial resemblance, even across gender lines. Indeed, it is precisely the fluidity of sexual ori- entation, gender identification, and polymorphism à la Proust that reveals the configuring of father and daughter identities here as a transposition or displacement, alternatively, of a simple replication of difference (which is one definition of translation). Rather, Bruce and Alison are to be recognized on the page as “inverted versions of each other in the family” (Watson 2008, 135). In this particular act of intergenerational transmission which celebrates the materi- ality of self-presentation, Bechdel is memorializing a connection that was often resisted in life by both Alison and her father, but which is now reenvisioned through art. Conclusion By identifying Nabokov’s, Condé’s, and Bechdel’s autobiograph- ical projects as distinctive modes of translation, I have hoped to show that translating a life requires a particular strategy or tech- nique of self-reflexiveness. The art of self-translation, with its perils and projections, is a highly mediated and motivated act of intimacy that takes place not in a vacuum, but within a set of cul- tural determinants. By wrestling with questions of familiarity and strangeness, assimilation and resistance, appropriation and deflec- tion, the autobiographer/translator and the translator/autobiogra- pher remind us that neither life nor language is self-contained. In their very existence, autobiographies—which are translations of “experience” and, therefore, subject to infinite and relentless in- terpretation—serve as testimonies to existential lack and linguistic incompleteness. Invocations of other lives and other voices—re- pressed, resisted, and reclaimed—autobiographies are translations in search of an original. Thus it is the drive to recuperate what may be always utterly lost—because of the foreignness in ourselves as well as in languages—that endows the autobiographer/translator with the greatest agency of all. translation / 38 References Apter, Emily. 2001. “Crossover Roots/Creole Tongues: A Conversation with Maryse Condé.” Public Culture 13, no. 1: 1–12. doi:10.1215/08992363-13-1-1. Bechdel, Alison. 2007. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mif- flin. Chaney, Michael, ed. 2011. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison: University of Wisconsis Press. Chute, Hillary L., and Alison Bechdel. 2006. “An Interview with Alison Bechdel.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4: 1004–1013. doi:10.1353/mfs.2007.0003. Condé, Maryse. 2012. La vie sans fards. Paris: JC Lattès. Freud, Sigmund. 1995 a. “An Autobiographical Study.” The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 3–41. ––––––. 1995 b. “Screen Memories.” The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 117–126. Kadish, Doris Y., and Françoise Massardier-Kenney. 1996. “Traduire Maryse Condé: Entretien avec Richard Philcox.” The French Review 69, no. 5: 749–761. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. On Autobiography. Translated by Katherine Leary. Madi- son: University of Wisconsin Press. Mahony, Patrick. 2001. “Translating Freud.” American Imago 58, no. 4: 837–840. doi:10.1353/aim.2001.0022. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1947. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Random House. Ornston Jr., Darius Gray, ed. 1992. Translating Freud. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Patti. 2010. Just Kids. London: Bloomsbury. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. 1998. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sprengnether, Madelon. 2012. “Freud as Memoirist: A Reading of ‘Screen Memo- ries.’” American Imago 69, no. 2: 215–239. doi:10.1353/aim.2012.0008. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 2012. Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Watson, Julia. 2008. “Autobiographical Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” In Michael Chaney, ed., 2011. 123–56. Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4: 965–979. doi:10.1353/mfs.2007.0013. Wolk, Douglas. 2007. Reading Comics: How They Work and What They Mean. Phil- adelphia: Capo Press. translation / 39  Bella Brodzki is Professor of Comparative Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. She teaches courses in autobiography; modern and contemporary fiction; literary and cul- tural theory; and translation studies. Her articles and essays on the critical intersec- tions with and impact of translation on other fields and disciplines have appeared in a range of publications, most recently in the collection, Translating Women, edited by Luise von Flotow (2011). She is the co-editor of Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobi- ography (1989) and author of Can These Bones Live?: Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007). Her current project is co-editing a special volume of Comparative Literature Studies entitled Trials of Trauma. translation / 40 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15520

Autobiography/Translation: Memory’s Losses or Narrative’s Gains? Response to Bella Brodzki’s Lecture Suzanne Jill Levine University of California in Santa Barbara, USA “We translate to be translated”—translation transports the transla- tor, but also the reader and the writer, in an act that transforms one text into another. Professor Brodzki uses this quote (which was a rejoinder in my book The Subversive Scribe (1991; 2009) to “thou art translated,” a line uttered by Quince to Bottom in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream), to move onto a broader stage. From the diverse scenarios of Russia and the Francophone Caribbean, from psychoanalysis to graphic memoir, Bella (I use her first name as we are old friends) analyzes parallels between the practice of autobiography and of translation, seeking to expand the definition of autobiography by means of the code of translation. Mediating these two practices she sets out to understand the screening process of memory, how or to what extent memory both distorts and creates the truths it seeks, and especially narratives that propose to reenact memory and to represent the truth. In her lecture, Bella discusses how autobiography, like transla- tion, is a rewriting, a re-presentation. At first glance we might find this argument farfetched. After all, unlike autobiography, a transla- tion is normally a rewriting of a whole and visible text. It is not, at least on the surface, the reconstruction or restaging in coherent form of the fragments of memories of a life lived. If we look further, how- ever, we can see that a translation performs a comparable artificial resuscitation. The original language has vanished in the text’s new version; the language that replaces it works to resurrect words and phrases, wordplays and metaphors, fragments of the translator’s lan- guage and mnemonic associations, that will bring to life the original, one hopes, as one expects the same from an autobiography. Bella’s discussion departs precisely from the readerly expecta- tion that the autobiographer’s pact with the reader—like the trans- translation / 41  lator’s “sacred duty”—is to be candidly true to an original. And yet, from an essentialist perspective, the end products of both prac- tices can easily become Faustian Frankensteins. Under the aegis of Freud, who made the unconscious betrayals of the omniscient narra- tor visible to us, these betrayals are parallel to those of the translator, who can only give us approximations, never the thing itself. The first question that jumps out at me, then, is: Are we talking only about autobiography in relation to translation, or are we talking about all narrative in general? That is, is Bella’s proposal in her paper suggest- ing a narrative theory that could be applied to any narrative form, beyond verbal language and written texts? No two narratives are the same, as Borges’s very first ficcion, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” his famous parable about the “anachronistic” practice of reading, written in 1939, so spectacularly tells us. This devilish commentary on commentary (as George Steiner called it) is at the center of Bella’s topic. Pierre Menard, avant-garde poet who, among his many daring experi- ments, attempts to rewrite a Don Quixote completely identical to the original, is Borges caricaturing himself as a young Ultraist. Borges’s story—supposedly written in French by an admiring dis- ciple of Menard—is a fiction that pretends to be a biography while it is (like all fiction, one could argue) autobiographical, and is not only about the absurd impossibility of the totally faithful transla- tion but also implies and reveals that it is in itself a translation. My question to Bella is, in this discursive context, is there a significant difference here between autobiography and biography vis-à-vis translation? I ask this coming, also, from my own work on a biography of Manuel Puig. The author of Kiss of the Spi- der Woman, Puig’s novels pay homage with their “dollar book” Freudianisms to Freud’s invention of the modern novel, that is, the decidedly nonobjective narrator. As both translator and biographer I have dealt with the challenges of subjectivity, memory, and inter- pretation, haunted by the pact of fidelity that such nonfiction writ- ing involves. Autobiography, biography, and creative memoir are evaluated, however, by the strength, intensity, and inventiveness of their narrative structure, of the story they construct, just as transla- tion is evaluated by its fluency, its persuasive rhetorical effect. The translation / writer of nonfiction is as dependent on literary conventions, plot, theme, character development, climax, and denouement as the fic- 42 tion writer. Truth is less of a consideration than the appropriateness of form and the success of style. Autobiography differs from biog- raphy because, as the subject and the writer/producer of the former is the same, we assume a much higher/deeper level of fidelity to the subject. However, considering that “the self is constituted by a discourse that it never completely masters”1 how different, really, are these two genres? We might define the difference this way: the biographer is situated outside of the life he or she wishes to represent and wants to work his or her way into it, while self-writing, autobiog- raphy, presents its author with the problem of being too much of an insider, needing to distance her or himself, to get far enough away to see what’s happening and what it is one actually wants to represent. My possible response to the question above can perhaps be aid- ed by my own experience. I have written an authorized biography and am attempting to write a translator’s autobiography. While the research for the biography was different from the current research for my own history, I also had to realize that my subjectivity influ- enced the biography as if it were in some way an autobiography; or, whether narrating an autobiography or a biography, I was and am never totally subjective or objective. Hence, can we agree on the translational nature of autobiography and also of other forms of narrative, fictional or nonfictional, and are we perhaps speaking of a translational paradigm for narrative in general? In “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” Georges Gus- dorf2 examines Paul Valéry’s radical proposal that biography in or- der to be true must go beyond its traditional limits.3 I cite these thoughts on this topic here because, among other things, they also relate to Bella’s provocative discussion of autobiography and trans- lation. They also reveal an important source of Borges’s fictions and essays that highlight narrative theory and feature his antirealist the- ories of narrative art as well as his poetics of writing as translation. According to the theory of biography proposed by Valéry—whose Monsieur Teste was a direct Borgesian model, fondly parodied by 1 Michael Spinker, “Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography,” in James Olney, ed., Autobi- ography: Essays Theoretical and Practical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) 342. 2 Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in James Olney, ed., Autobio- graphy: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) 41. 3 Paul Valéry, “La Vie est un conte,” Tel Quel II (1943): 348-349. The entire issue is available online at https://archive.org/stream/telquelv02valuoft#page/n7/mode/2up. translation / 43  Borges’s famous Pierre Menard as a kind of absurdly avant-garde intellectual artist—a biographer, moving between the actual life and his life-writing, would have to see through the eyes of the subject. The biographer would have to attempt to know as little of the fol- lowing moment as the subject himself would know about the cor- responding instant of his career. This would be to restore chance in each instant, rather than putting together a series that admits of a neat summary and a causality that can be described in a formula. Causality was, as we know, one of the core issues of Borges’s “Nar- rative Art and Magic.”4 Valéry’s point, as Borges sees it, is that the so-called real truth is nothing, unformed, blurred, and that therefore the original sin of biography—which we could compare with the original sign of autobiography—is to presume the virtues of logical coherence and rationalization. That is, we can extend Valery’s discussion of the prerogative of biography to that of autobiography in that the task at hand is not to show us the objective stages of a career, but to reveal the efforts of historian/biographer/autobiographer to discover or reveal the effort of a creator to give the meaning of her (or his) own mythical tale. This latter statement basically describes Freud’s attempt at autobi- ography in his “study.” On the surface he “objectively” appears to summarize his career—giving us much valuable information—but in reality he is creating his own self-myth as intuitive scientist, a myth in which, it so happens, his early work as a translator plays a major role. Bella reminds us that for Freud “la psychanalyse c’est moi.” Through her discussion we read his “autobiographical study” which reveals his influences, Goethe on Nature, and notably the Bible, which impacted him precisely because he belonged to an oppo- sitional minority as a Jew. What he read or experienced or what influenced him is more about his real feelings or interests; what he actually says about himself, is all about his ego and need for cultural power. For Freud translation was a power play, or as Bella writes, “Though he had a position as a Lecturer in Pathology in Vienna, it was his work as a translator that gained him entry into translation / 4 Jorge Luis Borges, “Narrative Art and Magic,” in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Wein- berger, translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, Eliot Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999) 75–82. 44 Charcot’s circle of personal acquaintances and full participation in the activities at Salpêtière Clinic” (AS, Freud R, 6). (infra, 21) Ironically this personal essay says less about the man beneath the persona than his essay on screen memories or any of his funda- mental books such as The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s “Au- tobiographical Study” is a prime example of an omniscient narrator blind to his own subjectivity. What I personally found fascinating is that Freud, as Jewish outsider, gained entrance to the circles of cul- tural power as a translator. Curiously, I could see a similar trajectory in my own life, as a woman gaining entrance to the Latin American Boom literary circles, a world of cultural significance in my time and context, in which I took on an identity as translator and even muse, more glamorous than my own modest “outsider” Washington Heights Jewish origins. As Manuel Puig (the author whose literary texts I translated and whose life I ultimately translated into a biography) aptly put it, Freud invented the modern novel: that is, he exposed the unavoid- able limitations of the omniscient narrator, hence his importance not only to autobiography but to all writing. In Bella’s discussion, Au- tobiography and Translation come together logically and intuitively in Freud whose early work as a translator helped create his career as a scientist. By extension, his role as translator helped create the persona whose theoretical work was practically based on autobi- ographical as well as clinical reflection. Suzanne Jill Levine is a leading translator of Latin American literature, and Professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara where she directs a Translation Studies doctoral program. Her scholarly and critical works include her award-winning literary biography, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman (FSG and Faber & Faber, 2000) and her groundbreaking book on the poetics of translation, The Subversive Scribe: Trans- lating Latin American Fiction (published in 1991 and reissued by Dalkey Archive Press in 2011), along with her classic translations of novels by Manuel Puig and her 2010 Penguin Classics editions of the works of Jorge Luis Borges. Aside from numerous volumes of translations of Latin American fiction and poetic works, she has regularly contributed articles, reviews, essays, and translations of prose and poetry to major anthologies and journals, including the New Yorker. Her many honors include National Endowment for the Arts and NEH fellowship and research grants, the first PEN USA West Prize for Literary Translation (1989), the PEN American Center Career Achieve- ment Award (1996), and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. For the translation of Jose Donoso’s The Lizard’s Tale, she was awarded the PEN USA West Prize in 2012. translation / 45 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15521

Dalit Consciousness and Translating Consciousness: Narrating Trauma as Cultural Translation Christi A. Merrill University of Michigan, USA Abstract: How do we understand literary catharsis as a multilingual project? This paper focuses on scenes from Ajay Navariya’s short story “Subcontinent” (in Laura Brueck’s translation from Hindi) to ask about the responsibility of writers, translators and scholars in grappling collectively with the trauma of caste-based sexual violence (or what Sharankumar Limbale calls “injustices done to Dalit women.”) Put in conversation with Robert Young’s reading of Freud on cultural translation, Navaria’s story complicates straightforward understandings of consciousness as monolingual. Instead, the Hindi story in English reveals a complex connection between what Limbale and others refer to as a distinct “Dalit consciousness” and G.N. Devy’s notion of “translating consciousness” by asking us to redefine how the languaged self responds to the original trauma of being read as untouchable in the dominant vernacular. For Devy translat- ing consciousness involves rejecting binaristic colonizer–colonized hierarchies, whereas for Limbale Dalit consciousness works to fight caste hierarchies operat- ing primarily within India itself. This paper takes up Rita Kothari’s suggestion that the dominant vernacular might be just as foreign as the colonial language in order to radically rethink the dialectical relationship between the languaged self and cultural transformation. What is literature’s role in responding to the trauma of caste-based sexual violence a language away? I ask as a Hindi translator as well as a scholar and teacher of Dalit literature—of work, I should explain, that very openly claims to write from the perspective of those “oppressed” or “ground down” (as “Dalit” is usually glossed) by the entrenched system of untouchability in India.1 Dalit writers in India have been asking versions of the question I have posed 1 I gratefully acknowledge the support of a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities that allowed me to complete the work on this paper, as well as the NIDA/FUSP Symposium organizers and Robert Young for providing the original impetus for investigating this material. translation / 47  here within their own language traditions, and as a group seem to agree that the main purpose of Dalit literature should be to raise awareness—or as the well-regarded Marathi writer Sharankumar Limbale puts it more vividly, “to inform Dalit society of its slavery, and narrate its pain and suffering to upper caste Hindus” (Limbale 2004, 19). It is not beside the point here that I quote Limbale from his book Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, which has been translated into English by (avowedly upper-caste Hindu and Cana- da-based postcolonial studies scholar) Alok Mukherjee. Dalit liter- ature, publisher S. Anand has pointed out, is a phenomenon in and of translation—from, to, and via English, as well as many other official Indian languages (Anand 2003, 4). Given current realities, I am suggesting here that we include postcolonial studies scholars and translators such as Mukherjee and myself in the project Lim- bale and others have begun when theorizing the purpose of Dalit literature. I propose here that we examine examples of Dalit liter- ature to think more carefully about the relationship of Translation Studies to postcolonial theory. Like many activists writing on the subject, Limbale contends that the work of Dalit literature is inspired directly by the revolu- tionary leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and can only be done by those with an explicit Dalit consciousness. A few pages later in his book on Dalit aesthetics—in a section devoted to the topic of Dalit con- sciousness—he explains: The Dalit consciousness in Dalit literature is the revolutionary mentality connected with struggle. It is a belief in rebellion against the caste system, recognizing the hu- man being as its focus. Ambedkarite thought is the inspiration for this consciousness. Dalit consciousness makes slaves conscious of their slavery. Dalit consciousness is an important seed for Dalit literature, it is separate and distinct from the conscious- ness of other writers. Dalit literature is demarcated as unique because of this con- sciousness. (Limbale 2004, 32) To ask about literature’s role in raising awareness about un- touchability as a human rights issue akin to slavery raises fun- damental questions about these points of comparison, especially when expressed across multiple languages. How might we adapt current theoretical models to understand Dalit consciousness as a translation / multilingual issue? G.N. Devy has argued that multilinguality is so central to the 48 Indian context that it requires its own theorization, one that he dis- cusses—serendipitously—as “translating consciousness.” Writing in the 1990s, Devy was primarily interested in developing a dis- tinctly postcolonial “aesthetics of translation” (Devy 2014, 163) that would inform “a more perceptive literary historiography” (165) responsive to the perspective of the multilingual user (“such as a translator” he notes) who “rends. . .open” the multiple sign systems converging in a single consciousness (164). If aesthetic production is figured in Devy’s writing with the violent imagery of rending open, “translating consciousness” itself is imagined in a friendlier fashion, as an intuitive “open” daily negotiation along a continuum of mutual understanding, that he contends—most crucially here—our monolingually-minded, European conceptual tools have not been able to theorize properly: In most Third World countries, where a dominating colonial language has acquired a privileged place, such communities [of translating consciousness] do exist. In India several languages are simultaneously used by language communities as if these lan- guages formed a continuous spectrum of significance. To conceptualize this situation is beyond European linguistics, which is based mostly on a monolingual view of language. The use of two or more different languages in translation activity cannot be understood through studies of foreign language acquisition. (165) Both Devy and Limbale suggest independently that the de- velopment of any literary aesthetic (perceptive or no) is neces- sarily ideological; moreover, when explaining how each of their approaches to the project of literary historiography differs from the mainstream, each uses the term “consciousness” to describe an alternative to the demeaning hierarchical forms of discrimina- tion a random language user encounters on a daily basis, that have become written into our own disciplinary conceptualizations. As a result, Devy and Limbale each call for a corrective literary his- toriography based on such a consciousness. For Devy, the crucial ideological difference informing a translating consciousness in- volves rejecting binaristic colonizer–colonized hierarchies, where- as for Limbale the crucial ideological difference Dalit conscious- ness works to fight is informed by the caste hierarchies operating primarily within India itself, both during the colonial period and after Independence. How might these two theories of conscious- ness be put in productive conversation with one another when translation / 49  focusing on postcolonial literary engagements with human rights struggles? I will attempt to address this larger question by reflecting on the inherent multilinguality of the translating consciousness Devy describes—whereby “several languages are simultaneously used by language communities as if these languages formed a contin- uous spectrum of significance” (65)—when it encounters caste- based discrimination. I will do this by analyzing a piece of postco- lonial fiction that details a series of shocking events experienced by a Dalit family: the short story “Upmadwip” written in Hindi by the Dalit writer and activist Ajay Navaria. I will quote primarily from the version translated into English by Laura Brueck (2012) as “Subcontinent” in an effort to vex perceived limits of language when describing violent encounters in translation. Only a few pages into “Subcontinent,” the narrator recalls a traumatic scene from his childhood in which he watches, help- less, as a gang of upper-caste men beat up his father to within an inch of his life, incensed that an “untouchable” (“achut” in the Hindi) would have the audacity to return to the village for a rela- tive’s wedding in a clean new kurta, rupees in his pocket, greeting friends comfortably, and holding his head high. Significantly, the story is framed by a tranquil domestic scene of the narrator as an adult living in an unnamed city struggling to wake from a night- marish sequence of horrific childhood memories, prompted by an impending decision over whether to return to the village once again for another relative’s wedding. The framing device is crucial for establishing two distinct perspectives on the same event: one of the adult looking back with a mixture of indignation and apprehen- sion, and the other of the innocent child offering direct testimony (albeit fictionalized) of a series of traumatic events that in their ancestral village seem to be lamentably routine. The structure of the story thus invites us to read this as a scene of initiation—into a kind of consciousness that we might not immediately recognize as a translating consciousness but are led to infer will eventually become a Dalit consciousness. How? Soon readers are introduced to a liminal dream state between waking and sleeping, past and present, city and village, and led translation / down a stepwell at the edge of what appears to be the adult nar- rator’s consciousness, invited to witness a childhood scene from 50 the young boy’s point of view as a group of high-caste villag- ers confront the father and his father’s aunt (whom the boy calls “Amma”) for forgetting “the rules and regulations of the village” (Navaria 2012, 87). The narrative structure allows readers to re- main cognizant of the adult narrator’s judgment on these “rules and regulations” while following the boy and his family through the village; this structure enables the implied author to call into question the entire system of signification the boy is being initiat- ed into. The story dramatizes why what Limbale terms “rebellion against the caste system” (2004, 32) would entail so much internal struggle, starting with the fundamental act of recognizing oneself and other Dalits as human beings equal to all others. As the scene continues, readers of the translated story are in turn asked to distinguish between the language of the past and of the present, of the village and the city, marked by the boy’s dis- comfort at the time and the adult narrator’s outrage looking back as his great aunt bows down at the high-caste villagers’ feet, assur- ing them, “They’ll never do it again in my life. They erred, having lived in the city” (Navaria 2012, 86). The narrative makes strategic use of the distance in perspective between the adult narrator (who is very conscious of the historical implications of this discrimina- tion) and the boy (who is at first shocked by what he witnesses and seemingly unable to interpret it) to map consciousness as a series of encounters with others where imperfect (even horrifying) com- munication regularly takes place. In the consciousness of the young boy these rules and regula- tions are as startling as they are incomprehensible: “Oh God, I’m done for! Maaaa! Forgive me, master, kind sir! It won’t happen again!” As Amma wailed, one of them struck her head hard with a shoe, and she cried out again. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Now they were all laughing. Seeing them beat Amma with their shoes, Father tried to get up again. When they noticed him moving, they fell on him afresh. Sticks, fists, shoes—flailing without stop. I stood trembling. One of them slapped me across the face. Father was lying on the ground. Unconscious. Blood dripping, thap-thap-thap, from his forehead. A streak of blood spread all the way down his pyjama. My lip had been split open. It was still bleeding. I stood there quaking. I almost pissed my pants. It seemed like it would never end. Father lay at peace. His new white kurta was torn from his chest to his stomach. Blood dribbled from his mouth. Father’s dead, I thought. Seeing a body drenched in blood, that’s the only thing an eight-year-old can think. (Navaria 2012, 86-87) translation / 51  Here the boy is presented as being unable to interpret the phys- ical details he witnesses, even while we can feel the pressure of the adult narrator’s judgment about the situation. And the admis- sion about the limitations of the boy’s own awareness, narrated suddenly in the third person—“Seeing a body drenched in blood, that’s the only thing an eight-year-old can think”—is all the more moving knowing that the adult narrator in the present tense of the story is picturing himself in a similar situation, anticipating trying to protect his own child from similar degradations, if he decides to travel back to the village with them for an upcoming wedding. The strategy of third-person narration thus generalizes the experience of the Dalit subject. Implicitly, the story asks the reader why I, why he, why anyone should have to learn how to interpret the blood stains on their father’s still body. This is not a postcolonial translating consciousness to cele- brate. There is no triumph a few paragraphs later when the boy be- comes more adept at speaking the village language of caste-based violence: I quietly wiped the blood off my lip with my torn collar. There were no tears in my eyes. But I kept making small crying sounds, hoo-hoo, for fear of getting thrashed again if I stayed quiet. I’d quickly realized that it was better to keep up the whimper- ing in front of them. (87) How might attention to translating consciousness here help us better conceptualize Dalit consciousness as a multilingual project beyond the monolingual limitations Devy warns against? In Hindi, we can imagine this scene of calibrated whimpering is playing as much to the upper-caste Hindu readers and fellow Dal- its Limbale identified as the target audience for Dalit literature; in English translation, the readership is expanded even further, since the elite English-speaking reader in India as well as the reader abroad are similarly put on notice about the demeaning effects of the caste system, and in such a way that challenges the received colonizer–colonized binaries of postcolonial studies. Here the language of dominance we must theorize is predicated on caste, and thus suggests a more complex mapping of translat- ing consciousness than the colonizer-colonized binary. We see in translation / the English translation as well that the narrator’s perspective is multiply displaced—both at the top of the stepwell and below, in 52 the past, present, and even future of the story. Bringing together the concept of translating consciousness with Dalit conscious- ness invites us to think afresh about the ways we might map such literary language, starting with the ways we theorize the very idea of “language” in literary work. In Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, Limbale puts par- ticular emphasis on what he calls—in the section title—“The Lan- guage of Dalit Literature,” explaining: The view of life conveyed in Dalit literature is different from the world of experience expressed hitherto. A new world, a new society, and a new human being have been revealed in literature, for the first time. The reality of Dalit literature is distinct, and so is the language of this reality. It is the uncouth-impolite language of Dalits. It is the spoken language of Dalits. This language does not recognize cultivated gestures and grammar. (33) Limbale’s assertions apply to many of the works of Dalit litera- ture published prior to this book on aesthetics, including Limbale’s own prose. In Navaria’s story, however, the hierarchies are tipped once again, since the “new world, . . .new society, . . .new human being” is waiting at the top of the stepwell in the consciousness of an urbane, multilingual Dalit man while the boy is left to grapple with the old world, old society communicating in the horrifying idiom of caste-based discrimination. However shocking this lan- guage may be to the boy as well as offensive to the narrator and ostensibly to his readers in turn, it is especially horrifying that it is not considered “impolite” in the village context of the story—the upper-caste villagers do not grant their “untouchable” neighbors that kind of respect. It is precisely the standardization of this de- grading idiom that Navaria’s story is asking us to consider. The narrative is offering a critique of this particular kind of language use, and thus we might say of the village translating consciousness depicted in the story. To understand how this critique might be inviting readers of both the Hindi story and the English translation to take part in a fraught project of recalibrating consciousness as a way of coming to terms with collective trauma, we must first think more carefully about the roles we play in the process of literary catharsis. I should admit here that I am grappling with a more specific version of the question of trauma and literary language, occasioned translation / 53  by a provocative encounter at a conference on the historiography of Dalit literature held in Delhi at Jamia Millia Islamia University in December, 2013. The conference was organized by members of the English Department and it brought together scholars from a number of different disciplines and areas of expertise along with creative writers working in a host of Indian languages.2 There were three days of sessions starting with a keynote speech by Kancha Ilaiah, academic panels, and several roundtable discussions with published writers such as Limbale and Navaria, including one de- voted to the place of translation in the reception of Dalit literature. On the particular panel I have in mind an English literature profes- sor gave a polished, impassioned paper invoking a lineup of US- based scholars on trauma and testimony urging us to acknowledge the importance of autobiographical writing as an act of individual catharsis that ultimately leads to healing; she described this pro- cess as “translating pain into language” (Abidi 2013). At the time, I see from my notes, I wondered about the relation- ship of catharsis to activism. I knew from reading Laura Brueck’s scholarship that a writer like Ajay Navaria thought of catharsis in much more politically engaged terms, as a collective, embold- ened confrontation with society. In a discussion on aesthetics in her recent book, Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Contemporary Dalit Literature (2014), Brueck explains: Dalit writer Ajay Navaria colorfully compares the realist aesthetic of Dalit literature to the necessity of lancing a cyst on the body of Hindu society. While the substance that the cyst releases may be unpleasant, its cathartic release is said to be necessary for the healing of the social body. (85)3 The difference between the two types of catharsis proposed here is crucial: in the model the conference paper presenter was looking towards, it is the individual writer who has suffered the trauma, and so it is the writer not the social body who is sick and requires healing. What difference does this make in thinking about the role of literature in healing trauma? 2 International Conference on Dalit Literature and Historiography, Department of English, Jamia translation / Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India, December 19–21, 2013. 3 Ajay Navaria’s original quote was from “Dalit Saˉhitya kaˉ Vigat Aur Vartamaˉn,” Praˉrambh (Dalit Saˉhitya Visheshank) 1, no. 3 (2004): 44. 54  In the ensuing discussion, the presenter was assailed by one imminent personality after another (speaking alternately in Hindi and in English): How does this model of therapy help us reduce intercaste violence? Are you trying to individualize Dalit experi- ence? What is the role of the reader’s subjectivity in this model? And, most vividly to me, Limbale shouted in frustration, “If my mother is being raped then I shouldn’t be crying but crying out to stop it!”It is in this context that I am left wondering—alongside the presenter and others in attendance at that conference, I am sure— about the role of literature in responding to trauma. What type of catharsis do we seek through literature, and what is the role of a translator and literature scholar in that process? Often scholars metaphorize the project of writing trauma as an act of speaking out against injustice. The assumption is a thera- peutic one, that repressed trauma and other forms of silencing are unhealthy for the subject, and that she will be free of her resulting symptoms only once she has successfully narrated and fully an- alyzed these painful memories. Robert Young has recently sug- gested that Freud consistently described such work as a process of translation—he points out that the word for “translation” in Ger- man (übersetzung) appears at least forty-five times in Interpreta- tion of Dreams alone, for instance—but in such a way that radical- ly rethinks the dialectical relationship between the languaged self and what Freud (“tantalizingly,” Young adds) calls “cultural trans- formation” [kulturelle Wandlung] (Young 2013).34 This version of “cultural translation,” Young contends, is not a simple, straightfor- ward task of “moving from text A to B, leaving text A behind, but rather moving to text B by making text A unconscious, repressed, but with A still haunting text B as its shadow and liable to reappear in disguised form at any moment” (17). I will spend a moment detailing this insight, for it has important implications for catharsis as a multilingual project, and the role of culture in mediating such a catharsis collectively. Young explains that in Freud’s writing, dream thoughts are like an “unknown language that we have to decipher on the basis of the translation” (9). Young likens the process to cracking the code of the Rosetta Stone, where you work backwards, comparing the Here Young is citing Freud 2005, 224. translation / 4 55  language you know against the one you do not, until you begin to understand the system by which meaning is made in the language unknown to you. This because for everyone—in Young’s reading of Freud—“the psyche is multilingual, alert to the constant possi- bility of using translation as a mechanism of displacement in the face of repression” (4). Even in a healthy, nontraumatized subject the psyche engages in such a process, he explains, and culture’s role is to tame a person’s natural instincts. Thus the psyche, in Young’s words, keeps itself “busy trans- lating into a foreign language that is unreadable to the indi- vidual subject him or herself” (5). Young understands Freud as suggesting that there are a number of languages converging in a single psyche, including the distinction between “dream thoughts” (in the unconscious) and “dream content” (in one’s consciousness), both of which are individual and idiosyncratic, even if internally consistent enough for an analyst to begin to recognize a pattern. Young quotes Freud as writing in The In- terpretation of Dreams: Dream-thoughts and dream-content lie before us like two representations of the same content in different languages—or, rather, a particular dream-content appears to us as a version of the relevant dream-thoughts rendered into a different mode of expres- sion, the characters and syntax of which we are meant to learn by comparison of the original with the translation. (Young 2013, 8) The role of multilingual performance is crucial in Freud’s theorizing, Young points out, given that Freud himself compared the process of decoding and deciphering dream content to Egyp- tian hieroglyphs, “whose characters need to be translated one by one into the language of the dream-thoughts” (2013, 9). The analyst is able to crack the code only after he sees how the indi- vidual, multilingual subject moves between other (conventional) languages, a technique he and Breuer began to pioneer in Studies in Hysteria, with the case of “Katharina.” Young quotes Freud as writing: “We had frequently compared the hysterical symp- tomatology with a pictographic script, which we were able to read once we had discovered a few cases of bilingualism” (132). This is a highly unusual “original”, however, when viewed in the translation / broader history of translation. “What makes psychoanalysis more than just translation into another discourse,” Young adds provoc- 56 atively, “is that psychoanalysis is translating the unknown” (8). How might such a comparison enable us to rethink Dalit con- sciousness as a multilingual project? If the job of the psyche is to “translate” or displace traumatic experiences into a language foreign to the individual subject, the work of psychoanalysis is then to interpret that idiosyncratic lan- guage and “de-translate” it back into a language she shares with her analyst, as Young explains: Psychoanalysis finds the meaning of dreams not in dreams themselves but in their invisible origins. In dreams we have only the translation: the patient and analyst’s job is to translate the incomprehensible dream-content back into its original, and then to analyze and repeat in reverse the work of translation which has transformed the first into the second. Dream-interpretation, therefore, as Jean Laplanche has suggested, is more a question of de-translation, trying to de-translate the dream back into an orig- inal that remains hidden. This is where and why the work of interpretation through association must come into play: breaking the dream-content down into its constit- uent parts one by one, and working through the dreamer’s associations, analyst and dreamer engage in the laborious work of de-translating the dream-content back into its original dream-thoughts. (10) Young’s reading of Freud insists that translation practice is at the core of our work as languaged beings (regardless of how many official languages we are said to speak), and that one of the central roles of culture is to train an individual to interpret to themselves, in a language that they share with others, the most hidden parts of themselves, such as traumatic events in the past. The case of Dalit literature is especially potent here because “culture” itself is accused of legitimizing the agents of that original trauma—not incidentally, but fundamentally. While he does not name Dalit literary examples specifically, Young does suggest that such cases are central to Freud’s work on cultural translation. Young reads Freud as a major theorist of cultur- al translation whose contributions to translation theory have import- ant implications most particularly for those translated subjects—like Dalit writers—until now often left out of our theorizing: Freud’s. . .theoretical paradigm [on translation]. . .remains infinitely suggestive. It of- fers, for example, a possible way of reading the invisible, the subaltern, those whose forms of public representation distort their fundamental being, where the invisibility or repression of subalterns in official discourses and documents from the past require translation / a de-translation exercise to make them visible in their own terms. (11) 57  Bringing together theories of Dalit consciousness with trans- lating consciousness suggests that the very prospect of shared lan- guage is exceedingly fraught, in ways that are important for the project of handling trauma through literary work. Young further hints that the project of analyzing the relationships between those languages might be key to better understanding the “original” (as trauma, or otherwise.) We see this most vividly in his reading of the case of Anna O, who responds to a childhood trauma by alternating moments of stark speechlessness (“aphasia”) with what Freud in English trans- lation refers to as “paraphasia,” switching into languages (English, French, Italian) foreign to Anna O’s own mother tongue of Ger- man. Following Freud, Young uses this example of an upper-class woman to show how suspicious the psyche itself remains general- ly of culture’s role in taming one’s instincts. We see in Anna O’s case that being highly cultured only serves to make her subterfug- es more elaborate, and the work of the analyst (not to mention the nurse who tended her) that much more demanding: The paraphasia receded, but now she spoke only in English, yet seemed to be un- aware of it, and would quarrel with the nurse, who was, of course, unable to under- stand her. Not until several months later did I manage to convince her that she was speaking English. She herself, however, still understood her German-speaking envi- ronment. Only in moments of great anxiety would her speech fail her completely, or she would mix up all kinds of languages. She would speak French or Italian at those times when she was at her best and most free. Between those periods and those in which she spoke English lay complete amnesia. (29) The case asks us to rethink the fundamentals of cultural trans- lation as a languaged relationship between individual and collec- tive, especially since the collective itself is figured as a plurality of overlapping language domains. Young’s reading calls into question the very notion of a discrete “mother tongue” as source of a stable cultural identity, and echoes ongoing debates surrounding Dalit ex- amples. For instance, in a 2013 article—“Caste in a Casteless Lan- guage: English as a Language of ‘Dalit’ Expression”—Rita Kothari complicates any simple understanding of English as a co- translation / lonial language, arguing that for writers and translators working with Dalit texts—like the poet Neerav Patel, whose example she 58 focuses on—English offers a more compelling alternative to re- gional vernaculars. Patel’s choice to write in English, rather than Gujarati, she suggests compellingly, “is animated by the misery of unwanted memories of language, and a desire to erase that mem- ory” (Kothari 2013, 65). Kothari refers to a soon-to-be-published essay Patel wrote in response to a public query: “Who (all) can claim Gujarati?” (64) Kothari explains: If standard Gujarati, Patel argues, is as distant and alien to dalits as English, he would rather embrace English, and use it to replace his “mother tongue,” thus making En- glish what he calls his “foster-tongue.” By being foreign, English does not normalize and legitimize caste, and by being an ex-colonial language with global reach, it be- comes empowering. (61) I have suggested elsewhere that English is not in fact casteless, that the language’s encounters with caste started early in the colo- nial encounter—I use the example of “pariah” whose first usage in English is 1613 (Merrill 2014, 262). However, here I am more interested in the ways Patel’s critique of his “mother tongue” in re- lation to English introduces an important perspective on Dalit con- sciousness as translating consciousness. As Kothari’s discussion of Patel’s critique makes clear, the imperative of Dalit conscious- ness is to redefine the very domain of language and its relationship to collective memory: An acclaimed poet and critic, Patel attacks the homogeneous idea of a “mother tongue” in India. Although this may seem a separate issue from English, it is very im- portant to see how the idea of an Indian language that alienates the dalits and colludes with the upper castes in normalizing caste discrimination shapes the dalit response to English. The specificity of the case below provides a much-needed elaboration of this operation to bring home the fact that Indian languages do not constitute for all Indians a proud inheritance, which “globalization” and similar invasive forces may allegedly besiege. This is essentially an upper-caste view and luxury; those who wish to redefine themselves must do so by abandoning this inheritance and embracing English. (65) While this seems neither Patel’s nor Kothari’s point, I would suggest that in the process Patel is also inviting us to rethink the very meaning of translation. Young, too, in his reading of Freud, asks us to rethink the en- terprise of translation as a relational exercise between language and memory, as we see in his discussion of the case of Anna O: translation / 59  Cultural translation, in Freud. . .is not a process by which the former text or elements are ever entirely left behind, but one in which the new text always remains doubled and haunted, its translations perpetually remaking themselves, the translated text per- petually seeking to revert to its original, like a ball held under water. The different languages, as in the dream, remain perpetually present. In some sense, therefore, according to Freud we live in two or more languages at once. This bi- or multilin- gualism in which, as it were, like Anno O., we read one language but translate it simultaneously into another, can illuminate how, in this model, the general sense of loss in translation modifies its gain—for while in cultural terms much is gained, in the individual this gain produces at the same time a constant sense of unease, of dis- ease, malaise, of “cultural frustration,” cultural denial, or as we might say today, of cultural dislocation. (Young 2013, 17-18) Young is implying that every language is haunted by a series of unconscious memories, be they individual or collective. His star- tling proposition is that the ensuing struggles to articulate difficult truths—to find apt language for these invisible “originals”—put productive pressure on whatever languages we have in common. We might then surmise that every speaker has a translating con- sciousness that holds within it (“like a ball held under water”) the potential for radically rethinking the possibilities of the lan- guage(s) she speaks. How might this complex understanding of the relationship between translation and consciousness apply to literary work? According to Limbale, one of the features of Dalit conscious- ness is the ability to identify with any injustice ever visited upon any member of the group. While detractors contend that such a stance results in literature that is predictable or propagandistic (charges his translator Mukherjee renders in English under the ru- bric of “univocality”), Limbale defends such politicized identifi- cations instead as a sign of cohesion and thus of strength, since it allows individuals to read a host of traumatic experiences visited upon Dalits as part of a programmatic effort at group discrimi- nation: “Social boycott, separate bastis, wells, and cremation grounds; inability to find rental accommodation; the necessity to conceal caste; denial of admission to public places; injustices done to Dalit women; dragging and cutting of dead animals; and the barber refusing to cut hair—these experiences are alike for all Dal- its” (Limbale 2004, 35). Limbale’s emphasis here is less on direct translation / experience of such injustices, and more on the daily acts of inter- pretation that renders someone part of the very category deserving 60 such discriminatory behavior. Understood this way, “original trau- ma” begins with the possibility of being read as untouchable by others; acknowledging that reading of untouchability subsequently then becomes part of one’s consciousness as distinctly and defiant- ly “Dalit.” Approaching Dalit literature through Young’s reading of Freud on “cultural translation” helps complicate and thus confound any simple glosses of the terms in play. If we look more close- ly at Young’s proposition that cultural translation is not a simple, straightforward task of “moving from text A to B, leaving text A behind, but rather moving to text B by making text A unconscious, repressed, but with A still haunting text B as its shadow and liable to reappear in disguised form at any moment,” then we might infer that all language speakers sharing an idiom of discrimination like the caste system are haunted by a text A such as “injustices done to Dalit women.” I will spend a moment pursuing this proposition through a later scene in Navaria’s story, in large part because it resonates with Limbale’s outburst that day: “If my mother is being raped then I shouldn’t be crying but crying out to stop it!” And in the process helps us rethink the theoretical categories by which we too might read such a scene. There is a suggestion early on in “Subcontinent” that sexual violence in the village has been ongoing and systemic, to the ex- tent that many “untouchables” are themselves offspring of a union (directly forced, or manipulated) between a high-caste man and an untouchable woman. We see this referenced directly in the story when the narrator makes clear that he himself is related to one of those high-caste thugs in the village who are beating up his father: “‘Pandit-ji, it’s not even her husband’s. It’s her lover’s. This bas- tard child is Harku’s!’ He was pointing at Father” (Navaria 2012, 87). The passing comment seems to affect the character of the pan- dit, who at first appears ready to protect the boy’s father, possibly because he is related to Harku. Even though this is another in- stance where the adult narrator looking back seems to understand the implications of this moment more than the child narrator, the narrative reveals the turmoil this causes on the young narrator’s part. As a boy, the narrator tells us, he held out hope the pandit would take pity on them, but was soon to be disappointed. Not only does the pandit bond with the high caste thugs, joining in with translation / 61  the verbal and physical humiliation, but he later seems to be the one to take advantage of Amma. The scene of Amma’s further humiliation comes late in the sto- ry, after the violence has escalated even further, when high-caste members of the village take umbrage over the groom daring to ride a horse to the door of his bride and they attack the wedding party with lathis. The boy falls down unconscious—the significance of this is important for this study—and we watch him in retrospect try to put language to the ongoing village drama he has witnessed: When I opened my eyes, it was still dark. An oil lamp was still burning in the hut. My aunt was sitting near the smoldering stove. The wedding party had left. . . . My head was throbbing. Someone had tied an old piece of dhoti around it. I don’t know when I dozed off again, but a woman’s shriek shocked me awake. I made haste to get up, but as soon as I rose, a blow struck my back, and I fell on my face. Half outside the hut, half inside. “Fucking city boy, if you move, I’ll unload a bullet in your skull,” someone yelled, tilting my face up with the muzzle of a double-barreled gun pushed into my jaw. To my right, a few feet away, I saw, beneath the white, dhoti-clad bottom of a pale pandit-god, the darkened soles of someone’s feet flailing and kicking; swinging on the back of this pale pandit was a fat, snake-like top-knot. . .and another scream. Terrified. Uninterrupted. Splitting the sky in two—chhann! (95-96) Like the boy in the story who lies halfway out of the hut, wa- vering between consciousness and unconsciousness, the charac- ter of the woman being violated too has no language at the ready to defend herself with—she can only flail and kick and scream. Navaria’s rendering of the scene raises unsettling questions about the very meaning of consciousness, and how language—any lan- guage—plays a part in making and remaking that consciousness. In this scene we have a series of confusing, upsetting pairs: the boy being threatened by an unnamed gunman, the “pale pandit-god” riding a woman we only know by her flailing dark feet, and then the “fat, snake-like top-knot” and the disembodied scream, which seem to emanate from the entwined bodies. At this heightened moment of violence, the boy and the violated woman can share no words of support, or mutual understanding, can only each submit to those who have enough power over the language to demand silence of the others. And yet, the treatment of this scene translation / of sexual violence as the boy’s memory, of a moment that haunts him as an adult, delineates how someone who is witness to vio- 62 lence (even a form of violence he may never experience directly) might be traumatized, in exactly the way Limbale has argued. If we then pursue the implicit analogy between Anna O. and the narrator of “Subcontinent,” we might begin to formulate a more nuanced understanding of translating consciousness when we con- sider carefully the process by which a traumatized Dalit subject struggles against aphasia. The fact that languages like Hindi and English have a mechanism in place for silencing both the subject who experiences the rape and the boy who witnesses it, puts a lie to the contention that it is only the individual subject who is haunt- ed by these violent incidents in the past. Instead, the language cultures themselves might be understood to be haunted, and the moments of paraphasia an indication of the ways such hauntings do not dwell in discrete language domains. Navaria’s story helps us understand how an act of translation (in both the commonly-un- derstood sense, and also with Young’s more specialized meaning) might reveal the ways simply being part of a language community unthinkingly we might be part of the process of repression. Taking seriously the project of Dalit consciousness, read in terms of an active translating consciousness, might afford us a more complex understanding of literary catharsis. translation / 63  References Abidi, Shuby. 2013. “Dalit Autobiography as Scriptotherapy.” International Confer- ence on Dalit Literature and Historiography, New Delhi, Jamia Millia Islamia, December 21. Anand, S. 2003. Touchable Tales: Publishing and Reading Dalit Literature. Pondi- cherry, India: Navayana. Devy, G. N. 2014. “’Of Many Heroes’: An Indian Essay in Literary Historiography.” In The G. N. Devy Reader. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan: 4: 1-225. Freud, Sigmund. 1999. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by Joyce Crick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. 2004. Studies In Hysteria. Translated by Nicola Luckhurst. New York: Penguin Books. Kothari, Rita. 2013. “Caste in a Casteless Language: English as a Language of ‘Dalit’ Expression.” Economic and Political Weekly, XLVIII (39): 60–68. Limbale, Sharankumar. 2004. Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies and Considerations. Translated by Alok Mukherjee. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Merrill, Christi A. 2014. “Postcolonial Issues: Translating Testimony, Arbitrating Justice” In A Companion to Translation Studies, edited by Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter. London: John Wiley and Sons. 259–270. Navaria, Ajay. 2012. “Subcontinent.” In Unclaimed Terrain. Translated by Laura Brueck. New Delhi: Navayana. Young, Robert J.C. 2013. “Freud on Translation and Cultural Translation.” Unpub- lished manuscript of paper delivered at the NIDA/FUSP Symposium in New York, September 20. Christi A. Merrill is an associate professor of South Asian Literature and Postcolonial Theory at the University of Michigan, and author of Riddles of Belonging: India in Trans- lation and other Tales of Possession (Fordham University Press, 2009). Her translations of the stories of Rajasthani writer Vijaydan Detha, Chouboli and Other Stories, were co-published by Katha (New Delhi) and Fordham University Press (New York), and won translation / the 2012 A.K. Ramanujan Award. She spent the 2013-14 school year in India on an NEH/AIIS Senior Fellowship researching her latest book project, Genres of Real Life: Mediating Stories of Injustice Across Languages. 64 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15522

Translating Talkies in Modernist Mexico The Language of Cinemas and the Politics of the Sound Film Industry Valeria Luiselli Hofstra University, USA Abstract: During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the first ‘talkies’ appeared in Mexico, and many new cinemas were built or adapted from older buildings in order to accommodate this paradigmatically modern entertainment technology. Until the 1920s movies were mostly screened in makeshift spaces –in private houses, old theaters, circuses and even churches. Then, in the early 1920s, the first ‘cinema palaces’ started to appear, and by the late 1930s there were around fifty new or newly adapted movie theaters specialized in featuring talkies in Mexico City. These movie houses were an emblem of spectacular modernity. They are also, as I argue, a clear example of ‘translation spaces’ in their ma- ny-layered complexity. I discuss a relatively wide range of translation practices, from dubbing and the politics of film translation in early foreign sound films in Mexico, to the role that the first movie theaters played as stone and concrete ‘translators’ of the modern experience of sound films, to the appropriation of old spaces and their repurposing for the new technologies, to the way that the- aters that were built in particular ‘languages,’ such as the International Style and the Streamline modern, constituted a form of ‘temporal’ translation. 1. Movie theaters in the age of sound: an introduction During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the first “talkies” appeared in Mexico, and many new cinemas were built or adapted from older buildings in order to accommodate this paradigmatically modern entertainment technology. Until the 1920s, movies were mostly screened in makeshift spaces—in private houses, old the- aters, circuses, and even churches. Then, in the early 1920s, the first “cinema palaces” started to appear, and by the late 1930s there were around fifty new or newly adapted movie theaters specialized in featuring talkies in Mexico City (Hershfield 2006, 265).1 These 1 Perhaps part of the problem is the lack of material evidence in magazines and newspapers re- garding the construction of theaters, as compared to the great amount of information regarding films and actors. Among news such as “Tarzan has divorced his wife” and “Chaplin is in love translation / 65  movie houses, as the architectural historian Fernanda Canales has written, were “an emblem of spectacular modernity” (Hershfield 2006, 180). The first sound movie theaters are also, as I shall ar- gue, a clear example of translation spaces in their many-layered complexity. Research on cinemas both from the perspective of architec- tural as well as cultural history remains scarce in relation to other areas of focus in both film studies and architectural history. Often, film historians ignore the spaces in which films were screened, and architectural historians tend to disregard the history of film when they deal with movie theaters. Although film criticism does not fall within the purview this paper, and I will not focus on any film in particular, I do want to place my architectural analysis and discus- sion of movie theaters within the specific context of the arrival of sound film technology in order to discuss the relationship between the modern architectural language of movie theaters and some of the dominating cultural politics of the burgeoning sound film in- dustry in Mexico. I am particularly interested in the question of whether these two things worked in consonance or, on the con- trary, were in dissonance in relation to the discourse of modernity or in creating a “sense” of being modern. Considering the spaces that were created with the arrival of sound film from an architec- tural perspective, and focusing on a small group of movie theaters, I intend to discuss the various senses in which translation practices took place within these new spaces, and how such practices con- tributed to a wider discourse of modernity. Did both cinemas and the film industry have a parallel evolution in terms of how they subscribed parameters of modernism? Did they play a similar so- cial and cultural role in their contribution to the formation of ideas of modernity? I will discuss a relatively wide range of translation practices, from dubbing and the politics of film translation in early for- eign sound films in Mexico, to the role that the first movie the- aters played as stone-and-concrete “translators” of the modern again” (Cinelandia, December 1932), as well as propaganda for new equipment for the new film theaters, advertisements which sell cheap and reliable English lessons, ads for new Kodak translation / cameras and new Clarion radios, and so on, propaganda for film theaters or news about them is, with few exceptions, notably absent from magazines when the inauguration of theaters are announced. 66 experience of sound films, to the appropriation of old spaces and their repurposing for the new technologies, to the way theaters that were built in particular architectural “languages,” such as the International Style and the Streamline modern, constituted a form of temporal translation.2 The way I approach these differ- ent practices and spaces, in turn, encompasses a hermeneutical approach to cultural practices, a phenomenological reading of building typology, and a more distant reading of buildings within the cityscape. My approach to translation, moreover, is tied to the quintes- sentially modernist distinction between foreignization and domes- tication. Modernist translation practices must be distinguished from what is conceived more generally as translation. The 1920s and 1930s were decades of experimentation with composition and translation. As the critic Lawrence Venuti writes, modernist translation practices, which had their philosophical root in nine- teenth-century philosophy, treated translation as an art and a source of innovation: The main trends in translation theory during [modernism] are rooted in German literary and philosophical traditions, in Romanticism, hermeneutics, and exis- tential phenomenology […] Nineteenth-century theorists and practitioners like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt treated translation as a creative force in which specific translation strategies might serve a variety of cultural and social functions, building languages, literatures, and nations. At the start of the twentieth century, these ideas are rethought from the vantage point of modernist movements which prize experiments with literary form as a way of revitalizing culture. Translation is a focus of theoretical speculation and formal innovation. (Venuti 2000, 11) Far from being a means of passively importing foreign liter- atures and adapting foreign languages to local ones, modernist translation as “formal innovation” constituted a form of active 2 Although the term “International Style” started to be used more frequently in the 1930s, it usu- ally refers to the language that architecture started using in the 1920s, and which became the emblematic style of modernism in architecture. Buildings designed according to the principles of the International Style are typically devoid of unnecessary ornamentation, are rectilinear, conceive exteriors as a result of interiors, and rationalize form and function. The Streamline Moderne style, which became widespread in the 1930s, draws on fundamental principles of the International style but merges it with Art Deco elements, such as the use of curved lines, horizontal planes, and references to nautical and aerial shapes. translation / 67  foreignization of the domestic (vis-à-vis domesticizing the for- eign), by which the foreign “contaminated” the domestic and thus pushed its limits further, while at the same time blurring the boundaries between the so-called “foreign” and the “domes- tic.” Seen in this light, modernist translation practices are ones in which translation was not merely conceived as an accurate ren- dering of a source language into a target language or a vehicle for explaining the foreign or making it more accessible or palatable to the local readership, but as a way of appropriating new forms and thus a creative locus of innovation. The term “translation practice”, moreover, in the context of Mexican cultural history can help us move beyond the passive categories of “reception” or “influence,” common to canonic literary and cultural studies, and allow us to focus on modernist cultural production in terms of exchanges. 2. Subtitles, dubbing, versions, and talkies: a hermeneutical approach to the horizon of a new soundscape Translation and dubbing were a fundamental part of the begin- nings of the sound film industry. By the end of the 1920s, the film industry had entered into a crisis and sound film was initially not being received enthusiastically around the world by leading fig- ures in the industry. Chaplin had said that talkies were “ruining the great beauty of silence”, (Maland 1989, 113) and Luigi Pirandello wrote in his well-known essay, “Will the Talkies do Away with Theater?”, that American’s “cheerful arrogance” regarding the ad- vent of sound films was not something to really be worried about, because talkies were nothing but a “poor reproduction of theater” (Bassnett and Lorch, 156). But beyond its reception among prom- inent intellectuals and public figures, the crisis was also economic, and related to the world financial crisis. In 1932, the magazine Cinelandia, which was simultaneously published in Mexico and Hollywood, featured a piece titled “La gran crisis del cine” [The Great Crisis in Film] discussing the crisis in the industry and ad- judicating the reasons for such crisis to the advent of talkies. The piece recounts, in a rather alarmist tone: translation / Hollywood producers are receiving, from all over the world, definite data confirming the reduction of income from ticket sales in all the cinemas in every city, in every country in the world. To tell the truth, we must add that the downward trend in pop- 68  ular interest for the cinematographic spectacle did not start with the world financial crisis: it is older than that and goes back to the exact moment in which sound and spoken film first came onto the international market. (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 17)3 With the arrival of sound films in Hollywood in the late 1920s one of the many problems the American film industry faced was preserving its cultural and economic hegemony over the rest of the world. Governments were enforcing protectionist laws guarding against linguistic “invasion.” Countries such as Argen- tina immediately banned movies spoken in English. Even in the UK, audiences started to protest against movies being spoken in “American.” In Mexico, one of the most influential newspapers, El Universal, gave rise to an aggressive campaign against the new movies spoken in English, calling the governments through- out the Spanish American continent to ban movies in English. By the end of the 1920s, 90% of the silent films screened in Mexico were made in the US, and the Latin American audiences could not understand the new sound films (see Hershfield 2006, 264). The working classes did not speak English, and the elites mostly spoke French as a second language, not English. A good part of the Mexican elites as well as columnists and journalists sup- ported the campaign in the vast majority of national print me- dia. They seemed to agree that English would overtake Spanish if Hollywood’s “pacific invasion” was not stopped by banning movies in English, and they contended that Spanish would soon become a dead language if the masses started identifying English as the language of entertainment. Although a few publications, such as the monthly Continental, responded aggressively to El Universal’s campaign, this anti-English movement was initially quite successful, at least among the elites and public intellectuals (see Reyes de la Maza 1973). When the negative reaction to sound film became a universal response, Hollywood entrepreneurs finally decided that they had to do something about it. The first solution they attempted was to make silent versions of the new sound films, strictly for foreign ex- 3 This quote, as well as much of the information regarding the late silent and early talkie eras, is taken from Reyes de la Mazas 1973, which is a compendium of articles from leading Mexican publications in 1929–1932. I will be quoting many articles from this compendium; all translations translation / into English of the original articles are mine. 69  port. This proved to be a complete failure in the entire world (Mora 1989, 31) as audiences wanted to partake in new technological advances and silent films were seen as a thing of the past. The sec- ond solution was to subtitle films, but countries had demands that were sometimes difficult to meet, as well as particular, local de- mographic realities. The Mexican president Emilio Portes Gil, for example, ordered that there should be “absolute Castilian purity in the language and subtitles of foreign films” (Garcia Riera 1992, 13), which was impossible as the people involved in subtitling were Spanish speakers from different Spanish-speaking countries now living in Los Angeles, and there was no way to conserve the Spanish “purity” demanded by Portes Gil. Moreover, in 1930, the percentage of analphabetism in Mexico was 65% (Vidal 2010, 20), so the majority of the population was unable to read film subtitles. The third entrepreneurial strategy was to dub original Holly- wood films. This, likewise, proved inadequate, as many specta- tors detested the monstrous disembodiment that the still precar- ious methods of dubbing entailed. Finally, at least in the case of films destined for the Spanish-speaking world, it was decided that Hollywood would produce “versions” of the original films, using actors that could speak Spanish fluently. They imported writers, technicians, directors and, of course, actors from Spain and Lat- in America to play the parts of the English-speaking “originals.” These actors were called the Hollywood Hispanics—and were vir- tually linguistic stunt doubles. Or, perhaps, these Spanish-speaking actors can be seen as full-fledged dubbers: they not only leant their voice to the “original” but their entire body. A truly remarkable translation feat of sorts: Hispanic cinema became Hollywood’s Spanish-language copy or version of itself. From their beginnings, Hispanic films failed to convince au- diences—as if their particular form of translation proved to be too simplistic and unsophisticated for modern spectators. The au- dience was perhaps aware that either they were not watching an entirely original film and that the actors they were seeing were most often not part of the venerable star-system. In fact, a Spanish newspaper published a sarcastic note “thanking” Hollywood for ridding them of so many untalented, unemployed actors and taking translation / them over to the USA (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 23). The film critic Luz Alba wrote a piece titled “Growls in Spanish” where she stat- 70 ed that the voices of the actors were “so emphatic and what they say is so stupid that one has the impression of being in a tent dra- ma, where one could at least recur to the final resource of throwing the chairs at the actors—something impossible to do at the cinema Olimpia because the chairs are glued to the floor” (cited in Reyes de la Maza 1973, 180). Moreover, people were disgusted with the myriad Spanish accents, vocabulary, and idiomatic twists on the screen, where Mexicans, Spaniards, Argentineans, and Cubans played roles not necessarily corresponding to their accents. Before Hispanic sound films even arrived in Mexico, a film critic using the pseudonym of Don Q, who worked for the Spanish-language, New York-based magazine Cine Mundial, stated in 1929 that the diversity of nationalities and even races to which those improvised actors belong is such that their films will look like salads, mixing a variety of accents and eth- nicities—something that could be tolerated in scenes that can lend themselves to a cosmopolitan interpretation, but which will lead to more than a few flops. (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 191) Indeed, Hispanic films only lasted a few years, soon proving to be an absolute commercial flop.3 Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s last attempt to keep hold of the Latin American and Spanish market was to get Hollywood’s best actors to speak a little Spanish. Laurel and Hardy, as well as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, all made shorts in Spanish and, though these fared better with educated audienc- es—at least in Mexico—than the movies featuring Hollywood His- panics, they did not do not well enough for entrepreneurs to persist in this last, rather eccentric endeavor (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 25). The theaters these subtitled, then dubbed, and then remade ver- sions were screened in were originally designed for silent films, and were, in turn, often older buildings—churches, convents, or old theaters—sometimes precariously and sometimes creatively “translated” or repurposed for cinema. One of the most emblem- atic spaces for film screenings in the early 1920s was a former sixteenth-century convent, which, in 1922, reopened with the rath- er bombastic name Progreso Mundial (World Progress). The old courtyard, typical of colonial architecture, was used as the primary 3 By 1939, after approximately 175 talkies, Hispanic films ceased to be produced (García Riera 1992, 14). translation / 71  sitting space, and the original stone arcade, traditionally plain and unadorned, was heavily clad with ornamentation. A second story had to be built to fit more spectators, for which slim iron pillars had to be placed between the seats (Alfaro 1997, 55). Progreso Mundial circa 1922. Most of these theaters had to be refurbished once again at the in the late 1920s and early 1930s, this time to accommodate new sound film technology. The Teatro-cinema Olimpia was the first cinema in Mexico to screen a talkie in 1929—eight years after its inauguration.4 Before this, in the early 1920s, it had been used si- multaneously for plays and silent films. The talkie that was shown was The Singing Fool. Before it played, the theater screened a short showing the Mexican consul in New York directly address- ing Mexicans and congratulating Warner Brothers for their inven- tion. Then, before the main screening, both the Orquesta Típica Mexicana and the New York Symphonic Orchestra were shown 4 Previously, the sound film (but not talkie) The Submarine had been screened in the Teatro Im- perial, in April 1929. An ad in the Universal read: “The Teatro Imperial, conscious of its program in constant progress and keeping ahead of its competition, will offer for the first time this great translation / advance of human invention […] Come to listen to the clamor and feel the anguish of a sinking submarine. Listen to the sounds of the depths of the ocean. Today, two shows, one at four and the other at eight” (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 76). 72 playing a selection of musical pieces. The directors of the Olim- pia, in conjunction with Warner Brothers, had also produced a free magazine with information about the “wonders of the new form of entertainment” as well as a translated transcription of the movie’s dialogues (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 80). The premiere, apparently, was such a success that soon the campaign launched by El Univer- sal was drowned by the clamors of “the masses”.5 The Olimpia was designed by one of the most important early cinema architects, Carlos Crombé.6 It was built inside the shell of an old hotel, which had, in turn, been built in a vegetable gar- den on the grounds of the first Franciscan convent built in Mexico City in the 16th century. Its interiors were originally designed ac- cording to the elegant neoclassical eighteenth-century Adamesque style, which had seen a revival among the middle classes in the late nineteenth century and up to the 1920s.7 There were two dancing salons, one smoking room, and two vestibules (Alfaro 1997, 25). The elegant and often opulent interiors of movie theaters were a common denominator at the time. The logic behind this was to give the upper middle classes as immersive an experience for their money as possible, and help them forget their mundane, everyday life for a few hours. As a description of the movie theater in the magazine Cine Mundial read: “The Aristocratic Cinema Olimpia, refuge for families when on cold winter afternoons tedium stabs with its sharp blade, enchanting retreat […] has come to fill a vac- uum which had long been felt in Mexico’s good society” (Cine Silente Mexicano/Mexican Silent Cinema, translation mine). 5 It is interesting to note, reading the different articles about movies published at the time, that the opinion of intellectuals was almost always in contrast to what seemed to be the response of the “masses” to innovations and entertainment. 6 Carlos Crombé was a rather prolific cinema architect by the standards of the time in Mexi- co. In the 1920s he built several teatro-cinemas, in varied “conservative” architectural styles, ranging from Beaux-Arts façades typical of the Porfirian era such as his famous Cine Odeon, to Adamesque interiors, and even Churrigueresque exteriors (a Mexican adaptation of Baroque) in his well known Teatro Colonial (1940). His later cinemas, such as the Cine Alameda (1936) and his modernization of his own earlier Cine Olimpa (1941) were very different to those of the 1920s. The Cosmos, Crombé’s last project, which burnt down in 1946 just before its official inauguration, was closer to art deco and was perhaps meant to signal another version of modernity, perhaps closer to functionalism, in its sobriety. It was certainly the most modern of Crombé’s cinemas—it was closer, at least, to International Modernism—but it was the last he designed, as he died shortly after it burned down. 7 The Adamesque style, developed by the Adam brothers in England, became fashionable in the mid- to late-eighteenth century and is usually considered an offshoot of neoclassical design and architecture. It simplified baroque and rococo, but was still heavily ornamental. translation / 73  Teatro-Cinema Olimpia circa 1921. There are various translation practices at work in the example of the Olimpia’s screening of The Singing Fool. Even if the movie itself was not subtitled—a translation practice that, as I said ear- lier, had been banned by presidential orders—or dubbed, even if it was not a Hispanic “version” of an “original,” several interest- ing and rather inventive translational strategies were being used to bring the first talkie closer to its non English-speaking audience. First, the film’s dialogue was printed out and distributed free to patrons, which would seem to imply that it was expected to be read after the show, as a sort of consecutive or “delayed” translation. Then, there was the initial appearance of the Mexican consul in New York, who, in his role of cultural and diplomatic translator, was attempting to both bridge the two cultures that were about to engage in a possibly alienating encounter and also to fully sanc- tion—politically, that is—the screening of a movie in a language that was treated by many with great suspicion. Further, and most translation / importantly in architectural terms, the movie was being premiered in one of the oldest, most elegant and well-established movie the- 74 aters—a choice of setting which perhaps sought to convey an aura of traditional legitimacy and normality for the public. Through all these different practices or strategies, the Olimpia was to all ex- tents functioning here as a translation space. But how was the Olimpia’s role as a translation space inter- preted by others? In the Revista de Revistas, a highly popular pub- lication of those times, the critic Peinbert refers to the Olimpia as “one of our best salons” and says that through these salons “Mex- ico will be irremediably invaded by talkies in just a few months” (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 86). Similarly, in the Universal the ed- itor and critic Carlos Noriega Hope wrote that “Yesterday it was the Olimpia that was paving the way; tomorrow it will be all the cinemas in Mexico […] Not a month will pass before mute films are inexorably exiled to the barrios. Everything will be filled with cries, musical synchronizations, and words in English” (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 137). Another critic, Eugene Gaudry, complained about the screening at the Olimpia saying that it would inaugurate a time of great cultural confusion where eventually “the foreigners that come to Mexico will not know what the national language is, because they will be seeing movies in English, French, German, Italian, Denmarkese [sic], and so on, with no Spanish translations” (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 171). Gaudry was of course exaggerating, but his complaints and concerns must have been shared by many, because a year later, in 1930, the managers at the Olimpia devised a mechanism which allowed for the insertion of explanatory Spanish text or titles be- tween scenes in foreign movies. The Olimpia was famous for its endeavors in translating as much as possible for their audiences. The critic Luz Alba noted in an article that “talkies at the Olimpia have many titles, more than those strictly necessary to understand the general issue, and just enough to understand the details— something that does not occur in talkies at other theaters, which only have enough titles to understand generalities” (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 200). Indeed, movie theaters such as the Olimpia were the sites that were helping translate or carry over a new modern experience to the Mexican audience, and this modern experience went beyond the technology of sound in film: it was also the experience of foreign languages and voices coming into the city’s soundscape, translation / 75  Teatro-Cinema Olimpia circa late 1920s. through the screens of these movie theaters. Whether viewed as enablers of a new invention or as “traitors” that would allow the talkies to come in and take over, these translators made of concrete and stone functioned as the material portals for foreign languag- es to come in and “foreignize” the soundscape of Mexican movie theaters. 3. Translation, tradition, and entertainment: a phenomenological approach After an initial period of resistance on the part of the Mexico City elite, in which many columnists and critics voiced their concerns and hesitations regarding sound film technology, it was clear that the talkies had come to stay. In the early 1930s, the Mexican film industry consolidated and producers started to invest funds and translation / human capital in new technologies and, of course, in producing Spanish-language talkies. 76  One of the first optical sound devices for film was in fact in- vented by a young Mexican man who was living in Los Angeles with his family at the time. His name, like the names of many remote national icons, has an almost cinematographic ring to it: José de Jesús “El Joselito” Rodriguez. In the back room of the bakery his parents owned he had been working for two years on a sound-on-film device that would adapt to any camera and be easy to transport. He finally completed the last adjustments to the Rodriguez Sound Recording System in 1929. It weighed less than twelve pounds and was purportedly adaptable to any camera cir- culating in the industry. As the story goes, he sat his family around a projector and activated it. To his family’s surprise, a horrifying, cacophonic, almost diabolical melody gushed out, in synchrony with the image of a few people moving their mouths rhythmically on the home-made screen. Joselito then stopped the mechanism, made a few adjustments, and tried again. What came out the sec- ond time around was the Mexican national anthem. Apparently, in the first try, he had set the mechanism the wrong way around, and what his family heard was the national anthem being sung backwards. Early sound films relied on a sound-on-disc technology, in which the sound heard during a film screening had been recorded onto a phonograph record that was physically separate from the film. The technology was flimsy and unreliable: not only did the two components—sound and image—seem disconnected, but they would often desynchronize completely, producing mass confusion and irritation in early spectators. The decisive technological step for the sound film industry was the fusion of both the sound and visual components of the movie in an optical sound device, lat- er called sound-on-film technology. Although initial experiments with the new technology took place in the early 1920s, the first full feature film with integrated sound was The Jazz Singer (1927). It was in that same year that Joselito Rodriguez began to develop his new device, which he imagined could be used in the burgeoning Mexican sound film industry and thus set Mexico at the forefront of international talkies. At the same time as Joselito was working on his device, in around 1930 a Mexican producer put together a crew and began working on a project that would lead to the first Mexican opti- translation / 77  cal sound film, Santa. Joselito, who probably knew he stood slim chances of getting a proper interview with film magnates, stalked the film’s producer, Juan de la Cruz Alarcón, at Los Angeles air- port. Alarcón was on his way back to Mexico, returning empty handed, after an unsuccessful trip to Hollywood in which he tried to acquire a sound-on-film technology device: they were all too costly and impossible to transport. Accompanied by his brother, Joselito approached Alarcón and secretly filmed and recorded their brief airport conversation, in which he told the producer of his latest invention. He was unsuccessful in settling any deal with him, but he at least managed to get his contact information down and record the whole encounter. A few days later, he mailed the reel to Alarcón back in Mexico. The recording met and surpassed Alarcón’s expectations. It was a done deal. Just a couple of weeks later, Joselito and his brother, Roberto, were repatriated and began working on Santa in the newly built studios of the Compania Na- cional Productora de Peliculas. Santa was premiered in 1932, in Mexico City’s newly renovat- ed Cine Palacio. The Palacio was finished in 1924 and renovated in the late 1920s to screen sound films. But what did this renovation consist in? Did sound film technology affect the architectural lan- guage or style of movie theaters beyond the necessary adjustments to their interiors? Interestingly, the renovations to the Palacio were also external: the theater perhaps had to send the message to its audiences that they were fully committed to modernity and they were as modern as the technology they housed. In a comparison of the two façades it is possible to notice some of the typical changes that architecture underwent during the de- cade. In the renovated cinema, the straight lines that once met the pinnacles framing the center façade were replaced by a stepped rooftop, more typical of the art deco style of the late 1920s in Mex- ico, making the building look taller and, especially, differentiat- ing it from the straight-line horizontal façades of both neocolonial and Porfirean art nouveau architecture. The exteriors of the Cine Palacio were also conditioned for the more striking form of film propaganda that started to flourish towards the end of the 1920s, which often made use of vertical edge-lit signs and likewise used translation / the marquee for placing film posters. There is, unfortunately, little published material about the the- 78 ater’s interior transformation or on what adaptations the film’s technicians had to do in order to screen Santa in a theater that was not initially built for talkies. The only mention in publications to its interior is that it was “modernized”—which probably means that the art nouveau ornamentation was “upgrade” to art deco (see, Cine Palacio circa 1924. Cine Palacio late 1920s. translation / 79  for example, García 2002). In short: a new technology demand- ed a new appearance, internal and external. Modernity demanded an integral makeover, a full translation of a space into its modern version. An urban melodrama of sorts, Santa was based on a best-sell- ing novel written at the close of the nineteenth century by the Mex- ican writer Federico Gamboa. It tells the story of a woman from the countryside who arrives in Mexico City and is forced into pros- titution. Modern Mexico city is portrayed as a threatening, cruel space, where well-intentioned people are treated harshlly. As the critic Joanne Hershfield writes regarding Santa, “the film affirmed the conservative discourse that idealized tradition […] and criti- cized the modern paradigm of progress” (Hershfield 2006, 268). It is somewhat interesting, in this light, that the storyline chosen to inaugurate the Mexican talkie—a format using technology that was spearheading modernity and progress—should come from a conservative nineteenth-century novel. It is also interesting that this conservative film was screened in a newly renovated, modern, art-deco movie theater. What can we make of the apparent décal- age between a movie and the theater that screened it? It must be noted that the example of the conservative Santa screened in the modern Palacio is by no means an exception. Most commercial movies made in Mexico during the 1930s—and well into the 1950s, the period in which the country entered its cine- matographic Golden Age—were no less conservative and tradi- tionalist. As Hershfield notes, “whether they were set in historical or contemporary contexts, these films exalted traditional values of patriarchy, the family, the macho hero, and virtuous, submissive femininity” (Hershfield 2006, 269). The fundamental reason for this is that the State was deeply involved in film production and distribution in Mexico, and therefore also had a “say” in its con- tent.8 The same is not true of the relationship between the State and movie theaters themselves.9 Theaters were seen as lucrative 8 As Susan Dever writes regarding the film industry and the star system, “Within Mexico these stars negotiated a relationship between spectators and the State, indoctrinating viewers in the rights and duties of Mexican citizenship. (Given the Mexican Government’s subsidy of the film translation / industry, making the State the producer of Golden Age cinema, this relationship was particularly well defined)” (Dever 2003, 12). 9 There is no evidence whatsoever that most film theaters received money from the State, as op- 80 spaces of entertainment, not places destined to educate the Mexi- can population. While successful films at the box office were usually the most conservative ones, Mexican cinemas in the early 1930s tend- ed toward a gradually increasing radical modernity. They were more experimental than their content (that is, than the films they showed), more forward-looking and more committed to a sense of modernity—however they interpreted this. In other words, if cinemas in the 1930s pointed toward the future, the content they screened mostly pointed toward the past. How, then, should we read the resulting tension? Can it be read as a tension between form and function? That is, a tension between modernity in form and conservatism in function? Or perhaps their function was not at all to conserve values through conservative movies, but simply to entertain and make money. In that case, how did their form con- tribute to the parameters and box office exigencies and how was this, in turn, gauged against the State’s own exigencies regarding the pedagogic, civilizing purpose of Mexican commercial films? The phenomenological assumption regarding the interrelated- ness of an aesthetic experience and the physical aspect of the space in which such an experience takes place may or may not be entirely accepted—the degree of the interrelatedness can certainly be ques- tioned in a space such as a theater, which disappears as soon as the lights go off and the show begins—but what is unquestionable is the fact that the architects of movie houses made stylistic choices which were necessarily tied to a taste informed by a preconception of what a space such as a cinema should “say” to its patrons. In his lecture “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault describes the mov- ie theater as a space that encloses within it a multiplicity of spaces. He explains the multiplicity of spaces enclosed in a movie theater posed to hospitals, schools, public housing, stadiums, universities, and public buildings. There were powerful families in the construction business—the Espinosa brothers, the Alarcóns, and of course, the controversial American tycoon William Jenkins—who had ties with the govern- ment and who would eventually hold a monopoly on Mexican film theaters. There were also politicians involved in theater construction and ownership, such as former president Abelardo Rodríguez. But none of this means that there was no public money, or at least honestly invested public money, in the business. Many reasons may explain the absence of the government in film theater construction and management. The short answer, however, is that theaters simply did not need it. As opposed to national film production, theaters had plenty of material to screen and plenty of patrons to entertain—a simple matter of supply and demand. translation / 81  through the figure of the heterotopia: “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces […] thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space” (Foucault 1984, 6). But what Foucault fails to do is to see the “very odd rectangular room” as anything more than just a box in which the experience takes place. He does not, in other words, regard the physical space of the theater as any- thing more than a sort of container. Cinemas, however, are much more complex in terms of their production of space than an “odd rectangular room.” The spaces in which films were seen provided a setting in which the viewers received their dose of entertainment within the bracket or “slices in time” (Foucault 1984, 6) which the experience of movie-going entailed. Palacio Chino late 1930s. Perhaps the clearest historical example of a conscious stylistic choice is that of the atmospheric cinemas, which were in vogue in translation / movie theater architecture in the United States in the 1920s and which sought to recreate exotic spaces. Such was the case of the 82 Palacio Chino (built in the late 1930s and inaugurated in 1940), which featured pagodas, Buddhas, and golden dragons in its par- ticular rendering of the atmospheric style. It was built in an old ball court, and designed by Luis de la Mora and Alfredo Olaga- ray. The critic Luis Helguera describes its interiors as built in “at- mospheric style, with pagodas, temples, and gold Buddha statues amid gardens. The ceiling was vault-like, not flat but very arched, and of course was painted deep blue. The screen was protected by a heavy black curtain, with Chinese motifs painted upon it. The screen arch was very heavily decorated, with dragons appearing here and there” (Heguera). Mexican architects of the atmospheric style followed the precept conceptualized by Charles Lee—“the show starts on the sidewalk.” They had attractive marquees, striking façades, and, in short, designed spaces that would bolster the “illusion” of the cinema, where the mind, leaving the real behind, was finally free to gambol and became more receptive to entertainment. Movie theaters, as spaces, can then perhaps be seen as a medium that, due to its “otherness,” helped transmit the illusion of cinema to its viewers. Whether this otherness was just a gleaming modernity, as in the case of the Cine Palacio, or whether it was set as an entire il- lusion, as in the case of the Palacio Chino, the point was that movie theaters were much more than just “odd rectangular rooms.” Going back to the question of form and function posed earli- er, how can we read the coexistence or juxtaposition of Mexican movies—conservative, and mostly realist and traditionalist—in these modern, “other” spaces? Perhaps by rephrasing this appar- ent dichotomy in terms of how movie theaters function as transla- tion spaces we can make better sense of it. In a “foreign” space of sorts, in a space that was utterly “other”—due to its modernity, its ornamental exuberance, or its atmospheric illusions—what peo- ple went to see was themselves; or even an older, more traditional version of themselves. A space “outside of time” and “outside of space”—a modern space of entertainment and illusion—thus func- tioned, paradoxically, as a sort of mirror of reality. In other words, a space that was foreign made the domestic visible. The patron or viewer, upon entering the other or foreign space of the movie theater, became a translator. A translator of what, ex- actly? A translator of him or herself for him or herself. The movie translation / 83  theater, inasmuch as it created an illusion or sense of being else- where, estranged the patron from his reality and from himself: he was in a foreign space of sorts. Then, the movie itself—a movie such as Santa, which in turn realistically depicted the reality “out- side” the space of the movies—made the patron face him-/herself. Translation spaces such as movie theaters were not just gateways for foreign languages and cultures, as I explained in the example of the Olimpia’s foreign talkie screenings, but also functioned as mirrors—spaces in which viewers come to see themselves reflect- ed in that other “version” of themselves in the context or against the backdrop of a space that was foreign and other, much like the translator who is always “strabismically” looking simultaneously at the foreign text and at her or his own. Moviegoers thus travels outside themselves and outside their domestic, local reality to re- turn to themselves. 4. New monumentality in the cityscape: building typologies and the urban layout By the mid 1930s, the Mexican film sound industry had entered its Golden Age. The number of films produced in the country had increased exponentially (see Mora 1989).The same was happening in many other parts of the world, as the advent of sound film and the language/translation problems it had created were partially re- solved by countries creating and investing in their own film indus- tries and producing films in their national languages. Paradoxically, however, while the film industry was becoming more and more fragmented into linguistic regions, the “interna- tional language” of theater architecture became more and more consolidated and unified. As the national film industry grew in Mexico in the 1930s, Spanish-language films were being screened in spaces that were increasingly trans- or international in terms of their architectural languages and styles. In this sense, it could perhaps be said that cinemas internationalized their content, how- ever “local” it may have been. Spectators seeing a movie about the most local of themes—be it the Mexican Revolution, Mexican urban poverty, or the Aztec past—were doing so in an interior that could just as easily be in Vienna, Buenos Aires, or Chicago. translation / But what about the relationship of these movie theaters to their surroundings? That is, how can movie theaters be understood as 84 translation spaces within the urban space they occupied and how can this relationship shine a different light upon their cultural and social role? In the 1930s, monumental sound movie theaters began to be built. These were not just adaptations of older buildings, but constructions whose function was, from the outset, to house sound films. Beyond their bold architecture, which contrasted with the older and more sober buildings in Mexico City and thus set them apart as grand palaces of entertainment, their monumental size also marked a dramatic shift in the appearance of the city, which had always been horizontally low-rise. One of the most interest- ing examples of modern cinema monumentality was Juan Segura’s Cine Hipódromo, housed within the Ermita building. Ermita building circa 1931. translation / 85  Cine Hipodromo, Ermita building. translation / Ermita building circa 1931. 86  The Ermita was a dramatic intervention in the cityscape. It was the first “skyscraper,” albeit only an eight-story one. Seen from the acute angle where Revolución and Avenida Jalisco meet, the building resembles a large ship sailing north. On its ground lev- el are spaces for small businesses, integrating the street-life into the building. Along its southern façade, a big entranceway, which makes resourceful use of the building’s triangular shape, opens into a cinema. On top of the cinema are three stories of apartments. Since Segura could not use columns inside the cinema, he had to think of a way of making sure the structure would support the three stories above. He therefore opted for structural steel and construct- ed an innovative steel structure around the cinema in order to se- cure it from the weight above, as well as to sound-proof it. He also used reinforced concrete in beam designs and roofs, as well as for minimal cladding purposes and ornaments—all of which were an integral part of the building (Toca 1997, 170). Although the Ermita was finished by 1931, the Hipódromo, did not open until 1936. Its inauguration poster depicted “the masses” crowding around the new, towering building. Teatro Cine Hipodromo inauguration poster, 1936. translation / 87  Other examples of modernist monumentality were Francis- co J. Serrano’s projects. He designed and modernized at least ten cinemas in the 1930s, some of which, in his own words “left be- hind their jacal [hut-like] appearance and became modern spaces” (Alfaro 1998, 58). One of his most important buildings, the Cine Encanto, was inaugurated in 1937, and loomed high above the sur- rounding buildings of the San Rafael neighborhood. Its art deco façade featured a heavily lit marquee, an enormous portico, and a striking sign at the top with the theater’s name written in deco typography. The vertical cement walls, forming a right angle with the central area of the façade, accentuate the height of the con- struction and the stretched glass-block vertical windows through which the light from the interior shone outwards, thus accentuat- ing the chiaroscuro suggested by the walls. The interiors of the Cine Encanto were modern and spare com- pared to the more lavishly ornamented theaters of the early 1920s. translation / Cine Encanto circa 1937. 88 The Streamline Moderne vestibule, with its curving forms, long horizontal lines, and round ship-like windows can be seen as a reaction to the earlier sumptuous interiors of movie palaces and at- mospherics, and a natural reflection of modern architecture’s ten- dency towards simplicity and economy of space and materials. Its vestibule, moreover, played with the ambiguous border between the inside and the outside, by integrating an interior garden and Cine Encanto (interiors) circa 1937. Cine Encanto (vestibule). translation / 89  using openings in the roof to allow plenty of natural light to flow in during the day or for the night sky to be seen from inside. One of the most interesting aspects of both Juan Segura’s and Francisco Serrano’s work is precisely that it raises the question of how modernity was being interpreted by these “independent” architects of the new film theaters.10 Segura and Serrano designed two of the first cinemas constructed specifically as sound cinemas. These movie theaters were no longer adaptations of constructions dating from an earlier period, they were not mere “upgrades” from art nouveau to art deco, and they were certainly not like the opu- lent, lavishly ornamented atmospheric palaces. Indeed, in the mid and late 1930s, movie theater architects would draw more and more on this interpretation of modernity and modernism and move towards more sober, less eclectic forms, building cinemas devoid of superficial ornamentation and maintaining a tighter relationship between form and function.11 But these movie theaters were also imposing new monuments to modernity, towering high above the city’s older buildings. They were as much places destined for seeing something (a movie) as places made to be seen. They were visible from afar; they loomed large, like the admonition of a possible future city, from below. These new buildings introduced a new time: the time of the “now” as a “future.” The time of the thoroughly, universally modern. If modernist translation practices were a form of foreignization of the domestic, those new movie theaters, in the local context where they appeared, must have seemed utterly foreign or oth- er—not by virtue of bringing in elements from a particular foreign country or region, as International Modernism and the Stream- line modern style were in essence extraterritorial, but by virtue of introducing a foreign time into the city’s traditional time. Their “otherness” was a “futureness.” If translation is a transportation, a transference, a carrying over, what these monuments to modern- ism translated was not any particular content, but the sense of time itself. 10 By independent, I mean that their work was not, as was the case with so many realms of ar- chitectural and artistic production—film certainly among them—funded by the Mexican State. translation / 11 As Maggie Valentine explains, “seemingly anachronistic ornate architecture and design dis- appeared from the buildings. Both [film and film theater architecture] were stripped of their artificial decoration in favor of a more honest […]) examination of life” (Valentine 1994, 6). 90 References Alfaro Salazar, Francisco Haroldo. 1997. Espacios distantes—aun vivos: las salas cinematográficas de la Ciudad de México. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. ———. 1998. República de los cines. Mexico City: Clio. Cine silente méxicano/Mexican Silent Cinema. S.v. “Cine Progreso.” http://cinesilen- temexicano.wordpress.com/?s=cine+progreso. Dever, Susan. 2003. Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas: From Post-Rev- olutionary Mexico to fin de siglo Mexamérica. The Suny Series in Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video and in Feminist Criticism and Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Of ther Spaces. Utopias and Heterotopias.” Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec, originally in Architecture /Mouvement/ Continu- ité (October). Available as pdf download at http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/ foucault1.pdf. García, Gustavo. 2002. “Adiós al Olimpia.” Letras Libres (October): 101–102. García Riera, Emilio. 1992. Historia documental del cine mexicano. Vol 1. Guadala- jara: Universidad de Guadaljara. Heguera, Luis. N.d. S.v. “Palacio Chino.” http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/ 13383http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/13383. Hershfield, Joanne. 2006. “Sreening the Nation.” In Mary K. Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis, eds., The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940. Durham: Duke University Press. Maland, Charles J. 1989. Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Mora, Carl J. 1989. Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896–1988. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reyes de la Maza, Luis. 1973. Cine sonoro mexicano. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Toca, Antonio. 1997. “Origins of Modern Architecture in Mexico.” In Edward Buri- an, ed., Modernity and the Architecture of Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press. Valentine, Maggie. 1994. The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie Theatre, Starring S. Charles Lee. New Haven: Yale University Press. Venuti, Lawrence. 2000. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Vidal Bonifaz, Rosario. 2010. Surgimiento de la industria cinematográfica y el papel del Estado de México 1895–1940. Mexico, D.F.: Miguel Angel Porrúa. translation / 91  Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City, and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. She is the author of Sidewalks, a collection of essays, and the internationally acclaimed novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth. Her work in fiction has been translated into more than twenty languages, and she has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Frieze, Granta, the New Yorker and McSweeney’s. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and lives in New York, where she teaches at Hofstra University. Photo: Zony Maya. translation / 92 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15523

Translating At the Edge of Empire: Olha Kobylianska and Rose Ausländer Sherry Simon Concordia University, Canada Abstract: The edge of empire is a mythical place which has inspired the histor- ical and literary imagination. As the easternmost city of the Habsburg Empire, Czernowitz was a product of a particular kind of border culture, one which sus- tained an intense relationship with the German language. In the multilingual matrix of the years leading to the collapse of the Empire and during the interwar period, translational relationships were developed through German. The cases of the Ukrainian writer Olha Kobylianska and the German-Jewish poet Rose Auslander are considered here. The edge of empire is a mythical place that has long stimulated the historical and literary imagination. The Roman Limes—which encompassed a vast area that included Britain (up to its northern, Atlantic reaches), continental Europe right across to the Black Sea and down to the Red Sea, and North Africa as far west as the Atlantic coast (see http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/430)—probably provide the most pervasive material traces of the walls, ditches, forts, fortresses, watchtowers, and civilian settlements that sepa- rate Empire from its barbarian outside. But the waxing and waning of innumerable empires over the course of world history—from the Greek and Mongol to the Habsburg, British, and Ottoman em- pires—have offered an abundant supply of objects and narratives, images and fantasies, a recent example of which is the Star Wars game called “The Edge of the Empire.” An expression of imperial power at its highest point (bringing the full might of military force to bear against the enemy without), the edge of empire is also, because of its physical distance from the imperial center, a place where identities can become diluted, where the precise dividing line between inside and outside can be- come troubled. This paradox is richly exploited in J. M. Coetzee’s translation / 93  1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians. It tells the story of a dis- abused middle-aged magistrate who chooses to end his days in a lazy imperial outpost, spending his free time carrying out his own archaeological digs. Largely indifferent to the bellicose aims of his military superi- ors, he comes under suspicion of collusion with the enemy. He has excavated a cache of slivers of wood that all seem to have some sort of message written on them, but the writing is ancient and im- penetrable and he has been unable to decipher the message. When he is forced, however, to provide the meaning of these writings, now considered crucial evidence, the magistrate suddenly finds words to transmit the messages he reads from the slips: appeals from barbarian prisoners to their families—intimate and immedi- ate and alive. Through his “translation,” the magistrate transforms the bar- barians from aliens into individual beings. He blurs the line that separates the enemy from the citizen, and he opens gaps in the Em- pire’s line of defense. And in fact the Empire never does achieve victory. The barbarians simply lure the army out into the desert and then vanish. Faithful to the genre of “the barbarian and the frontier”—classically drawn by Dino Buzzati in The Desert of the Tartars and powerfully evoked by Cavafy in the poem also called “Waiting for the Barbarians”—the barbarians in Coetzee’s novel are elusive. The moment of direct confrontation, feared and de- sired, never comes. The link between present and past, self and other, suggests Coetzee, is an imaginative leap, a gesture of volun- tary projection. Coetzee’s novel will be our entry point into another site of translation at the edge of empire. This is the city of Czernowitz (to- day’s Cernivtsi in Ukraine), the most easterly city of the erstwhile Habsburg empire. Abundantly mythologized as a border city, as a cultural bulwark against the alien forces from the east, the city provides rich material for a study of translational forces. Its geo- graphical situation but also its cultural vocation as a border city during the period of the military collapse and the reorganization of the Habsburg border lands offers a singular viewpoint onto the work of translation at the edge of empire. In what follows, I will translation / examine the work of two Czernowitz authors—Olha Kobylianska (1863-1942) and Rose Ausländer (1901-1988)—as translators of 94 their border city. Like Coetzee’s magistrate, they find the borders enacted by translation to be shifting and elusive. To translate at the edge is to be especially aware of the ways in which boundaries can accentuate or attenuate difference. Political borders hyposta- tize cultural and linguistic differences, while geographical borders often show difference to be gradual. The multilingualism of border zones problematizes the activities of translation as source–target transactions. Whether applied to a huge geographical expanse or to the microspaces of the multilingual city, the operations of trans- lation at the border are shaped by the special pressures of the in- terzone. This means that the frames of language exchange must be recast to respond to more subtle understandings of the relation be- tween language, territory, and identity. How do the competition and animosities, but also the shared references that inevitably flourish in multilingual geopolitical contexts, shape translation (Meylaerts 2013)? Languages that share the same terrain rarely participate in a peaceful and egalitarian conversation: their separate and compet- ing institutions are wary of one another, aggressive in their need for self-protection. Cultures of mediation are shaped by the social and political forces which regulate the relations among languages. Building the bulwark Today the Bukovina is largely situated in Ukraine. From 1774 until 1918, this area was the easternmost edge of the Habsburg empire that the emperor Joseph II consciously and vigorously constructed as a buffer zone in order to protect his territories from Russian and Ottoman expansion (Colin 1991, 7). He actively promoted the settlement of Germans from Austria and southwest Germany, as well as the Germanization of Ruthenians and Roumanians, the two largest language groups in the Bukovina. Over the course of the nineteenth century in particular, for both German-language empires (the Prussian and the Habsburg), “the East” exerted tremendous fascination. From 1848 to 1918, central Europe was crisscrossed by conflicting imperial projects, each marked by its own real and imagined borders and the constant pressure to defend newly conquered expanses of territory. The ar- eas that became known as the “eastern Marches” were increasing- ly important in public consciousness. The term “March”—origi- nally indicating the border provinces of the Carolingian Empire, translation / 95  granted a privileged political status in order to fulfill their duties in defending and expanding the Empire’s boundaries, and used only sporadically in the first half of the nineteenth century—became a catch-phrase (the OstMark) after 1848 (Thum 2013, 44–59). And in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new kind of highly ideologized novel later called the Ostmarkenroman emerged, pop- ularizing the idea “that a battle over territory was taking place in the eastern borderlands between the representations of a superior German civilization and their Slavic enemies” (Thum 2013, 48). As Pieter Judson has so convincingly demonstrated, these border zones were not “natural” zones of conflict, in particular of language conflict. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, they were, rather, strategically targeted by nationalist ideologists and enlisted in the struggle for patriotic allegiance (Judson 2006). “Na- tionalist activists” took every opportunity to transform rural con- flicts into national ones (10). In particular, campaigns around the language of schools were used to mobilize energies for nationalist causes in what Judson calls the “nationalization of the language frontier” (17). From 1848 onwards, Czernowitz had an increasingly Ger- man-language population. Many German-speaking Jews settled in the major Bukovinian cities and by 1918, 47 percent of the pop- ulation of Czernowitz was Jewish. “Since Bukovinian Jews were German-speaking and particularly loyal to the Habsburg monarchy and instrumental in its expansion in that region, Austrian officials tended to consider them representatives of the Habsburg empire” (Colin 1991, 7; see also Hirsch and Spitzer, chapters 2 and 4). Proof of the importance of Czernowitz for Austria and the German language came with the founding in 1875 of Franz Josef Univer- sity—a coveted boost to the intellectual and cultural life of what was considered by many to be an outpost of imperial life. While the town had its military garrisons to protect the city from attack, it also had its linguistic ramparts. By 1875, for example, in order to conform to the empire’s own language laws guaranteeing the use of a national language when numbers justified it, Lemberg univer- sity in the Galician city was giving all its courses in Polish—so the Empire had to exert its efforts at Germanization elsewhere. translation / The university in Czernowitz was the Empire’s first new universi- ty in fifty years (Judson 2016, 321). The new university, won for 96 Czernowitz over intense competition from other cities—notably Trieste—was the result of relentless lobbying by a noble landown- er from Bukovina who argued that only German scholarship could claim universality and that it would ensure an integrative function in this multilingual zone of empire (322). The University reflected the Empire’s broader political and ideological aims. When in 1866 Austria lost its traditional political hegemony in Germany, the liberal empire sought a renewed sense of mission in Europe. In the 1870s, the exploration of cultural diversity seemed to offer the foundations for a renewed Habsburg civilizing mission directed specifically to eastern and southeastern Europe, including the Bal- kans. In its earliest incarnation, this new mission for the empire focused its civiliza- tional energies on the existing crownlands of Galicia and Bukovina. The founding of a university in Czernowitz in 1875 offered early elaborations of Austria–Hungary’s new civilizational mission to the east and of it ideology of unity in diversity. (Judson 2016, 318) It is to be noted, however, that the new university did have the first professorships of Romanian and Ukrainian literature. What does multilingual mean? Like other cities in Central Europe—large cities like Budapest and Prague (where German was the first, then the second, language) (see Spector 2000), or smaller cities like Vilnius, Lviv, Riga, Danzig, Bucharest, Timisoara, Plovdiv, or Trieste—Czernowitz was intense- ly multilingual. What made Czernowitz different from other cities in Galicia, where Polish was dominant (for instance in Lemberg or Vilna), is that there was no one Christian national bourgeoisie which dominated in Czernowitz. Ukrainians (also known as Ruthenians) and Romanians were both a significant presence in the city, but the fact that neither was dominant in the city gave greater prominence and autonomy to the Jewish, German-speaking, population (Cor- bea-Hoisie cited in van Drunen 2013, I , 3, 34). The multilingualism of Czernowitz is today often remembered in a benign, nostalgic mode. Despite the violence of both World Wars and the repressive regime which ruled in the interwar period, memories of pre-World War II Czernowitz are often cast in a very rosy light—evoking the cosmopolitanism of a lost Mitteleuropa. Time and again, the character of Czernowitz’s language landscape is reiterated as a trademark symbol of the city—equivalent to a translation / 97  landmark or tourist attraction. City guidebooks, postcards, and similar popular materials praised the coexistence of separate but happily coexisting ethnic communities. This refrain was accentu- ated by pronouncements for instance by Rose Ausländer on the four-languaged town she grew up in (“Viersprachig verbrüderte Lieder in entzweiter Zeit,” Ausländer 1976, 72) or Paul Celan’s oft-quoted salute to his “city of books” (Hirsch and Spitzer 2010, 32), or the many memoirs by former inhabitants of the interwar period that evoke a long period of relative harmony—even against the backdrop of rising Romanian nationalism and anti-Semitism in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1908, a visitor to the city, Yitzchak Peretz (1852–1915 wrote “We stroll in the evening streets, and from dif- ferent windows the tones of different languages waft out, all dif- ferent kinds of folk music”, in (Olson 2010, 33). Peretz conveys what seems to be a conventional aural impression of the city—that of a harmonious music wafting through the air and captured with pleasure by the evening stroller. The myth of Czernowitz that issues from this image of happy polyphony has increasingly come to be critiqued in light of the easy idealizations it fosters. This image allowed German-speak- ing scholars, for example, to have Czernowitz stand as a site of pre-Nazi German pluralism, a safe haven in German historiogra- phy (Menninghaus 1999). It promoted a nostalgia industry which pitted a perfect “then” against the flawed “now,” though little proof was given beyond the same repeated phrases. A more nuanced por- trait of intercultural relations is therefore required. What kind of relations existed among the city’s various language communities? Following the outpouring of publications which, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, has opened research in this area of the world (see the excellent review of the literature by van Drunen 2013). I will bring translation studies into the discussion. How can the view from translation illuminate the field of language relations in the city? A first move is to view the city not as multilingual but as trans- lational. What is the sense of this distinction? Multilingualism calls up a space of pure diversity, a proliferation of tongues and of parallel conversations, without concern for the interactions among translation / these languages. The translational city looks for connections and convergences across language and communities, connections that 98 indicate direction (to and from which languages) and intensity (Si- mon 2012). It follows, then, that the translational city is not always a site of peaceful and friendly transactions. It includes the refus- al to translate, zones of silence and resistance. And so translation could be broadly defined as “writing at the intersection of languag- es,” writing under the influence of, in the company of, with and often against, other languages. A detailed examination of urban translation practices, such as those provided in Michaela Wolf’s pioneering study of translation in the Habsburg monarchy, distin- guishes between the formal practices of translation dictated by the Empire’s language laws and the myriad informal practices of trans- lation which were part of daily life—the domestic servants and ar- tisans who had to learn to serve in German, the tradespeople who had to learn German terminology, the informal exchanges through which children would be sent to neighboring villages of the empire to learn the languages across the border (Wolf 2012, 2015). Re- storing multilingual transactions to the streets of Habsburg cities, showing how these cities were in many ways precursors to today’s multilingual diasporic and postcolonial cities, Wolf’s study also confirms that translation practices were dominated by the power of German and therefore by translation into German. Literary trans- lation in Czernowitz also followed this pattern. Translation out of German, however, followed a different path. Whether in relation to Yiddish or Ukrainian, writers chose not so much to translate works in that direction as to abandon German in favor of a new writing language. Literary interactions Literary translation was a popular activity in Czernowitz, particu- larly in the interwar period. In her introduction to a book on Paul Celan, Amy Colin (1991) details the myriad activities of transla- tion which were undertaken by the participants in the active literary milieus of the city. These include Alfred Margul-Sperber’s Ger- man translations of British (T. S. Eliot), French (Apollinaire and Gérard de Nerval), and American (Robert Frost, Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and e e cum- mings) modernist poets as well as American Indian texts. Imman- uel Weissglas translated Eminescu’s famous poem “The Morning Star” into German and Grillparzer, Stifter, and parts of Goethe into translation / 99  Romanian. There was also indirect translation—with Romanian and Ukrainian poets influenced by German authors and inversely. Authors writing in German often used motifs from Romanian and Ukrainian folklore and translated important historical and literary texts from one language into the other (Colin 1991, 11). The writ- er who is at once exceptional and yet who best exemplifies the culture of mediation which issued from the multilingual matrix of Czernowitz is Paul Celan (Nouss 2010). Celan’s displacements from Czernowitz to Bucharest to Paris, his poetic memorialization of the Holocaust, his negation of the German language after the Nazis, his experiments across and through languages—these mark his work as uniquely expressive of the Czernowitz legacy, its hy- perconsciousness of language, of history and of the experience of literary mediation. An important trend of the early twentieth century saw many writers begin writing in German, then turn to their “national” lan- guage—Ukrainian, or Yiddish. Amy Colin gives the examples for Ukrainian of Felix Niemchevski, Osip Juril Fed’kovych, Alex- ander Popovich, and Isidor Vorobkevich, sometimes combining motifs from German Romanticism with images from Ruthenian folklore (Colin 1991, 11). To this list she might have added the im- portant Yiddish-language writers Itzik Manger and Eliezer Stein- barg—Manger, for instance, carried the German literary form of the ballad into Yiddish (Starck-Adler 2007, 124–132)—as well as that of the legendary Ukrainian writer Olha Kobylianska. It is to Kobylianska’s experience that I now turn to explore the language configuration of Czernowitz, before examining the work of anoth- er well-known Czernowitz poet, Rose Ausländer. Olha Kobylianska Born into a family who used German as their daily language (her father was a Ukrainian who worked for the Austrian administra- tion and her mother was of Polish origin), Kobylianska began her writing in German and in fact continued to keep a diary in German for her entire life. She was born and brought up in a small town not far from Czernowitz, but moved to the city when she was in her twenties. After “converting” to the Ukrainian national cause translation / in her late teens, she began to translate herself into Ukrainian— sometimes asking fellow authors to help her or receiving editorial 100 help from her publishers. Though she lived in a small corner of the Ukrainian cultural territory, Kobylianska was very soon in con- tact with the powerful standard-setters of the Ukrainian literary establishment. As a young woman writer she was much influenced by the opinions of these critics, and tried to change her style and subject matter to suit the left-wing populism that was considered appropriate. But Kobylianska was continually criticized for the strains of mysticism and intellectualism which were discerned in her writing. Though it would be those same qualities of modern- ism, exploration of the emotions of women and fascination with art which would endear her to later generations of readers and es- tablish her as a major figure in Ukrainian literature. Kobylianska’s writing is difficult to categorize, with its some- times incongruous mélange of feminism, intricate exploration of inner sentiments, portrayal of the cruelty of peasant life, and out- bursts of nationalist rhetoric. Critics are divided as to the elements of her work that are ironic or parodic and those that convey her true sentiments. Among her works, “Valse mélancolique” stands out as a truly radical portrait of women sharing a life together as artists. Like some of her other stories, this takes place in an ur- ban setting, recounting the daily life and conversations of women who have chosen to devote themselves to art rather than to a con- ventional married life. This story marked a radical beginning for Ukrainian literature. Kobylianska’s writings move between urban stories and rural depictions that are gothic in their intensity. In one story, a wife kills her husband and the children live in terror of being killed as well—though in the end the story shows sympathy for the woman browbeaten by the drunken husband. In fact Ko- bylianska knew both the urban and rural worlds, as she grew up in a small town, but travelled often to Czernowitz before settling there. She was involved in setting up the first women’s organiza- tion in the city—a radical organization from a feminist perspective but tied to the church and therefore suspect in the eyes of most young Ukrainian women who preferred to join left-wing social- ist organizations. Much of her writing associates “German” with high literature and a genteel life style. As a Ukrainian nationalist, she supported the Russians and then the Soviets as defenders of Ukrainian identity against the Austrians and then the Romanians, and when the Romanians took the city in 1942 she was condemned translation / 101  to death by hanging. She died before the hanging was to take place. There is a museum dedicated to her in Czernowitz and the main street, called the Herrengasse by the Austrians then by the name of a Romanian writer by the Romanians, is today named after her in Ukrainian Czernowitz. Kobylianska was influenced by George Sand but especially by Nietzsche, a writer she could read and quote in the original Ger- man—by contrast with her new compatriots who would have had only secondhand versions. Kobylianska was the first Ukrainian intellectual to introduce Nietzsche to Ukrainian readers, incorporating many of his philosophical concepts to her own philosophical system [. . .] Nietzsche’s association of myth with aesthetic creativity, his statement that myth is essential for the health of a culture, as well as his call on the “free spirits” to create this new “ruling idea” by which to live spoke directly to Ko- bylianska’s dissatisfaction with positivism, rationalism and socialism. (Ladygina 2013, 85) While many critics disparaged her use of “German technique,” which in this case included a combination of elements such as in- tellectualism, mysticism, and estheticism, the writer and feminist Lesia Ukrainka took the opposite position and praised its influence on Kobylianska’s writing: “It led you to recognize world literature, it transported you out into the broader world of ideas and art—this simply leaps out at once, when one compares your writing with that of the majority of Galicians” (de Haan 2006, 249). One could therefore refer to Kobylianska’s impressive output of novels and short stories in Ukrainian as translational writing—a product of the particular mélange of cultures particular to the Bu- kovina and Czernowitz. In turn, Kobylianska translated Ukrainian literature into German, including the works of Pchilka, Kobryns- ka, and Ukrainka (Franko 1998). In the case of Kobylianska as for the many other writers of Czernowitz, the multilingual milieu did not signify a close interrelationship with all the literary communi- ties but meant, rather, that writing occurred in the presence of other languages, in the consciousness of competing literary systems, and in this case with or against the power of German. translation / 102 Rose Ausländer In a prose fragment written in 1971, Rose Ausländer answers the question, “Why do I write?” with the following reply: Perhaps because I came into the world in Czernowitz, and because the world in Czer- nowitz came into me. That particular landscape. The particular people, fairy tales, and myths were in the air, one inhaled them. Czernowitz, with its four languages, was a city of muses that housed many artists, poets, and lovers of art, literature, and philosophy. (Cited in Morris 1998, 59) Rose Ausländer grew up and began her literary career in Czernowitz, where she was an active member of the Jewish Ger- man-language literary community, but left in her twenties to travel to the US. She spent the war years back in Czernowitz in hiding with her mother (she was one of the five thousand survivors of the ghetto, while 55,000 were murdered) and after another almost two decades of wandering finally settled in Dusseldorf in the 1960s. In the US after the war, Ausländer began a period during which she wrote poetry only in English. She later returned to the German language and has become a well-known German-language author. Her works are collected in seven volumes, much of which pub- lished after her death. The interweaving of diaspora and home, the long wanderings of much of her life, are reflected not only in the themes of her writing but in the consequences of the to-and-fro between English and German. In particular, her exposure to American modernism resulted in shifts in her formal expression, from a German-inspired lyricism to an American-inspired modernism. Ausländer is one of the sources most often quoted in favor of the image of a peaceful multilingual Czernowitz before the war. In the poem “Czernowitz Before the Second World War,” she writes: surrounded by beech forests. . . . . .Four languages in accord with each other spoiled the air Until the bombs fell the city breathed happily (Ausländer 1977, 6: 348) translation / 103  Indeed, Ausländer continued to praise the city of her birth and upbringing, despite the horrors she experienced during the war. Perhaps because she was always able to keep a distance between fatherland and motherland: My fatherland is dead they have buried it in fire. I live in my motherland word1 (quoted in Morris 1998, 49) This motherland is German, the language in which she wrote all her life, except for a period of eight years, from 1948 to 1956, when, she says, she “found herself” writing only in English. She was living in New York, a city where she had previously spent several years during the 1920s, and perhaps contemplating a con- version to an American existence. But this period turned out to be only a hiatus in her writing life, as she later returned to Europe and to the German language—and most of the English poems were dis- covered only after her death. Yet these years in English introduce a significant translational element into Ausländer’s esthetic, a more precise materialization of the Czernowitz multilingualism, and one that gave greater heft to the name she seems to have chosen to keep as hers—the name which belonged to the husband of a short-lived marriage: Ausländer or outsider. Rose Ausländer owned two suit- cases that she carried through her lifelong wanderings, and identi- fied fully with her Jewish identity as someone who has wandered for hundreds of years, “from Word to Word.” English was not German, the language of the war. Ausländer knew Paul Celan from Czernowitz, and met him several times later on her return trips to Europe—and she surely shared his sense of the contamination of the German language. English was also the language of her daily life in New York, of her workplaces there, and of the modernist poets she read and admired. Ausländer met Marianne Moore at a writer’s conference in New York in 1956, and in addition to Moore Ausländer was drawn to the work of Wal- lace Stevens and e e cummings. These sources allowed her to write translation / 1 Mein Vaterland ist tot/sie haben es begraben/im Feuer/Ich lebe/in meinem Mutterland/Wort. 104 poetry after years of silence and a personal crisis brought on by the death of her mother in 1947. Ausländer could return to poetry only through the oblique angle of another language—one which had not been part of the “old world” configuration. In 1956 she began again to write in German, putting together the shattered pieces of her life through a renewed belief in the mother tongue. The poetry becomes more angular, less lyrical, she says that the stars had taken on a new configuration, the flow- ered words had faded. She uses fewer adjectives, shorter lines, no rhyme or punctuation, the isolated word taking on new meaning. The mother tongue takes the place of the mother, the poem a place of refuge. But, as Lesley Morris argues, Ausländer’s “return” to German is less a one-way and definitive embrace of the authentic tongue than a renewed practice of translation, as she brings back to Ger- many the long experience of exile, experiencing new forms of dis- placement within the German-speaking world (Morris 1998, 55). The sheer number of Ausländer’s poems, which are normally only some twelve lines long, suggests an esthetic of incompletion, of relentless recommencing. Ausländer translated some of her English poems into German, just as she also translated at vari- ous times in her career the poems of others into German or En- glish—Yiddish poems by Itzik Manger (1901–1969) into German and German poems by Else Lasker-Schüler and Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) into English. The fragmented nature of Ausländer’s various exiles and returns points to a kind of permanent diasporic state, a Niemandsland of exile, where being at home will always mean being far away from home. Ausländer’s diasporic life be- gan before the Second World War, but her poetry was irrevocably marked by her experiences as a Jew during that period and by the wanderings which were a result of the destruction of Jewish life in Czernowitz. The imaginative world of Ausländer is deeply embedded in the originary crucible of languages in Czernowitz and marked es- pecially by one enormous fact: the sudden reversal of meaning attached to the German language. For this city, so tied to the myth of the “imaginary West in the East,” German had been elevated to the status of a religion—an affiliation so intense as to remain strong even during the Romanianization of the interwar years. translation / 105  Raised in the adoration of Deutschtum, Czernowitz authors were forced to see German undergo a spectacular transvaluation of val- ues—and therefore to revise their relationship to the language. For Ausländer, following Paul Celan, this meant a mediated relation to German, one which showed the “home” language to be partially alien. Conclusion The meaning of Czernowitz as a city at the edge of empire is dom- inated by the history of the significance given to German. The pre- eminence of the German language, lasting far into the twentieth century, was central to the writing lives of both Kobylianska and Ausländer. The historical events which shaped their relationship to this language were, however, of very different natures. Kobylians- ka’s literary imagination was shaped in German, and she carried into the Ukrainian language the sensibility she had first acquired in that language—both the popular sentimental novels she had read as a youth and the exalted ideas she took from Nietzsche. At the same time, her choice to write in Ukrainian was a decision to sep- arate herself from the German sphere and participate in the con- struction of a new Ukrainian sensibility. This turn to nationalism on the contested site of the border city expresses the conflictual nature of language relations in the border city. That Kobylians- ka, however, continued to keep a diary in German throughout her life, testifies to the ambiguities and split allegiances of the private sphere—where translation became a permanent condition. Ausländer’s relationship to German was shaped by the Jewish literary milieu of Czernowitz, by her personal experiences of di- aspora (before and after the Second World War) and by the Holo- caust. Ausländer is one of relatively few Jews to have lived through the Holocaust and to have continued to use German as a literary language after World War II. (Among the best-known exceptions are Paul Celan, as noted, and Marcel Reich-Ranicki.) It is surely significant that both Celan and Ausländer are from Czernowitz. Certainly her understanding of that language and its cultural affil- iations were tempered by the multilingual matrix of that city, and the translational relationships out of which it evolved. Her turn translation / away from German, and her subsequent return, her wanderings and her final settling in Dusseldorf, testify to a difficult relation- 106 ship to language and place—one which nevertheless allowed her to celebrate her past in the borderlands of the empire. Kobylianska and Ausländer would not have known one anoth- er in Czernowitz. They belonged to different milieus and different generations (Kobylianska was born in 1863; Ausländer in 1901), though Ausländer would have heard of the more famous Koby- lianska, her growing literary fame, her persecution and death in 1942. Their careers illustrate the parallel paths followed by the literatures of the city, each enclosed within its respective liter- ary languages and traditions. Even today, they are unlikely to be found in the same anthologies or literary histories. Nevertheless, both writers defined themselves with and against the German lan- guage—along the lines of tension that animated the language life of their common border city. translation / 107  References Ausländer, Rose. 1976. Aschenregen / die Spur deines Namens: Gedichte und Prosa. Volume 4. Edited by Helmut Braun. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. ––––––. 1977. Selected poems [of] Rose Ausländer. Translated by Ewald Osers. Lon- don: London Magazine Editions. ––––––. 1984–1990. Gesammelte Werke in sieben Bänden. Edited by Helmut Braun. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. ––––––. 1995. Mother Tongue. Translated by Jean Boase-Beier and Anthony Vivis. Todmorden: Arc Publications. Buzzati, Dino. (1940) 1989. Il deserto dei Tartari. Milan: Mondadori. Cavafy, C. 1976. The Complete Poems of Cavafy. Translated by Rae Dalven. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Coetzee, J. M. 1982. Waiting for the Barbarians. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Colin, Amy. 1991. Paul Celan: Holograms of Darkness. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. ––––––. 2006. “Czernowitz/Cernăuți/Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi/Czerniowce: A Test- ing Ground for Pluralism.” In Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 2006, 57–76. DOI: 10.1075/chlel.xx.12col. Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer. 2002. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Some Theoretical Reflections. New York: American Coun- cil of Learned Societies, Occasional Paper No. 52. Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer, eds. 2006. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centu- ries. Vol. II. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. In particular, “Cities as sites of hybrid literary identity and multicultural production,” 9–212. de Haan, Francisca, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds. 2006. Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries. 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Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Roth, J. 2002. Weights and Measures. Translated by D. Le Vay. London: P. Owen. Simon, S. 2012. Cities in Translation. Intersections of Language and Memory. Lon- don: Routledge. Spector, Scott. 2000. Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle. Berkeley: University of California Press. Starck-Adler, Astrid. 2007. “Multiculturalisme et multilinguisme à Czernowitz. L’exemple d’Itzik Manger.” Études germaniques 62 (1): 121–132. Stenberg, Peter. 1991. Journey to Oblivion. The End of the East European Yiddish and German Worlds in the Mirror of Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Thum, Gregor. 2013. “Megalomania and Angst. The nineteenth-century mythiciza- tion of Germany’s Eastern Borderlands.” In Shatterzone of Empires, Coexis- tence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Border- lands. Edited by Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. 42–60. van Drunen, Hieronymus Franciscus. 2013. “A sanguine bunch.” Regional identifi- cation in Habsburg Bukovina, 1774–1919. University of Amsterdam PhD thesis. Available online at http://dare.uva.nl/record/1/397355. Accessed November 4, 2014. Wolf, Michaela. 2012. Die vielsprachige Seele Kakaniens. Übersetzen und Dolmet- schen in der Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918. Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau. ––––––. 2015. The Habsburg Monarchy’s Many-Languaged Soul. Translating and interpreting, 1848–1918. Translated by Kate Sturge. Amsterdam: John Benja- mins. translation / 109  Sherry Simon is a professor in the French Department at Concordia University. She has published widely in the areas of literary, intercultural and translation studies, most recently exploring the cultural history of linguistically divided cities. Among her pub- lications are Translating Montreal. Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (2006) and Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (2012), both of which have appeared in French translation. She has edited or co-edited numerous volumes, in- cluding Translation Effects: The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture (with K. Mezei and L. von Flotow), (2014) and Speaking Memory. How Translation Shapes City Life (forthcoming MQUP). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec. She was a Killam Research Fellow (2009-11) and in 2010 received the Prix André-Laurendeau from l’Association francophone pour le savoir (ACFAS). translation / 110 

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Translating Ruins Alfred Mac Adam Barnard College-Columbia University, USA Abstract: This essay explores the relationship between a neo-Latin poem by Ianus Vitalis and three vernacular sonnets, versions of the Latin original, by Du Bellay, Spenser, and Francisco de Quevedo. The purpose of the essay is to ponder the problems and choices that the translators had to resolve in order to refashion Vitalis. The essay further seeks to show the strangeness of Vitalis’ poem and how his translators effetively created three original poems. This is an exploration of translation, more concerned with that problematic art than with the history of the European sonnet. Writing in 1932 about the numerous English versions of Homer, Jorge Luis Borges asserts—perhaps ironically though perhaps not—that the relationship between translations and originals de- fines the relationship between any text, its myriad literary sources, and the experiences an author assimilates to produce it. Unlike so- called originals, translations reveal rather than hide their sources: “El modelo propuesto a su imitación es un texto visible, no un laberinto inestimable de proyectos pretéritos o la acatada tentación momentánea de una facilidad”1 (Borges 1965, 105). Borges denies original composition, declaring all texts to be translations and writing (like reading) nothing more than trans- lating. This anti-Romantic theory of literary creation makes the juxtaposition of originals and translations complex: we are no lon- ger comparing the original with an imitation (the translation) but actually comparing coequals. Fair enough, but even though Borges deals with English trans- lations of Homer—the paucity of Spanish translations making his 1 “The model proposed for imitation is a visible text, not an incalculable labyrinth of past projects or the yielded-to, momentary temptation of an opportune insight.” Translation mine. translation / 111  essay impossible to write—he does not discuss the role played by nationality and national language in translation. Why did the En- glish, century after century, feel the need to translate and retranslate Homer? And what was the impact of these translations on the his- tory of English literature? If Borges had elected to study the many translations of Don Quixote into English, he would have reached the same conclusions about the relationship between translation and original; but he might also have noted that the history of the novel in English was changed because of Cervantes. Literary history abounds in translations or imitations that some- how acquire the status of originals. For example, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s La verdad sospechosa, from about 1634, is the basis for Corneille’s Le Menteur (1644), which in turn spawns Carlo Goldo- ni’s Il Bugiardo (1750) and Samuel Foote’s The Lyar (1762). Ruiz de Alarcón engenders not just translations and imitations but an entire theatrical tradition in four languages and four cultures, each of which reshapes the original to national tastes. This idea, that translators would deliberately accommodate a work to a national language, appears in Alastair Fowler’s Times Literary Supplement review (April 27, 2012) of a new edition of Gavin Douglas’s 1513 Scots translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. The translation crystalizes the language into which it is translated, much in the way the King James Bible or Luther’s translation consolidated English or Ger- man. Less important in terms of fixing a national language, but equally fascinating in terms of the relationship between original and translation are three sonnets, freestanding works of art in them- selves, which directly or indirectly derive from the epigram De Roma (1552) by Ianus Vitalis (1485–1560): Qui Romam in media quaeris novus advena Roma, Et Romae in Roma nil reperis media, Aspice murorum moles, praeruptaque saxa, Obrutaque horrenti vasta theatra situ: Haec sunt Roma. Viden velut ipsa cadaver, tantae Urbis adhuc spirent imperiosa minas. Vicit ut haec mundum, nixa est se vincere; vicit, A se non victum ne quid in orbe foret. translation / Nunc victa in Roma Roma illa invicta sepulta est, Atque eadem victrix victaque Roma fuit. Albula Romani restat nunc nominis index, 112  Quinetiam rapidis fertur in aequor aquis, Disce hinc, quid possit fortuna; inmota labascunt, Et quae perpetuo sun agitate manent. (McFarlane 1980, 24–26)2 Vitalis’ poem invites the recently arrived (novus advena) visi- tor who has come to Rome seeking ancient Rome to learn a moral lesson: Rome is now nothing but ruins. All that endures is, paradox- ically, the Tiber: The river flowing like time itself remains, while the ancient capital of the world is disjecta membra. The elegiac tone of Vitalis’ poem, enhanced by the repeated “o” in Rome, reflects the ancient fusion of elegy and epigram—which is to say that by Vitalis’ time, a neo-Latin epigram was simply a short poem. It might be of intellectual rather than emotional cast, though there is nothing consistent or absolute about its subject. Like the sonnet, the epigram could treat any theme, although concision is one of its principal features: the verbal economy of Latin would be an ideal for Renaissance vernacular poets to strive for, especially in sonnets. That Vitalis’ poem is comprised of fourteen lines is a fascinat- ing irony. A poem in Latin on mutability that seeks to avoid the mu- tability of vernacular tongues uses a structure that to Renaissance readers would immediately recall the sonnet. De Roma is an open invitation to vernacular translation, and Malcolm C. Smith (1977) lists over a dozen versions of the epigram. Not all are sonnets, but those under consideration here adapt Vitalis to that compact form. The first of the three, a translation of a translation, is Edmund Spenser’s version of Joachim du Bellay, which appears in his ap- propriately titled sonnet series The Ruines of Rome (1591). Spenser obtains that alliteration by not translating the title of du Bellay’s sonnet sequence, Les Antiquités de Rome (1558)—he changes it utterly. Antiquités are ancient, but ruines might be recent. While the name Rome itself implies antiquity, the sack of Rome in 1527 (and still in living memory in the second half of the sixteenth century) by the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V certainly created modern ruins. But setting aside historical anecdote and focusing 2 McFarlane’s version of Vitalis’ epigram is accompanied by Thomas Heywood’s version, from The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1637). Readers wondering about possible sources for Vitalis’ epigram might consider an idea in James Nohrnberg’s 1976 The Analogy of The Faerie Queene. Nohrnberg suggests two passages in Isaiah (34:14 and 13:21–22): “Both of the Isaiah passages would impress a poet on literary grounds alone; they are supreme in their kind, which is the elegy over fallen buildings, letterature delle rovine. . .” (236). translation / 113  exclusively on du Bellay’s words, it is clear that Spenser’s use of ruins is a transformation, a deviation from the original for rhetorical effect. Spenser had been translating du Bellay since before 1569, when he published translations of both Petrarch and du Bellay. Herbert Grierson, in the introduction to his seminal anthology Metaphysi- cal Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (1921), the inspiration for T.S. Eliot’s essay “The Metaphysical Po- ets,” wryly observes: “Over all the Elizabethan sonnets, in greater or less measure, hangs the suggestion of translation or imitation.” (xviii) We may confirm his statement by looking at sonnet number 3 (in the 1678 edition): Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome her seekest, And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all, These same old walls, old arches, which thou seest, Old palaces, is that, which Rome men call. Behold what wreak, what ruine, and what wast, And how that she, which with her mighty powre Tam’d all the world, hath tam’d her self at last, The Pray of time, which all things doth devowre. Rome now of Rome is th’ only funerall, And only Rome, of Rome hath victory; Neought save Tyber, hastning to his fall Remains of all: O worlds inconstancy! That which is firm, doth flit and fall away, And that is flitting, doth abide and stay. (Spenser 1679, 161) A suitably stern sonnet charged with a chastened Renaissance sense of fleeting time (wherever I turn my eyes I see nothing but death and decay), the ephemeral nature of all human creation, and of course the “mutability” so important to the eponymous “Two Cantos of Mutability” at the end of The Fairie Queene. Rome is absent from the “mutability cantos,” but Rome in this sonnet is a memento mori, so it is no wonder the poem figures among many similar poems in Spenser’s Complaints Containing Sundry Small Poems of the Worlds Vanity (1581) “as the Printer gathered them up” (as he says in the 1678 edition) to capitalize on the success of The Fairie Queene. translation / At the same time, is Rome a suitable subject for an English Protestant poet? Among the three poets scrutinized here only one is 114 a Protestant, whose only argument, leaving aside the desire to trans- late du Bellay, could be that the ruins of Rome are a fitting subject for a humanist lamentation. By the same token, the subject virtually disappears during the Baroque, just when we might expect to see it deployed with fervor. None of the poems in Jean Rousset’s 1968 Anthologie de la Poésie Baroque Française exploits this subject (although it could also be said that the same holds true for Grier- son’s anthology). So the wars of religion, the English Revolution, the Reformation, and the Counterreformation efface Rome’s ruins from poetry, although they turn up again during the Romantic era, reflecting the Romantics’ antiquarian side. The next case is Francisco de Quevedo’s 1648 collection, patri- otically titled Parnasso Español, monte en dos cumbres dividido, con las nueve musas castellanas, donde se contienen Poesías de don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas (literally, Spanish Parnassus, mountain divided into two peaks, with the nine Castilian muses, which contains poems by don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas). No ruins or antiquities for Quevedo, just rockribbed Castilian poetry in- spired by Castilian muses—who, it seems, could inspire translation as well as original creation. We smile, but Quevedo’s patriotism reminds us that each of these sonnets brings the subject of Roman ruins into a national literary tradition by transmuting it into a na- tional literary form. The title usually attached to the first poem in this collection is “A Roma sepultada en sus Ruinas” (To Rome Buried in her Ruins): Buscas en Roma a Roma, ¡oh peregrino!, Y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas: Cadáver son las que ostentó murallas, Y Tumba de sí propio el Aventino. Yace donde Reinaba el Palatino, Y limadas del tiempo las medallas, Más se muestran destrozo a las batallas De las edades que blasón latino. Sólo el Tibre quedó, cuya corriente, Si Ciudad la regó, ya sepultura La llora con funesto son doliente. ¡Oh Roma, en tu grandeza, en tu hermosura Huyó lo que era firme, y solamente Lo fugitivo permanece y dura! (de Quevedo 1968, 260–261) translation / 115  The utterly Baroque de Quevedo is much more specific in his Roman references, and to the Tiber mentioned by du Bellay and Spenser he adds the Aventine and the Palatine, two of Rome’s seven hills, symbols of an antiquity that precedes republican or imperial Rome, here turned, respectively, into a grave and a corpse. Joachim du Bellay, in his 1558 collection Les Antiquités de Rome, is the progenitor of Spenser’s sonnet and the likely source (along with Vitalis) of Quevedo’s. Du Bellay’s title curiously echoes the title of Andrea Palladio’s 1554 book Le Antichità di Roma, though the similarity could hardly be more ironic: Where du Bellay is concerned with the ravages of time, Palladio stresses the enduring grandeur of Roman architecture. His text contradicts the lesson of the three poems and defines the difference between a humanist literary tradition that more often than not found itself weeping over the loss of the classical past—whatever that meant for them—and an architectural present with Palladio endeavoring to use the Roman past (its architecture specifically) as a steppingstone to the future. This sense of the past as a foundation could not be more differ- ent from the view of du Bellay: Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome Et rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois, Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcs que tu vois, Et ces vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme. Voy quel orgueil, quelle ruine: & comme Celle qui mist le monde sous ses loix, Pour donter tout, se donta quelquefois, Et devint proie au temps, que tout consomme. Rome de Rome est le seul monument, Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement. Le Tybre seul, qui vers la mer s’enfuit, Reste de Rome. O mondaine inconstance! Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit, Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance. (du Bellay 1970, 5–6) All three sonnets are simultaneously the same and different, translations and originals, and it is here we begin to see the differ- ence between translation and adaptation, though maintaining that translation / distinction is by no means easy. Du Bellay recommends imitation in his 1549 Défense et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse (as 116 does Sir Philip Sidney in his 1595 Apology), and it may be that we should understand Spenser more in the mode of imitation rather than literal translation. Spenser made his mark on English prosody with the Spenserian sonnet (ABAB BCBC CDCD EE), but in rendering du Bellay he falls back on a standard English model: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Du Bellay’s rhyme scheme reflects the sonnet of the French, Span- ish, and Italian worlds: ABBA ABBA CCD EDE, with two tercets used variously to summarize or expand the thoughts expressed in the quatrains. The lapidary couplet of the English sonnet makes it radically different from the continental sonnet whose often-inter- laced tercets are an invitation to enhanced complexity rather than concision. So du Bellay, by using enjambment to link his tercets and recapitulate the rest of the poem, also, simultaneously, imi- tates the course of the Tiber as it winds through Rome. Spenser on the other hand must reach a moral conclusion, which he musically reinforces with alliteration: “That which is firm, doth flit and fall away, / And that is flitting, doth abide and stay.” “Flit” applied to stone buildings seems an unlikely metaphor, and “flitting” applied to a river seems odd. This is so even though the OED includes shifting position or passing away among the verb’s early meanings because flit implies flight and speed, which the time involved in the erosion of stone excludes. Du Bellay’s compressed ten rather than fourteen-syllable verses “Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit, / Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance” make a more sparing use of alliteration, just enough to create an ironic juxtaposition of “ferme” with the verb “fuit,” reinforced by the repetition of “temps” to mark the difference be- tween that which is destroyed by time and that which, though liq- uid, resists the corrosion of time. But alliteration and internal rhyme provide the musical lamentation in both du Bellay and Spenser: as in Vitalis’ epigram, the “o” in Rome is repeated so often and echoed in so many other “o”s that the entire poem sounds like a dirge. (This musicality raises another conundrum: we know how French, English, and Spanish sound, but for most of us Latin is a visual language and when spoken pronounced with the speaker’s own national accent: how would Vitalis’ hexameters “sound” to a Frenchman?) Du Bellay’s poem resorts to French commonplaces—for ex- translation / 117  ample the lamentation “O mondaine inconstance!” (not in Vitalis), which Spenser translates into English commonplaces “O worlds inconstancy!” Du Bellay’s disillusioned senior lectures the “nou- veau venu,” the novice who has come to Rome seeking the Rome of antiquity and finds only ruins, as if the traveler were ignorant of Roman history since the fifth century and as if no building had been erected or destroyed since then. Spenser uses “stranger” to obtain the same effect—the stranger or foreigner versus the experienced or native inhabitant—but to modern ears the word suggests a person unknown to the speaker rather than to the city. The problem of how to translate “nouveau venu” goes back to De Roma. Here, as in Mikolaj Sep-Szarzynski’s epigram (in Delitia italorum poetarum 1608), the novice is referred to as the “novus advena.” When the dramatist Thomas Heywood (in his 1637 The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells) translates Vitalis’ poem, he coins the awkward “New Stranger” to translate “novus advena.” Heywood needs twenty-eight couplets to translate Vitalis’ fourteen Latin verses. Lost in Spenser’s translation is du Bellay’s manipulation of the concept so important to the Hispanic baroque: “desengaño,” the loss of illusion that comes with moral experience, when the scales fall from our eyes and we see the fallen world for what it is. This sense is fundamental to the sonnet because of the innocence–expe- rience relationship between the newcomer and the speaker. Quevedo, perhaps reflecting a Counterreformation sensibility, transforms du Bellay’s “nouveau venu,” Spenser’s “stranger,” and Vitalis’ “novus advena” into a “peregrino.” The word had various meanings in seventeenth-century Spanish: as an adjective, it sug- gests the bizarre or exquisite; as a noun, it may mean a traveler abroad or a pilgrim traveling to a shrine. Quevedo’s choice of the term creates an ambiguity: Catholic pilgrims would visit Rome, the heart of the Church, but they would certainly not be looking for an- cient Rome, and in fact the ruin of the ancient city would constitute a triumph, malgré Saint Augustine, of Christianity over paganism. So “peregrino” here cannot be a pilgrim and is, once again, a senti- mental humanist who for some reason thinks contemporary Rome ought to look like ancient Rome. translation / The second verse becomes more precise in Quevedo. Du Bellay says, “Et rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois” and 118 Spenser follows: “And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all.” Spenser’s “at all” is simply an emphatic line-filler, as is du Bellay’s use of “n’aperçois” rather than a simple “see.” Quevedo’s visitor comes looking for Rome in Rome and doesn’t find it—“Y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas”—rather than du Bellay or Spenser’s stranger who can’t perceive it. In the third and fourth verses of the first quatrain, Quevedo Latinizes his word order in a daring use of hyperbaton: “Cadáver son las que ostentó murallas, / Y Tumba de sí propio el Aventino. The surprise of a singular noun followed by a plural verb obliges us to see the verse rather than hear it: “cadáver” starts the poetic clause and “murallas” ends it, but what Quevedo wants us to see is the equivalence: the walls are a corpse. The effect would, of course, be lost if the phrase were regularized: Las murallas que ostentó son cadáver (the walls it boasted are a corpse). The next verse follows suit, with “tumba” and “Aventino” thrown into opposition. The second quatrain, much more restrained syntactically, simply amplifies the first. The Palatine lies supine where it once ruled, the medallions, carved in relief but now worn away by time, look more like the wreckage of the battles of the ages than Latin glory. The poem loses energy but recovers it in the intertwined tercets. Quevedo innovates daringly by abruptly changing tenses. Where the quatrains are all in the present tense, the first tercet in- troduces a past preterit, which, curiously, makes little sense here: “Sólo el Tibre quedó” (only the Tiber remained), which, if it once bathed (regó) the city, now weeps for it as a grave. Again, Quevedo uses his first-and-last words to achieve drama: city is played off against grave. And the Tiber (none of the translations uses Vitalis’ alternative Albula for the Tiber), now back in the present tense, weeps with a “funereal, dolorous sound”. Quevedo uses the final tercet much in the way Spenser would use his final couplet. He resorts to apostrophe, addressing Rome (and turning away from the “peregrino” in the first verse) to point out that what was solid has fled and only that which is fugitive re- mains and endures. The phrase “en tu grandeza, en tu hermosura” (in your grandeur, in your beauty) is amplification, a delaying tactic that helps us savor the antithesis of a hardness (stone) that disap- pears, while what remains is flowing water. Naturally, the final verb translation / 119  “dura” (endures) echoes the adjective “duro” (hard) so, in enduring, the water acquires a lexical hardness. Compared with the first-person sonnet “Salmo 17,” (“Miré los muros de la Patria mía”), which approaches the tension of “meta- physical” poets like Donne in its amalgamation of ideas and feel- ings, Quevedo’s version of du Bellay’s sonnet seems fraught with syntactical flourishes that weaken rather than strengthen the poem. And “Salmo 17” is as much an imitation or translation as his re- working of du Bellay since it derives directly from Seneca’s Epistle XII to Lucilius. Quevedo’s concluding address to Rome, the most striking innovation within the framework of the two “translations” of du Bellay (and Vitalis) distracts the reader much in the way a bad detective writer’s introduction of a new character late in the plot is a nasty trick. The subject of the three poems, the moral lesson to be learned from a consideration of Rome’s ruins, simply lost relevance in the seventeenth century—Quevedo himself does not seem to have re- visited the city in any of his sonnets, and it is conspicuously absent from the sonnets of his rival Luis de Góngora. The Renaissance, humanist tradition of lamenting the lost past was lost, especially because of the prime importance of Rome as capital of the Catholic Counterreformation. The three sonnets here provide a rare opportunity to see three great poets working at translation. Du Bellay fits Vitalis into a well- wrought sonnet with compressed ten-syllable verses that Spenser, overcoming the vast difference between two sonnet traditions, transforms into a perfect English sonnet, while Quevedo seeks to infuse it with the glitter of the Spanish Baroque. Quevedo, perhaps, is the most successful because of his greater specificity and his bold use of antithesis. And yet we sense, as we do not in Quevedo’s reworking of Seneca into a Spanish sonnet with hendecasyllabic verses, the working-through of an exercise, that du Bellay is refit- ting a shopworn Renaissance conceit, that Spenser is trying, suc- cessfully, to transform a continental sonnet into an English sonnet while retaining the sense of the original. Quevedo seems to have attempted to improve on his sources, and may well have done so, even though he is recasting material long out of fashion. translation / Du Bellay, Spenser, and Quevedo, all working with Vitalis’ ep- igram as a distant source, produce new poems appropriate for their 120 language and culture, but none replicates De Roma in a vernacular language. Borges’s conclusion about the many translations of Ho- mer into English rings true here as well: “The concept of the de- finitive text belongs only to religion or fatigue.” Translation means commitment to time and place and like the Tiber flows infinitely. translation / 121  References Borges, Jorge Luis. (1932) 1965. “Las versiones homéricas.” In Discusión. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores. de Quevedo, Francisco. 1968. Obras Completas I, Poesía Original. Edited by José Manuel Blecua. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta. du Bellay, Joachim. (1558) 1970. Œuvres poétiques II. Les Antiquitez de Rome. Edited by Henri Chamard and Henri Weber. Paris: Librairie Nizet. Grierson, Herbert, ed. 1921. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Cen- tury. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McFarlane, I. D. 1980. Renaissance Latin Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nohrnberg, James. 1976. The Analogy of The Faerie Queene. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rousset, Jean. 1968. Anthologie de la Poésie Baroque Française. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin. Smith, Malcolm C. 1977. “Looking for Rome in Rome: Janus Vitalis and his Disci- ples.” In Revue de littérature comparée. Octobre-Decembre, 51 (4): 510-527. Spenser, Edmond. 1679. The Works of that Famous English Poet, Mr. Edmond Spenser. London: Printed by Henry Hills for Jonathan Edwin at the Three Roses in Ludgate Street. Alfred Mac Adam, professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College-Colum- bia University, has translated works by, among others, Carlos Fuentes, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Volpi, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Fernando Pessoa. His most recent critical essay, on Fernando Pessoa, appears in the Cambridge Guide to Autobiography. translation / 122 

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Interview: translation speaks to Lydia Liu translation assistant editor Carolyn Shread met with Lydia Liu in New York City on the occasion of the annual Nida Research Symposium on September 25, 2015. The theme of the symposium was “Untranslatability and Cultural Complexity” and Dr. Liu gave a fascinating and timely talk on “Translation Theory in the Age of Digital Media” with a response by Mary Louise Pratt. The other speakers at the symposium were Michael Wood and Philip Lewis. After the day of talks, Dr. Liu found time to sit down to answer the questions below, some of which were prompted by her article on “The Eventfulness of Translation: Temporality, Difference and Competing Universals” that appeared in Issue 4 of translation. It was an honor and pleasure to continue the conversation in this way, weaving together thoughts from the panels and Liu’s innovative approach to translation. It was particularly encouraging to hear about how, having distanced herself from translation after a perceived lack of receptiveness to her initial ideas, notably the proposal of a guest/ host paradigm as an alternative or supplement to the source/target dichotomy, when she published Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulation (1999), Liu has since returned to the field. As someone positioned within the U.S. academy with an Asian perspective and understanding of the history of translation, Liu’s contributions are especially valuable for offering cross-cultural perspectives on translation which, ironically, can be so very culturally constrained. In her research, Liu is perhaps most compelling in her dissections of the ways in which translation has the power to decenter canons and question imperialism and its effects. Her analyses draw on historical context and material culture to produce new and exciting insights, for instance in her comments here on the history of scripts and their relation to translation practices and effects. This interview acts as a hyphen between Liu’s proposals published in the Politics issue and her forthcoming article that will appear in Issue 7. CS: In addition to your position as Professor in the Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, USA, you are also founding direc- tor of the Tsinghua–Columbia Center for Translingual and Transcultural Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. I’m intrigued by the title of this center: do “translingual” and “transcultural” exhaust the concept of translation for you? Do they overlap with translation? By discussing these two terms, I’m hoping we might have an insight into how you conceive of translation. LL: The center’s name indicates a certain direction of my work that dates from twenty years ago when I published Translin- gual Practice, which thinks about a national literature though its multilingual, multicultural connections. It was not just an attempt to critique nationalism: I tried to demonstrate that if you were to take out all the so-called “foreign” elements from modern Chinese, you would not be able to speak. That is the translation / 123  magnitude of what I was trying to point out—not only at the level of vocabulary, at the level of syntax, but also at the level of genre, intellectual discourse, political theory. . . CS: And at the level of the script? LL: And at the level of the script, too, because in the twentieth century there were a number of major campaigns to eliminate Chinese characters and replace them with Roman scripts. The “Latinization” or “Romanization” movements were happening all around the world, including in neighboring Korea and Ja- pan. In colonial Vietnam they succeeded because the French crafted their Romanization system so as to get rid of the Chi- nese characters used to write Vietnamese. That move was rep- licated in China. There was a point in the twentieth century, in the 1920s and 1930s, when all progressive intellectuals were in favor of Romanization. This would have led to the elimination of Chinese characters, cutting the writing system off from its own history, scholarship, and literature in the same way that Turkish nationalist language reform succeeded in eliminating Arabic script, replacing it with the Roman script. The failure of the Romanization movement in China preserved Chinese liter- ature and its history of writing, but this doesn’t mean that there was no room to incorporate foreign words and neologisms— often via Japanese—into the Chinese script. CS: Often these types of movements emerge because there is a technological shift. Was this linked to a particular moment in history where a certain technology was driving this change? LL: Yes, absolutely. First it was the telegraph, which implied the need to do something about the Chinese script because there is too much information to send, and the telegraphic code re- quired simplification. But more importantly it was the intro- duction of the typewriter that put a lot of pressure on all East Asian societies to reform their scripts. It is interesting that the misrecognition of the typewriter and its limitation led to polit- translation / ical campaigns that targeted the native script in China, Japan, and many other places as a backward writing system. Progress 124  meant forward looking, efficiency, rapid literacy and educa- tion, so the national elite believed that their language or their writing systems were backward and must be replaced. They overlooked the limitation of the typewriter and focused on the perceived constraints of the writing system. In hindsight, it was the technology of the typewriter that was backward since it was incapable of processing nonlinear characters. They went so far as to design a number of models for Japanese and Chi- nese, but these were clumsy. In the 1970s, the Japanese mo- nopolized the manufacture of the fax machine, which could reproduce both graphs and letters. The fax machine made them realize for the first time that it was not the writing system—it was the backwardness of the machine itself that was to blame! The typewriter was too simple to reproduce something that the fax machine could easily capture, and now, of course, the com- puter can do even better. Today, nobody would even bring up Romanization issues in China or elsewhere because the com- puter is so advanced in terms of its input methods and its abili- ty to process large quantities of information, whether visual or alphabetical. CS: My second question is about how you have recently been framing translation as a political problem in your work, notably in your article in the Politics and Translation issue (Issue 4) of this journal. Could you talk about the way politics contributes to the way you think about translation? LL: I have always been unhappy with the way translation studies have been conceptualized. From the mid-1990s I distanced my- self from translation studies because I thought it was too con- straining—for instance, the source/target language distinction which I tried to refashion as a distinction between host language and guest language in Translingual Practice—but nobody seemed to pay attention. Then, when I did my research on the Opium Wars, especially treaties and international law, and saw how central translation was to imperial politics, it became clear to me that translation could provide an illuminating angle for un- derstanding international politics. For instance, one of the chap- ters in The Clash of Empires looks at how the British included an article in the 1858 Sino-British treaty at the Second Opium War, translation / 125  Article 51, which outlaws a Chinese character. It’s pronounced yi—at that time written as i, Romanizing it—and it is the Chi- nese character that the British translated as “barbarian,” arguing that the Chinese called the English barbarians on the evidence of that character. After establishing the translation or the semantic equivalence which I dispute in my book, they relied on the un- equal treaty to forbid the Chinese to use the character. Of course, they did not outlaw the other side of the equivalence, the English word “barbarian” that they continued to apply to the Chinese. A fascinating story, isn’t it? Amitav Ghosh’s recent novel Flood of Fire draws on the research from my book and retells this sto- ry of translation from the Opium War. I sometimes wonder if there are any similar legal prohibitions against other people’s words elsewhere in international relations, other attempts to kill a native word through translation. The Chinese word (yi) was killed after the Opium War and hasn’t been used for more than a hundred years. In The Clash of Empires I also look at how a text in interna- tional law was translated into Chinese for the first time and fundamentally prepared the ground for modern political theory in China. Many familiar modern Chinese concepts—including “sovereignty” and “human rights”—were first coined in the 1864 translation called Wanguo gongfa from the Elements of International Law by American legal scholar Henry Wheaton. This was the first international law book introduced to China or East Asia. The Japanese relied on this Chinese translation to gain an understanding of the modern world and used it to refute the West’s extraterritorial demands on Japan, as well as justify their own annexation of Korea and Taiwan. I took that translation as a triple event: a textual event, a diplomatic event, and an episte- mological event, anticipating the global importance of sovereign rights and human rights in the twentieth century. In short, the event of that translation did not just “happen” in 1864 and it has traversed a temporality that spans our own times. CS: I’d like to ask about another element in the title of your article in translation: the phrase “competing universals.” Since today at the Nida Symposium the theme translation / was “Untranslatability and Cultural Complexity,” how would you articulate com- peting universals and untranslatability? 126 LL: It’s only when you begin to worry about the whereabouts of meaning that untranslatability becomes a central concern. The idea of “competing universals” emerged out of the research I did in the archives of the UN to reopen the moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being drafted. That document was initially conceptualized as the “Interna- tional Declaration of Human Rights.” In the process of drafting it, the UN Commission on Human Rights decided to change the word “international” to “universal” in the title to empha- size the moral and philosophical importance of the Declara- tion. One question that I like to put to my students and others is this: do you think the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a Western document? Without thinking twice, most people answer yes. This reaction says something about where the uni- versal lies in most people’s minds. My answer is that, on the contrary, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is NOT a Western document. This conclusion is based on my research on the minutes, summary reports, and a lot of other UN archival material as well as the secondary studies of the drafting of the UN document. For instance, Article 1 includes the term “con- science” and it is English, but if you look at the discussions that went on behind the scenes, there was a Confucian concept proposed by the Vice-Chair of the UN Drafting Committee, P. C. Chang, who worked closely to craft the document with El- eanor Roosevelt, the Chair, along with a number of other dele- gates from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Chang was the one who proposed that human attributes should not just be defined as reason, but must also include ren, a written character from Confucian philosophy that consists of a human radical plus number two, which Chang rendered as “Two-man minded- ness” whereas I would translate the character as “the plural hu- man.” Chang tried to explain the word in a way that would help the committee members reground the idea of human rights in the plurality or sociality of human beings, rather than in indi- viduality. There is a fundamental difference between the two. I see Chang’s move as proposing a competing universal. Some people might object that Chang’s stance was merely nationalis- tic, but this is not the case because the Confucian classics were translation / 127  the shared legacy of many societies across East Asia, including the Japanese and Koreans and Vietnamese who all contributed to the study of Confucianism in the past. Confucianism was one of the civilizational resources that P. C. Chang tried to mo- bilize. He made many other contributions—for instance, his refusal to let a Christian understanding of natural rights be the dominant, determining factor in the definition of rights. Theo- logical terms were debated and some terms were taken out. Conscience—an inadequate translation of the Chinese, ren— was eventually added. This drafting process staged a play of competing universals among the delegates from many coun- tries around the world. Let’s not let this document be taken as simply a European-inspired, or American-inspired, document. My argument in the essay is that if you look at the actual day- to-day debates at the UN on concepts—very important con- cepts that we tend to associate with the Western tradition of human rights today—you would be surprised to find multiple contributions, not only from a Confucian humanist like P. C. Chang, but also from feminist activists, Latin American legal traditions, and Islamic traditions. I conclude that the Declara- tion of Human Rights is not a Western document but a docu- ment that registers competing universals. CS: I have another question about the notion of “eventfulness.” I’d like to quote one of your phrases from a footnote in your article, in which you suggest that rather than “an endless rehashing or deconstruction of the biblical story” of the Tower of Babel, it might be more productive to think about translation in terms of an event. I wonder if you could talk about this, perhaps relating it to the way that you have discussed the history of translation in specific contexts, such as the Afro-Asian Writers Conferences? LL: Eventfulness helps me in my attempt to work out the tempo- rality and spatiality of the act of translation. Translation is not just reduced to one instance of textual transfer, based on a com- munication model—which I reject—or a theological model, concerned with the fulfillment of meaning, since hermeneutics is still part of that tradition. How can we radically reconceptu- translation / alize the problem of translation in terms of its situatedness in time—whether we call it history or not—and place, where it 128 happens? Eventfulness might help us grapple with this prob- lem if we were not to think of translation as merely a textual event going after meanings across languages. If we were to think of it, for instance, in terms of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences and the multiple translation projects they carried out, through journals, correspondence, conferences, collabora- tions across many divides, then translation is something else as well—it may inhabit multiple temporalities. I want to free us from thinking of it merely as one time, one place, with its significance limited to whether one gets the meaning or not. To open it instead to the multiplicity of texts, open it to interpreta- tions, open it to other temporalities. Some people argue that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was simply crafted by an international elite, and that it didn’t really mean much at that time, in the Cold War. But you never know its mode of exis- tence. Human rights can be appropriated in any given instance and can generate surprising modes of survival. For instance, in the 1930s human rights discourse was mobilized in China to fight fascism when the nationalist government was rounding up Communists and leftwing intellectuals and putting them in jail, but in the Cold War it was mobilized to fight Communist, totalitarian regimes. So it never had a stable meaning. While the Declaration of Human Rights gave us a blueprint, the in- terpretation itself varies from place to place, time to time, and so I grant the concept itself a certain mobility, an openness to other languages and other intellectual traditions. Eventfulness allows these temporalities to give any particular text a new mode of life in a new language. That’s how I wanted to take translation in the direction of eventfulness and then to identify its political mode of being. The kind of translation work that took place among those who participated in the post-Bandung Afro-Asian Writers Confer- ences is a good example of this. There was a tremendous ef- fort to collaborate across nations and they produced so much—I think in my article I mentioned one instance of the translation of some of the writers from Africa, such as the Nigerian writ- er, Chinua Achebe, who was known in the 1960s and 1970s as an Afro-Asian writer—he was not primarily thought of as an Anglophone writer, as we call him now in Anglo-American ac- translation / 129  ademia. I have become wary of the imperial reappropriation of Afro-Asian writers as Anglophone writers, as Francophone writ- ers. . . What does this mean? They disavow that earlier history, the Afro-Asian writers’ solidarity and their mutual translations and wipe it out by incorporating them into English departments, or Francophone departments, across American and European universities. Today the teaching of Afro-Asian writers is redis- tributed among these departments, but in the recent past the writ- ers belonged together in a mode of political solidarity. CS: Today in your lecture you touched on la petite lettre. Since I understand that you are working on psychoanalysis, translation, and media studies, I was hoping for a few comments on these new directions in your thought. LL: The Freudian Robot didn’t really focus on translation, al- though translation was part of it. For instance, the translation of Lacan into American academia is a fascinating story that I dug out when I was writing the book. What puzzled me was that Lacan’s reading of Poe’s “Purloined Letter” has been in- terpreted by American translators and American literary critics and theorists as something entirely different from what Lacan was actually doing. I traced that to the Yale French Studies (No. 48, French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis [1972], 39–72) translation of Lacan: they eliminated a third of Lacan’s original essay, which dealt with cybernetics and infor- mation theory, and thereby created something called French theory. The United States has been fabricating French theo- ry for some time—even today with the translation of Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables! I looked at the Cold War situation during which disciplines did not speak to each other in the United States, but Lacan himself read across the disciplines. He was reading Freud along with cybernetics—so how did we miss this? Using Lacan as an example—but he was not the only one—I point out that there is an economy of translation: French theory has been manufactured by American academia through translation. translation / CS: In 2013 you published The Nesbitt Code in Chinese, which has not yet been translated. Would you consider translating it? 130 LL: Last month when I was in Beijing, a friend of mine asked me the same question: whether I would consider rendering it into English. I feel ambivalent about this. The main reason is that I wrote this book as part of a collective effort among Chinese writers to rethink the political history of the twentieth centu- ry. I was involved in a three-year-long Indian–Chinese writ- ers’ conversation and I consider myself as a writer in Chinese. The Nesbitt Code—a kind of pseudodetective novel—emerged out of that conversation because I was very interested in the way that Chinese and India poets and novelists remembered their histories. I wrote the book to reflect on the history of the twentieth century, starting with the Russian Revolution and the writers who went into exile, connecting the life stories of these people to reflect on the legacy of the Chinese Revolution. I’m not sure that people in the West are very interested in the psy- chic aspect of the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revo- lution, whereas in China this resonates because it’s their lived history. Since the Revolution ended in failure, there’s a great deal of melancholy and soul searching in China, a lot of pain associated with that history and many personal tragedies. But a question persists: why did so many intellectuals and scien- tists—Chinese, British, Russian, and others—rally around the idea of the Revolution? It’s something one cannot brush aside. I wrote this book to confront that question. What has deterred me from translating it into English is that the readership of English language publications is only interested in testimonial literature against the Communist regime. That’s why I hesitate. This melancholy story about the fundamental homelessness of modern intellectuals and the tragedy of the Revolution is not something that would resonate with publishers in the West. Look at how they talk about China! They talk about the hor- rors of the Cultural Revolution in the same breath as they talk about the Holocaust and are only excited by the evils of Com- munism. What do they know? Next to nothing! But I’m not at all interested in telling them what transpired in the Cultural Revolution. For the most part, the reading public in the United States and Europe only seek repeated confirmation of the supe- riority of their political system, the superiority of their culture, and superiority in general. They are not interested in learning translation / 131  about the difficult existential decisions that faced intellectuals in other parts of the world from the First to the Second World War and all the way to the Cultural Revolution. So you see where my difficulty lies. CS: Maybe it’s not for them. But what about in India? Have you thought of this, since the book came out of these exchanges? In that context do you think there would be an interest? LL: Maybe, there will be an interest when another worldwide rev- olution looms on the horizon or a new generation of the intel- ligentsia is born. Translating the book into English for my In- dian friends who actually asked for it would make good sense. That would be a compelling argument. Maybe I should have it translated into English, not for North American and European or British readers but for other English language readers. I’ll give it some thought. References Liu, Lydia H. 1995. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Trans- lated Modernity. China 1900-1936. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ––––. 2004. The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ––––. 2010. The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ––––. 2013. The Nesbitt Code (六個字母的解法 non-fiction, in Chinese) Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Lydia H. Liu is a theorist of media and translation living in New York. She is Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and has published on literary theory, translation, digital media, Chinese feminism, and empire in English and Chinese. Her English works include The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Un- conscious (2010), The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (2004) and, more recently, a coedited translation with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko called The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational translation / Theory (2013). 132 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15515

Introduction After an interruption of almost two years, due to a change of pub-lisher and additional complications, I am delighted to announce that translation: A transdisciplinary journal is back— stronger and better than before. Thanks to a collaboration with the publisher Eurilink University Press located in Rome in Italy, we are finally able to take up all the threads we had fashioned and, more importantly, are creating anew. We owe all our readers sincere apologies for the inconvenience this delay has caused many of you—readers who have been wait- ing for new articles and issues to peruse; authors who have been waiting to see their articles published; subscribers who have paid to receive the journal in print, online, or both; the community fol- lowing us online. Thank you for your patience and faith in our shared project that is translation. To get back on schedule as soon as possible, we will be pub- lishing issue 6—a special issue devoted to Memory and guest edit- ed by Bella Brodzki and Cristina Demaria—immediately after the present one. Before I introduce the exciting content of this issue, let me pres- ent a few new entries and changes in the journal’s staff. Carolyn Shread (Mount Holyoke College, USA) is the journal’s new assis- tant editor, and Giuliana Schiavi and Salvatore Mele (both Scuo- la Superiore Mediatori Linguistici, Vicenza, Italy and members of FUSP—Fondazione Universitaria San Pellegrino) are new mem- bers of the editorial board. In truth, they are not really new, since all three have served at the journal since 2014; but this is the first time they are officially connected to a new issue of the journal, and are presented to the readers. It is also thanks to Carolyn, Giuliana, and Salvatore that the journal is now reappearing. Loc Pham Quoc (Hoa Sen University, Vietnam), who has al- ready appeared in the journal as author, will in the future serve as translation / 9  the journal’s new reviews editor. He will be responsible for the reviews published on the journal’s website (translation.fusp.it). Reviews will include not only books, but also events, conferences, and other initiatives and publications related to translation. I look forward to a stimulating collaboration with these four fine scholars and friends. (Please find their bio presentations in the last pages of this issue, and on the journal’s website. A journal’s board is important to establish its editorial identity, to guarantee continuity, and to conceive innovative and original issues, but what gives a journal its body is its content. This is en- sured by the authors and their articles and contributions, and I am proud to present this new issue’s particularly strong and innovative content. First of all, we are happy to continue the tradition of hosting lectures presented at the yearly Nida Translation Studies Research Symposium in New York. The current issue is therefore publish- ing Bella Brodzki’s “Autobiography, Memory, and Translation” and Suzanne Jill Levine’s response, “Autobiography/Translation: Memory’s Losses or Narrative’s Gains?” It is a particular pleasure to include these two scholars’ contributions, since both serve on the journal’s advisory board and have sustained the journal since its foundation. From the same symposium, we also publish an article by Christi Merrill presented below. Bella Brodzki’s point of departure is a strong statement: She argues that “autobiography is a modality of translation” since it translates “experience.” The autobiographer, in other words, is a “translator of her own life experience or past, whose meaning is created through the interpretive act of remembering.” Brodzki’s essay develops ideas presented in her groundbreaking Can These Bones Live?: Translation, Survival and Cultural Memory (2007), in which she so convincingly demonstrates how connected mem- ory and translation are, since all translations reconfigure, redefine, and excavate a past, relying on memory and remembering. As mentioned above, Brodzki will be developing the theme of Mem- ory for our next issue as guest editor with Cristina Demaria. In this issue she looks at one special form of memory—autobiogra- phy—and analyzes three very different examples of autobiography translation / and their special mode of creating a memoir, conceived here as a self-reflexive mode of translation. The subject of autobiography is 10 therefore both a translator and a translation; the autobiographee is being displaced, carried over, “shifting shape and form, becoming other to herself.” As the translation process of the psychic content of self-re- flection and memory is a characteristic for autobiography, and “all memory is mediated and motivated,” Brodzki turns to Freud, electing him as a guiding spirit in her inquiry. Freud, himself a paradigmatic figure of translation, provides an interpretive frame- work for her analysis. The role of autobiography and translation in Freud is present in the essay as a kind of fil rouge, and, as Suzanne Jill Levine puts it in her response to Brodzki, “Autobiography and Translation come together logically and intuitively in Freud whose early work as a translator helped create his career as a scientist and hence the persona whose theoretical work was practically based on autobiographical as well as clinical reflection.” Brodzki’s first example is Nabokov’s Speak Memory, a book that in itself is particularly interesting also because it is a result of multiple translation processes between Russian and English. Brodzki’s next example is the Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé, whose texts are translated into English by her transla- tor–husband Richard Philcox. Here, Brodzki demonstrates how the couple “enact the ongoing, defining, and productive tension within translation studies, of the paradox of untranslatability on the one hand, and translatability on the other.” Alison Bech- del’s graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) is Brodzki’s final example of another variation on the theme of “how techniques of translation are implicated in the act of mate- rializing, textualizing, and visualizing the autobiographical sub- ject.” In her response to Brodzki’s lecture, Levine draws attention to parallels between autobiography and biography, asking wheth- er both of these forms of biographical writing, as well as other forms of narrative—fictional and nonfictional—can be considered as having a translational nature. “Are we perhaps speaking of a translational paradigm for narrative in general?” she asks. Analyzing the case of Dalit literature, “a phenomenon in and of translation,” Christi Merrill suggests we “think more carefully about the relationship of translation studies to postcolonial theo- ry.” Her article explores the ways Dalit consciousness is a multi- translation / 11  lingual issue, connecting it to the multilingualism that is so central in India that one can speak about a “translating consciousness” consisting in an “‘open’ daily negotiation along a continuum of mutual understanding.” Let me add a personal note here: for me, as a European grow- ing up in an ideologically monolingual society, going to India for the first time last year to attend the international conference on Plurilingualism and Orality at the Indraprastha College for Wom- en, University of Delhi, organized by Babli Moitra Saraf, one of our board members, and with the participation of this journal, it was an incredible surprise to experience how people used several languages simultaneously in a continuous translation movement. It struck me that if the dominating Eurocentric Translation Studies discourse had looked further outside its boundaries, and specifical- ly to the Indian tradition, it would have developed very differently and might have freed itself from the shackles of a binary hierarchy grounded in monolingualism, and the very idea of one necessary original of which any translation is derivative would not have had such a dominating position. The “translating consciousness” of which Merrill speaks is inherently multilingual, which automati- cally opens an alternative vision of what translation is about. In regard to Dalit literature, Merrill demonstrates how this multilingual negotiation is all but simple and peaceful; rather, it is connected to domination and repression. Since the language of dominance is predicated on caste, Merrill agues the translating consciousness is a more complex one then the colonizer–colonized binary. Merrill’s interesting contribution originated as a response to Robert Young’s lecture “Freud on Translation and Cultural Trans- lation” at the same New York symposium at which Bella Brodzki presented her paper. Young’s lecture—not included in this issue since it was committed to another publication—was dedicated to the concept of translation in Sigmund Freud’s work. Merrill works Young’s thematics into the problematic of the translating con- sciousness of Dalit literature in fascinating ways. For instance, in discussing catharsis as a multilingual project, she creates a parallel to Freud’s idea of psychoanalysis as a translation not only into an- translation / other language, but as a translation of the unknown. If the job of the psyche is to “translate” or displace traumatic 12 experience into a language foreign to the individual subject, the work of psychoanalysis is then to interpret that idiosyncratic lan- guage and “de-translate” it back into a language shared with the analyst. Merrill also sees clear parallels between the idea of cultural translation as explained by Young and Dalit literature, in that “it offers, for example, a possible way of reading the invisible, the subaltern.” Valeria Luiselli’s essay “Translating Talkies in Modernist Mexico. The Language of Cinemas and the Politics of the Sound Film Industry” represents a new and innovative way of looking at how translation may occur through cultural models such as ar- chitecture and movies, and how different “translation practices” represent cultural production and exchange. She tells the story of when the first talkies appeared in Mexico, and analyzes the way in which the introduction of sound movies represented a twofold translation, both spatial and cultural. In examining the arrival of sound film technology, Luiselli looks at the relationship between “the modern architectural language of movie theaters and some of the dominating cultural politics of the burgeoning sound film industry in Mexico.” Her question is whether there was a conso- nance or a dissonance in the relation to the discourse of modernity between sound film technology and architectural perspective, and how they contributed to the formation of ideas of modernity. What emerges is that modernist translation was actually “a way of ap- propriating new forms and thus a creative locus of innovation.” Luiselli discusses different forms of translation, from dubbing and the politics of film translation to the movie theaters as concrete spaces of translation, or even as translators, thus operating with a refreshingly broad concept of translation. Although Luiselli’s essay does not discuss this theme, I would suggest that this modernist translation practice was particularly prosperous in South America. The parallels between the thinking on translation expressed by authors such as Borges, De Paz, and especially Haroldo de Campos with his idea of translation as tran- creation and even “irreverently amorous devouring,” invite further investigation. Luiselli describes the fascinating story of how Spanish-speak- ing dubbers and voice actors were introduced in Hollywood films translation / 13  to counter the threat of English-language domination not only with their voices but also with “their entire body.” The introduction of American films in Mexico was complicated, however, and all man- ner of different options were explored in the process—including subtitling, dubbing, simultaneous “remakes,” and printouts of film dialogue. All of this cinematic innovation took place in buildings that were also subject to translational practices, such as the famous Teatro–Cinema Olimpia, for example, which was originally a con- vent. This movie theater plays a central role in the introduction— translation—of the modern experience to the Mexican audience, and was, in Luiselli’s words, a “translator made of concrete and stone.” Luiselli’s essay anticipates and opens a discussion that will be pursued in the future issue of this journal devoted to spaces and places, guest edited by Sherry Simon and Federico Montanari. Enquiries about translation in connection to places are also present in Sherry Simon’s essay “At the Edge of Empire: Rose Ausländer and Olha Kobylianska,” in which she examines “the work of translation at the edge of empire” through the two Czer- nowitz authors—the Ukrainian Olha Kobylianska (1863–1942) and the German–Jewish Rose Ausländer (1901–1988) viewed as translators of their border city. Luiselli’s broad concept of transla- tion, applied to cultural practices and movements, are developed by Simon in other both social and physical directions, for instance in the political and geographical borders of a multilingual city. To translate at the edge of empire—of which Czernowitz is an example in relation to the translational relationships developed through German—is to be especially aware of the ways in which boundaries can accentuate or attenuate difference. Political borders hypostatize cultural and linguistic differences, while geographical borders often show difference to be gradual. The multilingual- ism of border zones problematizes the activities of translation as source–target transactions. Drawing on a suggestion in Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, in which the distinction between enemy and citizen, alien and human beings is blurred, Simon looks at “another site of translation at the edge of empire,” a border city that has represent- ed a wall against the alien, discovering similar elusiveness and in- translation / stability of the borders. Czernowitz is intensely multilingual with the particularity of German as prominent and autonomous, and no 14 language apparently dominating over the others. In the search of a more realistic—and less idealized—understanding of the multilin- gualism of Czernowitz, Simon starts by defining it as translation- al, thus underscoring the “connections and convergences across language and communities” that might be much less peaceful and friendly than expected. Literary transactions express this translational terrain, and one of them is the tendency among many authors at the beginning of the twentieth century to move away from German to other minor languages. One such writer is Olha Kobylianska, who embraced the Ukrainian national cause and translated her texts from German. Her writing can be referred to as “translational writing—a product of the particular mélange of cultures particular to the Bukovina and Czernowitz.” The other author analyzed by Simon, Rose Ausländer, on the contrary, “returns” to German after her permanence in the writing in English. But this choice “is less a one-way and definitive em- brace of the authentic tongue than a renewed practice of translation, as she brings back to Germany the long experience of exile, expe- riencing new forms of displacement within the German-speaking world.” The eternal question of the relation between original and trans- lation is discussed in Alfred Mac Adam’s “Translating Ruins.” In an interesting perspective, he analyzes three sonnets that are direct or indirect derivations of Ianus Vitalis’ (1485–1560) epigram De Roma (1552) on the theme of Rome’s ruins. The “poem is a fasci- nating irony,” Mac Adam argues: “A poem in Latin on mutability that seeks to avoid the mutability of vernacular tongues” results in vernacular translations and imitations of which there exist over a dozen. The three sonnets compared by Mac Adam are Joachim du Bel- lay’s 1558 version and the two of which is progenitor or source, namely Edmund Spenser’s 1591 version of Joachim du Bellay and Francisco de Quevedo’s 1648 sonnet. The three sonnets are “si- multaneously the same and different, translations and originals” while they are in different relations to the distinction between translation and adaptation. They are all new poems, “appropriate for their language and culture, but none replicates De Roma in a vernacular language.” translation / 15  Each of translation’s issues includes an interview. We are hap- py to continue this tradition since interviews permit a different form of reflection from essays in that they are dialogic, “thinking- out-loud” texts. Lydia Liu—who has already published an article with us in our special issue on Politics guest edited by Sandro Mezzadra and Naoki Sakai (issue 4) and who will be present in a future issue (issue 7) with the lecture she gave at last year’s New York symposium—was interviewed by Carolyn Shread, transla- tion’s assistant editor. In the course of their conversation, Liu’s work against nationalism emerges as a strong starting point for her thinking on translation, which in many respects runs count- er to current ideas circulating in translation studies. Not only vo- cabulary, but intellectual discourse, political theory, and script are among the “foreign” elements that interrogate national literature and national identities in general. Script, and the technology con- nected to its reproduction such as the telegraph and the typewriter, actually “put pressure on all East Asian societies to reform their scripts.” The paradox consists in the fact that the typewriters’ lim- itations “[l]ed to campaigns that targeted the native script [. . .] as a backward writing system.” In regards to Liu’s ideas on the political dimension of trans- lation, this conversation with Liu offers an excellent explanation of the ideas she expressed in her article in issue 4 of this journal: Liu recalls her research on the Opium Wars through which she discovered how translation “could provide an illuminating angle for understanding international politics.” Contrary to what people generally think, Liu argues that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a Western docu- ment. It is, rather, a document that registers “competing univer- sals.” According to Liu, translation is an event, not just reduced to one instance of textual transfer, and needs to be reconceptualized in terms of situatedness in time and place. “Eventfulness allows temporalities to give any particular text a new mode of life in a new language,” she argues. I hope you enjoy reading this issue’s articles! SN translation / 16 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15516

Autobiography, Memory, and Translation Bella Brodzki Sarah Lawrence College, USA Abstract: The article traces a range of ways in which autobiography (self/life/ writing) and translation are mutually implicated in processes of displacement, recontextualization, mediation, and even comparison. Freud, paradigmatic fig- ure of translation and archeologist of memory, is the guiding spirit of this study. Its broad psychoanalytic framework situates three exemplary autobiographi- cal narratives and the modes of translation they perform: Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Maryse Condé’s La vie sans fards, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. The point of departure of my talk today is that autobiography is a modality of translation. Both autobiography and translation propel change, involve movement, recontextualization, mediation, even comparison. What is aptly named and fits under the rubric of auto- biography—meaning self/life/writing—refers to a broad range of self-referential maneuvers and practices, and is at base a Western genre predicated on a notion of the individual self as at once au- tonomous and relational, and capable of being both “the observing subject and the object of investigation” (Smith and Watson 1998, 4). Autobiography claims a venerable and variable tradition that begins roughly with St. Augustine’s conversion narrative Confes- sions and includes slave narratives, testimonios, and such recent examples of the Küntzlerroman as Patti Smith’s Just Kids. A useful working definition (if joyfully and consistently revised) of autobi- ography for scholars in the field comes from Philip Lejeune: “a ret- rospective narration produced by a real person concerning her/his own existence, focusing on the development of her/his own life, in particular the development of her/his personality” (Lejeune 1989, 4). What the French theorist calls “the autobiographical pact” is the assurance given the reader by the signature on the autobiogra- translation / 17  phy’s cover that the author, the narrator, and the protagonist of this narration share a common identity. Autobiography—or what is re- ferred to quite commonly, in the wake of post-Enlightenment the- ories of the subject and postcolonial discourse, as “life writing” or “life narrative”—is, in any case, not limited to the written, but can be performative, visual, filmic, or digital. What is interesting in all modes of life narrative is that the referential relationship between the origin and the translation, as it were—as well as between the autobiographer and the reader—is contractual. Please keep in mind as well that even, or especially, in autobi- ography studies, the very elements that comprise the constellation of self/life/writing are all culturally contested and problematized today. Put another way, and critical rigor notwithstanding, the va- lence of the various theoretical terms relevant to the autobiograph- ical enterprise, including such marketplace labels as “memoir,” changes depending on the specific discursive context. Much can be at stake ideologically, at least for literary critics and scholars of autobiography; what is a nuanced distinction in one instance is a major conceptual marker in another, a most obvious example of which being the ontological/epistemological difference between a “self” and a “subject”. The former term has metaphysical conno- tations, the latter is a discursive construction, and my view lies somewhere between the two—I don’t link “selfhood” with pleni- tude, transcendence, or authenticity, but nor do I consider the “I” to be merely a linguistic effect. How terms are implemented and in- terpreted, then, is itself a matter of translation, and heavily depen- dent on reception, on audience, on readership. Though I will use a variety of terms today, most of which are modifiers of “self,” this is not an indication of their interchangeability within a prescribed category or lexical field; rather it is an effort on my part to gesture towards the richness of the genre and its ongoing generativity. Returning to my opening assertion that autobiography is a modality of translation, let us consider that the autobiographer or producer of an autobiographical event is engaged in a process of subjective displacement, a carrying over of an idea or a notion of a life and/or selfhood. In the act of being inscribed or narra- tivized, the autobiographer is being translated. Being translated translation / for an autobiographer means shifting shape and form, becoming other to her/himself, as s/he distinguishes her/himself from others 18 through language. Another critical dimension of the autobiogra- phy/translation nexus is that translators inscribe their subjectivity into their versions, most acutely, into the views on translation they espouse and the strategies they deploy. Just as the autobiographer is reading herself/himself otherwise, so is the translator inscribing herself/himself through an other’s voice and text, into another lin- guistic or signifying form. To write is to be written, to narrate is to be narrated, to translate is to be translated. In my talk I shall be exploring a few of the myriad ways a subject verbalizes, materializes, and textualizes the process of self-analysis, self-reflection, and self-inscription in both autobiog- raphy and translation, as reflections on each other. I do not mean to suggest, however, that the self—as source material—is a giv- en, that it is transparent to itself, or that it is anterior to any act of interpretation. Precisely, I shall explore how various facets of the translation complex play out in three dissimilar and distinctive autobiographical projects. My literary examples are modern and contemporary, yet they differ widely from each other. As a com- paratist, I take seriously the conceit that seemingly strange juxta- positions can be most productive and illuminating. My first liter- ary example is text based: Russian polyglot Vladimir Nabokov’s exemplary, self-translated autobiography Speak, Memory (1947). The second concerns the intriguing and divergent autobiographical positions of Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé and her British translator–husband Richard Philcox regarding their embedded sit- uation (although I will make some reference to La vie sans fards, published in 2012, her most recent, and as yet untranslated autobi- ography), where most of my commentary will concern them as a translation couple and its implications for the global literary mar- ketplace. The third is also text based, but transgeneric: American cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home (2006). In each case, the autobiographer is implicitly, and often explicitly— depending on the various modes and languages involved—a trans- lator of his or her own “life experience” or past whose meaning is created through the interpretive act of remembering. As a paradigmatic figure of translation, Freud is my guiding or informing spirit into this area of inquiry: Freud as an object of translation; as a translator himself; and as a theorist, especially in the early essay “Screen Memories” (1899), in itself a selection translation / 19  of his own childhood recollections, disguised in dialogic form. The translation history of the writings of Sigmund Freud is one of the most fascinating, controversial, and overdetermined instanc- es of the power of a particular translator to influence indefinitely a target culture’s reception of a major body of thought. As some Anglophone readers of Freud are aware, the copyright on James Strachey’s twenty-four volume Standard Edition expired in 1989, provoking debates worldwide on the consequences of retranslating Freud’s works, not only for those reading in English, but in all foreign versions, since many are translations from the English and not the original German. On the one hand, Strachey’s monumen- tal endeavor has been admired for its homogeneous lucidity and consistency; on the other, it has been excoriated for effectively in- tegrating and synthesizing what Freud left fragmentary and “pro- cessive,” most glaringly for imposing Ancient Greek and Latin ter- minology onto everyday German words in the service of making Freudian discourse sound more “scientific.” Even as Freud (and his daughter Anna) approved of Alix and James Strachey’s, along with Ernest Jones and A. A. Brill’s, systematizing of psychoanalyt- ic terminology, however, he continued up until his death to use the same rich range and variety of ambiguous, and often contradictory, terms to describe the most elusive and intimate workings of “psy- chic life”—as he had always done. At the risk of committing the intentional fallacy, can we in- fer that Freud privileged dissemination over fidelity in translation, that his conception of language as figurative and fluid, and transla- tion as a pervasive medium of human experience, was broadly in- tercultural and transhistorical, consonant with his desire to attract the widest possible foreign readership for his radical creation— psychoanalysis—thus securing its status in history, as he put it, as the third revolution, after those of Copernicus and Darwin? As we well know, if it is almost impossible to overstate Freud’s influence on modernity, it is not in the realm of science that he made his im- pact (though this may be changing again, as neuroscientists uncov- er the brain’s relationship to the unconscious), but in the domain of culture, and the individual’s relation to it, as evidenced by the way those very archaisms for which Strachey was criticized have infil- translation / trated every aspect of our speech. All the more interesting, then, that the Freud who is universally invoked is, in fact, linguistical- 20 ly and culturally specific. As the essays in Darius Gray Ornston Jr.’s edited study Translating Freud show, many of the challenges raised by translating Freud are not only theoretical or conceptual in nature, but have to do with his extraordinary gifts as a stylist who enjoyed and exploited the rhetorical, aesthetic, and expressive qualities of language, especially that of his native German, which was inflected by his inveterate erudition and cosmopolitanism. Freud was an autobiographer, too, drawing on his own inte- riority as a source text to be interpreted and analyzed as he wres- tled with his developing “science of the mind“ (Freud 1995a, 30), whose purview, he claimed, was no longer only psychopathology, but its relevance to what we now call “the neurotic normal.” He wrote “An Autobiographical Study” in 1924, at the age of six- ty-eight. An account of the internal development of psychoanal- ysis as well as its external history (Freud 1995a, 30), the autobi- ographical essay was published as a contribution to a volume of “self-portraits” by prominent physicians. Far less personal than his case studies, his correspondence with Fleiss, the seemingly minor “Screen Memories” (1899), the monumental The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), or The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), “An Autobiographical Study” is nonetheless a revealing document and has substantial explanatory power. Freud used this essay as an occasion to present an introduction or overview of his ideas as they evolved, and of their reception in the international scientific com- munity. As a self-portrait of the investigator, it tempts the reader to surmise that in Freud’s mind “la psychanalyse, c’est moi!” Translation is central to the story Freud tells. In the early days of his career, he recounts, the planes shifted considerably when, as a foreign student and auditor in Paris, he offered to translate “a new volume of [Charcot’s] lectures into German.” Freud translated not only the third volume of Charcot’s Lessons on Diseases of the Nervous System (1886) and Tuesday’s Lessons at the Salpêtrière (1887–1888), but five entire books in all, from French and English into German. Though he had a position as a lecturer in pathology in Vienna, it was his work as a translator that gained him entry into Charcot’s circle of personal acquaintances and full participation in the activities at Salpêtière Clinic (Freud 1995a, 6). According to Patrick Mahony, “Freud made translation a uni- fied field concept” (Mahony 2001, 837). Mahony elaborates that translation / 21  in psychoanalysis the patient may be psychically conceived as a succession or accumulation of translations, with the analyst as- suming the complementary role of a translator. By means of trans- lations—psychic material is itself already a translation in need of a second order translation—“the analyst effects a translation of what is unconscious into consciousness” (Mahony 2001, 837); that is, dreams translate what the dreamer dreams to what the dreamer re- members and reports, translates from mental image to verbal nar- ration. Mahony also gives the following specific examples of what Freud deemed to be translations: dreams; generalized hysterical, obsessive, and phobic symptomatology; parapraxis (this term for a slip of the tongue is itself a wonderful example of a Strachey clas- sical archaism); fetishes; the choice of suicidal means; and the an- alyst’s interpretations (Mahony 2001, 837). Freud’s autobiograph- ical study is also a form of translation of his life and career as a scientist and a defense, even an apologia, of his intellectual legacy. I hope that these broad psychoanalytic insights will provide us with an interpretive framework for thinking figuratively and rhe- torically about the autobiographers and translators we are about to discuss. Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1947) is a virtuosic synesthetic, trans- lingual, transmodal, transcultural performance. I will barely pierce the surface of its many layers and textures today. By making the reader of the foreword privy to the many stages of rewriting, reframing, and recasting of what he calls “a systematically cor- related assemblage of personal recollections ranging geographi- cally from St. Petersburg to St. Nazaire, and covering thirty-sev- en years, from August 1903 to May 1940” (Nabokov 1947, 9), Nabokov might be giving us too much, before the first page of the autobiography proper has even been accessed. The detailed paratextual information, much like the exquisite meditation on the nature of a privileged life as only a consummately privileged polyglot consciousness could render it, is daunting and some- what overwrought. Translated into French, German, Spanish, and Italian by other translators, Nabokov explains that “for the translation / present, final edition […] I have availed myself of the correc- tions I made while turning it into Russian. This re-Englishing of 22 a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place” (Nabokov 1947, 12–13) is likened to the kinds of multiple metamorphoses familiar to but- terflies, but previously untried by humans. If in the foreword he posits himself as remarkable among his species, those very liter- ary and linguistic feats are grounded in a principle of translation that treats every change in form as a new thing to be celebrated, but not at the expense of preserving or immortalizing moments or stages of perfection. And yet, the exiled writer’s essay on the challenges of translating Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin into English reveals a translator hostile to a free-form, target-friendly version of a classic. His rarefied, academic, heavily annotated translation privileged its own elite audience, reflecting, as Lawrence Venuti puts it, Nabokov’s “deep nostalgic investment in the Russian lan- guage and in canonical works of Russian literature while disdain- ing the homogenizing tendencies of American consumer culture” (Venuti 2012, 110–111). Is there a connection between Nabokov’s protectionist views of the role of a literary translator and the way he translated his own life? A self-declared “chronophobiac” (Nabokov 1947, 19), his disclaimer about any affection for the psychoanalytic method might suggest there is: I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues—and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols… and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents. (Nabokov 1947, 20) Doth he protest too much? It is not my intention here to put little Vladimir’s psyche on the couch, despite the wealth of ma- terial he provides throughout this text (and elsewhere in his oeu- vre), only to indicate that while Nabokov is reacting to the most reductive and vulgar version of Freud in terms of symbolic con- tent, he is also using hermeneutic instruments in ways that strongly resemble Freud’s methods. Each embodies qualities of both the scientist and the poet, and both are formalists of the first order. Indeed, as masterful interpreters of signs and symptoms, and de- coders of patterns, both are drawn to structural repetitions, as well as to what escapes those structures and strictures. Critics, among them Jeffrey Berman and Jenefer Shute, have addressed why the translation / 23  figure of Freud looms so large—and so negatively—for Nabokov, as well as the implications for an understanding of his fiction, es- pecially Lolita. It seems to me that what Nabokov rejects in Freud is his primordial pessimism about human nature, and that what he negates is the general principle that he—that is, Nabokov—might not be master of his own mind. If the opening chapter of Speak, Memory is about anything, it is the eros/thanatos dialectic, as is the book’s final chapter, which focuses on intergenerational transmission and the transcendent or redemptive power of the aesthetic imagination. But my aim now is to direct attention to the associative method of forming com- posite events that Freud and Nabokov share, and which serves as Nabokov’s template or creed for turning one’s life into a work of art. What Nabokov calls “the match theme”—the Freudian germ of which is a verbal or imagistic link revealing a thematic or sym- bolic correspondence—is exemplified in two fabulously dramatic events drawn from his childhood. One of those themes is the tragic irony of history, as illustrated in the destiny of a certain General Kuropatkin, a friend of Nabokov’s father, who in one scene, while playing a “match” game with young Vladimir in which he “depicts the sea in calm and stormy weather,” (Nabokov 1947, 27) is in- formed that he will lead the Russian Army against the Japanese in the 1905 War. Fifteen years later, disguised as a peasant, he comes across Nabokov’s father in flight from the Bolsheviks, and asks him for a match. Though his childhood was indeed blessed, Nabokov’s message to his attentive reader above all is that the art of living is less a mat- ter of being endowed with rich original content than it is a matter of a perceiving intelligence imposing sensorial and cognitive mas- tery over the flux and chaos of the world. “The match theme” is a lesson in how to work with one’s source material: tracking, tracing, and linking across time and space seemingly unrelated episodes or events through a metonymic/metaphorical leap that brings them together and thereby raises them to a higher level of meaning, a threshold for further reflection, interpretation, and commentary. (It is, for example, a lesson in linking the moves on a chessboard with the assassination of his beloved father, not as the outcome of translation / a duel the child dreads, but at a public lecture, when it was least expected and he was shielding the body of a more likely politi- 24 cal target.) Nabokov’s technique for critical reading is the model for translating a life, and it is, then, primarily aesthetic in nature. That is, it foregrounds the structural and formal aspects of even the most spectacular and catastrophic of human experiences without divesting the events of any of their wondrous or devastating force, identifying—or, rather, creating—patterns, establishing affinities and thematic correspondences amidst/across what would other- wise remain inchoate, separate, isolated ephemera. “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography” (Nabokov 1974, 21). After Speak, Memory, not only is it impossible to read autobiography the same way again, but it is impossible to live autobiographically—that is, to think about one’s life as a thematic design—in the same fashion once one has internalized Nabokov’s model. The opening passage of Speak, Memory—beginning with “The cradle rocks above an abyss” on page 19—offers one of the most striking images and meditations on mortality to be found in the annals of autobiography. Yet the genesis of Speak, Memory was what is now the book’s fifth chapter, written originally in French and titled “Mademoiselle O.” That Nabokov was both worldly lit- erate and deeply imprinted by Russian literature is made manifest in the portrait which serves as the premise for this chapter. Its de- clared purpose is to reclaim through memory the destiny of his old French governess, whom he felt he had betrayed by having previously turned her into a fictional character, thus denying her the independent existence that rightfully belonged to her. Nabokov’s revisitation of the Swiss governess “Mademoi- selle” begins with her arrival by sleigh to the Russian country- side in the winter of 1905–1906. Though of his many tutors and governesses she was the object of some ridicule and derision, he now pays selective tribute to her “lovely” French and its impact on his appreciation for French literature. I have chosen to focus on this recontextualized portrait of the hapless, enormous, miserable figure, because indeed she may not be substantial enough on her own terms to support the attempt “to salvage her from fiction” (Nabokov 1947, 117). And this is not, despite the reasons he ini- tially gives, Nabokov’s prime motive for memorializing her. The autobiographer announces straight away that he is imagining the scene, that he is seeking recourse in fiction once again: “I was not translation / 25  there to greet her; but I do so now as I try to imagine what she saw and felt at that last stage of her fabulous and ill-timed journey” (Nabokov 1947, 98). The memorialist’s conjuring of poor Mademoiselle—who remains a rather disdained and pathetic character in this portray- al—has been culturally, linguistically, and, of course, physically displaced to the Russian steppes from her native Switzerland. The overarching image is of snow. Very lovely, very lonesome. But what am I doing in this stereoscopic dreamland? How did I get here? Somehow, the two sleighs have slipped away, leaving be- hind a passportless spy standing on the blue-white road in his New England snow- boots and stormcoat. The vibration in my ears is no longer their receding bells, but only my old blood singing. All is still spellbound, enthralled by the moon, fancy’s rear-vision mirror. The snow is real, though, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, sixty years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers. (Nabokov 1947, 100) A symbolic identification grounds Nabokov’s authorial/auto- biographical position in this classic Russian novelistic scene in which, laying his devices bare, he inserts himself at the end as both observing subject (“passportless spy”) and object of reflec- tion (“But what am I doing […] ? How did I get here?”) through the temporal and spatial displacement of “snow,” and Nabokov and Mademoiselle, who now occupy virtually equivalent or trans- posable positions in relation to the other’s estrangement. His un- derlying resistance to the idea that perhaps there was more to Ma- demoiselle than her lack if finesse is made clear to him belatedly, through his own experience of exile and loss, primarily as a result of the Russian Revolution. In an act of literary mediation and em- pathic projection he comes to understand the gravitas of her life story as a key to understanding his own. With retrospective insight he says at another point in the chapter that this is something “I could appreciate only after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart” (Nabokov 1947, 117). Nabokov’s insight, shared with Freud, is that all memory is mediated and motivated, and dependent on a dynamic imagina- translation / tion; because the psychic content of original memory is not avail- able, whether because of absence or inaccessibility, it cannot be 26 restored without being translated to later experiences, desires, and needs. Maryse Condé Maryse Condé, Guadeloupean author of several novels about Ca- ribbean heroines in Africa, slavery in the Antilles, the Salem witch trials, and even a revisionary reading of Wuthering Heights, has written two autobiographies: Tales from the Heart: True Stories From My Childhood,1 and the recently published—but still un- translated—La vie sans fards (2012). Self-identified as a classical- ly-schooled Francophone Caribbean writer, by which I mean that her readership would typically comprise Continental French and Antillean readers, she has attained preeminent status in the literary marketplace as a global Caribbean writer—in the company of Der- ek Walcott, Caryl Phillips, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Rafael Confiant, and Edwidge Danticat—as a result of translation. Being translated, especially into English, has enabled Condé’s work—albeit in altered form—to exceed its linguistic and cultural boundaries and live beyond its own spatial and temporal borders, however they have been constituted. In short, it has brought her the widest possible reception. And yet Condé’s translation complex is of a special order, espe- cially when read in a context—familial and erotic—that so readily invites a psychoanalytic interpretation; I am not going to undertake such a reading here. La vie sans fards is devoted primarily to the years she spent in West Africa during the politically promising pe- riod of decolonization, and then the corruption, hypocrisy, and re- pression of the postindependence regimes. This experience, which she consistently recounts in amatory language, “occupied a central place in my life and in my imagination” (Condé 2012, 16; transla- tion mine); but it was a painful disappointment, a doomed affair. Her less than positive depiction of African life, as seen in both her fiction and memoir, has made her a provocative and somewhat controver- sial figure in postcolonial literary circles. The continent couldn’t at- tract her sufficiently or compel her enough—despite long and varied opportunities during her sojourns in Guinea, Ghana, Ivory Coast, 1 Originally published in French in 1999; translated into English by Richard Philcox in 2001. In-text reference will be to the 2001 English edition. translation / 27  and Senegal—to learn to speak Malinké, Fulani, Peulh, or Wolof. In this failed intercultural encounter in which France, the Caribbean, and Africa are not reduced to the points they occupy in a colonial constellation, Condé represents herself as untranslatable, unable to be taken on her own terms in a different context. Conversely, her inability to find reflections of herself in Africa, to be recognized as herself and not a “toubabesse” [white woman, because Antillaise, for example], reinforces her sense of isolation and exclusion, wheth- er it be a result of history, racial identity, and/or cultural and class values. It is an otherness to which she clings and which she reads as immutable. This paradoxical sense of her own untranslatability drives the narrative, as the autobiographer depicts herself struggling against forces and structures that threaten her integrity, as metaphorically and literally understood. The critical matter pertaining to translation and memory here is not the authenticity or veracity of the self-por- trait as the autobiographer renders it, but the conditions of its re- ception, as she has experienced it. Distinguishing her motivations from the idealizing ones most often attributed to the conventions of recounting a life, Condé proclaims her passion for “unvarnished” truth-telling in the introduction, as she stakes a claim for her sin- gularity while also invoking a more abstract, albeit gendered, uni- versality. She inscribes herself squarely within the French Enlight- enment and Romantic traditions from the outset: “I want to display to my kind a woman in every way true to nature, and the woman I portray shall be myself” (Condé 2012, 12; translation mine). Despite Condé’s resolute individualism, feisty independence, and political risk-taking, her lively and sometimes harrowing nar- rative is framed, on its first and last pages, by her two husbands, the Guinean Mamadou Condé and the English Richard Philcox, whom she met in Senegal. Her marriage to Philcox will take place out- side the narrative, but she pays homage to their first meeting and telegraphs what is to follow. “He was the one who would change my life. He would take me to Europe and then to Guadeloupe. We would discover America together. He would help me gently sep- arate from my children and resume my studies. Above all, thanks to him, I would begin my career as a writer” (Condé 2012, 334; translation / translation mine). Condé herself is an accomplished English speaker and scholar 28 of English literature, who taught for many years at Columbia and other esteemed universities; but she seems to consider translation at best as a mechanistic exercise or practical necessity, not a cre- ative practice worthy of her critical attention. Her manifest lack of interest in translations of her work, when the stakes are, ironically, so high, sound disingenuous for many reasons—not the least of which is that she lives on such intimate and privileged terms with her translator. One could conceive such indifference as a matter of blind trust, and a convenient division of labor, since—in addition to being her translator—Philcox also handles all of her negotia- tions. Ironically, however, their embedded relation seems to ensure that instead of being on the same page regarding translation, their perspectives as a translational couple remain absolutely divergent. As is evidenced in a fascinating 1996 interview with Doris Kadish and Françoise Massardier (the authors of Translating Slav- ery) conducted in French with Philcox (with Condé present) in which he describes his training, strategy, and evolution as a trans- lator, Philcox sees his role as quite important. He valorizes the complex process of “recreating” a text and bringing the writer to a different cultural—that is, Anglophone—audience (Kadish and Massardier, 751). Not only does he believe there is an affinity be- tween the original and the translation, but he also maintains that he is “communicating the author’s writing in another language, in another culture” (Kadish and Massardier, 751; translation mine). Moreover, his translation practice is patently target-oriented; he seeks to make the author, as he says, more “transparent” to the reader, but not at the price of displacing “the geography of the text,” whatever it may be. The challenge for him may be less a question of linguistic specificity than of Condé’s “esoteric” cul- tural references; he even acknowledges being “market-driven” on her behalf. Rather than feeling diminished or constrained, Phil- cox concedes that he feels liberated by Condé’s indifference to his practice, as well as his product (Kadish and Massardier, 755). And he ultimately attributes his progress over the course of his career as a translator, interestingly enough, not to years of living with Condé, his author–wife, or to the cumulative experience of translating her work, but to studying translation theory (Kadish and Massardier, 755–756). That Philcox is sensitive to the gender question—“Do I have the right to translate a novel written by a translation / 29  woman? This question has greatly haunted me” (Kadish and Mas- sardier, 756)—reveals not only a great deal about his own refined and acute sensibility, but also attests to the primacy of gender as a marker of identity for Condé; whereas race seems to figure little, if at all, as a factor of difference for either of them. It is, of course, quite possible that Condé’s antitranslation posture is purely performative; but, if so, what is its value and what are its implications? What Condé stands for in this trans- lation couple is the irreducible difference between languages. Thus, whereas the translator, invested in global transmission and reception, considers his work to be coextensive with the origi- nal author’s work, she—dedicated to perfecting her own liter- ary style in her own tongue—considers them to be distinct. As I have said, Condé has stated her position on many occasions: that translation, being a transforming principle, doesn’t regard her, that she is “othered” in translation, both culturally and linguis- tically. Her insistence on this fact is consonant with what would seem to be the overarching message of her autobiographical oeu- vre. In a conversation with Emily Apter, which was conducted in French—“transposed,” not “transcribed” (Apter’s words) and translated into English, and which appeared in 2001—Condé puts a fine point on what I have described above: I have never read any of my books in translation… In translation, the play of lan- guages is destroyed. Of course, I recognize that my works have to be translated, but they are really not me. Only the original really counts for me. Some people say that translation adds to the original. For me, it is another work, perhaps an interesting one, but very distant from the original. (Apter, 92) Beyond the intriguing and alluring personal and domestic im- plications of Condé and Philcox as a translation couple, together they enact the ongoing, defining, and productive tension within translation studies, especially in relation to world literature and the global marketplace. Whatever the psychological source of Condé’s alienation or iconoclastic individualism, her view of translation as (1) radical difference and of untranslatability as (2) an act of per- sonal or even political resistance, actually coexists, of course—as it has throughout history—with the enduring, competing reality translation / of multilingualism. The inherent paradox of untranslatability in translation is what makes cultural memory possible. What this 30 translation couple reminds us of is that we must remain vigilant in the face of world literature’s instrumentalist, ever-serviceable view of translatability as an unproblematic given. Alison Bechdel Translation is the major operative principle in comics, defined for our purposes today as a juxtaposition of words and images that create a sustained narrative within deliberately sequenced bor- dered panels. In its particular interplay of the visual and the verbal, comics are not the verbal representation of visual art—ekphrasis— nor a representation of the world, but an interpretation; indeed, as Douglas Wolk puts it in Reading Comics, “Cartooning is a meta- phor for the subjectivity of perception” (21). Perhaps it is the pre- mium placed on personal drawing style, indeed of handwriting, in comics that makes it an especially interesting instance of autobi- ographical memory as a process of translation; since the object of our attention is self-perception and self-inscription across different cultural, social, and discursive contexts. I shall not be discussing comics or graphic narrative generally here, but graphic memoir, or what Gillian Whitlock calls “autographics” or “autographies” (Whitlock 2006, 966) as yet another variation on the theme of how techniques of translation are implicated in the act of materializing, textualizing, and visualizing the autobiographical subject. In chapter 4, which is roughly the center of Alison Bechdel’s critically acclaimed, densely and riveting inter/intratextual graph- ic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), the author foregrounds the book’s metaperformative processes, making ex- plicit what W. J. T. Mitchell describes as “the relation between the seeable and the sayable, display and discourse, showing and telling” (Mitchell 1986, 47). The astute reader already recognizes that comics are a language; this chapter declares that the memoir is a self-reflexive mode of translation, which also situates its autobi- ographical project within a comparative network of signifying sys- tems, most overtly Modernist literature and family photographs, but also the künstlerroman and lesbian coming-out stories. The canon of references comprises Camus, Fitzgerald, James, Stevens, Wilde, Joyce, Colette, and Proust. What characterizes such a nar- rative as “intra-” as well as “inter-” textual is that the images do not only transact with words, but they also engage with each other. translation / 31  In what Hillary Chute describes as a “cross-discursive” medium, intertextuality itself is rendered figuratively/pictorially as well as literally/verbally, showing how textual and visual forms and rhe- torical strategies interact to make latent psychic matter manifest, as in dreamwork. With her deft deployment of displacement and condensation, metaphor and metonymy, Bechdel makes the reader wonder, in the spirit of Jacques Lacan, if the unconscious isn’t structured like a cartoon. Bechdel’s intricately drawn, hyperliterary account of growing up in Middle America in a hothouse of aesthetic expression and erotic repression is constructed around her complex, ambivalent relationship with her authoritarian, fastidious, secretive father who bonded with her over books—while he slyly eludes another primal identification they also shared. An expert in historic architectural preservation, director of a family funeral home business, and high school English teacher, her father Bruce died when Bechdel was nineteen, leaving her to decipher the rich but troubling legacy of similarity and difference that defined their relationship—left her, in other words, to translate the scrambled codes she inherited from him. Indeed, Bruce’s closeted homosexuality and the circumstanc- es surrounding his ambiguous death—was it an accident or sui- cide?—generate this multilayered work. If in verbal autobiography “a lived life” as mediated through memory is the source text, in an autographic work—because its medium is patently visual—the source text would be assumed to be the same; however the relation between content and form is not integrated, synchronous, or organic in comics. If anything, the contiguity between content and form calls attention to the gap between them, to the space between image and words. Indeed, a graphic memoir challenges the primacy of verbal language as the source material, however coded or abstruse, or conveyer of both self-referential and extrareferential truth about that life. Comics are certainly a form of intersemiotic translation, as defined by Ro- man Jacobson: “transposition from one system of signs into an- other, e.g. from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting” (Venuti 2012, 118). But that formulation seems too one-sided for this case. Though there are clearly two systems of signs, it may translation / be impossible to determine which is the source text and which the target, on the level of verbal versus visual signs. 32  Understanding the deceptive simplicity of comics is counter- intuitive for serious readers of literature who are unaccustomed to having to process words and images within the same bounded space in a self-conscious, extensive fashion. What determines the order of reading of the panels, and how does size and shape matter? Horizontal or vertical? What about the blanks between the panels? How are they to be understood? While not exactly functioning as negative space, these blanks, called “gutters,” are also the borders outlining the images. What happens in that space? And, how is that space to be filled in? These elements are—pardon, the expres- sion—graphic reminders that comics, like verbal narrative, leave out more than they put in. It may initially seem as though the pic- tures are easier to grasp than the text, thus requiring less critical scrutiny, but this assumption does not take into account the density of information the pictures actually convey, some of which might be purely aesthetic or formalist in nature, and not content-driven or plot-enhancing at all. (No less so than in literature, virtuosity is a virtue in comics.) Thus the reader of comics who privileges the words at the expense of the images has failed to understand what is intrinsically, internally translative about comics; and, conversely, though it is necessary to possess what is known as “visual litera- cy,” that alone is also terribly insufficient for understanding com- ics. Comics are dependent on the dynamic, irreducible interplay between its verbal and visual components. Bechdel’s precise, fine-line, cross-hatch pictorial style, espe- cially her drawing of interiors, corresponds to her verbal dexterity. In terms of overall conceptual structure and design, the autobi- ography is relentlessly interpretive; experiences presented as dis- tilled or symbolic abstractions are mined not for their retrospective meaning, but for their present value as sources of speculative po- tential. “What if” begins many a sentence. Critics Hillary Chute and Julia Watson call Bechdel’s narrative strategy “recursive,” meaning that it is distinctly nonlinear, turning back in on itself, finding its closure in reversals, transversals, and coincidences (Chaney 2011, 149). In the service of creating a sustained narra- tive, not to mention a satisfying story, an autography selects and combines the panels that relate to one another associatively (that is, metaphorically) and/or temporally (that is, metonymically), as in memory. Following a series of events that Bechdel recalls, one translation / 33  of which includes an encounter with an actual snake, a panel in which she ponders the symbolism of phalluses and their creative and destructive powers, leads next to the scene, as she imagines it, of her father’s death, which occurred as he crossed Route 150 carrying a large bundle of brush and was hit by an oncoming truck. The image in the wide panel is of lush foliage—foliage is perva- sive in this narrative—lining an empty stretch of road with one lone leaf lying in the middle, suggesting her father’s last trace. The text box reads, “…You could say that my father’s end was my beginning. Or more precisely, that the end of his lie coincided with my truth” (Bechdel 2007, 117). In an interview with Hilary Chute, Bechdel refers to the entire enterprise of Fun Home as “involuted introspection,” pointing out that with the exception of the subplot of her own coming out story, “the sole dramatic incident in the book is that my dad dies” (Chute and Bechdel 2006, 1008). In other words, “the end of his li[f]e” compels a psychic and artistic internalizing process of ghostly re- membrance that can be regarded as a “retranslation of the self.” As I have elaborated elsewhere, translation in such a context of intergenerational transmission, whose knowledge is posthumous and always belated is, in the Benjaminian and Derridean sense, a passing down, a passing away, and a passing over of the foreign as well as the familiar, a living on through others, differently. The panel below the drawing of the road invoking her father’s death shows Alison and her father traveling in the family car (which is a hearse); Bruce’s eyes are on the road, while Alison’s head is barely visible as she peers out the window. The caption or text box reads, “Because I’d been lying too, for a long time. Since I was four or five” (Bechdel 2007, 117). What is the connection between these two panels? Everything hinges on the word “be- cause,” suggesting both causality and motivation. Bechdel’s mem- ory of accompanying her father on a business trip to Philadelphia, and stopping at a luncheonette, is a motivated one because, as she says, “WE [emphasis mine] saw a most unsettling sight.” Initially deprived of authorial perspective, the reader/viewer has no idea what the object of their gaze might be. On the following page, there are two unequally-sized panels. The dominant one shows translation / a masculine-looking woman wearing men’s clothes. Both father and daughter gaze at her; Alison expresses to the reader/viewer 34 the great surprise she experienced at this phenomenon. The text box below turns it into an instance of uncanny translation: “But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home—someone they’ve never spoken to, but know by sight—I recognized her with a surge of joy.” In the panel below, Bechdel recounts, “Dad recognized her too.” In her memory, he challenges her: “Is that [author’s emphasis] what you want to look like?” (Be- chdel 2007, 118). In the next panel, on the following page, with the image of the woman writ large, she asks rhetorically, “What could I say?” But to her father, she replies, “No.” This is followed by a panel in which father drags daughter, who is still looking back, out of the luncheonette. This instance of perfect translatability—a memory trace in which both Alison and Bruce, displaced from their own familiar/ familial context, recognize another outsider not as a stranger but as someone familiar to them on the basis of an implicit, shared sexu- al/gender difference—is reconstituted as a primal scene from Be- chdel’s childhood, and one of the most charged in the entire auto- biography. The cartoonist puts a fine point on it in the next panel when she discloses to the reader, “But the vision of that truck-driv- ing bulldyke sustained me through the years” (Bechdel 2007, 119). At the moment of Alison’s “recognition,” she didn’t know what a bulldyke was; the signifier may have “sustained” her, but its sig- nification eluded her until later in life. Of course, Bechdel is pro- jecting backward: her superimposition of the term bulldyke onto the genre-bending truck-trucker announces itself as belonging to a cur- rent linguistic/cultural/political context in which gender identity is understood to be performative and provocatively appropriated. This is a current context her father did not live to fully appreciate, but one she wishes him to assume now. As Madelon Sprengnether puts it, in- voking Freud, “[M]emories from childhood vividly recalled in adult life bear no specific relation to what happened in the past. Rather, they are composite formations—elements of childhood experiences as represented through the distorting lens of adult wishes, fantasies, and desires” (Sprengnether 2012, 215). Freud’s final paragraph in “Screen Memories,” which is an in- ternal dialogue or self-analysis, an example of life-writing mas- querading as a narrative with an interlocutor, views memory as a process of construction: translation / 35  the concept of a “screen memory” as one which owes its value as a memory not to its own content but to the relation existing between some other that has been sup- pressed… It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood; memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves. (Freud 1995b, 126) What is at stake in this primal scene which Bechdel has recon- structed because it comes to play a determining role in her com- ing-out story, is relationality of all kinds, grounding all autobiogra- phy and translation: the relation between the visual and the verbal (between what is seen and what is not said); between a father and a daughter who witness together, and who share a sense of complic- ity, but then suppress that bond of knowledge and affinity; between recognition and self-recognition; between lying and truth-telling. It is above all the circuits of deception and self-deception that Be- chdel seeks to rewire and overwrite. Coyly titled “In the shadow of young girls in flower,” after the French title of the second volume of Proust’s Recherche, the end of the chapter calls the reader’s attention to the fact that the previous translation of À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs— Within a Budding Grove—shifts the emphasis from the botanical to the erotic. However, Bechdel interjects, “As Proust himself so lavishly illustrates, the two are pretty much the same thing” (Bechdel 2007, 109). That cavalier conflation serves Bechdel as a metaphor for her father’s love for flowers and her own devel- oping identity as a lesbian, unleashing a cluster of critical con- vergences interpreted from a current vantage point. Chapter 4, in as much as it invokes Proust’s term “inversion,” is about reading generic and gender indeterminacy, but if Proust serves as the the- matic intertext, Freud has certainly provided us with the method for understanding how the bulldyke scene functions in the nar- rative and why resurrecting this memory now is so critical for Bechdel’s enterprise. Bechdel’s father started reading Proust the year before he died, translation / and it was after his death that Lydia Davis’s retranslation of À la recherche du temps perdu came out; though she prefers the “liter- 36 alness” of In Search of Lost Time, Bechdel laments the fact that perdu and lost are not simple equivalents: that perdu also connotes “ruined, undone, wasted, wrecked, and spoiled” (Bechdel 2007, 119). Bechdel’s point about what is literally as well as figurative- ly “lost in translation” when this source word in French is trans- ferred to English, is a metacommentary on what is irretrievable. “The complexity of loss itself” (Bechdel 2007, 120) is lost, despite translation’s capacity to recuperate and redeem difference over time and even space. Some differences are irreducible variants; they belong to the realm of the untranslatable. The translation strategy that propels Fun Home, however, ul- timately valorizes affinity and proximity by domesticating differ- ence through regeneration. The last page of chapter 4 comprises two unequally sized panels, both devoted to drawings taken from a box marked “family photographs” that Bechdel found after her father’s death, including one revealing her father’s transgressive past activities with a former male babysitter. (In her interview with Chute, she attributes the genesis of this book to the discovery of this photograph.) The reader remembers the smaller top photo- graph as the snapshot of an adolescent girl posing in a bathing suit which is the chapter head image; it serves as a kind of illustration of its title, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.” This time, however, Bechdel alerts the reader that the image in the redrawn photo is not of a girl (Alison, one might have speculated), but of her young father in drag, and looking, as she says, “not mincing or silly at all. He’s lissome, elegant” (Bechdel 2007, 120). In the large panel, that top photo is mostly obscured by the text box. What grabs the reader’s attention is the juxtaposition of two portraits, and their striking similarities: one of her twenty-two- year-old father sunbathing on the roof of his frat house, the other of Alison on a fire escape on her twenty-first birthday. She won- ders if this was taken by his lover, as hers was. For Bechdel, the autographer, the uncanny resemblance between the two figures and their two poses—“the exterior setting, the pained grin, the flexible wrists, even the angle of shadow falling across our fac- es”—is “about as close as a translation can get” (Bechdel 2007, 120). Where is the original or source? What, about the structur- al or formal aspects of this strategic arrangement, calls up an act of translation, one in which the points of contact are so acutely translation / 37  identifiable? Obviously, in this visual commentary there is some- thing beyond a merely shared physical, familial resemblance, even across gender lines. Indeed, it is precisely the fluidity of sexual ori- entation, gender identification, and polymorphism à la Proust that reveals the configuring of father and daughter identities here as a transposition or displacement, alternatively, of a simple replication of difference (which is one definition of translation). Rather, Bruce and Alison are to be recognized on the page as “inverted versions of each other in the family” (Watson 2008, 135). In this particular act of intergenerational transmission which celebrates the materi- ality of self-presentation, Bechdel is memorializing a connection that was often resisted in life by both Alison and her father, but which is now reenvisioned through art. Conclusion By identifying Nabokov’s, Condé’s, and Bechdel’s autobiograph- ical projects as distinctive modes of translation, I have hoped to show that translating a life requires a particular strategy or tech- nique of self-reflexiveness. The art of self-translation, with its perils and projections, is a highly mediated and motivated act of intimacy that takes place not in a vacuum, but within a set of cul- tural determinants. By wrestling with questions of familiarity and strangeness, assimilation and resistance, appropriation and deflec- tion, the autobiographer/translator and the translator/autobiogra- pher remind us that neither life nor language is self-contained. In their very existence, autobiographies—which are translations of “experience” and, therefore, subject to infinite and relentless in- terpretation—serve as testimonies to existential lack and linguistic incompleteness. Invocations of other lives and other voices—re- pressed, resisted, and reclaimed—autobiographies are translations in search of an original. Thus it is the drive to recuperate what may be always utterly lost—because of the foreignness in ourselves as well as in languages—that endows the autobiographer/translator with the greatest agency of all. translation / 38 References Apter, Emily. 2001. “Crossover Roots/Creole Tongues: A Conversation with Maryse Condé.” Public Culture 13, no. 1: 1–12. doi:10.1215/08992363-13-1-1. Bechdel, Alison. 2007. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mif- flin. Chaney, Michael, ed. 2011. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison: University of Wisconsis Press. Chute, Hillary L., and Alison Bechdel. 2006. “An Interview with Alison Bechdel.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4: 1004–1013. doi:10.1353/mfs.2007.0003. Condé, Maryse. 2012. La vie sans fards. Paris: JC Lattès. Freud, Sigmund. 1995 a. “An Autobiographical Study.” The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 3–41. ––––––. 1995 b. “Screen Memories.” The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 117–126. Kadish, Doris Y., and Françoise Massardier-Kenney. 1996. “Traduire Maryse Condé: Entretien avec Richard Philcox.” The French Review 69, no. 5: 749–761. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. On Autobiography. Translated by Katherine Leary. Madi- son: University of Wisconsin Press. Mahony, Patrick. 2001. “Translating Freud.” American Imago 58, no. 4: 837–840. doi:10.1353/aim.2001.0022. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1947. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Random House. Ornston Jr., Darius Gray, ed. 1992. Translating Freud. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Patti. 2010. Just Kids. London: Bloomsbury. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. 1998. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sprengnether, Madelon. 2012. “Freud as Memoirist: A Reading of ‘Screen Memo- ries.’” American Imago 69, no. 2: 215–239. doi:10.1353/aim.2012.0008. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. 2012. Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Watson, Julia. 2008. “Autobiographical Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” In Michael Chaney, ed., 2011. 123–56. Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4: 965–979. doi:10.1353/mfs.2007.0013. Wolk, Douglas. 2007. Reading Comics: How They Work and What They Mean. Phil- adelphia: Capo Press. translation / 39  Bella Brodzki is Professor of Comparative Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. She teaches courses in autobiography; modern and contemporary fiction; literary and cul- tural theory; and translation studies. Her articles and essays on the critical intersec- tions with and impact of translation on other fields and disciplines have appeared in a range of publications, most recently in the collection, Translating Women, edited by Luise von Flotow (2011). She is the co-editor of Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobi- ography (1989) and author of Can These Bones Live?: Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007). Her current project is co-editing a special volume of Comparative Literature Studies entitled Trials of Trauma. translation / 40 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15520

Autobiography/Translation: Memory’s Losses or Narrative’s Gains? Response to Bella Brodzki’s Lecture Suzanne Jill Levine University of California in Santa Barbara, USA “We translate to be translated”—translation transports the transla- tor, but also the reader and the writer, in an act that transforms one text into another. Professor Brodzki uses this quote (which was a rejoinder in my book The Subversive Scribe (1991; 2009) to “thou art translated,” a line uttered by Quince to Bottom in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream), to move onto a broader stage. From the diverse scenarios of Russia and the Francophone Caribbean, from psychoanalysis to graphic memoir, Bella (I use her first name as we are old friends) analyzes parallels between the practice of autobiography and of translation, seeking to expand the definition of autobiography by means of the code of translation. Mediating these two practices she sets out to understand the screening process of memory, how or to what extent memory both distorts and creates the truths it seeks, and especially narratives that propose to reenact memory and to represent the truth. In her lecture, Bella discusses how autobiography, like transla- tion, is a rewriting, a re-presentation. At first glance we might find this argument farfetched. After all, unlike autobiography, a transla- tion is normally a rewriting of a whole and visible text. It is not, at least on the surface, the reconstruction or restaging in coherent form of the fragments of memories of a life lived. If we look further, how- ever, we can see that a translation performs a comparable artificial resuscitation. The original language has vanished in the text’s new version; the language that replaces it works to resurrect words and phrases, wordplays and metaphors, fragments of the translator’s lan- guage and mnemonic associations, that will bring to life the original, one hopes, as one expects the same from an autobiography. Bella’s discussion departs precisely from the readerly expecta- tion that the autobiographer’s pact with the reader—like the trans- translation / 41  lator’s “sacred duty”—is to be candidly true to an original. And yet, from an essentialist perspective, the end products of both prac- tices can easily become Faustian Frankensteins. Under the aegis of Freud, who made the unconscious betrayals of the omniscient narra- tor visible to us, these betrayals are parallel to those of the translator, who can only give us approximations, never the thing itself. The first question that jumps out at me, then, is: Are we talking only about autobiography in relation to translation, or are we talking about all narrative in general? That is, is Bella’s proposal in her paper suggest- ing a narrative theory that could be applied to any narrative form, beyond verbal language and written texts? No two narratives are the same, as Borges’s very first ficcion, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” his famous parable about the “anachronistic” practice of reading, written in 1939, so spectacularly tells us. This devilish commentary on commentary (as George Steiner called it) is at the center of Bella’s topic. Pierre Menard, avant-garde poet who, among his many daring experi- ments, attempts to rewrite a Don Quixote completely identical to the original, is Borges caricaturing himself as a young Ultraist. Borges’s story—supposedly written in French by an admiring dis- ciple of Menard—is a fiction that pretends to be a biography while it is (like all fiction, one could argue) autobiographical, and is not only about the absurd impossibility of the totally faithful transla- tion but also implies and reveals that it is in itself a translation. My question to Bella is, in this discursive context, is there a significant difference here between autobiography and biography vis-à-vis translation? I ask this coming, also, from my own work on a biography of Manuel Puig. The author of Kiss of the Spi- der Woman, Puig’s novels pay homage with their “dollar book” Freudianisms to Freud’s invention of the modern novel, that is, the decidedly nonobjective narrator. As both translator and biographer I have dealt with the challenges of subjectivity, memory, and inter- pretation, haunted by the pact of fidelity that such nonfiction writ- ing involves. Autobiography, biography, and creative memoir are evaluated, however, by the strength, intensity, and inventiveness of their narrative structure, of the story they construct, just as transla- tion is evaluated by its fluency, its persuasive rhetorical effect. The translation / writer of nonfiction is as dependent on literary conventions, plot, theme, character development, climax, and denouement as the fic- 42 tion writer. Truth is less of a consideration than the appropriateness of form and the success of style. Autobiography differs from biog- raphy because, as the subject and the writer/producer of the former is the same, we assume a much higher/deeper level of fidelity to the subject. However, considering that “the self is constituted by a discourse that it never completely masters”1 how different, really, are these two genres? We might define the difference this way: the biographer is situated outside of the life he or she wishes to represent and wants to work his or her way into it, while self-writing, autobiog- raphy, presents its author with the problem of being too much of an insider, needing to distance her or himself, to get far enough away to see what’s happening and what it is one actually wants to represent. My possible response to the question above can perhaps be aid- ed by my own experience. I have written an authorized biography and am attempting to write a translator’s autobiography. While the research for the biography was different from the current research for my own history, I also had to realize that my subjectivity influ- enced the biography as if it were in some way an autobiography; or, whether narrating an autobiography or a biography, I was and am never totally subjective or objective. Hence, can we agree on the translational nature of autobiography and also of other forms of narrative, fictional or nonfictional, and are we perhaps speaking of a translational paradigm for narrative in general? In “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” Georges Gus- dorf2 examines Paul Valéry’s radical proposal that biography in or- der to be true must go beyond its traditional limits.3 I cite these thoughts on this topic here because, among other things, they also relate to Bella’s provocative discussion of autobiography and trans- lation. They also reveal an important source of Borges’s fictions and essays that highlight narrative theory and feature his antirealist the- ories of narrative art as well as his poetics of writing as translation. According to the theory of biography proposed by Valéry—whose Monsieur Teste was a direct Borgesian model, fondly parodied by 1 Michael Spinker, “Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography,” in James Olney, ed., Autobi- ography: Essays Theoretical and Practical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) 342. 2 Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in James Olney, ed., Autobio- graphy: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) 41. 3 Paul Valéry, “La Vie est un conte,” Tel Quel II (1943): 348-349. The entire issue is available online at https://archive.org/stream/telquelv02valuoft#page/n7/mode/2up. translation / 43  Borges’s famous Pierre Menard as a kind of absurdly avant-garde intellectual artist—a biographer, moving between the actual life and his life-writing, would have to see through the eyes of the subject. The biographer would have to attempt to know as little of the fol- lowing moment as the subject himself would know about the cor- responding instant of his career. This would be to restore chance in each instant, rather than putting together a series that admits of a neat summary and a causality that can be described in a formula. Causality was, as we know, one of the core issues of Borges’s “Nar- rative Art and Magic.”4 Valéry’s point, as Borges sees it, is that the so-called real truth is nothing, unformed, blurred, and that therefore the original sin of biography—which we could compare with the original sign of autobiography—is to presume the virtues of logical coherence and rationalization. That is, we can extend Valery’s discussion of the prerogative of biography to that of autobiography in that the task at hand is not to show us the objective stages of a career, but to reveal the efforts of historian/biographer/autobiographer to discover or reveal the effort of a creator to give the meaning of her (or his) own mythical tale. This latter statement basically describes Freud’s attempt at autobi- ography in his “study.” On the surface he “objectively” appears to summarize his career—giving us much valuable information—but in reality he is creating his own self-myth as intuitive scientist, a myth in which, it so happens, his early work as a translator plays a major role. Bella reminds us that for Freud “la psychanalyse c’est moi.” Through her discussion we read his “autobiographical study” which reveals his influences, Goethe on Nature, and notably the Bible, which impacted him precisely because he belonged to an oppo- sitional minority as a Jew. What he read or experienced or what influenced him is more about his real feelings or interests; what he actually says about himself, is all about his ego and need for cultural power. For Freud translation was a power play, or as Bella writes, “Though he had a position as a Lecturer in Pathology in Vienna, it was his work as a translator that gained him entry into translation / 4 Jorge Luis Borges, “Narrative Art and Magic,” in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Wein- berger, translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, Eliot Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999) 75–82. 44 Charcot’s circle of personal acquaintances and full participation in the activities at Salpêtière Clinic” (AS, Freud R, 6). (infra, 21) Ironically this personal essay says less about the man beneath the persona than his essay on screen memories or any of his funda- mental books such as The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s “Au- tobiographical Study” is a prime example of an omniscient narrator blind to his own subjectivity. What I personally found fascinating is that Freud, as Jewish outsider, gained entrance to the circles of cul- tural power as a translator. Curiously, I could see a similar trajectory in my own life, as a woman gaining entrance to the Latin American Boom literary circles, a world of cultural significance in my time and context, in which I took on an identity as translator and even muse, more glamorous than my own modest “outsider” Washington Heights Jewish origins. As Manuel Puig (the author whose literary texts I translated and whose life I ultimately translated into a biography) aptly put it, Freud invented the modern novel: that is, he exposed the unavoid- able limitations of the omniscient narrator, hence his importance not only to autobiography but to all writing. In Bella’s discussion, Au- tobiography and Translation come together logically and intuitively in Freud whose early work as a translator helped create his career as a scientist. By extension, his role as translator helped create the persona whose theoretical work was practically based on autobi- ographical as well as clinical reflection. Suzanne Jill Levine is a leading translator of Latin American literature, and Professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara where she directs a Translation Studies doctoral program. Her scholarly and critical works include her award-winning literary biography, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman (FSG and Faber & Faber, 2000) and her groundbreaking book on the poetics of translation, The Subversive Scribe: Trans- lating Latin American Fiction (published in 1991 and reissued by Dalkey Archive Press in 2011), along with her classic translations of novels by Manuel Puig and her 2010 Penguin Classics editions of the works of Jorge Luis Borges. Aside from numerous volumes of translations of Latin American fiction and poetic works, she has regularly contributed articles, reviews, essays, and translations of prose and poetry to major anthologies and journals, including the New Yorker. Her many honors include National Endowment for the Arts and NEH fellowship and research grants, the first PEN USA West Prize for Literary Translation (1989), the PEN American Center Career Achieve- ment Award (1996), and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. For the translation of Jose Donoso’s The Lizard’s Tale, she was awarded the PEN USA West Prize in 2012. translation / 45 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15521

Dalit Consciousness and Translating Consciousness: Narrating Trauma as Cultural Translation Christi A. Merrill University of Michigan, USA Abstract: How do we understand literary catharsis as a multilingual project? This paper focuses on scenes from Ajay Navariya’s short story “Subcontinent” (in Laura Brueck’s translation from Hindi) to ask about the responsibility of writers, translators and scholars in grappling collectively with the trauma of caste-based sexual violence (or what Sharankumar Limbale calls “injustices done to Dalit women.”) Put in conversation with Robert Young’s reading of Freud on cultural translation, Navaria’s story complicates straightforward understandings of consciousness as monolingual. Instead, the Hindi story in English reveals a complex connection between what Limbale and others refer to as a distinct “Dalit consciousness” and G.N. Devy’s notion of “translating consciousness” by asking us to redefine how the languaged self responds to the original trauma of being read as untouchable in the dominant vernacular. For Devy translat- ing consciousness involves rejecting binaristic colonizer–colonized hierarchies, whereas for Limbale Dalit consciousness works to fight caste hierarchies operat- ing primarily within India itself. This paper takes up Rita Kothari’s suggestion that the dominant vernacular might be just as foreign as the colonial language in order to radically rethink the dialectical relationship between the languaged self and cultural transformation. What is literature’s role in responding to the trauma of caste-based sexual violence a language away? I ask as a Hindi translator as well as a scholar and teacher of Dalit literature—of work, I should explain, that very openly claims to write from the perspective of those “oppressed” or “ground down” (as “Dalit” is usually glossed) by the entrenched system of untouchability in India.1 Dalit writers in India have been asking versions of the question I have posed 1 I gratefully acknowledge the support of a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities that allowed me to complete the work on this paper, as well as the NIDA/FUSP Symposium organizers and Robert Young for providing the original impetus for investigating this material. translation / 47  here within their own language traditions, and as a group seem to agree that the main purpose of Dalit literature should be to raise awareness—or as the well-regarded Marathi writer Sharankumar Limbale puts it more vividly, “to inform Dalit society of its slavery, and narrate its pain and suffering to upper caste Hindus” (Limbale 2004, 19). It is not beside the point here that I quote Limbale from his book Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, which has been translated into English by (avowedly upper-caste Hindu and Cana- da-based postcolonial studies scholar) Alok Mukherjee. Dalit liter- ature, publisher S. Anand has pointed out, is a phenomenon in and of translation—from, to, and via English, as well as many other official Indian languages (Anand 2003, 4). Given current realities, I am suggesting here that we include postcolonial studies scholars and translators such as Mukherjee and myself in the project Lim- bale and others have begun when theorizing the purpose of Dalit literature. I propose here that we examine examples of Dalit liter- ature to think more carefully about the relationship of Translation Studies to postcolonial theory. Like many activists writing on the subject, Limbale contends that the work of Dalit literature is inspired directly by the revolu- tionary leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and can only be done by those with an explicit Dalit consciousness. A few pages later in his book on Dalit aesthetics—in a section devoted to the topic of Dalit con- sciousness—he explains: The Dalit consciousness in Dalit literature is the revolutionary mentality connected with struggle. It is a belief in rebellion against the caste system, recognizing the hu- man being as its focus. Ambedkarite thought is the inspiration for this consciousness. Dalit consciousness makes slaves conscious of their slavery. Dalit consciousness is an important seed for Dalit literature, it is separate and distinct from the conscious- ness of other writers. Dalit literature is demarcated as unique because of this con- sciousness. (Limbale 2004, 32) To ask about literature’s role in raising awareness about un- touchability as a human rights issue akin to slavery raises fun- damental questions about these points of comparison, especially when expressed across multiple languages. How might we adapt current theoretical models to understand Dalit consciousness as a translation / multilingual issue? G.N. Devy has argued that multilinguality is so central to the 48 Indian context that it requires its own theorization, one that he dis- cusses—serendipitously—as “translating consciousness.” Writing in the 1990s, Devy was primarily interested in developing a dis- tinctly postcolonial “aesthetics of translation” (Devy 2014, 163) that would inform “a more perceptive literary historiography” (165) responsive to the perspective of the multilingual user (“such as a translator” he notes) who “rends. . .open” the multiple sign systems converging in a single consciousness (164). If aesthetic production is figured in Devy’s writing with the violent imagery of rending open, “translating consciousness” itself is imagined in a friendlier fashion, as an intuitive “open” daily negotiation along a continuum of mutual understanding, that he contends—most crucially here—our monolingually-minded, European conceptual tools have not been able to theorize properly: In most Third World countries, where a dominating colonial language has acquired a privileged place, such communities [of translating consciousness] do exist. In India several languages are simultaneously used by language communities as if these lan- guages formed a continuous spectrum of significance. To conceptualize this situation is beyond European linguistics, which is based mostly on a monolingual view of language. The use of two or more different languages in translation activity cannot be understood through studies of foreign language acquisition. (165) Both Devy and Limbale suggest independently that the de- velopment of any literary aesthetic (perceptive or no) is neces- sarily ideological; moreover, when explaining how each of their approaches to the project of literary historiography differs from the mainstream, each uses the term “consciousness” to describe an alternative to the demeaning hierarchical forms of discrimina- tion a random language user encounters on a daily basis, that have become written into our own disciplinary conceptualizations. As a result, Devy and Limbale each call for a corrective literary his- toriography based on such a consciousness. For Devy, the crucial ideological difference informing a translating consciousness in- volves rejecting binaristic colonizer–colonized hierarchies, where- as for Limbale the crucial ideological difference Dalit conscious- ness works to fight is informed by the caste hierarchies operating primarily within India itself, both during the colonial period and after Independence. How might these two theories of conscious- ness be put in productive conversation with one another when translation / 49  focusing on postcolonial literary engagements with human rights struggles? I will attempt to address this larger question by reflecting on the inherent multilinguality of the translating consciousness Devy describes—whereby “several languages are simultaneously used by language communities as if these languages formed a contin- uous spectrum of significance” (65)—when it encounters caste- based discrimination. I will do this by analyzing a piece of postco- lonial fiction that details a series of shocking events experienced by a Dalit family: the short story “Upmadwip” written in Hindi by the Dalit writer and activist Ajay Navaria. I will quote primarily from the version translated into English by Laura Brueck (2012) as “Subcontinent” in an effort to vex perceived limits of language when describing violent encounters in translation. Only a few pages into “Subcontinent,” the narrator recalls a traumatic scene from his childhood in which he watches, help- less, as a gang of upper-caste men beat up his father to within an inch of his life, incensed that an “untouchable” (“achut” in the Hindi) would have the audacity to return to the village for a rela- tive’s wedding in a clean new kurta, rupees in his pocket, greeting friends comfortably, and holding his head high. Significantly, the story is framed by a tranquil domestic scene of the narrator as an adult living in an unnamed city struggling to wake from a night- marish sequence of horrific childhood memories, prompted by an impending decision over whether to return to the village once again for another relative’s wedding. The framing device is crucial for establishing two distinct perspectives on the same event: one of the adult looking back with a mixture of indignation and apprehen- sion, and the other of the innocent child offering direct testimony (albeit fictionalized) of a series of traumatic events that in their ancestral village seem to be lamentably routine. The structure of the story thus invites us to read this as a scene of initiation—into a kind of consciousness that we might not immediately recognize as a translating consciousness but are led to infer will eventually become a Dalit consciousness. How? Soon readers are introduced to a liminal dream state between waking and sleeping, past and present, city and village, and led translation / down a stepwell at the edge of what appears to be the adult nar- rator’s consciousness, invited to witness a childhood scene from 50 the young boy’s point of view as a group of high-caste villag- ers confront the father and his father’s aunt (whom the boy calls “Amma”) for forgetting “the rules and regulations of the village” (Navaria 2012, 87). The narrative structure allows readers to re- main cognizant of the adult narrator’s judgment on these “rules and regulations” while following the boy and his family through the village; this structure enables the implied author to call into question the entire system of signification the boy is being initiat- ed into. The story dramatizes why what Limbale terms “rebellion against the caste system” (2004, 32) would entail so much internal struggle, starting with the fundamental act of recognizing oneself and other Dalits as human beings equal to all others. As the scene continues, readers of the translated story are in turn asked to distinguish between the language of the past and of the present, of the village and the city, marked by the boy’s dis- comfort at the time and the adult narrator’s outrage looking back as his great aunt bows down at the high-caste villagers’ feet, assur- ing them, “They’ll never do it again in my life. They erred, having lived in the city” (Navaria 2012, 86). The narrative makes strategic use of the distance in perspective between the adult narrator (who is very conscious of the historical implications of this discrimina- tion) and the boy (who is at first shocked by what he witnesses and seemingly unable to interpret it) to map consciousness as a series of encounters with others where imperfect (even horrifying) com- munication regularly takes place. In the consciousness of the young boy these rules and regula- tions are as startling as they are incomprehensible: “Oh God, I’m done for! Maaaa! Forgive me, master, kind sir! It won’t happen again!” As Amma wailed, one of them struck her head hard with a shoe, and she cried out again. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Now they were all laughing. Seeing them beat Amma with their shoes, Father tried to get up again. When they noticed him moving, they fell on him afresh. Sticks, fists, shoes—flailing without stop. I stood trembling. One of them slapped me across the face. Father was lying on the ground. Unconscious. Blood dripping, thap-thap-thap, from his forehead. A streak of blood spread all the way down his pyjama. My lip had been split open. It was still bleeding. I stood there quaking. I almost pissed my pants. It seemed like it would never end. Father lay at peace. His new white kurta was torn from his chest to his stomach. Blood dribbled from his mouth. Father’s dead, I thought. Seeing a body drenched in blood, that’s the only thing an eight-year-old can think. (Navaria 2012, 86-87) translation / 51  Here the boy is presented as being unable to interpret the phys- ical details he witnesses, even while we can feel the pressure of the adult narrator’s judgment about the situation. And the admis- sion about the limitations of the boy’s own awareness, narrated suddenly in the third person—“Seeing a body drenched in blood, that’s the only thing an eight-year-old can think”—is all the more moving knowing that the adult narrator in the present tense of the story is picturing himself in a similar situation, anticipating trying to protect his own child from similar degradations, if he decides to travel back to the village with them for an upcoming wedding. The strategy of third-person narration thus generalizes the experience of the Dalit subject. Implicitly, the story asks the reader why I, why he, why anyone should have to learn how to interpret the blood stains on their father’s still body. This is not a postcolonial translating consciousness to cele- brate. There is no triumph a few paragraphs later when the boy be- comes more adept at speaking the village language of caste-based violence: I quietly wiped the blood off my lip with my torn collar. There were no tears in my eyes. But I kept making small crying sounds, hoo-hoo, for fear of getting thrashed again if I stayed quiet. I’d quickly realized that it was better to keep up the whimper- ing in front of them. (87) How might attention to translating consciousness here help us better conceptualize Dalit consciousness as a multilingual project beyond the monolingual limitations Devy warns against? In Hindi, we can imagine this scene of calibrated whimpering is playing as much to the upper-caste Hindu readers and fellow Dal- its Limbale identified as the target audience for Dalit literature; in English translation, the readership is expanded even further, since the elite English-speaking reader in India as well as the reader abroad are similarly put on notice about the demeaning effects of the caste system, and in such a way that challenges the received colonizer–colonized binaries of postcolonial studies. Here the language of dominance we must theorize is predicated on caste, and thus suggests a more complex mapping of translat- ing consciousness than the colonizer-colonized binary. We see in translation / the English translation as well that the narrator’s perspective is multiply displaced—both at the top of the stepwell and below, in 52 the past, present, and even future of the story. Bringing together the concept of translating consciousness with Dalit conscious- ness invites us to think afresh about the ways we might map such literary language, starting with the ways we theorize the very idea of “language” in literary work. In Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature, Limbale puts par- ticular emphasis on what he calls—in the section title—“The Lan- guage of Dalit Literature,” explaining: The view of life conveyed in Dalit literature is different from the world of experience expressed hitherto. A new world, a new society, and a new human being have been revealed in literature, for the first time. The reality of Dalit literature is distinct, and so is the language of this reality. It is the uncouth-impolite language of Dalits. It is the spoken language of Dalits. This language does not recognize cultivated gestures and grammar. (33) Limbale’s assertions apply to many of the works of Dalit litera- ture published prior to this book on aesthetics, including Limbale’s own prose. In Navaria’s story, however, the hierarchies are tipped once again, since the “new world, . . .new society, . . .new human being” is waiting at the top of the stepwell in the consciousness of an urbane, multilingual Dalit man while the boy is left to grapple with the old world, old society communicating in the horrifying idiom of caste-based discrimination. However shocking this lan- guage may be to the boy as well as offensive to the narrator and ostensibly to his readers in turn, it is especially horrifying that it is not considered “impolite” in the village context of the story—the upper-caste villagers do not grant their “untouchable” neighbors that kind of respect. It is precisely the standardization of this de- grading idiom that Navaria’s story is asking us to consider. The narrative is offering a critique of this particular kind of language use, and thus we might say of the village translating consciousness depicted in the story. To understand how this critique might be inviting readers of both the Hindi story and the English translation to take part in a fraught project of recalibrating consciousness as a way of coming to terms with collective trauma, we must first think more carefully about the roles we play in the process of literary catharsis. I should admit here that I am grappling with a more specific version of the question of trauma and literary language, occasioned translation / 53  by a provocative encounter at a conference on the historiography of Dalit literature held in Delhi at Jamia Millia Islamia University in December, 2013. The conference was organized by members of the English Department and it brought together scholars from a number of different disciplines and areas of expertise along with creative writers working in a host of Indian languages.2 There were three days of sessions starting with a keynote speech by Kancha Ilaiah, academic panels, and several roundtable discussions with published writers such as Limbale and Navaria, including one de- voted to the place of translation in the reception of Dalit literature. On the particular panel I have in mind an English literature profes- sor gave a polished, impassioned paper invoking a lineup of US- based scholars on trauma and testimony urging us to acknowledge the importance of autobiographical writing as an act of individual catharsis that ultimately leads to healing; she described this pro- cess as “translating pain into language” (Abidi 2013). At the time, I see from my notes, I wondered about the relation- ship of catharsis to activism. I knew from reading Laura Brueck’s scholarship that a writer like Ajay Navaria thought of catharsis in much more politically engaged terms, as a collective, embold- ened confrontation with society. In a discussion on aesthetics in her recent book, Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Contemporary Dalit Literature (2014), Brueck explains: Dalit writer Ajay Navaria colorfully compares the realist aesthetic of Dalit literature to the necessity of lancing a cyst on the body of Hindu society. While the substance that the cyst releases may be unpleasant, its cathartic release is said to be necessary for the healing of the social body. (85)3 The difference between the two types of catharsis proposed here is crucial: in the model the conference paper presenter was looking towards, it is the individual writer who has suffered the trauma, and so it is the writer not the social body who is sick and requires healing. What difference does this make in thinking about the role of literature in healing trauma? 2 International Conference on Dalit Literature and Historiography, Department of English, Jamia translation / Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India, December 19–21, 2013. 3 Ajay Navaria’s original quote was from “Dalit Saˉhitya kaˉ Vigat Aur Vartamaˉn,” Praˉrambh (Dalit Saˉhitya Visheshank) 1, no. 3 (2004): 44. 54  In the ensuing discussion, the presenter was assailed by one imminent personality after another (speaking alternately in Hindi and in English): How does this model of therapy help us reduce intercaste violence? Are you trying to individualize Dalit experi- ence? What is the role of the reader’s subjectivity in this model? And, most vividly to me, Limbale shouted in frustration, “If my mother is being raped then I shouldn’t be crying but crying out to stop it!”It is in this context that I am left wondering—alongside the presenter and others in attendance at that conference, I am sure— about the role of literature in responding to trauma. What type of catharsis do we seek through literature, and what is the role of a translator and literature scholar in that process? Often scholars metaphorize the project of writing trauma as an act of speaking out against injustice. The assumption is a thera- peutic one, that repressed trauma and other forms of silencing are unhealthy for the subject, and that she will be free of her resulting symptoms only once she has successfully narrated and fully an- alyzed these painful memories. Robert Young has recently sug- gested that Freud consistently described such work as a process of translation—he points out that the word for “translation” in Ger- man (übersetzung) appears at least forty-five times in Interpreta- tion of Dreams alone, for instance—but in such a way that radical- ly rethinks the dialectical relationship between the languaged self and what Freud (“tantalizingly,” Young adds) calls “cultural trans- formation” [kulturelle Wandlung] (Young 2013).34 This version of “cultural translation,” Young contends, is not a simple, straightfor- ward task of “moving from text A to B, leaving text A behind, but rather moving to text B by making text A unconscious, repressed, but with A still haunting text B as its shadow and liable to reappear in disguised form at any moment” (17). I will spend a moment detailing this insight, for it has important implications for catharsis as a multilingual project, and the role of culture in mediating such a catharsis collectively. Young explains that in Freud’s writing, dream thoughts are like an “unknown language that we have to decipher on the basis of the translation” (9). Young likens the process to cracking the code of the Rosetta Stone, where you work backwards, comparing the Here Young is citing Freud 2005, 224. translation / 4 55  language you know against the one you do not, until you begin to understand the system by which meaning is made in the language unknown to you. This because for everyone—in Young’s reading of Freud—“the psyche is multilingual, alert to the constant possi- bility of using translation as a mechanism of displacement in the face of repression” (4). Even in a healthy, nontraumatized subject the psyche engages in such a process, he explains, and culture’s role is to tame a person’s natural instincts. Thus the psyche, in Young’s words, keeps itself “busy trans- lating into a foreign language that is unreadable to the indi- vidual subject him or herself” (5). Young understands Freud as suggesting that there are a number of languages converging in a single psyche, including the distinction between “dream thoughts” (in the unconscious) and “dream content” (in one’s consciousness), both of which are individual and idiosyncratic, even if internally consistent enough for an analyst to begin to recognize a pattern. Young quotes Freud as writing in The In- terpretation of Dreams: Dream-thoughts and dream-content lie before us like two representations of the same content in different languages—or, rather, a particular dream-content appears to us as a version of the relevant dream-thoughts rendered into a different mode of expres- sion, the characters and syntax of which we are meant to learn by comparison of the original with the translation. (Young 2013, 8) The role of multilingual performance is crucial in Freud’s theorizing, Young points out, given that Freud himself compared the process of decoding and deciphering dream content to Egyp- tian hieroglyphs, “whose characters need to be translated one by one into the language of the dream-thoughts” (2013, 9). The analyst is able to crack the code only after he sees how the indi- vidual, multilingual subject moves between other (conventional) languages, a technique he and Breuer began to pioneer in Studies in Hysteria, with the case of “Katharina.” Young quotes Freud as writing: “We had frequently compared the hysterical symp- tomatology with a pictographic script, which we were able to read once we had discovered a few cases of bilingualism” (132). This is a highly unusual “original”, however, when viewed in the translation / broader history of translation. “What makes psychoanalysis more than just translation into another discourse,” Young adds provoc- 56 atively, “is that psychoanalysis is translating the unknown” (8). How might such a comparison enable us to rethink Dalit con- sciousness as a multilingual project? If the job of the psyche is to “translate” or displace traumatic experiences into a language foreign to the individual subject, the work of psychoanalysis is then to interpret that idiosyncratic lan- guage and “de-translate” it back into a language she shares with her analyst, as Young explains: Psychoanalysis finds the meaning of dreams not in dreams themselves but in their invisible origins. In dreams we have only the translation: the patient and analyst’s job is to translate the incomprehensible dream-content back into its original, and then to analyze and repeat in reverse the work of translation which has transformed the first into the second. Dream-interpretation, therefore, as Jean Laplanche has suggested, is more a question of de-translation, trying to de-translate the dream back into an orig- inal that remains hidden. This is where and why the work of interpretation through association must come into play: breaking the dream-content down into its constit- uent parts one by one, and working through the dreamer’s associations, analyst and dreamer engage in the laborious work of de-translating the dream-content back into its original dream-thoughts. (10) Young’s reading of Freud insists that translation practice is at the core of our work as languaged beings (regardless of how many official languages we are said to speak), and that one of the central roles of culture is to train an individual to interpret to themselves, in a language that they share with others, the most hidden parts of themselves, such as traumatic events in the past. The case of Dalit literature is especially potent here because “culture” itself is accused of legitimizing the agents of that original trauma—not incidentally, but fundamentally. While he does not name Dalit literary examples specifically, Young does suggest that such cases are central to Freud’s work on cultural translation. Young reads Freud as a major theorist of cultur- al translation whose contributions to translation theory have import- ant implications most particularly for those translated subjects—like Dalit writers—until now often left out of our theorizing: Freud’s. . .theoretical paradigm [on translation]. . .remains infinitely suggestive. It of- fers, for example, a possible way of reading the invisible, the subaltern, those whose forms of public representation distort their fundamental being, where the invisibility or repression of subalterns in official discourses and documents from the past require translation / a de-translation exercise to make them visible in their own terms. (11) 57  Bringing together theories of Dalit consciousness with trans- lating consciousness suggests that the very prospect of shared lan- guage is exceedingly fraught, in ways that are important for the project of handling trauma through literary work. Young further hints that the project of analyzing the relationships between those languages might be key to better understanding the “original” (as trauma, or otherwise.) We see this most vividly in his reading of the case of Anna O, who responds to a childhood trauma by alternating moments of stark speechlessness (“aphasia”) with what Freud in English trans- lation refers to as “paraphasia,” switching into languages (English, French, Italian) foreign to Anna O’s own mother tongue of Ger- man. Following Freud, Young uses this example of an upper-class woman to show how suspicious the psyche itself remains general- ly of culture’s role in taming one’s instincts. We see in Anna O’s case that being highly cultured only serves to make her subterfug- es more elaborate, and the work of the analyst (not to mention the nurse who tended her) that much more demanding: The paraphasia receded, but now she spoke only in English, yet seemed to be un- aware of it, and would quarrel with the nurse, who was, of course, unable to under- stand her. Not until several months later did I manage to convince her that she was speaking English. She herself, however, still understood her German-speaking envi- ronment. Only in moments of great anxiety would her speech fail her completely, or she would mix up all kinds of languages. She would speak French or Italian at those times when she was at her best and most free. Between those periods and those in which she spoke English lay complete amnesia. (29) The case asks us to rethink the fundamentals of cultural trans- lation as a languaged relationship between individual and collec- tive, especially since the collective itself is figured as a plurality of overlapping language domains. Young’s reading calls into question the very notion of a discrete “mother tongue” as source of a stable cultural identity, and echoes ongoing debates surrounding Dalit ex- amples. For instance, in a 2013 article—“Caste in a Casteless Lan- guage: English as a Language of ‘Dalit’ Expression”—Rita Kothari complicates any simple understanding of English as a co- translation / lonial language, arguing that for writers and translators working with Dalit texts—like the poet Neerav Patel, whose example she 58 focuses on—English offers a more compelling alternative to re- gional vernaculars. Patel’s choice to write in English, rather than Gujarati, she suggests compellingly, “is animated by the misery of unwanted memories of language, and a desire to erase that mem- ory” (Kothari 2013, 65). Kothari refers to a soon-to-be-published essay Patel wrote in response to a public query: “Who (all) can claim Gujarati?” (64) Kothari explains: If standard Gujarati, Patel argues, is as distant and alien to dalits as English, he would rather embrace English, and use it to replace his “mother tongue,” thus making En- glish what he calls his “foster-tongue.” By being foreign, English does not normalize and legitimize caste, and by being an ex-colonial language with global reach, it be- comes empowering. (61) I have suggested elsewhere that English is not in fact casteless, that the language’s encounters with caste started early in the colo- nial encounter—I use the example of “pariah” whose first usage in English is 1613 (Merrill 2014, 262). However, here I am more interested in the ways Patel’s critique of his “mother tongue” in re- lation to English introduces an important perspective on Dalit con- sciousness as translating consciousness. As Kothari’s discussion of Patel’s critique makes clear, the imperative of Dalit conscious- ness is to redefine the very domain of language and its relationship to collective memory: An acclaimed poet and critic, Patel attacks the homogeneous idea of a “mother tongue” in India. Although this may seem a separate issue from English, it is very im- portant to see how the idea of an Indian language that alienates the dalits and colludes with the upper castes in normalizing caste discrimination shapes the dalit response to English. The specificity of the case below provides a much-needed elaboration of this operation to bring home the fact that Indian languages do not constitute for all Indians a proud inheritance, which “globalization” and similar invasive forces may allegedly besiege. This is essentially an upper-caste view and luxury; those who wish to redefine themselves must do so by abandoning this inheritance and embracing English. (65) While this seems neither Patel’s nor Kothari’s point, I would suggest that in the process Patel is also inviting us to rethink the very meaning of translation. Young, too, in his reading of Freud, asks us to rethink the en- terprise of translation as a relational exercise between language and memory, as we see in his discussion of the case of Anna O: translation / 59  Cultural translation, in Freud. . .is not a process by which the former text or elements are ever entirely left behind, but one in which the new text always remains doubled and haunted, its translations perpetually remaking themselves, the translated text per- petually seeking to revert to its original, like a ball held under water. The different languages, as in the dream, remain perpetually present. In some sense, therefore, according to Freud we live in two or more languages at once. This bi- or multilin- gualism in which, as it were, like Anno O., we read one language but translate it simultaneously into another, can illuminate how, in this model, the general sense of loss in translation modifies its gain—for while in cultural terms much is gained, in the individual this gain produces at the same time a constant sense of unease, of dis- ease, malaise, of “cultural frustration,” cultural denial, or as we might say today, of cultural dislocation. (Young 2013, 17-18) Young is implying that every language is haunted by a series of unconscious memories, be they individual or collective. His star- tling proposition is that the ensuing struggles to articulate difficult truths—to find apt language for these invisible “originals”—put productive pressure on whatever languages we have in common. We might then surmise that every speaker has a translating con- sciousness that holds within it (“like a ball held under water”) the potential for radically rethinking the possibilities of the lan- guage(s) she speaks. How might this complex understanding of the relationship between translation and consciousness apply to literary work? According to Limbale, one of the features of Dalit conscious- ness is the ability to identify with any injustice ever visited upon any member of the group. While detractors contend that such a stance results in literature that is predictable or propagandistic (charges his translator Mukherjee renders in English under the ru- bric of “univocality”), Limbale defends such politicized identifi- cations instead as a sign of cohesion and thus of strength, since it allows individuals to read a host of traumatic experiences visited upon Dalits as part of a programmatic effort at group discrimi- nation: “Social boycott, separate bastis, wells, and cremation grounds; inability to find rental accommodation; the necessity to conceal caste; denial of admission to public places; injustices done to Dalit women; dragging and cutting of dead animals; and the barber refusing to cut hair—these experiences are alike for all Dal- its” (Limbale 2004, 35). Limbale’s emphasis here is less on direct translation / experience of such injustices, and more on the daily acts of inter- pretation that renders someone part of the very category deserving 60 such discriminatory behavior. Understood this way, “original trau- ma” begins with the possibility of being read as untouchable by others; acknowledging that reading of untouchability subsequently then becomes part of one’s consciousness as distinctly and defiant- ly “Dalit.” Approaching Dalit literature through Young’s reading of Freud on “cultural translation” helps complicate and thus confound any simple glosses of the terms in play. If we look more close- ly at Young’s proposition that cultural translation is not a simple, straightforward task of “moving from text A to B, leaving text A behind, but rather moving to text B by making text A unconscious, repressed, but with A still haunting text B as its shadow and liable to reappear in disguised form at any moment,” then we might infer that all language speakers sharing an idiom of discrimination like the caste system are haunted by a text A such as “injustices done to Dalit women.” I will spend a moment pursuing this proposition through a later scene in Navaria’s story, in large part because it resonates with Limbale’s outburst that day: “If my mother is being raped then I shouldn’t be crying but crying out to stop it!” And in the process helps us rethink the theoretical categories by which we too might read such a scene. There is a suggestion early on in “Subcontinent” that sexual violence in the village has been ongoing and systemic, to the ex- tent that many “untouchables” are themselves offspring of a union (directly forced, or manipulated) between a high-caste man and an untouchable woman. We see this referenced directly in the story when the narrator makes clear that he himself is related to one of those high-caste thugs in the village who are beating up his father: “‘Pandit-ji, it’s not even her husband’s. It’s her lover’s. This bas- tard child is Harku’s!’ He was pointing at Father” (Navaria 2012, 87). The passing comment seems to affect the character of the pan- dit, who at first appears ready to protect the boy’s father, possibly because he is related to Harku. Even though this is another in- stance where the adult narrator looking back seems to understand the implications of this moment more than the child narrator, the narrative reveals the turmoil this causes on the young narrator’s part. As a boy, the narrator tells us, he held out hope the pandit would take pity on them, but was soon to be disappointed. Not only does the pandit bond with the high caste thugs, joining in with translation / 61  the verbal and physical humiliation, but he later seems to be the one to take advantage of Amma. The scene of Amma’s further humiliation comes late in the sto- ry, after the violence has escalated even further, when high-caste members of the village take umbrage over the groom daring to ride a horse to the door of his bride and they attack the wedding party with lathis. The boy falls down unconscious—the significance of this is important for this study—and we watch him in retrospect try to put language to the ongoing village drama he has witnessed: When I opened my eyes, it was still dark. An oil lamp was still burning in the hut. My aunt was sitting near the smoldering stove. The wedding party had left. . . . My head was throbbing. Someone had tied an old piece of dhoti around it. I don’t know when I dozed off again, but a woman’s shriek shocked me awake. I made haste to get up, but as soon as I rose, a blow struck my back, and I fell on my face. Half outside the hut, half inside. “Fucking city boy, if you move, I’ll unload a bullet in your skull,” someone yelled, tilting my face up with the muzzle of a double-barreled gun pushed into my jaw. To my right, a few feet away, I saw, beneath the white, dhoti-clad bottom of a pale pandit-god, the darkened soles of someone’s feet flailing and kicking; swinging on the back of this pale pandit was a fat, snake-like top-knot. . .and another scream. Terrified. Uninterrupted. Splitting the sky in two—chhann! (95-96) Like the boy in the story who lies halfway out of the hut, wa- vering between consciousness and unconsciousness, the charac- ter of the woman being violated too has no language at the ready to defend herself with—she can only flail and kick and scream. Navaria’s rendering of the scene raises unsettling questions about the very meaning of consciousness, and how language—any lan- guage—plays a part in making and remaking that consciousness. In this scene we have a series of confusing, upsetting pairs: the boy being threatened by an unnamed gunman, the “pale pandit-god” riding a woman we only know by her flailing dark feet, and then the “fat, snake-like top-knot” and the disembodied scream, which seem to emanate from the entwined bodies. At this heightened moment of violence, the boy and the violated woman can share no words of support, or mutual understanding, can only each submit to those who have enough power over the language to demand silence of the others. And yet, the treatment of this scene translation / of sexual violence as the boy’s memory, of a moment that haunts him as an adult, delineates how someone who is witness to vio- 62 lence (even a form of violence he may never experience directly) might be traumatized, in exactly the way Limbale has argued. If we then pursue the implicit analogy between Anna O. and the narrator of “Subcontinent,” we might begin to formulate a more nuanced understanding of translating consciousness when we con- sider carefully the process by which a traumatized Dalit subject struggles against aphasia. The fact that languages like Hindi and English have a mechanism in place for silencing both the subject who experiences the rape and the boy who witnesses it, puts a lie to the contention that it is only the individual subject who is haunt- ed by these violent incidents in the past. Instead, the language cultures themselves might be understood to be haunted, and the moments of paraphasia an indication of the ways such hauntings do not dwell in discrete language domains. Navaria’s story helps us understand how an act of translation (in both the commonly-un- derstood sense, and also with Young’s more specialized meaning) might reveal the ways simply being part of a language community unthinkingly we might be part of the process of repression. Taking seriously the project of Dalit consciousness, read in terms of an active translating consciousness, might afford us a more complex understanding of literary catharsis. translation / 63  References Abidi, Shuby. 2013. “Dalit Autobiography as Scriptotherapy.” International Confer- ence on Dalit Literature and Historiography, New Delhi, Jamia Millia Islamia, December 21. Anand, S. 2003. Touchable Tales: Publishing and Reading Dalit Literature. Pondi- cherry, India: Navayana. Devy, G. N. 2014. “’Of Many Heroes’: An Indian Essay in Literary Historiography.” In The G. N. Devy Reader. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan: 4: 1-225. Freud, Sigmund. 1999. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by Joyce Crick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. 2004. Studies In Hysteria. Translated by Nicola Luckhurst. New York: Penguin Books. Kothari, Rita. 2013. “Caste in a Casteless Language: English as a Language of ‘Dalit’ Expression.” Economic and Political Weekly, XLVIII (39): 60–68. Limbale, Sharankumar. 2004. Towards an Aesthetics of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies and Considerations. Translated by Alok Mukherjee. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Merrill, Christi A. 2014. “Postcolonial Issues: Translating Testimony, Arbitrating Justice” In A Companion to Translation Studies, edited by Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter. London: John Wiley and Sons. 259–270. Navaria, Ajay. 2012. “Subcontinent.” In Unclaimed Terrain. Translated by Laura Brueck. New Delhi: Navayana. Young, Robert J.C. 2013. “Freud on Translation and Cultural Translation.” Unpub- lished manuscript of paper delivered at the NIDA/FUSP Symposium in New York, September 20. Christi A. Merrill is an associate professor of South Asian Literature and Postcolonial Theory at the University of Michigan, and author of Riddles of Belonging: India in Trans- lation and other Tales of Possession (Fordham University Press, 2009). Her translations of the stories of Rajasthani writer Vijaydan Detha, Chouboli and Other Stories, were co-published by Katha (New Delhi) and Fordham University Press (New York), and won translation / the 2012 A.K. Ramanujan Award. She spent the 2013-14 school year in India on an NEH/AIIS Senior Fellowship researching her latest book project, Genres of Real Life: Mediating Stories of Injustice Across Languages. 64 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15522

Translating Talkies in Modernist Mexico The Language of Cinemas and the Politics of the Sound Film Industry Valeria Luiselli Hofstra University, USA Abstract: During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the first ‘talkies’ appeared in Mexico, and many new cinemas were built or adapted from older buildings in order to accommodate this paradigmatically modern entertainment technology. Until the 1920s movies were mostly screened in makeshift spaces –in private houses, old theaters, circuses and even churches. Then, in the early 1920s, the first ‘cinema palaces’ started to appear, and by the late 1930s there were around fifty new or newly adapted movie theaters specialized in featuring talkies in Mexico City. These movie houses were an emblem of spectacular modernity. They are also, as I argue, a clear example of ‘translation spaces’ in their ma- ny-layered complexity. I discuss a relatively wide range of translation practices, from dubbing and the politics of film translation in early foreign sound films in Mexico, to the role that the first movie theaters played as stone and concrete ‘translators’ of the modern experience of sound films, to the appropriation of old spaces and their repurposing for the new technologies, to the way that the- aters that were built in particular ‘languages,’ such as the International Style and the Streamline modern, constituted a form of ‘temporal’ translation. 1. Movie theaters in the age of sound: an introduction During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the first “talkies” appeared in Mexico, and many new cinemas were built or adapted from older buildings in order to accommodate this paradigmatically modern entertainment technology. Until the 1920s, movies were mostly screened in makeshift spaces—in private houses, old the- aters, circuses, and even churches. Then, in the early 1920s, the first “cinema palaces” started to appear, and by the late 1930s there were around fifty new or newly adapted movie theaters specialized in featuring talkies in Mexico City (Hershfield 2006, 265).1 These 1 Perhaps part of the problem is the lack of material evidence in magazines and newspapers re- garding the construction of theaters, as compared to the great amount of information regarding films and actors. Among news such as “Tarzan has divorced his wife” and “Chaplin is in love translation / 65  movie houses, as the architectural historian Fernanda Canales has written, were “an emblem of spectacular modernity” (Hershfield 2006, 180). The first sound movie theaters are also, as I shall ar- gue, a clear example of translation spaces in their many-layered complexity. Research on cinemas both from the perspective of architec- tural as well as cultural history remains scarce in relation to other areas of focus in both film studies and architectural history. Often, film historians ignore the spaces in which films were screened, and architectural historians tend to disregard the history of film when they deal with movie theaters. Although film criticism does not fall within the purview this paper, and I will not focus on any film in particular, I do want to place my architectural analysis and discus- sion of movie theaters within the specific context of the arrival of sound film technology in order to discuss the relationship between the modern architectural language of movie theaters and some of the dominating cultural politics of the burgeoning sound film in- dustry in Mexico. I am particularly interested in the question of whether these two things worked in consonance or, on the con- trary, were in dissonance in relation to the discourse of modernity or in creating a “sense” of being modern. Considering the spaces that were created with the arrival of sound film from an architec- tural perspective, and focusing on a small group of movie theaters, I intend to discuss the various senses in which translation practices took place within these new spaces, and how such practices con- tributed to a wider discourse of modernity. Did both cinemas and the film industry have a parallel evolution in terms of how they subscribed parameters of modernism? Did they play a similar so- cial and cultural role in their contribution to the formation of ideas of modernity? I will discuss a relatively wide range of translation practices, from dubbing and the politics of film translation in early for- eign sound films in Mexico, to the role that the first movie the- aters played as stone-and-concrete “translators” of the modern again” (Cinelandia, December 1932), as well as propaganda for new equipment for the new film theaters, advertisements which sell cheap and reliable English lessons, ads for new Kodak translation / cameras and new Clarion radios, and so on, propaganda for film theaters or news about them is, with few exceptions, notably absent from magazines when the inauguration of theaters are announced. 66 experience of sound films, to the appropriation of old spaces and their repurposing for the new technologies, to the way theaters that were built in particular architectural “languages,” such as the International Style and the Streamline modern, constituted a form of temporal translation.2 The way I approach these differ- ent practices and spaces, in turn, encompasses a hermeneutical approach to cultural practices, a phenomenological reading of building typology, and a more distant reading of buildings within the cityscape. My approach to translation, moreover, is tied to the quintes- sentially modernist distinction between foreignization and domes- tication. Modernist translation practices must be distinguished from what is conceived more generally as translation. The 1920s and 1930s were decades of experimentation with composition and translation. As the critic Lawrence Venuti writes, modernist translation practices, which had their philosophical root in nine- teenth-century philosophy, treated translation as an art and a source of innovation: The main trends in translation theory during [modernism] are rooted in German literary and philosophical traditions, in Romanticism, hermeneutics, and exis- tential phenomenology […] Nineteenth-century theorists and practitioners like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt treated translation as a creative force in which specific translation strategies might serve a variety of cultural and social functions, building languages, literatures, and nations. At the start of the twentieth century, these ideas are rethought from the vantage point of modernist movements which prize experiments with literary form as a way of revitalizing culture. Translation is a focus of theoretical speculation and formal innovation. (Venuti 2000, 11) Far from being a means of passively importing foreign liter- atures and adapting foreign languages to local ones, modernist translation as “formal innovation” constituted a form of active 2 Although the term “International Style” started to be used more frequently in the 1930s, it usu- ally refers to the language that architecture started using in the 1920s, and which became the emblematic style of modernism in architecture. Buildings designed according to the principles of the International Style are typically devoid of unnecessary ornamentation, are rectilinear, conceive exteriors as a result of interiors, and rationalize form and function. The Streamline Moderne style, which became widespread in the 1930s, draws on fundamental principles of the International style but merges it with Art Deco elements, such as the use of curved lines, horizontal planes, and references to nautical and aerial shapes. translation / 67  foreignization of the domestic (vis-à-vis domesticizing the for- eign), by which the foreign “contaminated” the domestic and thus pushed its limits further, while at the same time blurring the boundaries between the so-called “foreign” and the “domes- tic.” Seen in this light, modernist translation practices are ones in which translation was not merely conceived as an accurate ren- dering of a source language into a target language or a vehicle for explaining the foreign or making it more accessible or palatable to the local readership, but as a way of appropriating new forms and thus a creative locus of innovation. The term “translation practice”, moreover, in the context of Mexican cultural history can help us move beyond the passive categories of “reception” or “influence,” common to canonic literary and cultural studies, and allow us to focus on modernist cultural production in terms of exchanges. 2. Subtitles, dubbing, versions, and talkies: a hermeneutical approach to the horizon of a new soundscape Translation and dubbing were a fundamental part of the begin- nings of the sound film industry. By the end of the 1920s, the film industry had entered into a crisis and sound film was initially not being received enthusiastically around the world by leading fig- ures in the industry. Chaplin had said that talkies were “ruining the great beauty of silence”, (Maland 1989, 113) and Luigi Pirandello wrote in his well-known essay, “Will the Talkies do Away with Theater?”, that American’s “cheerful arrogance” regarding the ad- vent of sound films was not something to really be worried about, because talkies were nothing but a “poor reproduction of theater” (Bassnett and Lorch, 156). But beyond its reception among prom- inent intellectuals and public figures, the crisis was also economic, and related to the world financial crisis. In 1932, the magazine Cinelandia, which was simultaneously published in Mexico and Hollywood, featured a piece titled “La gran crisis del cine” [The Great Crisis in Film] discussing the crisis in the industry and ad- judicating the reasons for such crisis to the advent of talkies. The piece recounts, in a rather alarmist tone: translation / Hollywood producers are receiving, from all over the world, definite data confirming the reduction of income from ticket sales in all the cinemas in every city, in every country in the world. To tell the truth, we must add that the downward trend in pop- 68  ular interest for the cinematographic spectacle did not start with the world financial crisis: it is older than that and goes back to the exact moment in which sound and spoken film first came onto the international market. (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 17)3 With the arrival of sound films in Hollywood in the late 1920s one of the many problems the American film industry faced was preserving its cultural and economic hegemony over the rest of the world. Governments were enforcing protectionist laws guarding against linguistic “invasion.” Countries such as Argen- tina immediately banned movies spoken in English. Even in the UK, audiences started to protest against movies being spoken in “American.” In Mexico, one of the most influential newspapers, El Universal, gave rise to an aggressive campaign against the new movies spoken in English, calling the governments through- out the Spanish American continent to ban movies in English. By the end of the 1920s, 90% of the silent films screened in Mexico were made in the US, and the Latin American audiences could not understand the new sound films (see Hershfield 2006, 264). The working classes did not speak English, and the elites mostly spoke French as a second language, not English. A good part of the Mexican elites as well as columnists and journalists sup- ported the campaign in the vast majority of national print me- dia. They seemed to agree that English would overtake Spanish if Hollywood’s “pacific invasion” was not stopped by banning movies in English, and they contended that Spanish would soon become a dead language if the masses started identifying English as the language of entertainment. Although a few publications, such as the monthly Continental, responded aggressively to El Universal’s campaign, this anti-English movement was initially quite successful, at least among the elites and public intellectuals (see Reyes de la Maza 1973). When the negative reaction to sound film became a universal response, Hollywood entrepreneurs finally decided that they had to do something about it. The first solution they attempted was to make silent versions of the new sound films, strictly for foreign ex- 3 This quote, as well as much of the information regarding the late silent and early talkie eras, is taken from Reyes de la Mazas 1973, which is a compendium of articles from leading Mexican publications in 1929–1932. I will be quoting many articles from this compendium; all translations translation / into English of the original articles are mine. 69  port. This proved to be a complete failure in the entire world (Mora 1989, 31) as audiences wanted to partake in new technological advances and silent films were seen as a thing of the past. The sec- ond solution was to subtitle films, but countries had demands that were sometimes difficult to meet, as well as particular, local de- mographic realities. The Mexican president Emilio Portes Gil, for example, ordered that there should be “absolute Castilian purity in the language and subtitles of foreign films” (Garcia Riera 1992, 13), which was impossible as the people involved in subtitling were Spanish speakers from different Spanish-speaking countries now living in Los Angeles, and there was no way to conserve the Spanish “purity” demanded by Portes Gil. Moreover, in 1930, the percentage of analphabetism in Mexico was 65% (Vidal 2010, 20), so the majority of the population was unable to read film subtitles. The third entrepreneurial strategy was to dub original Holly- wood films. This, likewise, proved inadequate, as many specta- tors detested the monstrous disembodiment that the still precar- ious methods of dubbing entailed. Finally, at least in the case of films destined for the Spanish-speaking world, it was decided that Hollywood would produce “versions” of the original films, using actors that could speak Spanish fluently. They imported writers, technicians, directors and, of course, actors from Spain and Lat- in America to play the parts of the English-speaking “originals.” These actors were called the Hollywood Hispanics—and were vir- tually linguistic stunt doubles. Or, perhaps, these Spanish-speaking actors can be seen as full-fledged dubbers: they not only leant their voice to the “original” but their entire body. A truly remarkable translation feat of sorts: Hispanic cinema became Hollywood’s Spanish-language copy or version of itself. From their beginnings, Hispanic films failed to convince au- diences—as if their particular form of translation proved to be too simplistic and unsophisticated for modern spectators. The au- dience was perhaps aware that either they were not watching an entirely original film and that the actors they were seeing were most often not part of the venerable star-system. In fact, a Spanish newspaper published a sarcastic note “thanking” Hollywood for ridding them of so many untalented, unemployed actors and taking translation / them over to the USA (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 23). The film critic Luz Alba wrote a piece titled “Growls in Spanish” where she stat- 70 ed that the voices of the actors were “so emphatic and what they say is so stupid that one has the impression of being in a tent dra- ma, where one could at least recur to the final resource of throwing the chairs at the actors—something impossible to do at the cinema Olimpia because the chairs are glued to the floor” (cited in Reyes de la Maza 1973, 180). Moreover, people were disgusted with the myriad Spanish accents, vocabulary, and idiomatic twists on the screen, where Mexicans, Spaniards, Argentineans, and Cubans played roles not necessarily corresponding to their accents. Before Hispanic sound films even arrived in Mexico, a film critic using the pseudonym of Don Q, who worked for the Spanish-language, New York-based magazine Cine Mundial, stated in 1929 that the diversity of nationalities and even races to which those improvised actors belong is such that their films will look like salads, mixing a variety of accents and eth- nicities—something that could be tolerated in scenes that can lend themselves to a cosmopolitan interpretation, but which will lead to more than a few flops. (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 191) Indeed, Hispanic films only lasted a few years, soon proving to be an absolute commercial flop.3 Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s last attempt to keep hold of the Latin American and Spanish market was to get Hollywood’s best actors to speak a little Spanish. Laurel and Hardy, as well as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, all made shorts in Spanish and, though these fared better with educated audienc- es—at least in Mexico—than the movies featuring Hollywood His- panics, they did not do not well enough for entrepreneurs to persist in this last, rather eccentric endeavor (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 25). The theaters these subtitled, then dubbed, and then remade ver- sions were screened in were originally designed for silent films, and were, in turn, often older buildings—churches, convents, or old theaters—sometimes precariously and sometimes creatively “translated” or repurposed for cinema. One of the most emblem- atic spaces for film screenings in the early 1920s was a former sixteenth-century convent, which, in 1922, reopened with the rath- er bombastic name Progreso Mundial (World Progress). The old courtyard, typical of colonial architecture, was used as the primary 3 By 1939, after approximately 175 talkies, Hispanic films ceased to be produced (García Riera 1992, 14). translation / 71  sitting space, and the original stone arcade, traditionally plain and unadorned, was heavily clad with ornamentation. A second story had to be built to fit more spectators, for which slim iron pillars had to be placed between the seats (Alfaro 1997, 55). Progreso Mundial circa 1922. Most of these theaters had to be refurbished once again at the in the late 1920s and early 1930s, this time to accommodate new sound film technology. The Teatro-cinema Olimpia was the first cinema in Mexico to screen a talkie in 1929—eight years after its inauguration.4 Before this, in the early 1920s, it had been used si- multaneously for plays and silent films. The talkie that was shown was The Singing Fool. Before it played, the theater screened a short showing the Mexican consul in New York directly address- ing Mexicans and congratulating Warner Brothers for their inven- tion. Then, before the main screening, both the Orquesta Típica Mexicana and the New York Symphonic Orchestra were shown 4 Previously, the sound film (but not talkie) The Submarine had been screened in the Teatro Im- perial, in April 1929. An ad in the Universal read: “The Teatro Imperial, conscious of its program in constant progress and keeping ahead of its competition, will offer for the first time this great translation / advance of human invention […] Come to listen to the clamor and feel the anguish of a sinking submarine. Listen to the sounds of the depths of the ocean. Today, two shows, one at four and the other at eight” (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 76). 72 playing a selection of musical pieces. The directors of the Olim- pia, in conjunction with Warner Brothers, had also produced a free magazine with information about the “wonders of the new form of entertainment” as well as a translated transcription of the movie’s dialogues (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 80). The premiere, apparently, was such a success that soon the campaign launched by El Univer- sal was drowned by the clamors of “the masses”.5 The Olimpia was designed by one of the most important early cinema architects, Carlos Crombé.6 It was built inside the shell of an old hotel, which had, in turn, been built in a vegetable gar- den on the grounds of the first Franciscan convent built in Mexico City in the 16th century. Its interiors were originally designed ac- cording to the elegant neoclassical eighteenth-century Adamesque style, which had seen a revival among the middle classes in the late nineteenth century and up to the 1920s.7 There were two dancing salons, one smoking room, and two vestibules (Alfaro 1997, 25). The elegant and often opulent interiors of movie theaters were a common denominator at the time. The logic behind this was to give the upper middle classes as immersive an experience for their money as possible, and help them forget their mundane, everyday life for a few hours. As a description of the movie theater in the magazine Cine Mundial read: “The Aristocratic Cinema Olimpia, refuge for families when on cold winter afternoons tedium stabs with its sharp blade, enchanting retreat […] has come to fill a vac- uum which had long been felt in Mexico’s good society” (Cine Silente Mexicano/Mexican Silent Cinema, translation mine). 5 It is interesting to note, reading the different articles about movies published at the time, that the opinion of intellectuals was almost always in contrast to what seemed to be the response of the “masses” to innovations and entertainment. 6 Carlos Crombé was a rather prolific cinema architect by the standards of the time in Mexi- co. In the 1920s he built several teatro-cinemas, in varied “conservative” architectural styles, ranging from Beaux-Arts façades typical of the Porfirian era such as his famous Cine Odeon, to Adamesque interiors, and even Churrigueresque exteriors (a Mexican adaptation of Baroque) in his well known Teatro Colonial (1940). His later cinemas, such as the Cine Alameda (1936) and his modernization of his own earlier Cine Olimpa (1941) were very different to those of the 1920s. The Cosmos, Crombé’s last project, which burnt down in 1946 just before its official inauguration, was closer to art deco and was perhaps meant to signal another version of modernity, perhaps closer to functionalism, in its sobriety. It was certainly the most modern of Crombé’s cinemas—it was closer, at least, to International Modernism—but it was the last he designed, as he died shortly after it burned down. 7 The Adamesque style, developed by the Adam brothers in England, became fashionable in the mid- to late-eighteenth century and is usually considered an offshoot of neoclassical design and architecture. It simplified baroque and rococo, but was still heavily ornamental. translation / 73  Teatro-Cinema Olimpia circa 1921. There are various translation practices at work in the example of the Olimpia’s screening of The Singing Fool. Even if the movie itself was not subtitled—a translation practice that, as I said ear- lier, had been banned by presidential orders—or dubbed, even if it was not a Hispanic “version” of an “original,” several interest- ing and rather inventive translational strategies were being used to bring the first talkie closer to its non English-speaking audience. First, the film’s dialogue was printed out and distributed free to patrons, which would seem to imply that it was expected to be read after the show, as a sort of consecutive or “delayed” translation. Then, there was the initial appearance of the Mexican consul in New York, who, in his role of cultural and diplomatic translator, was attempting to both bridge the two cultures that were about to engage in a possibly alienating encounter and also to fully sanc- tion—politically, that is—the screening of a movie in a language that was treated by many with great suspicion. Further, and most translation / importantly in architectural terms, the movie was being premiered in one of the oldest, most elegant and well-established movie the- 74 aters—a choice of setting which perhaps sought to convey an aura of traditional legitimacy and normality for the public. Through all these different practices or strategies, the Olimpia was to all ex- tents functioning here as a translation space. But how was the Olimpia’s role as a translation space inter- preted by others? In the Revista de Revistas, a highly popular pub- lication of those times, the critic Peinbert refers to the Olimpia as “one of our best salons” and says that through these salons “Mex- ico will be irremediably invaded by talkies in just a few months” (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 86). Similarly, in the Universal the ed- itor and critic Carlos Noriega Hope wrote that “Yesterday it was the Olimpia that was paving the way; tomorrow it will be all the cinemas in Mexico […] Not a month will pass before mute films are inexorably exiled to the barrios. Everything will be filled with cries, musical synchronizations, and words in English” (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 137). Another critic, Eugene Gaudry, complained about the screening at the Olimpia saying that it would inaugurate a time of great cultural confusion where eventually “the foreigners that come to Mexico will not know what the national language is, because they will be seeing movies in English, French, German, Italian, Denmarkese [sic], and so on, with no Spanish translations” (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 171). Gaudry was of course exaggerating, but his complaints and concerns must have been shared by many, because a year later, in 1930, the managers at the Olimpia devised a mechanism which allowed for the insertion of explanatory Spanish text or titles be- tween scenes in foreign movies. The Olimpia was famous for its endeavors in translating as much as possible for their audiences. The critic Luz Alba noted in an article that “talkies at the Olimpia have many titles, more than those strictly necessary to understand the general issue, and just enough to understand the details— something that does not occur in talkies at other theaters, which only have enough titles to understand generalities” (Reyes de la Maza 1973, 200). Indeed, movie theaters such as the Olimpia were the sites that were helping translate or carry over a new modern experience to the Mexican audience, and this modern experience went beyond the technology of sound in film: it was also the experience of foreign languages and voices coming into the city’s soundscape, translation / 75  Teatro-Cinema Olimpia circa late 1920s. through the screens of these movie theaters. Whether viewed as enablers of a new invention or as “traitors” that would allow the talkies to come in and take over, these translators made of concrete and stone functioned as the material portals for foreign languag- es to come in and “foreignize” the soundscape of Mexican movie theaters. 3. Translation, tradition, and entertainment: a phenomenological approach After an initial period of resistance on the part of the Mexico City elite, in which many columnists and critics voiced their concerns and hesitations regarding sound film technology, it was clear that the talkies had come to stay. In the early 1930s, the Mexican film industry consolidated and producers started to invest funds and translation / human capital in new technologies and, of course, in producing Spanish-language talkies. 76  One of the first optical sound devices for film was in fact in- vented by a young Mexican man who was living in Los Angeles with his family at the time. His name, like the names of many remote national icons, has an almost cinematographic ring to it: José de Jesús “El Joselito” Rodriguez. In the back room of the bakery his parents owned he had been working for two years on a sound-on-film device that would adapt to any camera and be easy to transport. He finally completed the last adjustments to the Rodriguez Sound Recording System in 1929. It weighed less than twelve pounds and was purportedly adaptable to any camera cir- culating in the industry. As the story goes, he sat his family around a projector and activated it. To his family’s surprise, a horrifying, cacophonic, almost diabolical melody gushed out, in synchrony with the image of a few people moving their mouths rhythmically on the home-made screen. Joselito then stopped the mechanism, made a few adjustments, and tried again. What came out the sec- ond time around was the Mexican national anthem. Apparently, in the first try, he had set the mechanism the wrong way around, and what his family heard was the national anthem being sung backwards. Early sound films relied on a sound-on-disc technology, in which the sound heard during a film screening had been recorded onto a phonograph record that was physically separate from the film. The technology was flimsy and unreliable: not only did the two components—sound and image—seem disconnected, but they would often desynchronize completely, producing mass confusion and irritation in early spectators. The decisive technological step for the sound film industry was the fusion of both the sound and visual components of the movie in an optical sound device, lat- er called sound-on-film technology. Although initial experiments with the new technology took place in the early 1920s, the first full feature film with integrated sound was The Jazz Singer (1927). It was in that same year that Joselito Rodriguez began to develop his new device, which he imagined could be used in the burgeoning Mexican sound film industry and thus set Mexico at the forefront of international talkies. At the same time as Joselito was working on his device, in around 1930 a Mexican producer put together a crew and began working on a project that would lead to the first Mexican opti- translation / 77  cal sound film, Santa. Joselito, who probably knew he stood slim chances of getting a proper interview with film magnates, stalked the film’s producer, Juan de la Cruz Alarcón, at Los Angeles air- port. Alarcón was on his way back to Mexico, returning empty handed, after an unsuccessful trip to Hollywood in which he tried to acquire a sound-on-film technology device: they were all too costly and impossible to transport. Accompanied by his brother, Joselito approached Alarcón and secretly filmed and recorded their brief airport conversation, in which he told the producer of his latest invention. He was unsuccessful in settling any deal with him, but he at least managed to get his contact information down and record the whole encounter. A few days later, he mailed the reel to Alarcón back in Mexico. The recording met and surpassed Alarcón’s expectations. It was a done deal. Just a couple of weeks later, Joselito and his brother, Roberto, were repatriated and began working on Santa in the newly built studios of the Compania Na- cional Productora de Peliculas. Santa was premiered in 1932, in Mexico City’s newly renovat- ed Cine Palacio. The Palacio was finished in 1924 and renovated in the late 1920s to screen sound films. But what did this renovation consist in? Did sound film technology affect the architectural lan- guage or style of movie theaters beyond the necessary adjustments to their interiors? Interestingly, the renovations to the Palacio were also external: the theater perhaps had to send the message to its audiences that they were fully committed to modernity and they were as modern as the technology they housed. In a comparison of the two façades it is possible to notice some of the typical changes that architecture underwent during the de- cade. In the renovated cinema, the straight lines that once met the pinnacles framing the center façade were replaced by a stepped rooftop, more typical of the art deco style of the late 1920s in Mex- ico, making the building look taller and, especially, differentiat- ing it from the straight-line horizontal façades of both neocolonial and Porfirean art nouveau architecture. The exteriors of the Cine Palacio were also conditioned for the more striking form of film propaganda that started to flourish towards the end of the 1920s, which often made use of vertical edge-lit signs and likewise used translation / the marquee for placing film posters. There is, unfortunately, little published material about the the- 78 ater’s interior transformation or on what adaptations the film’s technicians had to do in order to screen Santa in a theater that was not initially built for talkies. The only mention in publications to its interior is that it was “modernized”—which probably means that the art nouveau ornamentation was “upgrade” to art deco (see, Cine Palacio circa 1924. Cine Palacio late 1920s. translation / 79  for example, García 2002). In short: a new technology demand- ed a new appearance, internal and external. Modernity demanded an integral makeover, a full translation of a space into its modern version. An urban melodrama of sorts, Santa was based on a best-sell- ing novel written at the close of the nineteenth century by the Mex- ican writer Federico Gamboa. It tells the story of a woman from the countryside who arrives in Mexico City and is forced into pros- titution. Modern Mexico city is portrayed as a threatening, cruel space, where well-intentioned people are treated harshlly. As the critic Joanne Hershfield writes regarding Santa, “the film affirmed the conservative discourse that idealized tradition […] and criti- cized the modern paradigm of progress” (Hershfield 2006, 268). It is somewhat interesting, in this light, that the storyline chosen to inaugurate the Mexican talkie—a format using technology that was spearheading modernity and progress—should come from a conservative nineteenth-century novel. It is also interesting that this conservative film was screened in a newly renovated, modern, art-deco movie theater. What can we make of the apparent décal- age between a movie and the theater that screened it? It must be noted that the example of the conservative Santa screened in the modern Palacio is by no means an exception. Most commercial movies made in Mexico during the 1930s—and well into the 1950s, the period in which the country entered its cine- matographic Golden Age—were no less conservative and tradi- tionalist. As Hershfield notes, “whether they were set in historical or contemporary contexts, these films exalted traditional values of patriarchy, the family, the macho hero, and virtuous, submissive femininity” (Hershfield 2006, 269). The fundamental reason for this is that the State was deeply involved in film production and distribution in Mexico, and therefore also had a “say” in its con- tent.8 The same is not true of the relationship between the State and movie theaters themselves.9 Theaters were seen as lucrative 8 As Susan Dever writes regarding the film industry and the star system, “Within Mexico these stars negotiated a relationship between spectators and the State, indoctrinating viewers in the rights and duties of Mexican citizenship. (Given the Mexican Government’s subsidy of the film translation / industry, making the State the producer of Golden Age cinema, this relationship was particularly well defined)” (Dever 2003, 12). 9 There is no evidence whatsoever that most film theaters received money from the State, as op- 80 spaces of entertainment, not places destined to educate the Mexi- can population. While successful films at the box office were usually the most conservative ones, Mexican cinemas in the early 1930s tend- ed toward a gradually increasing radical modernity. They were more experimental than their content (that is, than the films they showed), more forward-looking and more committed to a sense of modernity—however they interpreted this. In other words, if cinemas in the 1930s pointed toward the future, the content they screened mostly pointed toward the past. How, then, should we read the resulting tension? Can it be read as a tension between form and function? That is, a tension between modernity in form and conservatism in function? Or perhaps their function was not at all to conserve values through conservative movies, but simply to entertain and make money. In that case, how did their form con- tribute to the parameters and box office exigencies and how was this, in turn, gauged against the State’s own exigencies regarding the pedagogic, civilizing purpose of Mexican commercial films? The phenomenological assumption regarding the interrelated- ness of an aesthetic experience and the physical aspect of the space in which such an experience takes place may or may not be entirely accepted—the degree of the interrelatedness can certainly be ques- tioned in a space such as a theater, which disappears as soon as the lights go off and the show begins—but what is unquestionable is the fact that the architects of movie houses made stylistic choices which were necessarily tied to a taste informed by a preconception of what a space such as a cinema should “say” to its patrons. In his lecture “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault describes the mov- ie theater as a space that encloses within it a multiplicity of spaces. He explains the multiplicity of spaces enclosed in a movie theater posed to hospitals, schools, public housing, stadiums, universities, and public buildings. There were powerful families in the construction business—the Espinosa brothers, the Alarcóns, and of course, the controversial American tycoon William Jenkins—who had ties with the govern- ment and who would eventually hold a monopoly on Mexican film theaters. There were also politicians involved in theater construction and ownership, such as former president Abelardo Rodríguez. But none of this means that there was no public money, or at least honestly invested public money, in the business. Many reasons may explain the absence of the government in film theater construction and management. The short answer, however, is that theaters simply did not need it. As opposed to national film production, theaters had plenty of material to screen and plenty of patrons to entertain—a simple matter of supply and demand. translation / 81  through the figure of the heterotopia: “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces […] thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space” (Foucault 1984, 6). But what Foucault fails to do is to see the “very odd rectangular room” as anything more than just a box in which the experience takes place. He does not, in other words, regard the physical space of the theater as any- thing more than a sort of container. Cinemas, however, are much more complex in terms of their production of space than an “odd rectangular room.” The spaces in which films were seen provided a setting in which the viewers received their dose of entertainment within the bracket or “slices in time” (Foucault 1984, 6) which the experience of movie-going entailed. Palacio Chino late 1930s. Perhaps the clearest historical example of a conscious stylistic choice is that of the atmospheric cinemas, which were in vogue in translation / movie theater architecture in the United States in the 1920s and which sought to recreate exotic spaces. Such was the case of the 82 Palacio Chino (built in the late 1930s and inaugurated in 1940), which featured pagodas, Buddhas, and golden dragons in its par- ticular rendering of the atmospheric style. It was built in an old ball court, and designed by Luis de la Mora and Alfredo Olaga- ray. The critic Luis Helguera describes its interiors as built in “at- mospheric style, with pagodas, temples, and gold Buddha statues amid gardens. The ceiling was vault-like, not flat but very arched, and of course was painted deep blue. The screen was protected by a heavy black curtain, with Chinese motifs painted upon it. The screen arch was very heavily decorated, with dragons appearing here and there” (Heguera). Mexican architects of the atmospheric style followed the precept conceptualized by Charles Lee—“the show starts on the sidewalk.” They had attractive marquees, striking façades, and, in short, designed spaces that would bolster the “illusion” of the cinema, where the mind, leaving the real behind, was finally free to gambol and became more receptive to entertainment. Movie theaters, as spaces, can then perhaps be seen as a medium that, due to its “otherness,” helped transmit the illusion of cinema to its viewers. Whether this otherness was just a gleaming modernity, as in the case of the Cine Palacio, or whether it was set as an entire il- lusion, as in the case of the Palacio Chino, the point was that movie theaters were much more than just “odd rectangular rooms.” Going back to the question of form and function posed earli- er, how can we read the coexistence or juxtaposition of Mexican movies—conservative, and mostly realist and traditionalist—in these modern, “other” spaces? Perhaps by rephrasing this appar- ent dichotomy in terms of how movie theaters function as transla- tion spaces we can make better sense of it. In a “foreign” space of sorts, in a space that was utterly “other”—due to its modernity, its ornamental exuberance, or its atmospheric illusions—what peo- ple went to see was themselves; or even an older, more traditional version of themselves. A space “outside of time” and “outside of space”—a modern space of entertainment and illusion—thus func- tioned, paradoxically, as a sort of mirror of reality. In other words, a space that was foreign made the domestic visible. The patron or viewer, upon entering the other or foreign space of the movie theater, became a translator. A translator of what, ex- actly? A translator of him or herself for him or herself. The movie translation / 83  theater, inasmuch as it created an illusion or sense of being else- where, estranged the patron from his reality and from himself: he was in a foreign space of sorts. Then, the movie itself—a movie such as Santa, which in turn realistically depicted the reality “out- side” the space of the movies—made the patron face him-/herself. Translation spaces such as movie theaters were not just gateways for foreign languages and cultures, as I explained in the example of the Olimpia’s foreign talkie screenings, but also functioned as mirrors—spaces in which viewers come to see themselves reflect- ed in that other “version” of themselves in the context or against the backdrop of a space that was foreign and other, much like the translator who is always “strabismically” looking simultaneously at the foreign text and at her or his own. Moviegoers thus travels outside themselves and outside their domestic, local reality to re- turn to themselves. 4. New monumentality in the cityscape: building typologies and the urban layout By the mid 1930s, the Mexican film sound industry had entered its Golden Age. The number of films produced in the country had increased exponentially (see Mora 1989).The same was happening in many other parts of the world, as the advent of sound film and the language/translation problems it had created were partially re- solved by countries creating and investing in their own film indus- tries and producing films in their national languages. Paradoxically, however, while the film industry was becoming more and more fragmented into linguistic regions, the “interna- tional language” of theater architecture became more and more consolidated and unified. As the national film industry grew in Mexico in the 1930s, Spanish-language films were being screened in spaces that were increasingly trans- or international in terms of their architectural languages and styles. In this sense, it could perhaps be said that cinemas internationalized their content, how- ever “local” it may have been. Spectators seeing a movie about the most local of themes—be it the Mexican Revolution, Mexican urban poverty, or the Aztec past—were doing so in an interior that could just as easily be in Vienna, Buenos Aires, or Chicago. translation / But what about the relationship of these movie theaters to their surroundings? That is, how can movie theaters be understood as 84 translation spaces within the urban space they occupied and how can this relationship shine a different light upon their cultural and social role? In the 1930s, monumental sound movie theaters began to be built. These were not just adaptations of older buildings, but constructions whose function was, from the outset, to house sound films. Beyond their bold architecture, which contrasted with the older and more sober buildings in Mexico City and thus set them apart as grand palaces of entertainment, their monumental size also marked a dramatic shift in the appearance of the city, which had always been horizontally low-rise. One of the most interest- ing examples of modern cinema monumentality was Juan Segura’s Cine Hipódromo, housed within the Ermita building. Ermita building circa 1931. translation / 85  Cine Hipodromo, Ermita building. translation / Ermita building circa 1931. 86  The Ermita was a dramatic intervention in the cityscape. It was the first “skyscraper,” albeit only an eight-story one. Seen from the acute angle where Revolución and Avenida Jalisco meet, the building resembles a large ship sailing north. On its ground lev- el are spaces for small businesses, integrating the street-life into the building. Along its southern façade, a big entranceway, which makes resourceful use of the building’s triangular shape, opens into a cinema. On top of the cinema are three stories of apartments. Since Segura could not use columns inside the cinema, he had to think of a way of making sure the structure would support the three stories above. He therefore opted for structural steel and construct- ed an innovative steel structure around the cinema in order to se- cure it from the weight above, as well as to sound-proof it. He also used reinforced concrete in beam designs and roofs, as well as for minimal cladding purposes and ornaments—all of which were an integral part of the building (Toca 1997, 170). Although the Ermita was finished by 1931, the Hipódromo, did not open until 1936. Its inauguration poster depicted “the masses” crowding around the new, towering building. Teatro Cine Hipodromo inauguration poster, 1936. translation / 87  Other examples of modernist monumentality were Francis- co J. Serrano’s projects. He designed and modernized at least ten cinemas in the 1930s, some of which, in his own words “left be- hind their jacal [hut-like] appearance and became modern spaces” (Alfaro 1998, 58). One of his most important buildings, the Cine Encanto, was inaugurated in 1937, and loomed high above the sur- rounding buildings of the San Rafael neighborhood. Its art deco façade featured a heavily lit marquee, an enormous portico, and a striking sign at the top with the theater’s name written in deco typography. The vertical cement walls, forming a right angle with the central area of the façade, accentuate the height of the con- struction and the stretched glass-block vertical windows through which the light from the interior shone outwards, thus accentuat- ing the chiaroscuro suggested by the walls. The interiors of the Cine Encanto were modern and spare com- pared to the more lavishly ornamented theaters of the early 1920s. translation / Cine Encanto circa 1937. 88 The Streamline Moderne vestibule, with its curving forms, long horizontal lines, and round ship-like windows can be seen as a reaction to the earlier sumptuous interiors of movie palaces and at- mospherics, and a natural reflection of modern architecture’s ten- dency towards simplicity and economy of space and materials. Its vestibule, moreover, played with the ambiguous border between the inside and the outside, by integrating an interior garden and Cine Encanto (interiors) circa 1937. Cine Encanto (vestibule). translation / 89  using openings in the roof to allow plenty of natural light to flow in during the day or for the night sky to be seen from inside. One of the most interesting aspects of both Juan Segura’s and Francisco Serrano’s work is precisely that it raises the question of how modernity was being interpreted by these “independent” architects of the new film theaters.10 Segura and Serrano designed two of the first cinemas constructed specifically as sound cinemas. These movie theaters were no longer adaptations of constructions dating from an earlier period, they were not mere “upgrades” from art nouveau to art deco, and they were certainly not like the opu- lent, lavishly ornamented atmospheric palaces. Indeed, in the mid and late 1930s, movie theater architects would draw more and more on this interpretation of modernity and modernism and move towards more sober, less eclectic forms, building cinemas devoid of superficial ornamentation and maintaining a tighter relationship between form and function.11 But these movie theaters were also imposing new monuments to modernity, towering high above the city’s older buildings. They were as much places destined for seeing something (a movie) as places made to be seen. They were visible from afar; they loomed large, like the admonition of a possible future city, from below. These new buildings introduced a new time: the time of the “now” as a “future.” The time of the thoroughly, universally modern. If modernist translation practices were a form of foreignization of the domestic, those new movie theaters, in the local context where they appeared, must have seemed utterly foreign or oth- er—not by virtue of bringing in elements from a particular foreign country or region, as International Modernism and the Stream- line modern style were in essence extraterritorial, but by virtue of introducing a foreign time into the city’s traditional time. Their “otherness” was a “futureness.” If translation is a transportation, a transference, a carrying over, what these monuments to modern- ism translated was not any particular content, but the sense of time itself. 10 By independent, I mean that their work was not, as was the case with so many realms of ar- chitectural and artistic production—film certainly among them—funded by the Mexican State. translation / 11 As Maggie Valentine explains, “seemingly anachronistic ornate architecture and design dis- appeared from the buildings. Both [film and film theater architecture] were stripped of their artificial decoration in favor of a more honest […]) examination of life” (Valentine 1994, 6). 90 References Alfaro Salazar, Francisco Haroldo. 1997. Espacios distantes—aun vivos: las salas cinematográficas de la Ciudad de México. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. ———. 1998. República de los cines. Mexico City: Clio. Cine silente méxicano/Mexican Silent Cinema. S.v. “Cine Progreso.” http://cinesilen- temexicano.wordpress.com/?s=cine+progreso. Dever, Susan. 2003. Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas: From Post-Rev- olutionary Mexico to fin de siglo Mexamérica. The Suny Series in Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video and in Feminist Criticism and Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Of ther Spaces. Utopias and Heterotopias.” Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec, originally in Architecture /Mouvement/ Continu- ité (October). Available as pdf download at http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/ foucault1.pdf. García, Gustavo. 2002. “Adiós al Olimpia.” Letras Libres (October): 101–102. García Riera, Emilio. 1992. Historia documental del cine mexicano. Vol 1. Guadala- jara: Universidad de Guadaljara. Heguera, Luis. N.d. S.v. “Palacio Chino.” http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/ 13383http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/13383. Hershfield, Joanne. 2006. “Sreening the Nation.” In Mary K. Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis, eds., The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940. Durham: Duke University Press. Maland, Charles J. 1989. Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Mora, Carl J. 1989. Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896–1988. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reyes de la Maza, Luis. 1973. Cine sonoro mexicano. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Toca, Antonio. 1997. “Origins of Modern Architecture in Mexico.” In Edward Buri- an, ed., Modernity and the Architecture of Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press. Valentine, Maggie. 1994. The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie Theatre, Starring S. Charles Lee. New Haven: Yale University Press. Venuti, Lawrence. 2000. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Vidal Bonifaz, Rosario. 2010. Surgimiento de la industria cinematográfica y el papel del Estado de México 1895–1940. Mexico, D.F.: Miguel Angel Porrúa. translation / 91  Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City, and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. She is the author of Sidewalks, a collection of essays, and the internationally acclaimed novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth. Her work in fiction has been translated into more than twenty languages, and she has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Frieze, Granta, the New Yorker and McSweeney’s. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and lives in New York, where she teaches at Hofstra University. Photo: Zony Maya. translation / 92 

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Translating At the Edge of Empire: Olha Kobylianska and Rose Ausländer Sherry Simon Concordia University, Canada Abstract: The edge of empire is a mythical place which has inspired the histor- ical and literary imagination. As the easternmost city of the Habsburg Empire, Czernowitz was a product of a particular kind of border culture, one which sus- tained an intense relationship with the German language. In the multilingual matrix of the years leading to the collapse of the Empire and during the interwar period, translational relationships were developed through German. The cases of the Ukrainian writer Olha Kobylianska and the German-Jewish poet Rose Auslander are considered here. The edge of empire is a mythical place that has long stimulated the historical and literary imagination. The Roman Limes—which encompassed a vast area that included Britain (up to its northern, Atlantic reaches), continental Europe right across to the Black Sea and down to the Red Sea, and North Africa as far west as the Atlantic coast (see http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/430)—probably provide the most pervasive material traces of the walls, ditches, forts, fortresses, watchtowers, and civilian settlements that sepa- rate Empire from its barbarian outside. But the waxing and waning of innumerable empires over the course of world history—from the Greek and Mongol to the Habsburg, British, and Ottoman em- pires—have offered an abundant supply of objects and narratives, images and fantasies, a recent example of which is the Star Wars game called “The Edge of the Empire.” An expression of imperial power at its highest point (bringing the full might of military force to bear against the enemy without), the edge of empire is also, because of its physical distance from the imperial center, a place where identities can become diluted, where the precise dividing line between inside and outside can be- come troubled. This paradox is richly exploited in J. M. Coetzee’s translation / 93  1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians. It tells the story of a dis- abused middle-aged magistrate who chooses to end his days in a lazy imperial outpost, spending his free time carrying out his own archaeological digs. Largely indifferent to the bellicose aims of his military superi- ors, he comes under suspicion of collusion with the enemy. He has excavated a cache of slivers of wood that all seem to have some sort of message written on them, but the writing is ancient and im- penetrable and he has been unable to decipher the message. When he is forced, however, to provide the meaning of these writings, now considered crucial evidence, the magistrate suddenly finds words to transmit the messages he reads from the slips: appeals from barbarian prisoners to their families—intimate and immedi- ate and alive. Through his “translation,” the magistrate transforms the bar- barians from aliens into individual beings. He blurs the line that separates the enemy from the citizen, and he opens gaps in the Em- pire’s line of defense. And in fact the Empire never does achieve victory. The barbarians simply lure the army out into the desert and then vanish. Faithful to the genre of “the barbarian and the frontier”—classically drawn by Dino Buzzati in The Desert of the Tartars and powerfully evoked by Cavafy in the poem also called “Waiting for the Barbarians”—the barbarians in Coetzee’s novel are elusive. The moment of direct confrontation, feared and de- sired, never comes. The link between present and past, self and other, suggests Coetzee, is an imaginative leap, a gesture of volun- tary projection. Coetzee’s novel will be our entry point into another site of translation at the edge of empire. This is the city of Czernowitz (to- day’s Cernivtsi in Ukraine), the most easterly city of the erstwhile Habsburg empire. Abundantly mythologized as a border city, as a cultural bulwark against the alien forces from the east, the city provides rich material for a study of translational forces. Its geo- graphical situation but also its cultural vocation as a border city during the period of the military collapse and the reorganization of the Habsburg border lands offers a singular viewpoint onto the work of translation at the edge of empire. In what follows, I will translation / examine the work of two Czernowitz authors—Olha Kobylianska (1863-1942) and Rose Ausländer (1901-1988)—as translators of 94 their border city. Like Coetzee’s magistrate, they find the borders enacted by translation to be shifting and elusive. To translate at the edge is to be especially aware of the ways in which boundaries can accentuate or attenuate difference. Political borders hyposta- tize cultural and linguistic differences, while geographical borders often show difference to be gradual. The multilingualism of border zones problematizes the activities of translation as source–target transactions. Whether applied to a huge geographical expanse or to the microspaces of the multilingual city, the operations of trans- lation at the border are shaped by the special pressures of the in- terzone. This means that the frames of language exchange must be recast to respond to more subtle understandings of the relation be- tween language, territory, and identity. How do the competition and animosities, but also the shared references that inevitably flourish in multilingual geopolitical contexts, shape translation (Meylaerts 2013)? Languages that share the same terrain rarely participate in a peaceful and egalitarian conversation: their separate and compet- ing institutions are wary of one another, aggressive in their need for self-protection. Cultures of mediation are shaped by the social and political forces which regulate the relations among languages. Building the bulwark Today the Bukovina is largely situated in Ukraine. From 1774 until 1918, this area was the easternmost edge of the Habsburg empire that the emperor Joseph II consciously and vigorously constructed as a buffer zone in order to protect his territories from Russian and Ottoman expansion (Colin 1991, 7). He actively promoted the settlement of Germans from Austria and southwest Germany, as well as the Germanization of Ruthenians and Roumanians, the two largest language groups in the Bukovina. Over the course of the nineteenth century in particular, for both German-language empires (the Prussian and the Habsburg), “the East” exerted tremendous fascination. From 1848 to 1918, central Europe was crisscrossed by conflicting imperial projects, each marked by its own real and imagined borders and the constant pressure to defend newly conquered expanses of territory. The ar- eas that became known as the “eastern Marches” were increasing- ly important in public consciousness. The term “March”—origi- nally indicating the border provinces of the Carolingian Empire, translation / 95  granted a privileged political status in order to fulfill their duties in defending and expanding the Empire’s boundaries, and used only sporadically in the first half of the nineteenth century—became a catch-phrase (the OstMark) after 1848 (Thum 2013, 44–59). And in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new kind of highly ideologized novel later called the Ostmarkenroman emerged, pop- ularizing the idea “that a battle over territory was taking place in the eastern borderlands between the representations of a superior German civilization and their Slavic enemies” (Thum 2013, 48). As Pieter Judson has so convincingly demonstrated, these border zones were not “natural” zones of conflict, in particular of language conflict. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, they were, rather, strategically targeted by nationalist ideologists and enlisted in the struggle for patriotic allegiance (Judson 2006). “Na- tionalist activists” took every opportunity to transform rural con- flicts into national ones (10). In particular, campaigns around the language of schools were used to mobilize energies for nationalist causes in what Judson calls the “nationalization of the language frontier” (17). From 1848 onwards, Czernowitz had an increasingly Ger- man-language population. Many German-speaking Jews settled in the major Bukovinian cities and by 1918, 47 percent of the pop- ulation of Czernowitz was Jewish. “Since Bukovinian Jews were German-speaking and particularly loyal to the Habsburg monarchy and instrumental in its expansion in that region, Austrian officials tended to consider them representatives of the Habsburg empire” (Colin 1991, 7; see also Hirsch and Spitzer, chapters 2 and 4). Proof of the importance of Czernowitz for Austria and the German language came with the founding in 1875 of Franz Josef Univer- sity—a coveted boost to the intellectual and cultural life of what was considered by many to be an outpost of imperial life. While the town had its military garrisons to protect the city from attack, it also had its linguistic ramparts. By 1875, for example, in order to conform to the empire’s own language laws guaranteeing the use of a national language when numbers justified it, Lemberg univer- sity in the Galician city was giving all its courses in Polish—so the Empire had to exert its efforts at Germanization elsewhere. translation / The university in Czernowitz was the Empire’s first new universi- ty in fifty years (Judson 2016, 321). The new university, won for 96 Czernowitz over intense competition from other cities—notably Trieste—was the result of relentless lobbying by a noble landown- er from Bukovina who argued that only German scholarship could claim universality and that it would ensure an integrative function in this multilingual zone of empire (322). The University reflected the Empire’s broader political and ideological aims. When in 1866 Austria lost its traditional political hegemony in Germany, the liberal empire sought a renewed sense of mission in Europe. In the 1870s, the exploration of cultural diversity seemed to offer the foundations for a renewed Habsburg civilizing mission directed specifically to eastern and southeastern Europe, including the Bal- kans. In its earliest incarnation, this new mission for the empire focused its civiliza- tional energies on the existing crownlands of Galicia and Bukovina. The founding of a university in Czernowitz in 1875 offered early elaborations of Austria–Hungary’s new civilizational mission to the east and of it ideology of unity in diversity. (Judson 2016, 318) It is to be noted, however, that the new university did have the first professorships of Romanian and Ukrainian literature. What does multilingual mean? Like other cities in Central Europe—large cities like Budapest and Prague (where German was the first, then the second, language) (see Spector 2000), or smaller cities like Vilnius, Lviv, Riga, Danzig, Bucharest, Timisoara, Plovdiv, or Trieste—Czernowitz was intense- ly multilingual. What made Czernowitz different from other cities in Galicia, where Polish was dominant (for instance in Lemberg or Vilna), is that there was no one Christian national bourgeoisie which dominated in Czernowitz. Ukrainians (also known as Ruthenians) and Romanians were both a significant presence in the city, but the fact that neither was dominant in the city gave greater prominence and autonomy to the Jewish, German-speaking, population (Cor- bea-Hoisie cited in van Drunen 2013, I , 3, 34). The multilingualism of Czernowitz is today often remembered in a benign, nostalgic mode. Despite the violence of both World Wars and the repressive regime which ruled in the interwar period, memories of pre-World War II Czernowitz are often cast in a very rosy light—evoking the cosmopolitanism of a lost Mitteleuropa. Time and again, the character of Czernowitz’s language landscape is reiterated as a trademark symbol of the city—equivalent to a translation / 97  landmark or tourist attraction. City guidebooks, postcards, and similar popular materials praised the coexistence of separate but happily coexisting ethnic communities. This refrain was accentu- ated by pronouncements for instance by Rose Ausländer on the four-languaged town she grew up in (“Viersprachig verbrüderte Lieder in entzweiter Zeit,” Ausländer 1976, 72) or Paul Celan’s oft-quoted salute to his “city of books” (Hirsch and Spitzer 2010, 32), or the many memoirs by former inhabitants of the interwar period that evoke a long period of relative harmony—even against the backdrop of rising Romanian nationalism and anti-Semitism in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1908, a visitor to the city, Yitzchak Peretz (1852–1915 wrote “We stroll in the evening streets, and from dif- ferent windows the tones of different languages waft out, all dif- ferent kinds of folk music”, in (Olson 2010, 33). Peretz conveys what seems to be a conventional aural impression of the city—that of a harmonious music wafting through the air and captured with pleasure by the evening stroller. The myth of Czernowitz that issues from this image of happy polyphony has increasingly come to be critiqued in light of the easy idealizations it fosters. This image allowed German-speak- ing scholars, for example, to have Czernowitz stand as a site of pre-Nazi German pluralism, a safe haven in German historiogra- phy (Menninghaus 1999). It promoted a nostalgia industry which pitted a perfect “then” against the flawed “now,” though little proof was given beyond the same repeated phrases. A more nuanced por- trait of intercultural relations is therefore required. What kind of relations existed among the city’s various language communities? Following the outpouring of publications which, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, has opened research in this area of the world (see the excellent review of the literature by van Drunen 2013). I will bring translation studies into the discussion. How can the view from translation illuminate the field of language relations in the city? A first move is to view the city not as multilingual but as trans- lational. What is the sense of this distinction? Multilingualism calls up a space of pure diversity, a proliferation of tongues and of parallel conversations, without concern for the interactions among translation / these languages. The translational city looks for connections and convergences across language and communities, connections that 98 indicate direction (to and from which languages) and intensity (Si- mon 2012). It follows, then, that the translational city is not always a site of peaceful and friendly transactions. It includes the refus- al to translate, zones of silence and resistance. And so translation could be broadly defined as “writing at the intersection of languag- es,” writing under the influence of, in the company of, with and often against, other languages. A detailed examination of urban translation practices, such as those provided in Michaela Wolf’s pioneering study of translation in the Habsburg monarchy, distin- guishes between the formal practices of translation dictated by the Empire’s language laws and the myriad informal practices of trans- lation which were part of daily life—the domestic servants and ar- tisans who had to learn to serve in German, the tradespeople who had to learn German terminology, the informal exchanges through which children would be sent to neighboring villages of the empire to learn the languages across the border (Wolf 2012, 2015). Re- storing multilingual transactions to the streets of Habsburg cities, showing how these cities were in many ways precursors to today’s multilingual diasporic and postcolonial cities, Wolf’s study also confirms that translation practices were dominated by the power of German and therefore by translation into German. Literary trans- lation in Czernowitz also followed this pattern. Translation out of German, however, followed a different path. Whether in relation to Yiddish or Ukrainian, writers chose not so much to translate works in that direction as to abandon German in favor of a new writing language. Literary interactions Literary translation was a popular activity in Czernowitz, particu- larly in the interwar period. In her introduction to a book on Paul Celan, Amy Colin (1991) details the myriad activities of transla- tion which were undertaken by the participants in the active literary milieus of the city. These include Alfred Margul-Sperber’s Ger- man translations of British (T. S. Eliot), French (Apollinaire and Gérard de Nerval), and American (Robert Frost, Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and e e cum- mings) modernist poets as well as American Indian texts. Imman- uel Weissglas translated Eminescu’s famous poem “The Morning Star” into German and Grillparzer, Stifter, and parts of Goethe into translation / 99  Romanian. There was also indirect translation—with Romanian and Ukrainian poets influenced by German authors and inversely. Authors writing in German often used motifs from Romanian and Ukrainian folklore and translated important historical and literary texts from one language into the other (Colin 1991, 11). The writ- er who is at once exceptional and yet who best exemplifies the culture of mediation which issued from the multilingual matrix of Czernowitz is Paul Celan (Nouss 2010). Celan’s displacements from Czernowitz to Bucharest to Paris, his poetic memorialization of the Holocaust, his negation of the German language after the Nazis, his experiments across and through languages—these mark his work as uniquely expressive of the Czernowitz legacy, its hy- perconsciousness of language, of history and of the experience of literary mediation. An important trend of the early twentieth century saw many writers begin writing in German, then turn to their “national” lan- guage—Ukrainian, or Yiddish. Amy Colin gives the examples for Ukrainian of Felix Niemchevski, Osip Juril Fed’kovych, Alex- ander Popovich, and Isidor Vorobkevich, sometimes combining motifs from German Romanticism with images from Ruthenian folklore (Colin 1991, 11). To this list she might have added the im- portant Yiddish-language writers Itzik Manger and Eliezer Stein- barg—Manger, for instance, carried the German literary form of the ballad into Yiddish (Starck-Adler 2007, 124–132)—as well as that of the legendary Ukrainian writer Olha Kobylianska. It is to Kobylianska’s experience that I now turn to explore the language configuration of Czernowitz, before examining the work of anoth- er well-known Czernowitz poet, Rose Ausländer. Olha Kobylianska Born into a family who used German as their daily language (her father was a Ukrainian who worked for the Austrian administra- tion and her mother was of Polish origin), Kobylianska began her writing in German and in fact continued to keep a diary in German for her entire life. She was born and brought up in a small town not far from Czernowitz, but moved to the city when she was in her twenties. After “converting” to the Ukrainian national cause translation / in her late teens, she began to translate herself into Ukrainian— sometimes asking fellow authors to help her or receiving editorial 100 help from her publishers. Though she lived in a small corner of the Ukrainian cultural territory, Kobylianska was very soon in con- tact with the powerful standard-setters of the Ukrainian literary establishment. As a young woman writer she was much influenced by the opinions of these critics, and tried to change her style and subject matter to suit the left-wing populism that was considered appropriate. But Kobylianska was continually criticized for the strains of mysticism and intellectualism which were discerned in her writing. Though it would be those same qualities of modern- ism, exploration of the emotions of women and fascination with art which would endear her to later generations of readers and es- tablish her as a major figure in Ukrainian literature. Kobylianska’s writing is difficult to categorize, with its some- times incongruous mélange of feminism, intricate exploration of inner sentiments, portrayal of the cruelty of peasant life, and out- bursts of nationalist rhetoric. Critics are divided as to the elements of her work that are ironic or parodic and those that convey her true sentiments. Among her works, “Valse mélancolique” stands out as a truly radical portrait of women sharing a life together as artists. Like some of her other stories, this takes place in an ur- ban setting, recounting the daily life and conversations of women who have chosen to devote themselves to art rather than to a con- ventional married life. This story marked a radical beginning for Ukrainian literature. Kobylianska’s writings move between urban stories and rural depictions that are gothic in their intensity. In one story, a wife kills her husband and the children live in terror of being killed as well—though in the end the story shows sympathy for the woman browbeaten by the drunken husband. In fact Ko- bylianska knew both the urban and rural worlds, as she grew up in a small town, but travelled often to Czernowitz before settling there. She was involved in setting up the first women’s organiza- tion in the city—a radical organization from a feminist perspective but tied to the church and therefore suspect in the eyes of most young Ukrainian women who preferred to join left-wing social- ist organizations. Much of her writing associates “German” with high literature and a genteel life style. As a Ukrainian nationalist, she supported the Russians and then the Soviets as defenders of Ukrainian identity against the Austrians and then the Romanians, and when the Romanians took the city in 1942 she was condemned translation / 101  to death by hanging. She died before the hanging was to take place. There is a museum dedicated to her in Czernowitz and the main street, called the Herrengasse by the Austrians then by the name of a Romanian writer by the Romanians, is today named after her in Ukrainian Czernowitz. Kobylianska was influenced by George Sand but especially by Nietzsche, a writer she could read and quote in the original Ger- man—by contrast with her new compatriots who would have had only secondhand versions. Kobylianska was the first Ukrainian intellectual to introduce Nietzsche to Ukrainian readers, incorporating many of his philosophical concepts to her own philosophical system [. . .] Nietzsche’s association of myth with aesthetic creativity, his statement that myth is essential for the health of a culture, as well as his call on the “free spirits” to create this new “ruling idea” by which to live spoke directly to Ko- bylianska’s dissatisfaction with positivism, rationalism and socialism. (Ladygina 2013, 85) While many critics disparaged her use of “German technique,” which in this case included a combination of elements such as in- tellectualism, mysticism, and estheticism, the writer and feminist Lesia Ukrainka took the opposite position and praised its influence on Kobylianska’s writing: “It led you to recognize world literature, it transported you out into the broader world of ideas and art—this simply leaps out at once, when one compares your writing with that of the majority of Galicians” (de Haan 2006, 249). One could therefore refer to Kobylianska’s impressive output of novels and short stories in Ukrainian as translational writing—a product of the particular mélange of cultures particular to the Bu- kovina and Czernowitz. In turn, Kobylianska translated Ukrainian literature into German, including the works of Pchilka, Kobryns- ka, and Ukrainka (Franko 1998). In the case of Kobylianska as for the many other writers of Czernowitz, the multilingual milieu did not signify a close interrelationship with all the literary communi- ties but meant, rather, that writing occurred in the presence of other languages, in the consciousness of competing literary systems, and in this case with or against the power of German. translation / 102 Rose Ausländer In a prose fragment written in 1971, Rose Ausländer answers the question, “Why do I write?” with the following reply: Perhaps because I came into the world in Czernowitz, and because the world in Czer- nowitz came into me. That particular landscape. The particular people, fairy tales, and myths were in the air, one inhaled them. Czernowitz, with its four languages, was a city of muses that housed many artists, poets, and lovers of art, literature, and philosophy. (Cited in Morris 1998, 59) Rose Ausländer grew up and began her literary career in Czernowitz, where she was an active member of the Jewish Ger- man-language literary community, but left in her twenties to travel to the US. She spent the war years back in Czernowitz in hiding with her mother (she was one of the five thousand survivors of the ghetto, while 55,000 were murdered) and after another almost two decades of wandering finally settled in Dusseldorf in the 1960s. In the US after the war, Ausländer began a period during which she wrote poetry only in English. She later returned to the German language and has become a well-known German-language author. Her works are collected in seven volumes, much of which pub- lished after her death. The interweaving of diaspora and home, the long wanderings of much of her life, are reflected not only in the themes of her writing but in the consequences of the to-and-fro between English and German. In particular, her exposure to American modernism resulted in shifts in her formal expression, from a German-inspired lyricism to an American-inspired modernism. Ausländer is one of the sources most often quoted in favor of the image of a peaceful multilingual Czernowitz before the war. In the poem “Czernowitz Before the Second World War,” she writes: surrounded by beech forests. . . . . .Four languages in accord with each other spoiled the air Until the bombs fell the city breathed happily (Ausländer 1977, 6: 348) translation / 103  Indeed, Ausländer continued to praise the city of her birth and upbringing, despite the horrors she experienced during the war. Perhaps because she was always able to keep a distance between fatherland and motherland: My fatherland is dead they have buried it in fire. I live in my motherland word1 (quoted in Morris 1998, 49) This motherland is German, the language in which she wrote all her life, except for a period of eight years, from 1948 to 1956, when, she says, she “found herself” writing only in English. She was living in New York, a city where she had previously spent several years during the 1920s, and perhaps contemplating a con- version to an American existence. But this period turned out to be only a hiatus in her writing life, as she later returned to Europe and to the German language—and most of the English poems were dis- covered only after her death. Yet these years in English introduce a significant translational element into Ausländer’s esthetic, a more precise materialization of the Czernowitz multilingualism, and one that gave greater heft to the name she seems to have chosen to keep as hers—the name which belonged to the husband of a short-lived marriage: Ausländer or outsider. Rose Ausländer owned two suit- cases that she carried through her lifelong wanderings, and identi- fied fully with her Jewish identity as someone who has wandered for hundreds of years, “from Word to Word.” English was not German, the language of the war. Ausländer knew Paul Celan from Czernowitz, and met him several times later on her return trips to Europe—and she surely shared his sense of the contamination of the German language. English was also the language of her daily life in New York, of her workplaces there, and of the modernist poets she read and admired. Ausländer met Marianne Moore at a writer’s conference in New York in 1956, and in addition to Moore Ausländer was drawn to the work of Wal- lace Stevens and e e cummings. These sources allowed her to write translation / 1 Mein Vaterland ist tot/sie haben es begraben/im Feuer/Ich lebe/in meinem Mutterland/Wort. 104 poetry after years of silence and a personal crisis brought on by the death of her mother in 1947. Ausländer could return to poetry only through the oblique angle of another language—one which had not been part of the “old world” configuration. In 1956 she began again to write in German, putting together the shattered pieces of her life through a renewed belief in the mother tongue. The poetry becomes more angular, less lyrical, she says that the stars had taken on a new configuration, the flow- ered words had faded. She uses fewer adjectives, shorter lines, no rhyme or punctuation, the isolated word taking on new meaning. The mother tongue takes the place of the mother, the poem a place of refuge. But, as Lesley Morris argues, Ausländer’s “return” to German is less a one-way and definitive embrace of the authentic tongue than a renewed practice of translation, as she brings back to Ger- many the long experience of exile, experiencing new forms of dis- placement within the German-speaking world (Morris 1998, 55). The sheer number of Ausländer’s poems, which are normally only some twelve lines long, suggests an esthetic of incompletion, of relentless recommencing. Ausländer translated some of her English poems into German, just as she also translated at vari- ous times in her career the poems of others into German or En- glish—Yiddish poems by Itzik Manger (1901–1969) into German and German poems by Else Lasker-Schüler and Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) into English. The fragmented nature of Ausländer’s various exiles and returns points to a kind of permanent diasporic state, a Niemandsland of exile, where being at home will always mean being far away from home. Ausländer’s diasporic life be- gan before the Second World War, but her poetry was irrevocably marked by her experiences as a Jew during that period and by the wanderings which were a result of the destruction of Jewish life in Czernowitz. The imaginative world of Ausländer is deeply embedded in the originary crucible of languages in Czernowitz and marked es- pecially by one enormous fact: the sudden reversal of meaning attached to the German language. For this city, so tied to the myth of the “imaginary West in the East,” German had been elevated to the status of a religion—an affiliation so intense as to remain strong even during the Romanianization of the interwar years. translation / 105  Raised in the adoration of Deutschtum, Czernowitz authors were forced to see German undergo a spectacular transvaluation of val- ues—and therefore to revise their relationship to the language. For Ausländer, following Paul Celan, this meant a mediated relation to German, one which showed the “home” language to be partially alien. Conclusion The meaning of Czernowitz as a city at the edge of empire is dom- inated by the history of the significance given to German. The pre- eminence of the German language, lasting far into the twentieth century, was central to the writing lives of both Kobylianska and Ausländer. The historical events which shaped their relationship to this language were, however, of very different natures. Kobylians- ka’s literary imagination was shaped in German, and she carried into the Ukrainian language the sensibility she had first acquired in that language—both the popular sentimental novels she had read as a youth and the exalted ideas she took from Nietzsche. At the same time, her choice to write in Ukrainian was a decision to sep- arate herself from the German sphere and participate in the con- struction of a new Ukrainian sensibility. This turn to nationalism on the contested site of the border city expresses the conflictual nature of language relations in the border city. That Kobylians- ka, however, continued to keep a diary in German throughout her life, testifies to the ambiguities and split allegiances of the private sphere—where translation became a permanent condition. Ausländer’s relationship to German was shaped by the Jewish literary milieu of Czernowitz, by her personal experiences of di- aspora (before and after the Second World War) and by the Holo- caust. Ausländer is one of relatively few Jews to have lived through the Holocaust and to have continued to use German as a literary language after World War II. (Among the best-known exceptions are Paul Celan, as noted, and Marcel Reich-Ranicki.) It is surely significant that both Celan and Ausländer are from Czernowitz. Certainly her understanding of that language and its cultural affil- iations were tempered by the multilingual matrix of that city, and the translational relationships out of which it evolved. Her turn translation / away from German, and her subsequent return, her wanderings and her final settling in Dusseldorf, testify to a difficult relation- 106 ship to language and place—one which nevertheless allowed her to celebrate her past in the borderlands of the empire. Kobylianska and Ausländer would not have known one anoth- er in Czernowitz. They belonged to different milieus and different generations (Kobylianska was born in 1863; Ausländer in 1901), though Ausländer would have heard of the more famous Koby- lianska, her growing literary fame, her persecution and death in 1942. Their careers illustrate the parallel paths followed by the literatures of the city, each enclosed within its respective liter- ary languages and traditions. Even today, they are unlikely to be found in the same anthologies or literary histories. Nevertheless, both writers defined themselves with and against the German lan- guage—along the lines of tension that animated the language life of their common border city. translation / 107  References Ausländer, Rose. 1976. Aschenregen / die Spur deines Namens: Gedichte und Prosa. Volume 4. Edited by Helmut Braun. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. ––––––. 1977. Selected poems [of] Rose Ausländer. Translated by Ewald Osers. Lon- don: London Magazine Editions. ––––––. 1984–1990. Gesammelte Werke in sieben Bänden. Edited by Helmut Braun. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. ––––––. 1995. Mother Tongue. Translated by Jean Boase-Beier and Anthony Vivis. Todmorden: Arc Publications. Buzzati, Dino. (1940) 1989. Il deserto dei Tartari. Milan: Mondadori. Cavafy, C. 1976. The Complete Poems of Cavafy. Translated by Rae Dalven. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Coetzee, J. M. 1982. Waiting for the Barbarians. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Colin, Amy. 1991. Paul Celan: Holograms of Darkness. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. ––––––. 2006. “Czernowitz/Cernăuți/Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi/Czerniowce: A Test- ing Ground for Pluralism.” In Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 2006, 57–76. DOI: 10.1075/chlel.xx.12col. Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer. 2002. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Some Theoretical Reflections. New York: American Coun- cil of Learned Societies, Occasional Paper No. 52. Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer, eds. 2006. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centu- ries. Vol. II. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. In particular, “Cities as sites of hybrid literary identity and multicultural production,” 9–212. de Haan, Francisca, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds. 2006. Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries. Entry “Olha Kobylianska.” Budapest & New York: CEU Press. Franko, Roma. 1998. “Women’s Voices in Ukrainian Literature. Olha Kobylianska (1863–1942). Biographical Sketch.” Language Lantern Publications. www.lan- guagelanterns.com/kobylian.htm. Accessed May 8, 2014. Hirsch, Marianne, and Leo Spitzer. 2010. Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernow- itz in Jewish Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Judson, Pieter. 2006. Guardians of the Nation. Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ––––––. 2016. The Habsburg Empire. A New History. Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press. Kobylianska, Olha. 1999. But. . .The Lord is Silent: Selected Prose Fiction. Translat- ed by Roma Z. Franko and Sonia V. Morris. Saskatoon, SK: Language Lanterns Publications. ––––––. 2000. Warm the Children, O Sun: Selected Prose Fiction. Translated by translation / Roma Z. Franko and Sonia V. Morris. Saskatoon, SK: Language Lanterns Pub- lications. 108 Ladygina, Yuliya Volodymyrivna. 2013. Narrating the Self in the Mass Age: Olha Kobylianska in the European Fin-de-Siècle and Its Aftermath, 1886–1936. San Diego: ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing. Menninghaus, W. 1999. “Czernowitz/Bukowina.” Merkur-Suttgart 53: 3/4, Part 600: 345–357. Meylaerts, Reine. 2013. “Multilingualism as a Challenge for Translation Studies.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Carmen Millán and Francesca Bartrina. London: Routledge. 519–533. Morris, Leslie. 1998. “Mutterland/Niemandsland: Diaspora and Displacement in the Poetry of Rose Ausländer.” Religion and Literature 30 (3): 47–65. Nouss, Alexis. 2010. Paul Celan. Les lieux d’un déplacement. Paris: Le Bord de l’eau. Olson, Jess. 2010. “A Tale of Two Photographs: Nathan Birnbaum, the Election of 1907, and the 1908 Yiddish Language Conference.” In Czernowitz at 100: Robinson, Richard. 2007. Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Roth, J. 2002. Weights and Measures. Translated by D. Le Vay. London: P. Owen. Simon, S. 2012. Cities in Translation. Intersections of Language and Memory. Lon- don: Routledge. Spector, Scott. 2000. Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle. Berkeley: University of California Press. Starck-Adler, Astrid. 2007. “Multiculturalisme et multilinguisme à Czernowitz. L’exemple d’Itzik Manger.” Études germaniques 62 (1): 121–132. Stenberg, Peter. 1991. Journey to Oblivion. The End of the East European Yiddish and German Worlds in the Mirror of Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Thum, Gregor. 2013. “Megalomania and Angst. The nineteenth-century mythiciza- tion of Germany’s Eastern Borderlands.” In Shatterzone of Empires, Coexis- tence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Border- lands. Edited by Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. 42–60. van Drunen, Hieronymus Franciscus. 2013. “A sanguine bunch.” Regional identifi- cation in Habsburg Bukovina, 1774–1919. University of Amsterdam PhD thesis. Available online at http://dare.uva.nl/record/1/397355. Accessed November 4, 2014. Wolf, Michaela. 2012. Die vielsprachige Seele Kakaniens. Übersetzen und Dolmet- schen in der Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918. Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau. ––––––. 2015. The Habsburg Monarchy’s Many-Languaged Soul. Translating and interpreting, 1848–1918. Translated by Kate Sturge. Amsterdam: John Benja- mins. translation / 109  Sherry Simon is a professor in the French Department at Concordia University. She has published widely in the areas of literary, intercultural and translation studies, most recently exploring the cultural history of linguistically divided cities. Among her pub- lications are Translating Montreal. Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (2006) and Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (2012), both of which have appeared in French translation. She has edited or co-edited numerous volumes, in- cluding Translation Effects: The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture (with K. Mezei and L. von Flotow), (2014) and Speaking Memory. How Translation Shapes City Life (forthcoming MQUP). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec. She was a Killam Research Fellow (2009-11) and in 2010 received the Prix André-Laurendeau from l’Association francophone pour le savoir (ACFAS). translation / 110 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15524

Translating Ruins Alfred Mac Adam Barnard College-Columbia University, USA Abstract: This essay explores the relationship between a neo-Latin poem by Ianus Vitalis and three vernacular sonnets, versions of the Latin original, by Du Bellay, Spenser, and Francisco de Quevedo. The purpose of the essay is to ponder the problems and choices that the translators had to resolve in order to refashion Vitalis. The essay further seeks to show the strangeness of Vitalis’ poem and how his translators effetively created three original poems. This is an exploration of translation, more concerned with that problematic art than with the history of the European sonnet. Writing in 1932 about the numerous English versions of Homer, Jorge Luis Borges asserts—perhaps ironically though perhaps not—that the relationship between translations and originals de- fines the relationship between any text, its myriad literary sources, and the experiences an author assimilates to produce it. Unlike so- called originals, translations reveal rather than hide their sources: “El modelo propuesto a su imitación es un texto visible, no un laberinto inestimable de proyectos pretéritos o la acatada tentación momentánea de una facilidad”1 (Borges 1965, 105). Borges denies original composition, declaring all texts to be translations and writing (like reading) nothing more than trans- lating. This anti-Romantic theory of literary creation makes the juxtaposition of originals and translations complex: we are no lon- ger comparing the original with an imitation (the translation) but actually comparing coequals. Fair enough, but even though Borges deals with English trans- lations of Homer—the paucity of Spanish translations making his 1 “The model proposed for imitation is a visible text, not an incalculable labyrinth of past projects or the yielded-to, momentary temptation of an opportune insight.” Translation mine. translation / 111  essay impossible to write—he does not discuss the role played by nationality and national language in translation. Why did the En- glish, century after century, feel the need to translate and retranslate Homer? And what was the impact of these translations on the his- tory of English literature? If Borges had elected to study the many translations of Don Quixote into English, he would have reached the same conclusions about the relationship between translation and original; but he might also have noted that the history of the novel in English was changed because of Cervantes. Literary history abounds in translations or imitations that some- how acquire the status of originals. For example, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s La verdad sospechosa, from about 1634, is the basis for Corneille’s Le Menteur (1644), which in turn spawns Carlo Goldo- ni’s Il Bugiardo (1750) and Samuel Foote’s The Lyar (1762). Ruiz de Alarcón engenders not just translations and imitations but an entire theatrical tradition in four languages and four cultures, each of which reshapes the original to national tastes. This idea, that translators would deliberately accommodate a work to a national language, appears in Alastair Fowler’s Times Literary Supplement review (April 27, 2012) of a new edition of Gavin Douglas’s 1513 Scots translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. The translation crystalizes the language into which it is translated, much in the way the King James Bible or Luther’s translation consolidated English or Ger- man. Less important in terms of fixing a national language, but equally fascinating in terms of the relationship between original and translation are three sonnets, freestanding works of art in them- selves, which directly or indirectly derive from the epigram De Roma (1552) by Ianus Vitalis (1485–1560): Qui Romam in media quaeris novus advena Roma, Et Romae in Roma nil reperis media, Aspice murorum moles, praeruptaque saxa, Obrutaque horrenti vasta theatra situ: Haec sunt Roma. Viden velut ipsa cadaver, tantae Urbis adhuc spirent imperiosa minas. Vicit ut haec mundum, nixa est se vincere; vicit, A se non victum ne quid in orbe foret. translation / Nunc victa in Roma Roma illa invicta sepulta est, Atque eadem victrix victaque Roma fuit. Albula Romani restat nunc nominis index, 112  Quinetiam rapidis fertur in aequor aquis, Disce hinc, quid possit fortuna; inmota labascunt, Et quae perpetuo sun agitate manent. (McFarlane 1980, 24–26)2 Vitalis’ poem invites the recently arrived (novus advena) visi- tor who has come to Rome seeking ancient Rome to learn a moral lesson: Rome is now nothing but ruins. All that endures is, paradox- ically, the Tiber: The river flowing like time itself remains, while the ancient capital of the world is disjecta membra. The elegiac tone of Vitalis’ poem, enhanced by the repeated “o” in Rome, reflects the ancient fusion of elegy and epigram—which is to say that by Vitalis’ time, a neo-Latin epigram was simply a short poem. It might be of intellectual rather than emotional cast, though there is nothing consistent or absolute about its subject. Like the sonnet, the epigram could treat any theme, although concision is one of its principal features: the verbal economy of Latin would be an ideal for Renaissance vernacular poets to strive for, especially in sonnets. That Vitalis’ poem is comprised of fourteen lines is a fascinat- ing irony. A poem in Latin on mutability that seeks to avoid the mu- tability of vernacular tongues uses a structure that to Renaissance readers would immediately recall the sonnet. De Roma is an open invitation to vernacular translation, and Malcolm C. Smith (1977) lists over a dozen versions of the epigram. Not all are sonnets, but those under consideration here adapt Vitalis to that compact form. The first of the three, a translation of a translation, is Edmund Spenser’s version of Joachim du Bellay, which appears in his ap- propriately titled sonnet series The Ruines of Rome (1591). Spenser obtains that alliteration by not translating the title of du Bellay’s sonnet sequence, Les Antiquités de Rome (1558)—he changes it utterly. Antiquités are ancient, but ruines might be recent. While the name Rome itself implies antiquity, the sack of Rome in 1527 (and still in living memory in the second half of the sixteenth century) by the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V certainly created modern ruins. But setting aside historical anecdote and focusing 2 McFarlane’s version of Vitalis’ epigram is accompanied by Thomas Heywood’s version, from The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1637). Readers wondering about possible sources for Vitalis’ epigram might consider an idea in James Nohrnberg’s 1976 The Analogy of The Faerie Queene. Nohrnberg suggests two passages in Isaiah (34:14 and 13:21–22): “Both of the Isaiah passages would impress a poet on literary grounds alone; they are supreme in their kind, which is the elegy over fallen buildings, letterature delle rovine. . .” (236). translation / 113  exclusively on du Bellay’s words, it is clear that Spenser’s use of ruins is a transformation, a deviation from the original for rhetorical effect. Spenser had been translating du Bellay since before 1569, when he published translations of both Petrarch and du Bellay. Herbert Grierson, in the introduction to his seminal anthology Metaphysi- cal Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (1921), the inspiration for T.S. Eliot’s essay “The Metaphysical Po- ets,” wryly observes: “Over all the Elizabethan sonnets, in greater or less measure, hangs the suggestion of translation or imitation.” (xviii) We may confirm his statement by looking at sonnet number 3 (in the 1678 edition): Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome her seekest, And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all, These same old walls, old arches, which thou seest, Old palaces, is that, which Rome men call. Behold what wreak, what ruine, and what wast, And how that she, which with her mighty powre Tam’d all the world, hath tam’d her self at last, The Pray of time, which all things doth devowre. Rome now of Rome is th’ only funerall, And only Rome, of Rome hath victory; Neought save Tyber, hastning to his fall Remains of all: O worlds inconstancy! That which is firm, doth flit and fall away, And that is flitting, doth abide and stay. (Spenser 1679, 161) A suitably stern sonnet charged with a chastened Renaissance sense of fleeting time (wherever I turn my eyes I see nothing but death and decay), the ephemeral nature of all human creation, and of course the “mutability” so important to the eponymous “Two Cantos of Mutability” at the end of The Fairie Queene. Rome is absent from the “mutability cantos,” but Rome in this sonnet is a memento mori, so it is no wonder the poem figures among many similar poems in Spenser’s Complaints Containing Sundry Small Poems of the Worlds Vanity (1581) “as the Printer gathered them up” (as he says in the 1678 edition) to capitalize on the success of The Fairie Queene. translation / At the same time, is Rome a suitable subject for an English Protestant poet? Among the three poets scrutinized here only one is 114 a Protestant, whose only argument, leaving aside the desire to trans- late du Bellay, could be that the ruins of Rome are a fitting subject for a humanist lamentation. By the same token, the subject virtually disappears during the Baroque, just when we might expect to see it deployed with fervor. None of the poems in Jean Rousset’s 1968 Anthologie de la Poésie Baroque Française exploits this subject (although it could also be said that the same holds true for Grier- son’s anthology). So the wars of religion, the English Revolution, the Reformation, and the Counterreformation efface Rome’s ruins from poetry, although they turn up again during the Romantic era, reflecting the Romantics’ antiquarian side. The next case is Francisco de Quevedo’s 1648 collection, patri- otically titled Parnasso Español, monte en dos cumbres dividido, con las nueve musas castellanas, donde se contienen Poesías de don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas (literally, Spanish Parnassus, mountain divided into two peaks, with the nine Castilian muses, which contains poems by don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas). No ruins or antiquities for Quevedo, just rockribbed Castilian poetry in- spired by Castilian muses—who, it seems, could inspire translation as well as original creation. We smile, but Quevedo’s patriotism reminds us that each of these sonnets brings the subject of Roman ruins into a national literary tradition by transmuting it into a na- tional literary form. The title usually attached to the first poem in this collection is “A Roma sepultada en sus Ruinas” (To Rome Buried in her Ruins): Buscas en Roma a Roma, ¡oh peregrino!, Y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas: Cadáver son las que ostentó murallas, Y Tumba de sí propio el Aventino. Yace donde Reinaba el Palatino, Y limadas del tiempo las medallas, Más se muestran destrozo a las batallas De las edades que blasón latino. Sólo el Tibre quedó, cuya corriente, Si Ciudad la regó, ya sepultura La llora con funesto son doliente. ¡Oh Roma, en tu grandeza, en tu hermosura Huyó lo que era firme, y solamente Lo fugitivo permanece y dura! (de Quevedo 1968, 260–261) translation / 115  The utterly Baroque de Quevedo is much more specific in his Roman references, and to the Tiber mentioned by du Bellay and Spenser he adds the Aventine and the Palatine, two of Rome’s seven hills, symbols of an antiquity that precedes republican or imperial Rome, here turned, respectively, into a grave and a corpse. Joachim du Bellay, in his 1558 collection Les Antiquités de Rome, is the progenitor of Spenser’s sonnet and the likely source (along with Vitalis) of Quevedo’s. Du Bellay’s title curiously echoes the title of Andrea Palladio’s 1554 book Le Antichità di Roma, though the similarity could hardly be more ironic: Where du Bellay is concerned with the ravages of time, Palladio stresses the enduring grandeur of Roman architecture. His text contradicts the lesson of the three poems and defines the difference between a humanist literary tradition that more often than not found itself weeping over the loss of the classical past—whatever that meant for them—and an architectural present with Palladio endeavoring to use the Roman past (its architecture specifically) as a steppingstone to the future. This sense of the past as a foundation could not be more differ- ent from the view of du Bellay: Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome Et rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois, Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcs que tu vois, Et ces vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme. Voy quel orgueil, quelle ruine: & comme Celle qui mist le monde sous ses loix, Pour donter tout, se donta quelquefois, Et devint proie au temps, que tout consomme. Rome de Rome est le seul monument, Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement. Le Tybre seul, qui vers la mer s’enfuit, Reste de Rome. O mondaine inconstance! Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit, Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance. (du Bellay 1970, 5–6) All three sonnets are simultaneously the same and different, translations and originals, and it is here we begin to see the differ- ence between translation and adaptation, though maintaining that translation / distinction is by no means easy. Du Bellay recommends imitation in his 1549 Défense et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse (as 116 does Sir Philip Sidney in his 1595 Apology), and it may be that we should understand Spenser more in the mode of imitation rather than literal translation. Spenser made his mark on English prosody with the Spenserian sonnet (ABAB BCBC CDCD EE), but in rendering du Bellay he falls back on a standard English model: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Du Bellay’s rhyme scheme reflects the sonnet of the French, Span- ish, and Italian worlds: ABBA ABBA CCD EDE, with two tercets used variously to summarize or expand the thoughts expressed in the quatrains. The lapidary couplet of the English sonnet makes it radically different from the continental sonnet whose often-inter- laced tercets are an invitation to enhanced complexity rather than concision. So du Bellay, by using enjambment to link his tercets and recapitulate the rest of the poem, also, simultaneously, imi- tates the course of the Tiber as it winds through Rome. Spenser on the other hand must reach a moral conclusion, which he musically reinforces with alliteration: “That which is firm, doth flit and fall away, / And that is flitting, doth abide and stay.” “Flit” applied to stone buildings seems an unlikely metaphor, and “flitting” applied to a river seems odd. This is so even though the OED includes shifting position or passing away among the verb’s early meanings because flit implies flight and speed, which the time involved in the erosion of stone excludes. Du Bellay’s compressed ten rather than fourteen-syllable verses “Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit, / Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance” make a more sparing use of alliteration, just enough to create an ironic juxtaposition of “ferme” with the verb “fuit,” reinforced by the repetition of “temps” to mark the difference be- tween that which is destroyed by time and that which, though liq- uid, resists the corrosion of time. But alliteration and internal rhyme provide the musical lamentation in both du Bellay and Spenser: as in Vitalis’ epigram, the “o” in Rome is repeated so often and echoed in so many other “o”s that the entire poem sounds like a dirge. (This musicality raises another conundrum: we know how French, English, and Spanish sound, but for most of us Latin is a visual language and when spoken pronounced with the speaker’s own national accent: how would Vitalis’ hexameters “sound” to a Frenchman?) Du Bellay’s poem resorts to French commonplaces—for ex- translation / 117  ample the lamentation “O mondaine inconstance!” (not in Vitalis), which Spenser translates into English commonplaces “O worlds inconstancy!” Du Bellay’s disillusioned senior lectures the “nou- veau venu,” the novice who has come to Rome seeking the Rome of antiquity and finds only ruins, as if the traveler were ignorant of Roman history since the fifth century and as if no building had been erected or destroyed since then. Spenser uses “stranger” to obtain the same effect—the stranger or foreigner versus the experienced or native inhabitant—but to modern ears the word suggests a person unknown to the speaker rather than to the city. The problem of how to translate “nouveau venu” goes back to De Roma. Here, as in Mikolaj Sep-Szarzynski’s epigram (in Delitia italorum poetarum 1608), the novice is referred to as the “novus advena.” When the dramatist Thomas Heywood (in his 1637 The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells) translates Vitalis’ poem, he coins the awkward “New Stranger” to translate “novus advena.” Heywood needs twenty-eight couplets to translate Vitalis’ fourteen Latin verses. Lost in Spenser’s translation is du Bellay’s manipulation of the concept so important to the Hispanic baroque: “desengaño,” the loss of illusion that comes with moral experience, when the scales fall from our eyes and we see the fallen world for what it is. This sense is fundamental to the sonnet because of the innocence–expe- rience relationship between the newcomer and the speaker. Quevedo, perhaps reflecting a Counterreformation sensibility, transforms du Bellay’s “nouveau venu,” Spenser’s “stranger,” and Vitalis’ “novus advena” into a “peregrino.” The word had various meanings in seventeenth-century Spanish: as an adjective, it sug- gests the bizarre or exquisite; as a noun, it may mean a traveler abroad or a pilgrim traveling to a shrine. Quevedo’s choice of the term creates an ambiguity: Catholic pilgrims would visit Rome, the heart of the Church, but they would certainly not be looking for an- cient Rome, and in fact the ruin of the ancient city would constitute a triumph, malgré Saint Augustine, of Christianity over paganism. So “peregrino” here cannot be a pilgrim and is, once again, a senti- mental humanist who for some reason thinks contemporary Rome ought to look like ancient Rome. translation / The second verse becomes more precise in Quevedo. Du Bellay says, “Et rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois” and 118 Spenser follows: “And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all.” Spenser’s “at all” is simply an emphatic line-filler, as is du Bellay’s use of “n’aperçois” rather than a simple “see.” Quevedo’s visitor comes looking for Rome in Rome and doesn’t find it—“Y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas”—rather than du Bellay or Spenser’s stranger who can’t perceive it. In the third and fourth verses of the first quatrain, Quevedo Latinizes his word order in a daring use of hyperbaton: “Cadáver son las que ostentó murallas, / Y Tumba de sí propio el Aventino. The surprise of a singular noun followed by a plural verb obliges us to see the verse rather than hear it: “cadáver” starts the poetic clause and “murallas” ends it, but what Quevedo wants us to see is the equivalence: the walls are a corpse. The effect would, of course, be lost if the phrase were regularized: Las murallas que ostentó son cadáver (the walls it boasted are a corpse). The next verse follows suit, with “tumba” and “Aventino” thrown into opposition. The second quatrain, much more restrained syntactically, simply amplifies the first. The Palatine lies supine where it once ruled, the medallions, carved in relief but now worn away by time, look more like the wreckage of the battles of the ages than Latin glory. The poem loses energy but recovers it in the intertwined tercets. Quevedo innovates daringly by abruptly changing tenses. Where the quatrains are all in the present tense, the first tercet in- troduces a past preterit, which, curiously, makes little sense here: “Sólo el Tibre quedó” (only the Tiber remained), which, if it once bathed (regó) the city, now weeps for it as a grave. Again, Quevedo uses his first-and-last words to achieve drama: city is played off against grave. And the Tiber (none of the translations uses Vitalis’ alternative Albula for the Tiber), now back in the present tense, weeps with a “funereal, dolorous sound”. Quevedo uses the final tercet much in the way Spenser would use his final couplet. He resorts to apostrophe, addressing Rome (and turning away from the “peregrino” in the first verse) to point out that what was solid has fled and only that which is fugitive re- mains and endures. The phrase “en tu grandeza, en tu hermosura” (in your grandeur, in your beauty) is amplification, a delaying tactic that helps us savor the antithesis of a hardness (stone) that disap- pears, while what remains is flowing water. Naturally, the final verb translation / 119  “dura” (endures) echoes the adjective “duro” (hard) so, in enduring, the water acquires a lexical hardness. Compared with the first-person sonnet “Salmo 17,” (“Miré los muros de la Patria mía”), which approaches the tension of “meta- physical” poets like Donne in its amalgamation of ideas and feel- ings, Quevedo’s version of du Bellay’s sonnet seems fraught with syntactical flourishes that weaken rather than strengthen the poem. And “Salmo 17” is as much an imitation or translation as his re- working of du Bellay since it derives directly from Seneca’s Epistle XII to Lucilius. Quevedo’s concluding address to Rome, the most striking innovation within the framework of the two “translations” of du Bellay (and Vitalis) distracts the reader much in the way a bad detective writer’s introduction of a new character late in the plot is a nasty trick. The subject of the three poems, the moral lesson to be learned from a consideration of Rome’s ruins, simply lost relevance in the seventeenth century—Quevedo himself does not seem to have re- visited the city in any of his sonnets, and it is conspicuously absent from the sonnets of his rival Luis de Góngora. The Renaissance, humanist tradition of lamenting the lost past was lost, especially because of the prime importance of Rome as capital of the Catholic Counterreformation. The three sonnets here provide a rare opportunity to see three great poets working at translation. Du Bellay fits Vitalis into a well- wrought sonnet with compressed ten-syllable verses that Spenser, overcoming the vast difference between two sonnet traditions, transforms into a perfect English sonnet, while Quevedo seeks to infuse it with the glitter of the Spanish Baroque. Quevedo, perhaps, is the most successful because of his greater specificity and his bold use of antithesis. And yet we sense, as we do not in Quevedo’s reworking of Seneca into a Spanish sonnet with hendecasyllabic verses, the working-through of an exercise, that du Bellay is refit- ting a shopworn Renaissance conceit, that Spenser is trying, suc- cessfully, to transform a continental sonnet into an English sonnet while retaining the sense of the original. Quevedo seems to have attempted to improve on his sources, and may well have done so, even though he is recasting material long out of fashion. translation / Du Bellay, Spenser, and Quevedo, all working with Vitalis’ ep- igram as a distant source, produce new poems appropriate for their 120 language and culture, but none replicates De Roma in a vernacular language. Borges’s conclusion about the many translations of Ho- mer into English rings true here as well: “The concept of the de- finitive text belongs only to religion or fatigue.” Translation means commitment to time and place and like the Tiber flows infinitely. translation / 121  References Borges, Jorge Luis. (1932) 1965. “Las versiones homéricas.” In Discusión. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores. de Quevedo, Francisco. 1968. Obras Completas I, Poesía Original. Edited by José Manuel Blecua. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta. du Bellay, Joachim. (1558) 1970. Œuvres poétiques II. Les Antiquitez de Rome. Edited by Henri Chamard and Henri Weber. Paris: Librairie Nizet. Grierson, Herbert, ed. 1921. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Cen- tury. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McFarlane, I. D. 1980. Renaissance Latin Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nohrnberg, James. 1976. The Analogy of The Faerie Queene. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rousset, Jean. 1968. Anthologie de la Poésie Baroque Française. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin. Smith, Malcolm C. 1977. “Looking for Rome in Rome: Janus Vitalis and his Disci- ples.” In Revue de littérature comparée. Octobre-Decembre, 51 (4): 510-527. Spenser, Edmond. 1679. The Works of that Famous English Poet, Mr. Edmond Spenser. London: Printed by Henry Hills for Jonathan Edwin at the Three Roses in Ludgate Street. Alfred Mac Adam, professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College-Colum- bia University, has translated works by, among others, Carlos Fuentes, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Volpi, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Fernando Pessoa. His most recent critical essay, on Fernando Pessoa, appears in the Cambridge Guide to Autobiography. translation / 122 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15525

Interview: translation speaks to Lydia Liu translation assistant editor Carolyn Shread met with Lydia Liu in New York City on the occasion of the annual Nida Research Symposium on September 25, 2015. The theme of the symposium was “Untranslatability and Cultural Complexity” and Dr. Liu gave a fascinating and timely talk on “Translation Theory in the Age of Digital Media” with a response by Mary Louise Pratt. The other speakers at the symposium were Michael Wood and Philip Lewis. After the day of talks, Dr. Liu found time to sit down to answer the questions below, some of which were prompted by her article on “The Eventfulness of Translation: Temporality, Difference and Competing Universals” that appeared in Issue 4 of translation. It was an honor and pleasure to continue the conversation in this way, weaving together thoughts from the panels and Liu’s innovative approach to translation. It was particularly encouraging to hear about how, having distanced herself from translation after a perceived lack of receptiveness to her initial ideas, notably the proposal of a guest/ host paradigm as an alternative or supplement to the source/target dichotomy, when she published Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulation (1999), Liu has since returned to the field. As someone positioned within the U.S. academy with an Asian perspective and understanding of the history of translation, Liu’s contributions are especially valuable for offering cross-cultural perspectives on translation which, ironically, can be so very culturally constrained. In her research, Liu is perhaps most compelling in her dissections of the ways in which translation has the power to decenter canons and question imperialism and its effects. Her analyses draw on historical context and material culture to produce new and exciting insights, for instance in her comments here on the history of scripts and their relation to translation practices and effects. This interview acts as a hyphen between Liu’s proposals published in the Politics issue and her forthcoming article that will appear in Issue 7. CS: In addition to your position as Professor in the Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, USA, you are also founding direc- tor of the Tsinghua–Columbia Center for Translingual and Transcultural Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. I’m intrigued by the title of this center: do “translingual” and “transcultural” exhaust the concept of translation for you? Do they overlap with translation? By discussing these two terms, I’m hoping we might have an insight into how you conceive of translation. LL: The center’s name indicates a certain direction of my work that dates from twenty years ago when I published Translin- gual Practice, which thinks about a national literature though its multilingual, multicultural connections. It was not just an attempt to critique nationalism: I tried to demonstrate that if you were to take out all the so-called “foreign” elements from modern Chinese, you would not be able to speak. That is the translation / 123  magnitude of what I was trying to point out—not only at the level of vocabulary, at the level of syntax, but also at the level of genre, intellectual discourse, political theory. . . CS: And at the level of the script? LL: And at the level of the script, too, because in the twentieth century there were a number of major campaigns to eliminate Chinese characters and replace them with Roman scripts. The “Latinization” or “Romanization” movements were happening all around the world, including in neighboring Korea and Ja- pan. In colonial Vietnam they succeeded because the French crafted their Romanization system so as to get rid of the Chi- nese characters used to write Vietnamese. That move was rep- licated in China. There was a point in the twentieth century, in the 1920s and 1930s, when all progressive intellectuals were in favor of Romanization. This would have led to the elimination of Chinese characters, cutting the writing system off from its own history, scholarship, and literature in the same way that Turkish nationalist language reform succeeded in eliminating Arabic script, replacing it with the Roman script. The failure of the Romanization movement in China preserved Chinese liter- ature and its history of writing, but this doesn’t mean that there was no room to incorporate foreign words and neologisms— often via Japanese—into the Chinese script. CS: Often these types of movements emerge because there is a technological shift. Was this linked to a particular moment in history where a certain technology was driving this change? LL: Yes, absolutely. First it was the telegraph, which implied the need to do something about the Chinese script because there is too much information to send, and the telegraphic code re- quired simplification. But more importantly it was the intro- duction of the typewriter that put a lot of pressure on all East Asian societies to reform their scripts. It is interesting that the misrecognition of the typewriter and its limitation led to polit- translation / ical campaigns that targeted the native script in China, Japan, and many other places as a backward writing system. Progress 124  meant forward looking, efficiency, rapid literacy and educa- tion, so the national elite believed that their language or their writing systems were backward and must be replaced. They overlooked the limitation of the typewriter and focused on the perceived constraints of the writing system. In hindsight, it was the technology of the typewriter that was backward since it was incapable of processing nonlinear characters. They went so far as to design a number of models for Japanese and Chi- nese, but these were clumsy. In the 1970s, the Japanese mo- nopolized the manufacture of the fax machine, which could reproduce both graphs and letters. The fax machine made them realize for the first time that it was not the writing system—it was the backwardness of the machine itself that was to blame! The typewriter was too simple to reproduce something that the fax machine could easily capture, and now, of course, the com- puter can do even better. Today, nobody would even bring up Romanization issues in China or elsewhere because the com- puter is so advanced in terms of its input methods and its abili- ty to process large quantities of information, whether visual or alphabetical. CS: My second question is about how you have recently been framing translation as a political problem in your work, notably in your article in the Politics and Translation issue (Issue 4) of this journal. Could you talk about the way politics contributes to the way you think about translation? LL: I have always been unhappy with the way translation studies have been conceptualized. From the mid-1990s I distanced my- self from translation studies because I thought it was too con- straining—for instance, the source/target language distinction which I tried to refashion as a distinction between host language and guest language in Translingual Practice—but nobody seemed to pay attention. Then, when I did my research on the Opium Wars, especially treaties and international law, and saw how central translation was to imperial politics, it became clear to me that translation could provide an illuminating angle for un- derstanding international politics. For instance, one of the chap- ters in The Clash of Empires looks at how the British included an article in the 1858 Sino-British treaty at the Second Opium War, translation / 125  Article 51, which outlaws a Chinese character. It’s pronounced yi—at that time written as i, Romanizing it—and it is the Chi- nese character that the British translated as “barbarian,” arguing that the Chinese called the English barbarians on the evidence of that character. After establishing the translation or the semantic equivalence which I dispute in my book, they relied on the un- equal treaty to forbid the Chinese to use the character. Of course, they did not outlaw the other side of the equivalence, the English word “barbarian” that they continued to apply to the Chinese. A fascinating story, isn’t it? Amitav Ghosh’s recent novel Flood of Fire draws on the research from my book and retells this sto- ry of translation from the Opium War. I sometimes wonder if there are any similar legal prohibitions against other people’s words elsewhere in international relations, other attempts to kill a native word through translation. The Chinese word (yi) was killed after the Opium War and hasn’t been used for more than a hundred years. In The Clash of Empires I also look at how a text in interna- tional law was translated into Chinese for the first time and fundamentally prepared the ground for modern political theory in China. Many familiar modern Chinese concepts—including “sovereignty” and “human rights”—were first coined in the 1864 translation called Wanguo gongfa from the Elements of International Law by American legal scholar Henry Wheaton. This was the first international law book introduced to China or East Asia. The Japanese relied on this Chinese translation to gain an understanding of the modern world and used it to refute the West’s extraterritorial demands on Japan, as well as justify their own annexation of Korea and Taiwan. I took that translation as a triple event: a textual event, a diplomatic event, and an episte- mological event, anticipating the global importance of sovereign rights and human rights in the twentieth century. In short, the event of that translation did not just “happen” in 1864 and it has traversed a temporality that spans our own times. CS: I’d like to ask about another element in the title of your article in translation: the phrase “competing universals.” Since today at the Nida Symposium the theme translation / was “Untranslatability and Cultural Complexity,” how would you articulate com- peting universals and untranslatability? 126 LL: It’s only when you begin to worry about the whereabouts of meaning that untranslatability becomes a central concern. The idea of “competing universals” emerged out of the research I did in the archives of the UN to reopen the moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being drafted. That document was initially conceptualized as the “Interna- tional Declaration of Human Rights.” In the process of drafting it, the UN Commission on Human Rights decided to change the word “international” to “universal” in the title to empha- size the moral and philosophical importance of the Declara- tion. One question that I like to put to my students and others is this: do you think the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a Western document? Without thinking twice, most people answer yes. This reaction says something about where the uni- versal lies in most people’s minds. My answer is that, on the contrary, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is NOT a Western document. This conclusion is based on my research on the minutes, summary reports, and a lot of other UN archival material as well as the secondary studies of the drafting of the UN document. For instance, Article 1 includes the term “con- science” and it is English, but if you look at the discussions that went on behind the scenes, there was a Confucian concept proposed by the Vice-Chair of the UN Drafting Committee, P. C. Chang, who worked closely to craft the document with El- eanor Roosevelt, the Chair, along with a number of other dele- gates from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Chang was the one who proposed that human attributes should not just be defined as reason, but must also include ren, a written character from Confucian philosophy that consists of a human radical plus number two, which Chang rendered as “Two-man minded- ness” whereas I would translate the character as “the plural hu- man.” Chang tried to explain the word in a way that would help the committee members reground the idea of human rights in the plurality or sociality of human beings, rather than in indi- viduality. There is a fundamental difference between the two. I see Chang’s move as proposing a competing universal. Some people might object that Chang’s stance was merely nationalis- tic, but this is not the case because the Confucian classics were translation / 127  the shared legacy of many societies across East Asia, including the Japanese and Koreans and Vietnamese who all contributed to the study of Confucianism in the past. Confucianism was one of the civilizational resources that P. C. Chang tried to mo- bilize. He made many other contributions—for instance, his refusal to let a Christian understanding of natural rights be the dominant, determining factor in the definition of rights. Theo- logical terms were debated and some terms were taken out. Conscience—an inadequate translation of the Chinese, ren— was eventually added. This drafting process staged a play of competing universals among the delegates from many coun- tries around the world. Let’s not let this document be taken as simply a European-inspired, or American-inspired, document. My argument in the essay is that if you look at the actual day- to-day debates at the UN on concepts—very important con- cepts that we tend to associate with the Western tradition of human rights today—you would be surprised to find multiple contributions, not only from a Confucian humanist like P. C. Chang, but also from feminist activists, Latin American legal traditions, and Islamic traditions. I conclude that the Declara- tion of Human Rights is not a Western document but a docu- ment that registers competing universals. CS: I have another question about the notion of “eventfulness.” I’d like to quote one of your phrases from a footnote in your article, in which you suggest that rather than “an endless rehashing or deconstruction of the biblical story” of the Tower of Babel, it might be more productive to think about translation in terms of an event. I wonder if you could talk about this, perhaps relating it to the way that you have discussed the history of translation in specific contexts, such as the Afro-Asian Writers Conferences? LL: Eventfulness helps me in my attempt to work out the tempo- rality and spatiality of the act of translation. Translation is not just reduced to one instance of textual transfer, based on a com- munication model—which I reject—or a theological model, concerned with the fulfillment of meaning, since hermeneutics is still part of that tradition. How can we radically reconceptu- translation / alize the problem of translation in terms of its situatedness in time—whether we call it history or not—and place, where it 128 happens? Eventfulness might help us grapple with this prob- lem if we were not to think of translation as merely a textual event going after meanings across languages. If we were to think of it, for instance, in terms of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences and the multiple translation projects they carried out, through journals, correspondence, conferences, collabora- tions across many divides, then translation is something else as well—it may inhabit multiple temporalities. I want to free us from thinking of it merely as one time, one place, with its significance limited to whether one gets the meaning or not. To open it instead to the multiplicity of texts, open it to interpreta- tions, open it to other temporalities. Some people argue that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was simply crafted by an international elite, and that it didn’t really mean much at that time, in the Cold War. But you never know its mode of exis- tence. Human rights can be appropriated in any given instance and can generate surprising modes of survival. For instance, in the 1930s human rights discourse was mobilized in China to fight fascism when the nationalist government was rounding up Communists and leftwing intellectuals and putting them in jail, but in the Cold War it was mobilized to fight Communist, totalitarian regimes. So it never had a stable meaning. While the Declaration of Human Rights gave us a blueprint, the in- terpretation itself varies from place to place, time to time, and so I grant the concept itself a certain mobility, an openness to other languages and other intellectual traditions. Eventfulness allows these temporalities to give any particular text a new mode of life in a new language. That’s how I wanted to take translation in the direction of eventfulness and then to identify its political mode of being. The kind of translation work that took place among those who participated in the post-Bandung Afro-Asian Writers Confer- ences is a good example of this. There was a tremendous ef- fort to collaborate across nations and they produced so much—I think in my article I mentioned one instance of the translation of some of the writers from Africa, such as the Nigerian writ- er, Chinua Achebe, who was known in the 1960s and 1970s as an Afro-Asian writer—he was not primarily thought of as an Anglophone writer, as we call him now in Anglo-American ac- translation / 129  ademia. I have become wary of the imperial reappropriation of Afro-Asian writers as Anglophone writers, as Francophone writ- ers. . . What does this mean? They disavow that earlier history, the Afro-Asian writers’ solidarity and their mutual translations and wipe it out by incorporating them into English departments, or Francophone departments, across American and European universities. Today the teaching of Afro-Asian writers is redis- tributed among these departments, but in the recent past the writ- ers belonged together in a mode of political solidarity. CS: Today in your lecture you touched on la petite lettre. Since I understand that you are working on psychoanalysis, translation, and media studies, I was hoping for a few comments on these new directions in your thought. LL: The Freudian Robot didn’t really focus on translation, al- though translation was part of it. For instance, the translation of Lacan into American academia is a fascinating story that I dug out when I was writing the book. What puzzled me was that Lacan’s reading of Poe’s “Purloined Letter” has been in- terpreted by American translators and American literary critics and theorists as something entirely different from what Lacan was actually doing. I traced that to the Yale French Studies (No. 48, French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis [1972], 39–72) translation of Lacan: they eliminated a third of Lacan’s original essay, which dealt with cybernetics and infor- mation theory, and thereby created something called French theory. The United States has been fabricating French theo- ry for some time—even today with the translation of Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables! I looked at the Cold War situation during which disciplines did not speak to each other in the United States, but Lacan himself read across the disciplines. He was reading Freud along with cybernetics—so how did we miss this? Using Lacan as an example—but he was not the only one—I point out that there is an economy of translation: French theory has been manufactured by American academia through translation. translation / CS: In 2013 you published The Nesbitt Code in Chinese, which has not yet been translated. Would you consider translating it? 130 LL: Last month when I was in Beijing, a friend of mine asked me the same question: whether I would consider rendering it into English. I feel ambivalent about this. The main reason is that I wrote this book as part of a collective effort among Chinese writers to rethink the political history of the twentieth centu- ry. I was involved in a three-year-long Indian–Chinese writ- ers’ conversation and I consider myself as a writer in Chinese. The Nesbitt Code—a kind of pseudodetective novel—emerged out of that conversation because I was very interested in the way that Chinese and India poets and novelists remembered their histories. I wrote the book to reflect on the history of the twentieth century, starting with the Russian Revolution and the writers who went into exile, connecting the life stories of these people to reflect on the legacy of the Chinese Revolution. I’m not sure that people in the West are very interested in the psy- chic aspect of the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revo- lution, whereas in China this resonates because it’s their lived history. Since the Revolution ended in failure, there’s a great deal of melancholy and soul searching in China, a lot of pain associated with that history and many personal tragedies. But a question persists: why did so many intellectuals and scien- tists—Chinese, British, Russian, and others—rally around the idea of the Revolution? It’s something one cannot brush aside. I wrote this book to confront that question. What has deterred me from translating it into English is that the readership of English language publications is only interested in testimonial literature against the Communist regime. That’s why I hesitate. This melancholy story about the fundamental homelessness of modern intellectuals and the tragedy of the Revolution is not something that would resonate with publishers in the West. Look at how they talk about China! They talk about the hor- rors of the Cultural Revolution in the same breath as they talk about the Holocaust and are only excited by the evils of Com- munism. What do they know? Next to nothing! But I’m not at all interested in telling them what transpired in the Cultural Revolution. For the most part, the reading public in the United States and Europe only seek repeated confirmation of the supe- riority of their political system, the superiority of their culture, and superiority in general. They are not interested in learning translation / 131  about the difficult existential decisions that faced intellectuals in other parts of the world from the First to the Second World War and all the way to the Cultural Revolution. So you see where my difficulty lies. CS: Maybe it’s not for them. But what about in India? Have you thought of this, since the book came out of these exchanges? In that context do you think there would be an interest? LL: Maybe, there will be an interest when another worldwide rev- olution looms on the horizon or a new generation of the intel- ligentsia is born. Translating the book into English for my In- dian friends who actually asked for it would make good sense. That would be a compelling argument. Maybe I should have it translated into English, not for North American and European or British readers but for other English language readers. I’ll give it some thought. References Liu, Lydia H. 1995. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Trans- lated Modernity. China 1900-1936. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ––––. 2004. The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ––––. 2010. The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ––––. 2013. The Nesbitt Code (六個字母的解法 non-fiction, in Chinese) Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Lydia H. Liu is a theorist of media and translation living in New York. She is Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and has published on literary theory, translation, digital media, Chinese feminism, and empire in English and Chinese. Her English works include The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Un- conscious (2010), The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (2004) and, more recently, a coedited translation with Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko called The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational translation / Theory (2013). 132 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15527

Translation does not concern a comparison between two languages but the interpretation of two texts in two different languages. Umberto Eco (2001) Ever since we started publishing this journal I have wanted to dedicate a special issue to memory. Memory and translation are so obviously connected, yet so little studied. Memory—as the retrieval, reconstruction, inscription, and leaving of traces and their effects—plays a central role in any translation process, and translation, in its inherently transformative character, is intrinsic to every memory and memorializing act. Loss, furthering, circulation, redefinition, distancing, transmigration, rewriting are all possible aspects and effects of translation that could not take place if not for some sort of memorialization. * Since the initial planning of this special issue, my editors of choice were also clear to me. I am so grateful to the two fine scholars—and dear friends—Bella Brodzki and Cristina Demaria for having accepted to serve as guest editors for this issue. Their backgrounds and research make them a perfect duo for the present issue. Bella Brodzki’s brilliant Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007) is perhaps the most important publication bringing together translation and memory, demonstrating how “excavating or unearthing burial sites or ruins in order to reconstruct traces of the physical and textual past in a new context is also a mode of translation, just as resurrecting a memory or interpreting a dream are acts of translation.” I found reading this book truly illuminating.  Bringing Bella together with Cristina, who for years has studied memory from the somewhat different angle of the semiotics of culture, was a fortunate choice. Cristina’s research is in the most various expressions and testimonies of memory— from reconciliation processes in South Africa and Chile to documentaries of events and experiences of trauma. “Studying memory [as a cultural phenomenon] means considering not only the material conditions, means, or devices through which it is inscribed and transmitted, but also the models, forms, and practices that define those genres that orient, and also retranslate or reenunciate, narrations of the past” (2012, 10; my translation). * I would like to thank Bella and Cristina for their wonderful work in putting this issue together. I also want to thank the authors for their contributions, each of which provides new and diversified insights into how translation works through memory. I am also very grateful for their patience during the many publication delays. Regrettably, it took much longer than expected and originally programmed to publish this special issue. On behalf of the board, I want to apologize to our guest editors, authors, and readers for the unconscionable delay in delivering our journal. Over the past few years, we moved from one publisher to another but now, after a lengthy hiatus, we have finally found a new home with Eurilink University Press in Rome. * Reading this issue’s essays has enriched my under- standing of the relations between translation and memory. I have learned new things, and I have been surprised and pleased. I hope you will join me in appreciating this special issue. * This issue is dedicated to the memory of Umberto Eco, who passed away more than a year ago while we were busy preparing this issue. Translation was one of the themes to which he devoted much interest and writing in his last few years, and his contributions on translation as negotiation, based on his experience both as a translator and as a widely translated author, will continue to accompany us. I am most grateful for the opportunity he gave me to discover and investigate translation through the lens of semiotics, and Cristina Demaria and I, who both completed our doctorates under his supervision, share fond memories of the lively discussions on translation and its limits during our university seminars. S. N. References Brodzki, Bella. 2007. Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Demaria, Cristina. 2012. Il trauma, l’archivio e il testimone. La semiotica, il documentario e la rappresentazione del “reale”. (Trauma, archive, and witness. Semiotics, documentaries, and the representation of the “real”). Bologna: Bononia University Press. Eco, Umberto. 2001. Experiences in Translation. Translated by Alastair McEwen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Eco, Umberto. 2003. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. Translator/s not specified. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15528

0. A preface on the translational internationalization of the humanities This special volume is the result of a very long, exciting, yet rather difficult struggle, involving translations and self- translations. Who writes here is the “effect” of two people’s endeavors; two people who have come to know each other to some extent across text, screen, and phone line—who, surely, respect and cherish one another, without ever having met. One is American, the other Italian; they have been invited to write for an International Journal in English, a journal that hosts articles that engage, obviously, not only translation, but that are themselves the product of self-translations. This very process has necessarily become part of the volume’s introduction, since one of its authors is not a native speaker. This is a “fact” that nowadays has become routine at least in the Western-Eurocentric worlds, and none dares question it: we must write in English. Otherwise, our international status will be affected, and not only will we go back to being provincial, addressing only a limited audience, but we will be devalued, score lower on all the national evaluations that determine individual and institutional research funding. This seems to be a one-way trajectory that everyone acknowledges, that some occasionally criticize, but is never actually resisted, since it is the way the global production of knowledge and educational systems work. One might wonder why we are foregrounding the obvious, when we should be writing about translation and memory. As many of the essays here demonstrate, however, the relationship between translation and memory has very much to do with not only the position of the person who is translating, but also with that of the person who is writing about translation, and thus creating an archive–memory of all the lives a text might have, along with its histories and narratives, its former and new translated meanings. If all critical analysis and meditation on the differences between languages—which includes the memory that sustains them, and the memory-texts in the languages that manage to survive—are but a translation/self-translation, often erasing nuances and disregarding untranslatability, then in which recesses of translation (from and into English and into every other language) and memory does the future of the humanities reside? 1. Memory and translation of past intercourses Isn’t this what a translation does? [. . .] By elevating the signifier to its meaning or value, all the while preserving the mournful and debt-laden memory of the singular body, the first body, the unique body that the translation thus elevates, preserves, and negates [relève]? Since it is a question of a travail—indeed, as we noted, a travail of the negative—this relevance is a travail of mourning, in the most enigmatic sense of this word [. . .] The measure of the relève or relevance, the price of a translation, is always what is called meaning, that is, value, preservation, truth as preservation (Wahrheit, bewahren) or the value of meaning, namely, what, in being freed from the body, is elevated above it, interiorizes it, spiritualizes it, preserves it in memory. A faithful and mournful memory. (Derrida 2013, 378) Among the many theoretical perspectives from which one can look at translation, as well as the many objects that can be considered from the point of view of translation theories and practices, the translation/memory nexus is among the most fraught, precisely because memory is by definition contesta- tory, and always mediated, and thereby the most complex and difficult to qualify on almost every level. Because of their tight intertwining, one runs the risk of reiterating or echoing what has been said and done already (see, for example, the recent book by one of the author of this volume: Brownlie 2016). Oversaturated, we struggle to find what else could come from further confrontations between these two concepts: how to consider and render truly heuristic an encounter between translation and memory now, in the age of posttranslation studies (Gentzler 2017)? The quoted passage above from Jacques Derrida dates back many years, and, in the domain of translation theories influenced by poststructuralism, it serves as a milestone in the encounter between translation and memory. In what follows, we would like to go back to what might belong to even older history of memory and translation engagements. If for literary critics and translation specialists this history sounds passé, it is not the case for philosophers or scholars working with language and meaning. One of the first fields of confrontation and exchange between translation and memory was the study of the “meaning of meaning”—semiotics, philosophy of language— whereby the implications of any act of translation became part of many theories and speculations on the working of meaning between languages and cultures (Nergaard 1995). Should this seem peripheral to the main event, we could point to structuralism, and even to the beginnings of poststructuralism, up to its recent neomaterialist transformations, as a way of rethinking languages, cultures, and their relation with history and the “material” world. There we find the crucial work of translation and memory as perspectives and/or as epistemic positions that have enabled the study of languages and cultures and the effects of different temporalities, politics, subjectivities and bodies—that is, of the transformative character of translation in memorializing act. As clarification, let us start from some basic assumptions underlining not a post-, but a no-longer- structuralist, interpretative, and translational conception of how semiosis works, looking at the work of Umberto Eco, to whom this issue is dedicated. Even though his work is recognized as having significantly contributed to the development of Roman Jakobson’s three-fold classification of translation (Eco 2001),1 here we want to mention briefly another concept that he used to explain the workings of semiosis, along with that of memory. The operative first assumption is that every act of interpretation that comprises acts of translation has recourse to an encyclopedia, in the semiotic sense that Umberto Eco (1976, 1984) has given to the term—that in its turn refers to semantic and iconic memories that are part not only of every langue system, but of every act of parole, to go back to Ferdinand de Saussure. In other words, the very idea of how meaning works had already changed in the 1980s, thanks also to Eco’s perspective for which the idea of a semiotic universe is made not so much of signs, but of cultural units; entities that absorb and reflect the influence of the culture in which they find themselves, and which are no longer the lemmas [word; term] of a rigid system of content organization (a dictionary), but rather the nodes of a network of meanings that can be treaded upon in multiple directions, depending on the inferences and the interpretive connections one chooses: a semiotic universe that takes the shape of an encyclopedia. (Lorusso 2015, 81) In respect to translation processes, this concept is relevant for two different reasons. The first is that, in accepting semiosis as operating within encyclopedias, what is most relevant is that every term composing a code is always already interpreted, bringing along the history of its uses and translations; the working of languages moving from its structure to the actual effects and transformations of every signifying practices that define not so much what is a 1 One of the most significant contributions to Jakobson’s classification was made by Eco in Experiences in Translation (2001), starting from Charles S. Peirce’s influence on Jakobson. Even though Eco emphasizes that for Peirce “meaning, in its primary sense, is a ‘translation of a sign into another system of signs’” (Eco 2001, 69), he also argues that Peirce “uses translation in a figurative sense: not like a metaphor, but pars pro toto (in the sense that he assumes ‘translation’ as a synecdoche for ‘interpretation’)” (Eco 2001, 69). language, but what concurs to its different kinds of circulation and transmissions, that is, to its translations. As Patrizia Violi summarizes: “The encyclopaedia marks the transformation of the code from a rule that defines signification and interpretation, into the idea of a system of possible inferences, in which even a principle of choice and of freedom may find a place” (Violi 1992, 99). In a culture conceived as an encyclopedia, the hierarchies fall, because the priorities and the dependencies change according to circumstances (thus locally, and bodily). Meaning starts to be thought of as always already constructed and reconstructed, hence translated, in time (and space), within a dialectic between what is already deposited in the encyclopedia and what is historically and culturally negotiated; between consolidated habits2 and their possible transform- ations. And here is the second reason this concept might play a role: collective memories, thought of in their contingent political, social and historical formations, are what is filtered and negotiated and transformed from local, national and cultural encyclopedia. Memory and its processes are what, in different contexts, emerge as different processes of cultural translation. Every translator, therefore, deals not only with those memories belonging to the cultural and historical contexts in which she operates, and with the different politics of memory surrounding the particular text being translated, but also with the semantic and pragmatic fields (scripts, genres, frames) of which each term, each name, is part. In other words, languages, and not only natural languages but images and sounds as well, are thought of as forms of cultural and historical memory, often capable of directing, but, at least, influencing, what we now think of as the fluxes of linguistic traffic that are produced in those border and contact zones— again, temporal and spatial—wherein translation operates. In other words, whenever we look at the processes of archiving and preserving cultures, we find the modeling, and translating, nature of memory. Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky wrote more than forty years ago that the “implanting 2 We refer here to the notion of habit as theorized by Charles S. Peirce (see especially Collect- ed Papers V.4000). of a fact into the collective memory, then, is like a translation from one language into another—in this case, into the ‘language of culture’” (Lotman and Uspensky 1971, 214). And they add—prior to much more recent theorizations of what an “event” is in light of transmedia and current transnational thinking: “Events have multilayered interpretations, they are subject to corrections, revisions. The construction of the historical event is nothing but the translation of something into the language of memory” (Lorusso 2015, 101). A visual example of such influence is the concept of Pathosformel by, recently rediscovered and much discussed in memory studies and aesthetic theory. Developed throughout his life, the unfinished project of the atlas of Mnemosyne, Pathosformeln refers to all those images and forms of pathos (emotions, passions such as fear, awe, and horror) that survive as a cultural heritage imprinted in our collective memory. There are, in other words, antique roots sustaining modern images, their translations—the very way in which their meaning can be reversed—that is at stake whenever we analyze visual cultures.3 2. Memory and translation current transactions However, even though the intersections and exchanges between memory and translation are undeniable, indisputable, and generative, they do not exclude several critical issues: how can these intersections be truly heuristic? Is any confrontation possible without ironing out the actual differences between the two concepts? That is, on the one hand, to think of translation as a way to construct collective memories, their survival, and on the other hand, of memory as always requiring a transfer of time and space, a recontextualizing of its representations and expressions? And even more so if we think of translation as the transformation of one’s own traditions and identity, in itself a process that implies the fatigue of welcoming and of hospitality, the hard work of transmitting one’s own otherness; 3 In the past few years, there has been an increasing interest in Warburg’s project and his idea of Pathosforlmen in many fields (visual studies, aesthetics, history) dealing with the construction and circulation of memory images. Amongst the many author, see the work of Georges Didi-Huberman (2005, 2011). moreover, as a widening of the very concept of multidirec- tional memory (Rothberg 2009). One has to remember all the different practices— individual and collective, linguistic and social—that are at stake in every engagement, to think of practices of translation as both a metaphorical transfer and, as Barbara Godard (see Karpinski, Henderson, Sowton, and Ellenwood 2013) suggests, as metonymical links (see also Tymoczko 1999). In other words, one must not forget the implications of using translation as a metaphor standing in for the encounter with the other that is, also, a transformation of one’s own tradition and memory. This is a choice that is always conveyed by the real labor that accompanies welcoming not only another language, but also another future and another possible past into the negotiations between the translator, the texts, the discourses, and the places, spaces, and times surrounding them. What happens when translation is “translated,” transferred as an expansion and an extension of memories through the figure of testimony and witnessing? And how does translation function in the dynamics of postmemory, as conceptualized by Marianne Hirsch4 and others (see Hirsch 1997, 2012) , in the intergenerational passage that structures both filiation and affiliation? In as much as the concepts and processes of translation and memory are understood to be mutually implicating, if not interpenetrating, in literary critical studies, philosophy, linguistics, distinctions between individual (or autobiographic- al memory) and collective or cultural memory are often not acknowledged. Even when the topic is traumatic memory, in particular, and the analytic categories are drawn from the familiar models of psychoanalytic theory, memory as a phenomenon and a practice is considered to operate across (hence our volume’s title) realms and registers. Likewise, we—as the editors of this volume—are not inclined to privilege either personal or public memory, or engage in debate over the question of priority or precedence. Our essays treat translation in regard to both social and individual memory, reflecting our conviction that, for our 4See the interview with Marianne Hirsch in this issue, in which she revisits the concept of postmemory in its relationship with practices of translation. interpretive purposes, both draw from the same well. There is analytic force and ethical impact in studying the uses and effects of each, and their interconnectedness, as autobiogra- phical narratives, fiction, as well as other forms of literary and cultural expression demonstrate. However, in the disciplines of psychology and the social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, political science, and history, these distinctions do matter, differently; indeed, they are foundational. Having said that, there appears to be a strong drift now in the direction of stressing the effects of the social and the public on personal memory, or an attempt to bridge social science and psychological approaches. This is the case in cutting-edge empirical research in the neurosciences and cognitive psychology, where arguably the greatest advances in memory studies have recently taken place. “Mnemonic consequences,” or what is otherwise referred to as the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, are attributed to the role of conversation/the impact of silence, the said and the unsaid (Stone et al. 2012); this is also true for studies in the reconstructing of memory, which reached its greatest visibility (and notoriety) in the 1990s. Whereas in psychoanalysis the agent of repression is the unconscious (both singular and collective, though to different effect), recent research in cognitive and neurobiological science finds the suppressing or controlling of unwanted memories to be the product of brain systems similar to the mechanisms that stop reflexive motor responses (Anderson and Levy 2009). In studies that seek to bridge psychology—which is method- logyically individually based and functional in its perspective—and the disciplines more generally focused on groups, whether they are nations, tribes, generations, or other units, an important connection is psychology’s recent affirmation that individuals are embedded in complex social networks. Memory, according to neuroscientists, has an epidemiological dimension in the sense of social contagion, which is now exacerbated by social media. Whether mnemonic formations are primarily biological or social in origin, psychology is not interested in the individual qua individual, but in general or universal principles or features that can be extracted. In other words, just because the locus is the individual doesn’t mean that the investment is in the subject or subjectivity. Despite this fundamental difference between the various disciplinary approaches that, nevertheless, needed to be mentioned, what steers much of this work back to literary and cultural perspectives on memory and translation of psychic phenomena is the centrality accorded to narrative and identity. In this respect, Aleida Assmann’s (2015) recent reflections on the working of cultural memory merits mention. Assmann comments not only on neuroscience’s and media studies’ shared “basis in the constructivist hypothesis that events and experiences have no ontological status but are made and remade over and over again” (Assmann 2015, 42), as Lotman and Uspensky (1978) have also said. Her work is also relevant because of her perspective on cultural memory as a domain that must engage with the role of affects—both individual and collective, along with their intertwining— within a diachronic and transgenerational analytical gaze. What does her “model” suggest? Arguably, a sort of rearticulation of the very notion of postmemory, with the added insights of a constructivist point of view. The latter emphasizes the synchronic and embedded quality of a memory fabricated according to actual needs and demands in the present, calls for approaches that focus on the affective dimension of memory in a long-term diachronic perspective, both at the individual and at the collective transgenerational transmission levels. It is probably in this very rearticulation of the relationship between cultural memory and postmemory that processes of translation and rewriting of memories are not only significant because they create an “afterlife of repeated transformations, but also a prehistory”: what is at stake are the ways in which “memory traces interact with previous experiences and cultural patterns; how both of these provide templates that gain a steering function within our mental cosmos” (Assmann 2015, 43). Resonance is thus a form of “stimulating and strengthening the affective charge in the process of remem- bering” (44), where  [t]he concept of resonance implies the interaction of two separate entities, one located in the foreground, one in the background. In this case, the element in the foreground does not cover up or elide what exists in the background; on the contrary, the element in the foreground triggers the background and fuses with it. We may also speak of a cooperation, in which the background element nonconconsciously or unconsciously guides, forms, shapes the foreground element. My emphasis here is on the hidden correspondence and the tacit agreement between a surface stimulus and its response on a deeper and nonconscious level, which can enlarge our understanding of the nonconscious but not necessarily unconscious, let alone occult, dynamics of memory. (Assmann 2015, 45) Resonance and a prehistory of memories can be found in the ways in which translation processes, when dealing with the past, are forms of cooperation between background and foreground that might differ, involving both temporalization and spatialization strategies, as our essays and interviews amply demonstrate. As the interview with James Young that we present online (http://translation.fusp.it) amply suggests, ongoing interest in the link between language and landscape, memorial sites, ruins, and layered translations points to the manifold ways that translation is instrumentalized for different memorializing ends, whether they be in the service of creation, reclamation, or effacement of a memory or former version (one’s own or another’s). Arguably, every act of translation displaces a previous one; sometimes, they continue to coexist, even if one of the languages or versions is in the ascendant or dominant position. Translation works in two directions, toward both remembrance/reification and oblivion, along a continuum which is, of course, subject to change over time. Although, for example, we witness the erasing and mistranslating of place names in Brian Friel’s (1981) famous play Translations—in which in 1883 British surveyors are redrawing the map, that is, converting Gaelic names to English ones—in 1922 both Irish and English were made the official languages of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Linguistic appropriation is the primary form of displacement of the other; linguistic imperialism in this form has been one of the great weapons of choice in history. It is important to note, however, that translation involves reaction and resistance, as well as aggression and enactment. Isabelle Jenin’s essay in our volume addresses the replacement of place names in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, in which the original Indian names for the American landscape are changed to English and Spanish ones. The text, she argues, shows that the “translated” landscape is in some way fundamentally untranslatable, that the Laguna Pueblo spirits that haunt the European settlers’ imprint are exercising their own dominion, keeping their names alive. Toponymy isn’t inherently political, but the history and meaning of place names are dramatically associated with changes of regime, occupation, settlement, and linguistic/ cultural imperialism in general; acts of translation— renaming—are complicit with memorializing and monument- alizing efforts that represent symbolic as well as economic capital investments. They shape, even distort, cultural memory and identity by ensuring certain legacies while effacing, sometimes even burying others. 4. Traces of translatability and untranslatability The working of memory and translation as a kind of urban archaeology has recently been reclaimed and further developed by Sherry Simon (2012). Simon’s overarching project deals with those urban spaces that are divided and polyglot, such as Nicosia, Trieste, and Montreal, addressing translation studies in relation to its growing engagement with those cultural, economic, and political disparities and variations that act on each process of “mediation”. According to Simon, “[s]uch an enlarged understanding of translation includes acts of mediation which are not language transfers in the conventional sense, but are more broadly practices of writing that take place at the crossroads” (8), and “[t]ranslation is a useful and often neglected entry point into questions of diversity and accommodation, identity and community, and the kinds of durable links that can be established across histories and memories” (156). Processes of translation are capable of mobilizing and circulating divergent, indeed conflictual, memories. Therefore, if translation can be thought of as an act that contributes to redefining not only cultural spaces, but also the very spaces where citizenship is identified, it becomes something more than the acknowledgement and the expression of differences. It is also in this sense that translation become a mode, a dispositif in the Foucauldian employment of the term, thanks to which what has passed away, what is apparently past, disappeared, removed, and suppressed, overtakes and exceeds its own predetermined destiny through a rebirth in other contexts, in other times and places, with renewed images. At the same time, the very nature of a dispositif might direct us to reflect again on the status and condition of translatability and untranslatability, whereby speaking of untranslatability does not mean to deny the potentiality of any translation; on the contrary, it means accepting, and always interrogating translation as an actual transformation and interpretation of the memory of cultures or, better yet, of the cultures of memories, their resilience and their resonances. It means continually interrogating the discontinuities and heterogeneities inhabiting every memory construction and tracing of borders, in regards to which we should always exercise not only the work of comparison but, as Marianne Hirsch expresses in her interview in this volume, an effort to imagine new possible political connections and affiliations, new ways of mobilizing memories and their visual, verbal, and performative translations. For Simon, it is undeniable that in every context in which there is a strong awareness of the border—of different languages coexisting, along with competing and often conflicting memories—the suspicion of the “other language” prevails, the other language here acquiring another kind of “untranslatability” entailing any deviation from one’s own, or any inclusion of the translated histories and stories of those living across the material or symbolic border that separates them from us. Both acts of inclusion and exclusion are charged with deep ideological valence: how can we translate what we do not want to translate? Most times, the enemy is the one whose story we do not want to hear; that we do not want to recognize and actually translate, since we might understand it, thus allowing the other’s memory possibly to haunt us. However, as Simon says, cities crossed by linguistic borders— more Trieste and Montreal (to mention her examples) than Jerusalem, or Cape Town (to mention other examples)—are places in which translation can become a very powerful tool, first by bringing along in its very practice the social force of distancing. That is in the confirmation of alterity in the emphasis on social and cultural differences, in the recognition and yielding to religious and national belonging. Second, by calling on the force of furthering, that is, in the creation of new links and bonds through deviant and excessive forms of cross- over: interferences, self-translation, rewriting, transmigration, and countermemorialization. The practice of furthering does not entail a presupposition of sameness; on the contrary, it presumes the integration of memories in conflict or, rather, of their relocation within their own cultural and historical contexts. But is this really possible? 5. Trauma and translation Many of the essays we present here reflect on the practice of translation as a means of managing not only internal borders and conflicting memories. At the same time they address the challenges any translator faces when converting traumatic memories into diverse contexts and spaces with different or competing Histories, whether of the Shoah, the Native American, or the Armenian genocide. It is risky to enter here into a multifaceted debate that some may regard as already “old,” or over-utilized as a trope. However, some of the most significant contemporary “thinking [about] trauma’s future” (Rothberg 2014, xii) includes voices that try to understand the ways in which the category of trauma as an interpretive model might still have an impact on our experience of temporality and its structure. One option is to look at trauma along with its implicated concept of belatedness (Freud’s idea of Nachträglichkeit) This suggests reading trauma not in and for itself, but for its possible representations—verbal, visual, spatial—for when it tries to express a structure of feeling for a (no longer unclaimed) experience; it also implies looking at the coming together of different times, whereby the category of trauma does not point to the disruptive nature of experienced time, but to how we write about it, translate it. These are the complexities of belatedness weaving into the writing, or the (re)calling and the repealing, of past experiences within which trauma is made manifest: questions of narrative and time that are inseparable from ethical and political questions. A further level of confrontation between “new” trauma theory and translation studies emerges once it has become almost unavoidable for any discourse on trauma to travel elsewhere, geographically and geoculturally, to go beyond a Eurocentric and monocultural orientation, to move to another affect-world, in order to better apprehend its impact (Rothberg 2014); to test its future-tense and its slow violence (Kaplan 2015). In so doing, a paradigm in which translation and trauma meet might also start to answer different questions: how do states colonize a disruptive temporality into sovereign chronologies, and how do they translate them; or how is the changing biopolitical horizon in which trauma is both produced and policed affecting its very experience—an example of which is when what is produced and policed regards different people, different places, refugees and exiles; different bodies? There is no doubt that the contemporary technological versions of subjectivity and identity have moved the idea of trauma through many translations and transmutations. We must contemplate the cultural and historical specificity of the concepts and categories of trauma, thanks to its translations, as Michael Rothberg reminds us: “The category of trauma ought to trouble the historicist gesture of much contemporary criticism as well as its concomitant notions of history and culture” (Rothberg 2014, xv). As much as the category of trauma might enable the political, cultural, and social impact of translation, it involves the dislocation of subjects, histories, and cultures. And even though there could be multiple forms of dislocation, deriving from “punctual” events (a massacre, for example) or from systemic violence or transhistorical structural trauma (LaCapra 2001), there is continuity, nonetheless. The task of “theory” is to find it, to look for connections, overlaps, similitude, and translation across the cultural and historical contexts under scrutiny. We discern connections and similarities in the current climate of History and its forms of violence involving different scales of temporality and modes of subjectivity; these are pertinent to both in trauma and in translation studies, but they have probably not, thus far, been addressed sufficiently. In sum, the challenge seems to be how to critically engage with classical trauma theory’s dominant paradigm by rethinking and rewriting how to connect events of extreme violence, disjunctive structures of subjective and collective experience, and discursive and aesthetic forms of rewriting and translation. 6. Media transmediality and the archive Yet another question comes to mind: what is specific to the concept and practices of translation when the current mobilizing of memory results in new and different representations of form and content, which are transformed by what is being called a post-roadcast era (Hoskins 2011)? What does it mean today to move from the unknown to the known, to render something from the past familiar, within the ever-changing forms and formations of contemporary mediascapes and memoryscapes, or else to accept their untrans- latability? In order to answer these questions in their intertwining with memory, one could engage in dialogue with Media- Specific Analysis, which deals mainly with contemporary examples of how a literary genre, as Hayles states, “mutates and transforms when it is instantiated in different media [. . .] MSA insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of these embodiments interacts dynamically with linguistic, rhetorical, and literary practice to create the effects we call ‘literature’” (Hayles 2014, 21). Or, also, it could confront itself with a more sociologically oriented tendency that maintains that media “functions” have been unhooked from both the tools and the objects with which they have been traditionally associated. To give the most common example, what we once normally thought of as television has now gone beyond the television set itself, its content released from its “container,” from its specific embodiment, its own materiality. In other words, what used to be defined as a media product—even what is labeled as “literature”—is now a transmedia set of translated events and practices of consumption: programs are seen through streaming or downloaded from the Internet in different countries, fandom providing almost instantaneous subtitles; books and their characters cannot be launched without a YouTube trailer that immediately receives global comments; programs have websites and Facebook pages, their actors living many other lives as characters of a proliferation of narratives produced and archived in fan fiction websites from all over the world, where they become adaptations and local versions of the “original,” of a matrix that is changed through on-going transmedia storytelling (Demaria 2014). What we have briefly described here is now almost a cliché in Media Studies; it is part of a phenomenon that has been called, and from then on overtly quoted as, a convergent and participative culture, of media spreadability (Jenkins, Green, Ford 2013) that endlessly rewrites the return of history and memory through prosthetic tools (Landsberg 2004). The narrative complexity on one hand and the transmedia overflows exemplified by fanfic websites on the other supposedly constitute the evidence of a participatory and spectator-centered culture of prosumers, of a diffuse audience whose agency has helped to blur the boundaries between an original “text” (such as, for example, a TV series) and its transformations and local translations (how the characters and their stories are transformed and reimagined, and their format readapted in different countries). Hence, we still need a reflection on a language of the text that does not exclude the “materiality” of the screen or the computer, as well as the effects of the notion that content outside its containers might induce the very thinking of new forms of translation. The different media and screens implicated in all studies of contemporary digital transmu- tations, their specificity but also their syncreticity—that is, the simultaneous presence of different languages and their particular intertwining effects and affects (verbal, visual, textual, aural)—can allow us to reflect on the peculiar ways in which content might migrate from one digital space to another. Moreover, different—or else very similar—stories might be told. What might be at stake are the main transformations undergone by narrative imaginations (Montani 2010)—from a mimetic account of time (as in epic or ancient theatre), to a more productive projection, first helped by the narrative configurations allowed by the novel and cinema, and currently by contemporary media narratives—remediations and translations of all previous forms and genres (the novel, cinema, TV, and so on) and of the memory of all the antique images (Pathosformeln), languages, and cultures they involve. What is the role of translation in those processes of selection and management of what becomes part of an archive as a set of rules and criteria, as a collection, as a process of distribution and delivery of memory? This problem involves a critical reading of those technologies of memory that are supported by different politics of digital archives, whereby one faces the double and ambivalent dimension of archive as origin and archive as law, of the authority and authorship of the archive. It is the case, to quote but one example, of the recent transfer of CIA and other former classified verbal, visual, and audiovisual documents dealing with the US involvement with the Pinochet dictatorship to the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago de Chile.5 These political documents rest on a techno-ethical paradox: between providing free access to memory as a civil or human right and the opacity of a history preserved as a trace of and a testimony to its very secrecy. More generally speaking, when translation meets the archive, it encounters its possible displacements and various transnational administrations of memory (NGOs, humanitarian agencies that demand to speak and designate, to classify and preserve documents in the name of other people’s memories). Hence, how can one analyze such performative acts, this verbal and visual documentality? This refers to the exercises of power that affect subjective and collective investments, the comprehensive power of knowledge-production in relation to the rights and meanings of contemporary archives. 5 For more on this project led by Cristián Gomez-Moya on the archive and human rights, see http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-91/gomezmoya#sthash.g0wBGq8a.dpuf; and http://www.wordsinspace.net/lib-arch-data/2013-fall/?ai1ec_event=declassifying-the- archive-declassification-documentation-human-rights&instance_id. Accessed July 1, 2016. In conclusion The articles that make up this issue of translation: an interdisciplinary journal offer indeed a range of meditations on an intriguing set of case studies that bring new perspectives on many of the topics we have raised. Each elaborates, in its own fashion, on the author’s respective engagement with the act of translation and transmission as an act that opens up memory’s archive and its various resonances. Instead of individually summarizing the contents of our volume’s contributors’ articles, we have chosen to continue weaving our shared considerations by incorporating some of their principal insights as an ongoing discussion and highlighting the questions they have provoked us into posing. The essays are bookended by interviews with Marianne Hirsch and James Young, respectively. Their impact on this most consequential field of study, as it engages history, architecture, literature, and art, has been extraordinary. Indeed, the field of Memory Studies as such would not exist without their definitive, groundbreaking work. One regards the role of memory when the author is both a translator and a critic of translational processes, as in Adams Bodomo’s essay, in which we find the author’s own poems that he himself translates, and Bernard McGuirk’s article, where he meditates on his own translation both of Haroldo De Campos’s poems and of Brazilian protest songs. Here we find the challenge posed by the echoes, influences, hybridities, and intertexts of contemporary transculturations, whereby the task of the translator involves not abandoning but suspending certain spontaneous choices of literal translation in favor of interaction and indeed transaction. Moreover, underlying all the works, the role translation plays in changing—and even in radically transforming—local, national, and global memories emerges in all its effects, as in the case of the Armenian genocide thanks to the many translations and the cinematic version of Antonia Arslan’s 2007 novel Skylark Farm, which Sona Haroutyunian analyzes, focusing on the relationship between the historical event and its various kinds of representations. Along with these questions, what is put under scrutiny is both the role of the writer as the translator of a fading oral memory (as in Bodomo’s, Jenin’s, and McGuirk’s articles) and of the translator as a witness or a second-degree witness (Deane-Cox); coming into contact with—and sometimes be- traying—the memory of the texts and the memory the texts sought to convey. Or else preserving memory by transforming it into a new genre, a new type of storytelling, as Isabelle Jenin shows us in her analysis of Silko’s novel. These questions are raised and further problematized in Brownlie’s article, where she addresses the ways in which two autobiographical stories by Katherine Mansfield—“Prelude” and “At the Bay”—reflect in style and structure the processes of autobiographical memory. They are also articulated in David Amezcua Gomez’s study of Muñoz Molina’s novel Sefarad, in which he traces how in multidirectional memory (of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and post-Civil War Spain) “empathetic connections” are translated into monumental fiction. Or yet into monuments tout court, as James Young here (see infra) discusses with Bella Brodzki and Siri Nergaard, pointing to how, in order to understand traumatic memories and their translations, topography, literature, diaries, ruins all collapse into a fragmented yet resonant text, of which one element cannot be read without the other. The problem of accountability and responsibility remains paramount: how much do we really want to translate? And how much can we translate when it comes to postmemories of the Holocaust? Language issues and questions emerging from the translation of first and second generation testimonies are at the core of memory studies, as both Young and Hirsch comment in their interviews, referring both to their own work, and to the influence that a graphic novel such as Art Spieglman’s Mauss and a documentary such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah had on their own thinking. Moreover: what to give to, or for, the “other”? How is the other constructed as such? How is the other interchangeable with oneself under diasporic conditions; is it a fluid category or status? How is nostalgia translated across these different contexts? Here we go back to the very ambivalent notion of who is a witness in translation and to what she is a witness of, and for whom, given the complexities of postmemory, and the consequences of legacy and identification that this category invokes (see the interview, infra), since processes of trans- mission and forms of aesthetic affiliation are both modes of translation. What emerges from all the contributions is that public, cultural, and national memories (with all the due distinctions) are rewritten every day no matter how previous institutionalized versions have prevailed. The construction of homogeneous cultural and national memories takes place notwithstanding their potential translations, ruins, and ghosts; yet, new translations can affect and determine different politics of memory, changing their archival prospects. What keeps translation itself alive is the tension between self-referentiality and extrareferentiality; it is simultaneously an open and a closed system. There are countless examples throughout history of the dialectic between preservation and destruction (through neglect as well as abuse), and, as a result, of active struggles for restoration of sites of memory, however contested their value. But memory, given that it projects both forward and backward, provides residual rewards for those who desire the new. For this volume’s editors and contributors, the question of how we translate translation—as a carrying over and a covering over of the past—is the means by which, the gesture towards which, we name and rename until infinity. References Anderson, Michael C., and Benjamin J. Levy. 2009. “Suppressing Unwanted Memories.” Currents Directions in Psychological Science 18 (4): 189– 194. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01634.x. Assmann, Aleida. 2015. “Impact and Resonance: Towards a Theory of Emotions in Cultural Memory.” In The Formative Past and the Formation of the Future: Collective Remembering and Identity Formation, edited by Terje Stordalen and Naguib Saphinaz-Amal, 41– 69. Oslo: Novus Forlag. Brownlie, Shioban. 2016. Mapping Memory in Translation. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Demaria, Cristina. 2014. “True Detective Stories. Media Textuality and the Anthology Format between Remediation and Transmedia Narratives.” Between 4 (8). Special issue Tecnologia, immaginazione, forme del narrare, edited by Lucia Esposito, Emanuela Piga, and Alessandra Ruggiero. Available at: http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/issue/view/33/showToc. doi:10.13125/2039-6597/1332. Derrida, Jacques. 2013. “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” Translated by Lawrence Venuti. In Signature Derrida, edited by Jay Williams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Didi-Hubermann, Georges. 2005. Confronting Images. Questioning the Ends of a Certain Theory of Art. Translated by John Goodman. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Sate University Press. ———. 2011. Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet. L’oeil de l’histoire, 3. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. ———. 1984. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, London, MacMillan. ———. 2000. Experiences in Translation, Toronto, Buffalo, London, Toronto University Press. Friel, Brian. 1981. Translations. London: Faber and Faber. Gentzler, Edwin. 2017. Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post- Translation Studies. London, New York: Routledge. Hayles, N. Katherine. [2004] 2014. “Print is Flat, Code is deep: the Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” In Transmedia Frictions. The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities, edited by Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson, 20–33. Oakland: University of California Press. Originally  published in Poetics Today 25 (1), 2004: 67–90. doi:10.1215/03335372- 25-1-67. Hoskins, Andrew. 2011. “7/7 and connective memory: Interactional trajectories of remembering in post-scarcity culture.” Memory Studies 4 (3): 269–280. doi:10.1177/1750698011402570. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames. Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory. Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York and London: NYU Press. Kaplan, E. Ann. 2016. Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Karpinski, Eva C., Jennifer Henderson, Ian Sowton, and Ray Ellenwood, eds. 2013. Trans/Acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Lorusso, Anna Maria. 2015. Cultural Semiotics. For a Cultural Perspective in Semiotics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lotman, Yuri, and Boris Uspensky. 1978. “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture.” In Soviet Semiotics and Criticism: An Anthology, special issue of New Literary History, 9 (2): 211–232. doi:10.2307/468571. Montani, Pietro. 2010. L’immaginazione intermediale: perlustrare, rifigurare, testimoniare il mondo visibile. Rome–Bari: GLF Editori Laterza. Nergaard, Siri, ed. 1995. Teorie contemporanee della traduzione. Milan: Bompiani. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Volumes I–VI. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2014. “Beyond Tancred and Clorinda—trauma studies for implicated subjects.” Preface to The Future of Trauma Theory. Contemporary  Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, xii–xviii. London and New York: Routledge. Simon, Sherry. 2012. Cities in Translation. Intersections of Language and Memory. London and New York: Routledge. Stone, Charles B., Alin Coman, Adam D. Brown, Jonathan Koppel, and William Hirst. 2012. “Toward a Science of Silence: The Consequences of Leaving a Memory Unsaid.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7 (1): 39–53. doi:10.1177/1745691611427303. Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Translation in Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Violi, Patrizia. 1992. “Le molte enciclopedie.” In Semiotica: storia teoria interpretazione. Saggi intorno a Umberto Eco, edited by Patrizia Magli, Giovani Manetti, and Patrizia Violi (99–113). Milano: Bompiani. is Professor of Comparative Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. She teaches courses in autobiography; modern and contemporary fiction; literary and cultural theory; and translation studies. Her articles and essays on the critical intersections with and impact of translation on other fields and disciplines have appeared in a range of publications, most recently in the collection, Translating Women, edited by Luise von Flotow (2011). She is the coeditor of Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography (1989) and author of Can These Bones Live?: Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007). Her current project is coediting a special volume of Comparative Literature Studies entitled Trials of Trauma. is Associate Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna (Italy), where she teaches Semiotics of Media and Semiotics of Conflict. She has worked on gender and translation and, in the past ten years, on collective and cultural memories and their visual, trans-media, performative and artistic representations, focusing recently on traumatic memories of postdictatorship in Argentina and Chile, along the way they intersect with questions regarding biological identity and documentality. 

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Abstract: This paper proposes a theoretical and methodological strategy for reconceptualizing African literature in the twenty-first century. Twentieth-century African literature was characterized by colonial concepts through which literature in indigenous African languages was largely neglected while literature in colonial languages was promoted with problematic notions such as “Anglophone African literature,” “Francophone African literature,” and “Lusophone African literature.” African literature needs to be reconceptualized as Afriphone literature, where the notion of African literature must prototypically subsume literature in languages indigenous to Africa. African literature must be reconceptualized first and foremost as African language literature. Many scholars interested in the documentation and revitalization of African languages and cultures, which constitute attempts to preserve the collective memory of these African traditional knowledge systems, are largely in agreement with this, but how to go about doing Afriphone literature remains a research challenge. This paper proposes an approach to addressing the problem based on the theoretical and methodological notion of parallel text. 1. Introduction The Ivorian writer Ahmadou Kourouma, author of the novel Les Soleils des indépendances (1968), has invented the term “diplosie” (Kourouma 1991) to express what he considers to be the reality that the vast majority of African writers presumably think in one language and express themselves (speak, enchant, or write) in another. It is indeed true that many African writers of the twentieth century and earlier did speak their native African languages on the one hand and then wrote many of their works in the former colonial language of their countries, including English, French, or Portuguese, on the other hand. It is also true, however, that while this has continued into the twenty-first Century more and more writers, conscious of the need to document their traditional verbal art and other collective cultural memories of their societies, are beginning to “translate” their own work. This exercise is what I call parallel text practice or parallel-texting. More and more African writers have resolved that the only major way forward to produce literature in African languages and thus preserve these languages, big and small, is for Western-educated writers who still speak their African languages to write parallel texts—that is, produce the same texts that they wrote in English, French, or Portuguese in their African language following the theme, genre, and style of the original as much as possible but not necessarily a word for word translation. Of course, more importantly, they should write first in the African language and then translate into English or other languages, but irrespective of which language the original text is in it has the same effect of producing literature in African languages and making it available for a wider readership because the practice of parallel texts means that the two or more texts must be published concurrently and contiguously—that is, side by side. Parallel text practice as described here is part of a comprehensive agenda by myself (Bodomo 2013, 2014a, 2014b) and a group of academics dedicated to the promotion of African language literature, as part of the general program of documenting the languages and cultures of Africa to reconceptualize African literature and general humanities in the twenty-first century. One of the earliest African writers to set the agenda for producing literature in African languages is the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Ngugi started his writing career by writing in English but then later realized that the best, and indeed most natural, way to promote African literature is through writing in African languages, so he started writing in Kikuyu and Swahili and translating many of his works into English, especially with works such as Caitani Matharabaini (translated as Devil on the Cross). Indeed, Ngugi at some point did not recognize as African literature any literature that was not produced in indigenous African languages, preferring to call literature in European languages written by Africans Afro-European literature, and decried the constant “Europhonism” of African writers (Ngugi 1986, 2009). The following excerpt from his seminal work of literary criticism, Decolonizing the Mind (1986), captures this thinking: What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages? While we were haranguing enemies in European tongues, imperialists have continued to spout their lies in our native tongues (such as translating the Bible into all African languages...). So, we’re losing the battle because we haven’t been fighting. And the literature that’s been created should be called Afro-European, not African. (Ngugi 1986, 26) From this angle, then, it does not make sense to Ngugi and many African writers who push for an African language literature agenda to describe African literature in seemingly obsolete, contradictory terms such as “Anglophone African literature,” “Francophone African literature,” or “Lusophone African literature,” terms whose definitions we will have to reconsider in the “Discussion” section of this essay. Of course, other African writers had and still have a very different position from that of Ngugi and other campaigners for an African language literature agenda. They often give reasons for why we must not worry about writing in African languages and why we must continue to write in European languages. Some of these include the fact that not all African languages have a script, and that the market share for a writer of African literature in African languages would be insignificant. They also point to the fact that European languages continue to be official languages in African countries where they serve as a lingua franca to speakers who speak a diverse set of languages, so writing in English, French, or Portuguese would be a way of developing a certain kind of “national” literature. The late Chinua Achebe, one of Nigeria’s and Africa’s most renowned novelists, belongs to this group and, in a long polemical argumentation with Ngugi, expressed many of his counterpoints to Ngugi in his seminal “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature” (Achebe 1989). Defending why he writes in English in terms of its serving as a unifying “national” language, he states the following: I write in English. English is a world language. But I do not write in English because it is a world language. My romance with the world is subsidiary to my involvement with Nigeria and Africa. Nigeria is a reality which I could not ignore. (Achebe 1989, 100) Ngugi, however, points to the glaring “abnormality” of arguing for writing African literature in European languages in the following telling statement: The very fact that what common sense dictates in the literary practice of other cultures [to write in your own spoken language] is being questioned in an African writer is a measure of how far imperialism has distorted the view of African realities. It has turned reality upside down: the abnormal is viewed as normal and the normal is viewed as abnormal. Africa actually enriches Europe: but Africa is made to believe that it needs Europe to rescue it from poverty. Africa’s natural and human resources continue to develop Europe and America: but Africa is made to feel grateful for aid from the same quarters that still sit on the back of the continent. Africa even produces intellectuals who now rationalise this upside-down way of looking at Africa. (Ngugi 1986, 28) The foregoing shows that there is clearly a great debate going on within African literature about which language/s is/are best suited for African literature. It is of course not simply an “either–or” scenario, and it is indeed possible to write in both African languages and in European languages. In this essay, I propose how we can write in African languages and still not lose the visibility that is implicit in many of the arguments against the use of African languages. In section 2, I define and sketch the idea of parallel texts as a theoretical methodology for doing African language literature which involves actually having parallel texts in African languages and in European or other languages of wider communication. The theory subsumes the following definition of African literature: African literature is any form of artistic creation produced in the medium of African languages, first and foremost, or any other natural language (written, spoken, or enchanted) by an artist or group of artists with substantial enough experiences of the landscape of the continental landmass of Africa and its associated islands, along with diasporic exportations of the cultures of this continental landmass. (Bodomo 2013, 2014a, 2014b) This definition,1 as can be seen, emphasizes the import- ance of African languages without necessarily excluding a role played by other natural languages, and the literature can be written, spoken or even enchanted as done in libation pouring practices in West Africa. The authors do not have to be African, but must have enough substantial experiences of Africa to be able to express its cultures, both as seen on the continent itself and also in its diaspora communities. In section 3, I use two of my poems written in both Dagaare—my mother tongue, a language spoken by some two million people who live in northwestern Ghana and adjacent parts of Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast—and in English. The two are poems about important events in recent African history that might continue to be in the collective memory of many Africans for a long time: the death of Nelson Mandela in December 2013 and the kidnapping of about three hundred schoolgirls by Boko Haram militants in northeastern Nigeria in April 2014. Section 4 contains a brief discussion of the consequences of such an approach that involves the redefinition of a number of issues in African literature and the renaming of African language literature as Afriphone literature, along with a relation of this discussion to a society’s collective memory, while section 5 concludes the essay with a recap of the major points, and points to how we might sustain the agenda for Afriphone literature in the future. 1 Other ways of defining African literature include cataloguing the major themes and stylistic devices that recur in texts by African writers (magic, witchcraft, proverbs, etc). Ayuk (2014) is an example of such an approach. 1. Parallel texts: theory and methodology A parallel text, as used here, is a set of texts in which written (or even spoken and sung) literary expressions in two or more languages are mediated in the form of translation at various levels, including the graphemic, the morphological, the syntactic, the phonological, and certainly the semantic. In effect, the end result of the translation at one or more of these levels is a set of texts existing side by side for ease of cognitive processing by the recipient. A theory of parallel texts is postulated as follows: in a bilingual and biliterate (or multilingual and multiliterate) environment, for more effective and optimal knowledge and information dissemination, language users should produce contiguous texts in at least two of the languages within the bilingual and biliterate environment. The raison d’être for translation is in the fact that multilingualism within a speech community doesn’t necessarily guarantee that all individuals within a community will be polyglottic. There is often a rather intricate distinction between plurality of language at the community level and plurality of language at the individual level. An individual who has lived all her life in a rural area and speaks only one language fluently who now arrives to live in a city where many languages are spoken may be called a monoglot in a multilingual community; on the other hand a person born in a multilingual city and most likely speaking many languages who now gets posted as a civil servant to a rural area where only one language is spoken would be a polyglot functioning within a monolingual community. Theoretically then, since multilingualism is not synonymous with polyglottism, in a multilingual environment where one might have some monoglots, parallel texts as a form of translation are justified if we want to achieve optimal knowledge acquisition and information dissemination within the community. The concept of parallel texts is both a theory and a methodology in the sense that, theoretically, it mediates any dissonance that exists between the number of languages at the community level and the number of languages within individuals; parallel texts mediate and try to resolve the discords between multilingualism and polyglottism, between “lingualism” and “glottism.” Methodologically, it gives writers an opportunity to optimally express themselves by “placing” oral or written texts side by side within a given context, so simultaneous translation or interpretation is a parallel text, and poems written on the same theme and style and placed side by side constitute a parallel text, as I will illustrate in the next section. 2. An illustration with two poems Two important events that attracted much of Africa’s and the world’s attention and are now arguably part of our global collective memory occurred in December 2013 and April 2014— only about four months apart. The first involved the death of the legendary South African freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela, which occurred on December 5, 2013. The other event involved the capture of almost three hundred schoolgirls in the town of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria, where Islamic militants calling themselves Boko Haram are fighting for a separate polity. I captured each of these events in the form of a parallel text, first writing in my mother tongue, Dagaare, spoken in Ghana as mentioned above, and in English. So each of these two poems about important African events are parallel-texted in Dagaare and English—and here parallel-texting actually means producing them side by side. A piece of work written and published in a volume and later written and published in another volume is not a parallel text, it is simply a (delayed) translation. Pairs of text about the same topic and genre qualify as parallel texts only if they exist side by side, on the same page or on contiguous pages. With this background clarification, I now present the two parallel texts, beginning first with the “Mandela” poem to be followed by the “Chibok girls” poem: MANDɛLA GAA LA DAPARE N bakori mine woi Friends N mabiiri woi Children of one Mother Zenɛ Dizemba beraanuu Today December 5 bebiri News coming in bodes not Te yelpaala na ba taa nimiri well N gaa la BBC I flipped unto BBC Ka N noɔre maa fɛlɛlɛ And the news was tasteless A gaa CNN Clicked unto CNN Ka N polaa teɛ kpelele And my heart pumped A yuo CCTV ka a ne a zu CCTV was not any different A gaa GBC ka a le ang deɛ And GBC confirmed it all: la Grandfather, ancestor Ka te saakoma Mandɛla Mandela Deɛ ba la be a tengɛ nyɛ zu Is no longer with us on Earth Te GANDAA Mandɛla na It is our HERO Mandela! la! There he goes as always! O paa yaa deɛ wa yie la! Majestically, in his Dagakparoo, Gangalang! dagakparoo! Kurilane, Sangsalang! Gallantly, in his kurilane! A zɛle tammo ne logiri Bow, army of arrows in tow A te kulo o yiri He is on his way home A kyaare sapare Facing East A te gɛrɛ Dapare On the ultimate journey to Dapare CHIBOK MAMINE HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY WHISPERS FROM BOKO HARAM Yɛ Mamine Bebiri Yaane! A year ago Deyang: 300 sweet little voices said to you: A yɛ pɔgsarebilii kɔɔre ata Mom, mama, mma, Da wa age mare yɛ la Happy Mother's Day! A vare poɔre yɛ You saw them smile, cry A yeli ko yɛ: tears of love Plastering you with ever so Mma, ne fo Mamine Bebiri gentle hugs of gratitude Yaane! In Nico Mbargan language: N puori fo la yaga “Sweet Mother, I no go Ne fo nang wong tuo forget you, Kaa ma ka N baa I no go forget this suffer Kyɛ zenɛ wey you suffer for me” A yɛ pɔgsarebilii kɔɔre ata Today nyɛ 300 sweet little voices are quietened, you may think Yɛ deɛ ba la wong ba yɛlɛ But listen, listen carefully Togitogitogi To the gentle caressing A mang boɔle ka winds of Chibok Ligiligiligi To the chirping little birds over the hills of Maiduguri Yɛ na teɛre ka ba wa yele yeli zaa To the hissing sonics of the praying mantis up on the Kyɛ yɛ kyɛlle, a kyɛlle Jos plateau velaa Kyɛlle a Chibok saseɛ nang And you will hear 300 fuuro lɛ sweet little voices Kyɛlle a Maidugri nuuli From Boko Haram nang kono lɛ dungeons Kyɛlle a Jos tangazu salingsobo nang voorɔ lɛ Yɛ na wong la a yɛ Obstinately whispering to pɔgsarebilii kɔɔre ata kanga you: na zaa Mom, mama, Mma, Happy Mother’s Day! Boko Haram nang pɔge bare (Vienna, May 2014) Kyɛ ka ba nang sɔgle yele: Mma, Ne fo Mamine Bebiri Yaane! (Veɛna, Mee 2014) In the “Mandela” poem, after hearing breaking news on most of the news media of the world, we are imagining how Mandela, our newly minted ancestor, is preparing for the journey to Dapare—the mythical homeland of all departed spirits, of our ancestors—like all men, all warriors in our Dagaare culture, he would have had to wear the smock, our war uniform, arm himself with bows and arrows, face East, and walk away majestically. . . The smock is not only the traditional dress of the Dagaaba, the people who speak Dagaare, it is also a warrior dress etymologically, and is thus appropriate for a man like Mandela who has been a warrior all his life. Indeed, when Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana, was declaring the independence of Ghana on March 6, 1957, after a long struggle, he and his lieutenants wore the smock as a dress for the victorious warriors they were. The bow and arrow are further symbols for a great warrior but also meant to help him protect himself as he goes home, and even to hunt for some game if he so desires. As for the symbolism of facing East in Dagaare culture, it expresses the idea that a good man, a good farmer must always rise early in the morning, and make sure he goes before sunrise to the farm. Women in the culture are metaphorically facing West since they stay at home and must particularly check that by sunset they prepare food for the man who comes back home from the farm, from the hunting grounds, or from the war front after a hard day’s job in the wilderness.  The “Chibok girls” poem is imagining how the mothers of these girls would have enjoyed their company on Mothers’ Day and other days when they stayed close together and enjoyed each other’s company. It then imagines how it would be without them when the next Mothers’ Day comes around and they would be without these children. The poem, which may be termed a “telepathic poem,” then evokes instances in which the girls may be communicating with their mothers through the medium of the birds, the winds, and the singing insects in the vicinity of the Jos plateau, the most important landmark in that region of Nigeria. 3. Discussion What are some of the consequences for an agenda of parallel texts for the promotion of African literature, and how might we relate the need to produce literary works in African languages to the issue of a society’s collective memory? Reconceptualizations. First, a number of recon- ceptualizations have to take place to put things in perspective as a consequence of this agenda. We agree with Ngugi that the “normal” for African literature should be African language literature. We reconceptualize that here as Afriphone literature, and claim in this paper and in previous work (Bodomo 2013, 2014a, 2014b) that the most prototypical form of African literature is Afriphone literature. This does not in any way exclude the use of European languages in African literature, but those cannot be the norm. Indeed, terms like Anglophone African literature, Francophone African literature, and Lusophone African literature are obsolete, twentieth-century colonial notions about African literature. Rather, we reconceptualize that Anglophone African literature as used in the twentieth century is literature that was written about Africa in English. It is essentially English literature about Africa. The new conceptualization of Anglophone African literature is one of translated literature. A piece of work is, first and foremost, considered Anglophone African literature if it was first written in an African language and then translated into English. Any piece of work that was first written in English about Africa (whether or not by an African) is English literature about Africa. However, if a piece of work is written in English and translated into an African language, that translated version is African literature. In the same vein, Francophone African literature as used in the twentieth century meant literature that was written in French about Africa. But we shall not refer to it like that now— we shall refer to it as French literature about Africa (whether or not written by an African). In the twenty-first century, the reconceptualization of Francophone African literature is literature that was first written in an African language and then translated into French. If a piece of work is written in French about Africa and translated into an African language, that piece of work qualifies as African literature. Finally, Lusophone African literature in the twentieth century meant literature written in Portuguese about Africa. However, in the twenty-first century, where there is a robust agenda for the promotion of Afriphone literature, Lusophone African literature qualifies as such if the original text was written in an African language. Lusophone African literature is not literature first written in Portuguese but that which was translated into Portuguese from an African language. If however a piece of work originally written in Portuguese now gets translated into an African language, the translated text is African literature. As can be seen from this reconceptualization of Anglophone African literature, Francophone African literature, and Lusophone African literature, the parallel text pair is a pair comprising Afriphone literature and Europhone African literature; in the case of the “Mandela” and “Chibok girls” poems, a Dagaare-phone African literature and an Anglophone African literature. Afriphone, then, in itself is a cover term for the many African language literatures that are expected to blossom from the Afriphone literary agenda in the twenty-first century. Parallel texts and collective memory. The practice of parallel texts as outlined in this paper is clearly a specialized form of translation. This specialized form of literary translation connects to an important discussion on the relationship between literary translation and cultural memory (what I call collective memory here), as espoused in works like Long’s (2008). In Long’s paper, she investigates “the relationship between literary translation and cultural memory, using a twentieth century film version of one of Shakespeare’s plays as a case study in inter-semiotic translation” (1). The work goes on to clarify that the common perception of translation is often confined to its use as a language learning tool or as a means of information transfer between languages. The wider academic concept embraces not only inter-lingual translation, but both intra-lingual activity or rewording in the same language and inter-semiotic translation defined by Roman Jacobson as “the interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (Jakobson 1959, 114). (Long 2008, 1) If more and more African writers do parallel-texting, as proposed here, the end result of this literary practice would be the documentation of the verbal art and other traditional linguistic knowledge systems, including ideophones, proverbs, and other kinds of verbal indirection towards preserving and enriching the collective memory of contemporary African societies. The term “collective memory” as I use it here could form the basis of what one may term “African memory” 1 in the sense that it evokes some typically traditional African ways of remembering the past—including not just the oral transmission modes involved but also of recognizing some older individuals with experiences of the society’s past as repositories of the history and culture of their society. In short, knowledgeable elders are considered as authoritative custodians of each rural African society’s past. This fact is encoded by an African saying that whenever an old man dies it is like a library that burns down! These traditional collective memory practices have formed the basis of memory documentation in contemporary African polities, with two of the most prominent ones being attempts to document the painful apartheid past in South Africa through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) sittings (Gade 2013), and the attempt to document the collective 1 I would like to thank Critina Demaria, one of the editors of the present journal, for suggesting that I connect my idea of parallel text as a translation/writing process to the idea of memory documentation, and for questioning whether one can indeed talk of an “African memory.” memory of the 1994 Rwandan genocide (Rettig 2008) in which more than half a million people lost their lives. Parallel texts in the Curriculum. To summa- rize this discussion section, further consequences for the practice of African literature in school and university curricula are that African literature programs ought to focus on African language literatures and not literature in European languages about Africa. They may, obviously, do courses on Anglophone African literature, Francophone African literature, and Lusophone African literature but, in line with the twenty-first- century definition of these literatures, these must be translations into English, French, and Portuguese respectively from African language literature. In sum then, African literature in the twenty-first century is literature that is written originally in an indigenous African language or that has been translated from an African language into other languages. It is Afriphone literature if it stays in the original African language, Anglophone African literature if it is translated from an African language into English, Francophone African literature if it is translated from an African language into French, and Lusophone African literature if it is translated from an African language into Portuguese. 5. Conclusion In this paper, we have proposed the concept of parallel texts as a theoretical and methodological strategy for reconceptualizing African literature in the twenty-first century. As described in the paper, a theory of parallel texts stipulates that in a multilingual and multiliterate environment, for more effective and optimal knowledge and information dissemination, users of language should produce contiguous texts in at least two of the languages within the said environ- ment. Drawing from this, a parallel text would then be a set of texts in which written literary expressions in two or more languages are mediated in the form of translation at various levels, including the graphemic, the morphological, the syntactic, the phonological, and certainly the semantic. Conclusively, the end result of the translation at one or more of these levels is a set of texts existing side by side for ease of cognitive processing by the recipient, and may serve to document the collective memories of African traditional societies in the form of preserving various kinds of indigenous verbal art. Two poems by the author have been used as illustrations of these concepts and it is expected that more writers would set about practicing parallel-texting, and indeed that publishers will from now onwards encourage the publication of parallel-texted volumes. Many scholars of African languages, linguistics, and literatures are interested in the documentation and revitalization of African languages and their associated cultures. They are largely in agreement that this is an urgent task, but how to go about doing this remains a research challenge. This paper has proposed an approach to addressing the problem with the theoretical and methodological notion of parallel texts. It is hoped that more parallel-texted volumes will be published within the next ten years for the promotion of Afriphone literatures. This parallel-text approach as a special kind of writing and translation process could indeed be contributing to the construction of a new and richer collective memory which is an instance of the idea of African memory, as discussed above. References Achebe, Chinua. 1989. “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature.” In Historical and Cultural Contexts of Linguistic and Literary Phenomena/Contextes historiques et culturels des phénomènes linguistiques et littéraires (Proceedings of the Seventeenth Triennial Congress of the Fédération Internationale del Langues et Littératures Modernes held at the University of Guelph, August 18–25), edited by G. D. Killam, 3–8. Guelph, Ontario: University of Guelph. Ayuk, Hamilton. 2014. What is African literature? Accessed June 6, 2014. http://princehamilton.blogspot.co.at/2009/06/what-is-african- literature.html. Bodomo, Adams. 2013. Lecture notes for “Language, Literacy, and Literature: The Language Question in African Literary Expression” (Course no. 140251), Department of African Studies, University of Vienna. ———. 2014a. “Survey Report on African Languages and Literatures.” Unpublished manuscript, University of Vienna, Austria. ———. 2014b. “The Language Question in Defining African literature: Contributions from Linguistics and Cognitive Science.” Paper presented at the Vereinigung für Afrikawissenschaften in Deutschland (VAD), Bayreuth University, June 11–14, 2014. Gade, Christian B. N. 2013. “Restorative Justice and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Process.” South African Journal of Philosophy 32(1): 10–35. doi:10.1080/02580136.2013.810412. Jakobson, Roman. 1959. On Linguistics aspects of Translation. Accessed November 12, 2014. http://complit.utoronto.ca/wp- content/uploads/COL1000H_Roman_Jakobson_LinguisticAspects.pdf Kourouma, Ahmadou. 1968. Les Soleils des indépendances. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Repr. Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1970. ———. 1991. Comments. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on African Literatures. Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization, Lagos, Nigeria. Long, Lynne. 2008. “Literary translation and cultural memory.” Unpublished article, draft version, University of Warwick, UK. Last accessed November 12, 2014. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/202/. Ngugi, wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers Ltd. ———. 2009. Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance. New York: BasicCivitas Books. Rettig, Max. 2008. “Gacaca: Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation in Postconflict in Rwanda?” African Studies Review 51 (3):25–50. doi: 10.1353/arw.0.0091. is Professor of African Studies and holds the chair of African Languages and Literatures at the University of Vienna. He specializes in African linguistics, African language literatures, global African diaspora studies, and digital humanities with particular reference to the digitization of African languages and their oral cultures. As Director of the Global African Diaspora Studies (GADS) research platform at the University of Vienna, he has expertise and broad interests in the study of the sociocultural and sociopolitical aspects of Africa and its global relations. 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15530

Abstract: “Get thee behind me Satan, I want to resist”. . . To translate memory across cultures and disciplines is an act of defiance, a proud sign of disobedience, tacitly performed by one of the most celebrated and internationally renowned practitioners and seminal theoreticians of the tasks facing the translator, the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos. In “On Mephistofaustic Transluciferation,” he writes: “If it has no Muse, it could be said to have an Angel; translation has an angelical function, that of bearer, of messenger. It is a messianic point or a semiotic place of convergence of intentionality.” Addressed here are the challenges posed in translating memory, memories, as the retrieval, reconstruction, inscription, and leaving of the traces and effects of a markedly memorializing act. The task of the trans(at)l(antic)ator involves not abandoning but suspending certain spontaneous choices of literal translation in favor of inter- and trans-action. The responses are: differ, defer, never with indifference, always without deference; address not only urgently political issues of The Movimento dos Sem Terra, primordial in Brazil, but also the transactions, with and in the Movement, of so many poets and songwriters and now, perhaps even more defiantly, with a Brazilian-inflected countertheory to the rescue. Remembering (belated) versions The invitation to “establish a dialogue with and among scholars working on the intersections between translation studies and memory studies as they are presently configured and might be envisioned in the future,” keynote of this special issue on translating memory across cultures and disciplines, proleptically, had been tacitly accepted avant la lettre and throughout his career by one of the most celebrated and internationally renowned practitioners and seminal theoreticians of the tasks and challenges facing the translator, the Brazilian poet and transcreator, Haroldo de Campos. In “Committing Translation or the Task of the Trans(at)l(antic)ator,” the introductory essay to my translations of the ineradicably political memories and cultural expressions of ideological indignation of the MST (Movement of the Landless Rural Workers in Brazil) in Landless Voices in Song and Poetry. The Movimento dos Sem Terra of Brazil (Vieira and McGuirck 2007, XXI–XXIV), I addressed and now return to the challenges posed in translating memory, memories, as the retrieval, reconstruction, inscription, and leaving of traces and their effects of a markedly “memorializing act” (Vieria and McGuirck 2007); in and for a Brazil confronting its own secular inequalities and injustices, alerted to that sovereign state’s and that nation’s continuing struggle to emerge from the cliché-ridden inscription on its national flag, the ever-ironic “Ordem e Progresso.” Under whose orders and for the progress of whom was national memory to be reinscribed, translated, indeed transferred from the hegemonies of a very recent twenty-year military regime and its transitional legacies in the period of rebuilding a democracy from 1984? Further, on undertaking this commission, I recalled the advice of Umberto Eco as I reflected on the experience of having worked, together with the Brazilian critic and translation theorist, Else Vieira, in preparation of Haroldo de Campos in Conversation (McGuirck and Vieira 2009), the volume that arose, in memoriam, not least from the numerous meetings that, as editors, we held between 1999 and 2002 with Haroldo and his wife Carmen Arruda Campos in the hospitality of their Library of Babel home:1 I frequently feel irritated when I read essays on the theory of translation that, even though brilliant and perceptive, do not provide enough examples. I think translation scholars should have had at least one of the following experiences 1 This volume contains renderings in English of the following Haroldo de Campos essays touching variously on his theories of translation: ”On Translation as Creation and Criticism,” ”Constructivism in Brazil: Concretism and Neo-Concretism. A Personal Post Scriptum,” “On Mephistofaustic Transluciferation,” “On Homerotherapy: Translating The Iliad,” and “The Ex- centric Viewpoint: Tradition, Transcreation, Transculturation.”  during their life: translating, checking and editing translations, or being translated and working in close co-operation with their translators [. . .] Between the purely theoretical argument that, since languages are differently structured, translation is impossible, and the commonsensical acknowledgement that people, after all, do translate and understand each other, it seems to me that the idea of translation as a process of negotiation (between author and text, between author and readers, as well as between the structure of two languages and the encyclopaedias of two cultures) is the only one that matches experience. (Eco 2003, 36) In such “a process of negotiation,” in that multiple “in- betweenness,” here evoked by Eco but previously the subject of an indispensable meditation on a specifically Latin American project, the “entre-lugar” of Silviano Santiago, “between sacrifice and play, between prison and transgression, between submission to the code and aggression, between obedience and rebellion” (Santiago 1978, 11), and as translator of the poems and songs of the Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST, or Movement of the landless rural workers), I soon confronted commitment, in various of its encyclopaedic forms. What had they done to my song? The preceding decades had witnessed the revitalizing of popular music as a vehicle for political activisms in Brazil. One obvious source had been the música sertaneja of land-deprived migrant workers, driven to the cities and taking with them their country music, be it traditional or, more recently, influenced by the commercial brands of the southern cultures of the United States. No less influential had been the pagode movement’s samba- esque registering of the violent tensions of poverty in hardly couched critiques of repressive regimes, military or otherwise. The performances echoed, consciously or subliminally, the prosodies—high and low—of Brazilian Portuguese and the broadsheet and cordel strains of popular imaginaries from across and beyond the nation. For Brazil has never ceased to explore and express its sensitivity to the ideological power of the protest song; not least, and latterly, against the imagined and projected versions of what is to come peddled, for many of its displaced, unrepresented and unlikely-to-be-remembered vic- tims, by the invasive myth-makers of a nation awarded the Trojan horses of a World Cup and an Olympic Games.  At the time of committing myself to undertake the translations of unabashedly radical texts, it was the centenary of the birth of the celebrated Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Inspiration of politically committed poetry and song for not a continent but a world, he had long ago been described by Federico García Lorca as being closer to blood than to ink. It was on such a note—often indissociable from tears or from wine—that the anguish and euphoria, the despair and hope that suffuse the texts I translated were approached and embraced. My locus of transcreation was, and is, unavoidably and unapologetically, Anglophone; it is also, though tempered, European. As a critic and translator of, primarily, literatures in Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian, I exploited the availability of translation alternatives from those traditions as well as from any Brazil-specific contexts that informed the choices made. Pace Umberto Eco, I often wrote as both Mouse and Rat, chewing or munching in a further in- betweenness or the negotiated hybridity that I had experienced in tussling with Haroldo de Campos himself.2 For part of our “translating, checking and editing translations, or being translated and working in close co-operation” had been the daunting enterprise of revisiting “o anjo esquerdo da história”; beginning with the resonantly intertextual reference to Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history. His face [. . .] turned towards the past” (Benjamin 1999, 249), broached at once in the title of this long de Campos poem. Written to commemorate the victims of the notorious massacre in 1996 of nineteen protesting members of the MST at El Dorado dos Carajás in the State of Pará, and originally rendered into English by Haroldo as “the left-winged angel of history.” Engagement with the calculatedly syntagmatic disconti- nuity and attendant staccato rhythms of the Brazilian Portuguese text also had to take into account a context of commitment and contributions, to and in the Movement, of such distinguished Brazilian artists as Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento, Frei Betto, and many others, including Haroldo de Campos himself, and thus readdress previous tasks of the other—cultural inseparably from linguistic—translator(s). 2See the facsimile of Haroldo de Campos’s scribbled distinction between chewing and munching with reference to my translation of “quoheletic poem 2: in praise of the termite,” in McGuirck and Vieira 2009, 339.  The Latin American protest song explosions of the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, of which Robert Pring-Mill reminded us in “Gracias a la vida” The Power and Poetry of Song (1990), had hardly left Brazil unaffected by the echoes, influences, hybridities, and intertexts of contemporary transculturations. He listed civil rights, the peace movement, and the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in the US; Italian CantAcronache; the Greece of Theodorakis; the Catalan Nova Cançó; the Portuguese Nova Canção; Irish songs of “the troubles”; and Asian and African instances from the Philipines, East Timor, and Mongolia, to Mozambique and Angola. Not least of the intertexts of Brazilian protest song and poetry were the Cuban, Argentine, and Chilean expressions that sprinkled the MST artists with inspirations taken from the archives of the Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and nueva canción traditions. If any one element of Pring-Mill’s seminal analysis can be said to have informed the texts of the MST, it is this evocation: “Asked about his own songs (in 1973), the Uruguayan Daniel Vigliette said firmly that they were as much de propuesta as de protesta: designed not merely to protest but to propose—in other words not merely to ‘tear down fences’ (quite literally so in Viglietti’s own anti-latifundista ‘A desalambrar!’) but also ‘to build bridges’ and to be constructive” (Pring-Mill 1990, 10). Pring-Mill identified three functions of such texts: “response to an immediate environment”; “instrument of political and social change”; communicating a “horizon of expectations” and “presuppositions.” Yet he was quick to add a vital rider on cultural difference: “the whole rhetoric of such poems and songs is very different from ours, partly because Spanish [and here read Portuguese] handles issues more violently—more dramatically and emotionally—than English (sometimes in ways which we may find indecorous)” (Pring-Mill 1990, 10–14). He continued: The messages of individual Latin American songs function within the framework of belief they foster and reinforce, in that extremely different social context. In countries where illiteracy is as high as it is in most of Latin America, where censorship and repression are so often at work, and where the official media are so rarely to be trusted, the message-bearing function of poesía de compromiso—sung or unsung—has an importance which it is not easy for a more literate academic audience to appreciate. Its messages perform a varied series of useful social functions [. . .] all of which are doubly  important in the context of predominantly oral cultures. Thus they serve both to report and to record events (interpreting them, naturally enough, from specific points of view, which will strike all those who disagree with them as prejudiced); they praise, or lament, heroes and denounce tyrants; they protest against abuses and propound solutions (whether these are viable or not); and they teach many kinds of practical lessons, which their listeners are encouraged to put into practice. (Pring-Mill 1990, 77) Pring-Mill, a decade or so on, would hardly have been surprised not to have the last word. He might also have smiled at the risky certainty, in respect not only of rhetoric but also of politics, of Perry Anderson, as a heady mixture of denunciation and the recuperation of misappropriated national memories promised to turn to propounded solution in the form of a first left- wing figure, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, democratically elected in 2002, on the crest of the MST wave of popular protest: “the symbolism of a former shoe-shine boy and street vendor achieving supreme power in the most unequal major society on earth speaks for itself [. . .] A climate of popular expectation surrounds Lula that no President of the New Republic has ever enjoyed at the outset of his mandate. Hope of relief from the misery of the last years will not vanish overnight” (Anderson 2002, 21). Get thee behind me Satan, I want to resist. . . The risk of failing to render the textual wrath of a poem written in the indignation of 1996 protest amidst the 2002 days of heady triumphalist expectation—with popular memory of tyranny and criminality and a consciousness of the threat of impunity all too readily fading—seemed but one looming contention. The task of the trans(at)l(antic)ator therefore involved not abandoning but suspending certain spontaneous choices of literal translation in favor of inter- and trans-action. The challenges were: differ, defer, never with indifference, always without deference; address not only issues dear to the MST, primordial in Brazil, but also the transactions, with and in the Movement, of so many poets and songwriters and now, perhaps even more challengingly, but with a Brazilian inflected countertheory to the rescue, of Haroldo de Campos himself, from his essay on “On Mephistofaustic Transluciferation”:  Translation, like philosophy, has no Muse [. . .] says Walter Benjamin (“Die Aufgabe des Uebersetzers”). And yet, if it has no Muse, it could be said to have an Angel [. . .] translation has an angelical function, that of bearer, messenger [. . .] it is even, for the original [. . .] a messianic point or, in lay terms of modern theory of signs, a semiotic place of convergence of intentionality [. . .] Benjamin inverts the relation of servitude which, as a rule, affects ingenuous conceptions of translation as a tribute to fidelity. Fidelity (so-called translation literal to meaning, or, simply, inverted, servile, translation) [. . .] Therefore, in the Benjaminian perspective [. . .] the original is what in a certain way serves the translation, at the moment when it unburdens it from the task of transporting the unessential content of the message [. . .] and permits it to dedicate itself to an other enterprise of fidelity [. . .] the “fidelity to reproduction of form” [. . .] It is oriented by the rebellious slogan of non serviam, of non-submission to a presence which is exterior to it, to a content which remains intrinsically unessential to it [. . .] a satanic enterprise. The “cursed” counterpart of the angelical nature of translation is Hubris, the semiological sin of Satan, il trapassar del segno (Paradiso XXXVI, 117), the transgression of sign limits [. . .] A translator of poetry is a choreographer of the inner dance of languages [. . .]. (Haroldo de Campos 2009, 233–236) How many angels? On the head of opin. . . ionated Manicheans be it, however, whether scholastic or materialist, to limit the inspirers of Brazilian or any other translators to but two angels: the good, the bad. And the ugly configuration of Haroldo’s predecessor poet Drummond de Andrade’s anjo torto (“crooked angel”), in “Poema de sete faces” (Poem of seven faces), as long ago as 1930, should have alerted subsequent and would-be theorists to both the revelations and the dangers of going transcendental in “the retrieval, reconstruction, and inscription” of remembering, as surely as the Shakespearean “seven” it echoes had led to “mere oblivion/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”3 The figure of the postmodern angel, always and already fallen, was also one too easily overlooked, left behind (Drummond’s “gauche na vida”/ “gauche in life”?), in the long march of historical materialism. . . 3 The caution of such philosophers as Richard Rorty in respect of the temptation to go transcendental in the memorializing of historical events had long ago been poeticized by Drummond de Andrade and, inherited, by Haroldo de Campos, not least in echo of William Shakespeare’s Jaques in As You Like It, Act II scene VII: “Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history.” often the most dogmatic of “the imagined and projected versions of what is to come” on the part of de Campos’s Marxisant Brazilian detractors, as will be revealed in and after a reading of the poem; and of its guest.4 For into the space of neglect—of suppressed memory—Haroldo de Campos had injected “o anjo esquerdo da história,” for him “the left-winged angel of history”; “the angel on the left of history” in my transjection, my inherently “transformative” but necessarily subsequent swerve, my own anxious clinamen). o anjo esquerdo da história the angel on the left of history os sem-terra afinal the landless at last estão assentados na are settled in pleniposse da terra: full possession of the land: de sem-terra passaram a from landless to com-terra: ei-los landed: here they’re enterrados interred desterrados de seu sopro their life’s breath de vida unearthly aterrados earthed terrorizados terrified terra que à terra earth which onto earth torna returns pleniposseiros terra- land-holders pleni- tenentes de uma potentiary of a (single vala (bala) comum: bullet) common grave: pelo avesso afinal outside in at last entranhados no holed deep into lato ventre do the broad-bellied latifúndio acres of the latifundio- que de im- land once barren produtivo re- so sudden- velou-se assim u- ly shown to be most f- bérrimo: gerando pingue ecund: udder-spawning profit messe de crop of sangue vermelhoso reddening blood 4 In ”Constructivism in Brazil: Concretism and Neo-Concretism. A Personal Post Scriptum,” Haroldo de Campos offers his riposte to Roberto Schwarz, as emblematic propagator of the attacks levied against the concretists and de Campos’s notion of a postutopical poetry. My “Laughin’ again he’s awake: de Campos a l’oreille de l’autre celte” addresses the polemic extensively in McGuirck and Vieira 2009, 126–152. lavradores sem un-labored lavra ei- labor: here they’re los: afinal con- larvaed at vertidos em larvas last em mortuá- on mortal rios despojos: remains ataúdes lavrados coffins labored na escassa madeira from the scanty timber (matéria) (timbre) de si mesmos: a bala assassina of themselves: the assassin bullet atocaiou-os stalks them mortiassentados thirst-squatting sitibundos death-settlers decúbito-abatidos pre- decumbents cut down pre- destinatários de uma destined for a agra (magra) meagre (earth) acre a- re(dis)(forme) forma grarian —fome—a- —famine— grária: ei- re (de)(formed) form los gregária here they are: gregarious comunidade de meeiros commune share-cropping do nada: nothingness: enver- shame- gonhada a- faced in goniada agony avexada vexed —envergoncorroída de —shamecorroded by imo-abrasivo re- inmost abrasive re- morso - morse- a pátria landless (como ufanar-se da?) (‘how shall we extol thee?’) apátrida homeland pranteia os seus des- laments its dis- possuídos párias – possessed pariahs – pátria parricida: parricide patria que talvez só afinal a for maybe only at last the espada flamejante fiery sword do anjo torto da his- of the crooked angel of his- tória cha- tory flam- mejando a contravento e ing against the wind and afogueando os burning the agrossicários sócios desse agrokilltural cronies of that fúnebre sodalício onde a somber sodality where morte-marechala comanda uma field-marshal death commands a torva milícia de janízaros-ja- grim militia of janissary-gun- gunços: men: somente o anjo esquerdo only the angel on the left da história escovada a of a history groomed against contrapelo com sua the grain shall manage with its multigirante espada po- multiswirling sword derá (quem dera! ) um dia (if only!) one day to convocar do ror convoke from the nebulous nebuloso dos dias vin- mass of days to douros o dia come the at last afinal sobreveniente do overriding day of the justo just ajuste de adjustment of contas accounts (Haroldo de Campos, 1996 © Translation Bernard McGuirk 2002) The task of transacting—trans/dancing—with Haroldo de Campos’s poetry was made the more challenging by his Mephistofaustic promptings. In the essay, he had willingly reen- gaged with both Marx and Nietzsche in a reminder that translation in particular and writing in general always perform the act of transcreation, a refutation of original (etiology) and target (teleology), not only linguistically but also culturally and, let it be stressed, ideologically. Self-consciously, he had echoed Marx’s precursor complaint against the censuring of his style. Self- mockingly, he had appropriated Nietzsche’s plea for the neces- sarily sublime “maldade”—the “evil”—of mischievous content and form. Radical content radical form radical translation Countless Brazilian artists had reacted, in creative political interventions, to the obscenity of the murderous repressions perpetrated against the MST—as did de Campos, here, to the massacre of Eldorado dos Carajás. Cyclical repetitions of organized violence, the option against the poor—in cynical inversion of the “for the poor” slogan of Liberation Theology— had triggered the indignation and the artistry of such as Frei Betto’s “Receita para matar um sem-terra”/“Recipe for Killing the Landless”, Sebastião Salgado’s (1997) photography, in Terra, and Chico Buarque’s “Levantados do chão” (Raised from the ground). These contemporary artists, however, no less than their predecessors Graciliano Ramos, João Cabral de Melo Neto, or Glauber Rocha, will not be remembered for their indignation alone. Each—and differently—had had to make another option, broadly definable as the style of mischief-making that is the prerogative of any radical art. Style also functions as a sharecropping, a participating in the intertextuality available to the individual artist; or, in de Campos’s formulation, Karl Marx’s “property of form,” inseparable from his “individual spirituality.” Such an option, being for the poor, should never be poor. Even to think as much would be either to neglect the need for creativity or to misread it. To confuse, say, Graciliano Ramos’s calculatedly daring minimalism, in Vidas secas (Barren lives) of 1938, with some unmediated response to the prescriptive exclusions of the Soviet Writers’ Congress of 1934. To ignore João Cabral de Melo Neto’s career-long engagement with the materiality of words or with what Francis Ponge called Le parti pris des choses. To undersell, perversely, the difficulty of his own challenge: “É difícil defender/só com palavras a vida” (It’s hard to defend/only with words life) (Morte e vida severina [Death and Life of Severino]), of 1956. To imagine a tabula rasa (inter-cine-text- less) Glauber Rocha, deprived, in the 1960s, of a dialogical relationship with Italian neorealism. To conceive that, in postmodernity, the compassions of Sebastião Salgado did not reflect, and reflect on, Don Macullin’s 1970s photography of the oppressed. To fail to hear in Chico Buarque’s song the 1990s echo of José Saramago’s “Do chão pode levantar-se um livro, como uma espiga de trigo ou uma flor brava. Ou uma ave. Ou uma bandeira” (From the ground a book can rise, like an ear of wheat or a wild flower. Or a bird. Or a banner). But there is neither need nor time for doubt. The urgent indivisibility of radical content from radical form is better demonstrated by critical artistry than by artless criticism. An unapologetic option for the inseparably transcendental and material underpins the very title of “o anjo esquerdo da história.” Whether God is dead or not (and whether such a dominant metaphysics of absence might be Marxian or Nietzschean in inspiration), the conspiracies of history are still played out amidst the configurations of narrative. Which is not to see history as narrative (that is, only as troped)—for that would be to deradicalize both history’s powers and any reading of it. In Le monolinguisme de l’autre (1996), Derrida elaborated on the “call for an outside.” In “o anjo. . . ,” de Campos called upon a figure, that of the avenging angel, which inhabits, simultaneously, both the inside and the outside of “a história.” He even staked out for it a particular location, the place of enunciation for a nuncio to a nation, for a committed messenger. Yet the call is not voiced until after that necessary delay that enables the poem to revisit, to reinhabit, to relive the arduous struggle for a hearing, paradoxically, on behalf of a voice—that of poetry—no less excluded, traditionally, than the referents of its echoing anger. Thus, by way of (not) analyzing the poem, I prefer to comment on aspects of my own transjection of it. Cheek to cheek. . . and the ear of the other Cast at me as a throw of the dice, the poem impelled me to reject paraphrase. Haphazardly, I projected it, rather, only as recastable. For the game was too serious to stop at a single appropriation. The ear of this other, too, had its particularity, its “properties of form,” its “individual spirituality.” An Irish specific of a past inherited, part-interred (ex-patria), in an England pre- , pro- , and post-Thatcher, suffused and infused my option for an irony that filtered distorted echoes of another, unofficial, “national” anthem: “Land of Hope and Glory.” “How shall we extol Thee?” who were born not of, but only on, Thee. Here I played with another geopolitics, one of parallel clichés, terra firma, “broad acres,” “field-marshals” of a homeland unheimlich and—sublime “maldade”—of the Mal-vinas, with their no less somber soldiery.5 That the translation must speak for, and of, itself is but part of the point. In language, for Bakhtin, the word was always half someone else’s. . . whether spoken or written. Had de Campos not taken but half of Mallarmé’s angelism, appropriating 5“Land of Hope and Glory” operates as a much appropriated English national hymn. It has been adopted as the official anthem and is sung at the annual conferences of the Conservative Party. poetry’s power of memory but adding to it a specifically Brazilian infernal vision (“quem dera!”), that of Canudos, and of Antônio Conselheiro? A post-Blake m(isc)arriage wherein the legacy of revolutionary mysticism assailed, as forcefully as does dialectical materialism, the hell-on-earth of landless utopians yet to glimpse a Brazilian heaven of agrarian reform? Such a politico-poetics could not presume to deprive those sem terra of the configurations, including the martyrs, saints, and avenging angels, of their local narratives, small or grand. . . sem céu? Heaven-less? Who knows? Who would impose? If their collective history had certainly been groomed against the grain (where every day was—is?—a last day), at least the poem leaves its protagonists “lying still” with their theology and with its (dis-) placements.6 Haroldo de Campos was no angel, least of all in his own poetic practice. He was unstintingly confident, certainly enough to lampoon critical and ideological rigidities and excesses. Acutely alert to the fact that Brazilian neo-Hegelians, no less than their counterparts elsewhere, in their determination to confront the brutality of much of Latin American society, have fallen precisely into the lure of a discourse too mimetic of brute reality, too mirroring ever to achieve a cutting edge, Haroldo de Campos convoked the figure of poetry itself. He knew that poetry is a master teaser, a baiter of stiff contemporary realists or the limp lamp bearers of reflection theories past and present. The inter- and intracultural transluciferations of his textual performances had allowed for the inter-action of Brazilians speaking and listening to Brazilians being listened and spoken to; in turn, they inspired that other, the present trans(at)l(antic)ator whose sign/ature shuttles to and fro, ever seeking to perform intra-, but never faithful, ever faith-less, illusorily face-less, scorn-fully masking source, mourn-fully eschewing target, settling (lawlessly), for an ever extra-trans-mission of occupations, pre- occupations, needs, urgencies. 6 The reference is to the 1902 foundational memorializing of the Canudos war of 1896–1897 in the seminal text of Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões, in which the rebellion and massacre of the sertanejo inhabitants of the Brazilian interior, in the State of Bahia, prefigure the plight, a century on, of the sem terra of El Dorado dos Carajás. Stormy (whether you like it or not. . . ) Whence, for Haroldo de Campos, the “anjo esquerdo da história”? In his unapologetic rejection of “unacceptable cognitive models,” the challenge of de Campos is consistent, not least when addressing the angel as an appropriated icon of the left, inherited from Walter Benjamin’s seminal formulation: This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 1999, 249) His reconfiguration, in poetry, of the readily packaged but not so smoothly imported “anjo,” regarded by Else Vieira as a de Campos “mutation” in the poet’s resistance to allowing Benjamin’s “Angelus Novus” cum “angel of history” to be unproblematically appropriated as emblematic of a Brazilian historical materialism, must also be seen as an instrument of Haroldo’s staunch debunking of those theorists who would unquestioningly identify their ideological stance with “the storm of progress.”7 Most notoriously, Roberto Schwarz, “sociologizing critic, of vocational incompatibility with the new in poetry” (de Campos, in McGuirk and Vieira 2009,197): The basic scheme is as follows: a tiny élite devotes itself to copying Old World culture [. . .] As a result, literature and politics occupy an exotic position, and we become incapable of creating things of our own that spring from the depths of our life and history [....] But why not reverse the argument? Why should the imitative character of our life not stem from forms of inequality so brutal that they lack the minimal reciprocity [. . .] without which modern society can only appear artificial and “imported”? (Schwarz 1992, 85– 89). 7 See the sections “Protean Angels: Shifting Spectres of Walter Benjamin” and “Crooked Angels, Satanic Angels: From Determinism to the Recovery of Revolutionary Possibility” in “Weaving Histories and Cultural Memories. The (Inter)National Materialisms of o anjo esquerdo da história,“ in McGuirck and Vieira 2009, 170–175.  Far from resembling “devoted copying,” such Haroldo de Campos performances as I have dealt with here, whether in his criticism or in his poetry, are, to use his own formulation, “textos de ruptura”(rupture texts). In Panorama do Finnegans Wake (1962), the de Campos brothers, Augusto and Haroldo, had already embarked—for a hybrid genre of transl-iter-ation—on the journey of strenuous excursions demanded, by the modern artist par excellence, Stéphane Mallarmé.8 As has been seen in respect of “o anjo esquerdo da história”, any “angelism” inherited from Mallarmé is supplemented by the daemonic; is traced (as even Roberto Schwarz might admit) by the diabolic. The recuperative moves of the poem play with “fallen” transcendentalism and that corrective shift which—for Haroldo de Campos, no less than for any Marxist—tugs “a história” (history and the story of history) always to the Left. Not “going transcendental,” but refusing to forget that particular -ism (without being “-ista”). Not appropriating an already unbalanced Brazilian history (which ever was and still is on the Right). Rather, engaging with it and in it through concrete performances. Destabilizing the dubious claim that we judge our own time by its politicians, the past by its artists. Searching for poetry’s readmission to a Res Pública Brasileira in which the artist (in academic freedom, pace Roberto et al) might also stage the still-to be-negotiated identities of the nation. Writ(h)ing, in agon, so that sub-alterity (sic) might no longer be a leper’s bell to be hung, by the dark forces of any “sociologizing” thought-police, about the neck of Brazil’s excluded artists. Are Haroldo de Campos’s “o anjo esquerdo da história” and my transjection of it—as not abandoned or to be forgotten, mutilatedly only “left winged” and but formerly “of history,” but rather ever active, whole, uncut, as ”the angel on the left of history”—merely a further negotiated staging? Or just a plea for the performative poet–critic to be heard as also improvising politically against, in counterpoint to, “unacceptable cognitive 8 “The double effort required to allow Mallarmé’s gaps their full disjunctive and destructive power, yet at the same time remain attentive to the multitude of invisible currents which pass back and forth between the separated segments, will strike many readers as inexcusably arduous and unrewarding,” and “such moments are of the essence in Mallarmé [. . .] the type of modern artist [. . .] intent on breaking up ready-made Gestalten and smooth surface textures in order to compel his audience to look elsewhere for artistic coherence, to venture beneath the surface into the difficult, undifferentiated world of unconscious process, to interrupt the easy flow of horizontal perception with strenuous excursions into multi-level, all-at-once ‘verticality’” (Bowie 1978, 6 and 16, respectively). models” of a Brazil in construction. . . though sorely lacking in deconstruction? Trans memoriam To Jacques Derrida’s “there is always something sexual at stake in the resistance to deconstruction” (1987, 196), this particular re- reader—and re-hearer—of Haroldo de Campos would add: “and cultural, and ideological.” But isn’t that where the guest translator came, invited, between 1999 and 2002, by and with Haroldo and Carmen, and with Else, into the hospitality of the Babelic home of Brazil and Brazilian letters? Unheimlich? Years on, I am still questioning the possibility of speaking or hearing “do exterior,” “from abroad”; but, now, it is because I have listened, learned, read, and may even write, that intra- has a history which includes extra-; that il n’y a pas d’hors contexte. At, and beyond, the limits of the languages and the antics of nations—not least in transatlantications—the sting and the contamination of the tse-tse flies in the face of hygienic, much less immune, bodies such as text, context, literary, semiotic, cultural, or translation studies. In aporetic threshold perfor- mances, where differences between some “outside” and some “in” are never abolished but ever undermined, not merely inverted but politically subverted, “transtextuality” is a new wor(l)d. . . but it is readable, habitable, pleasurable; like tsextuality. This place of aporia is before a door, a threshold, a border, a line, or simply the edge or the approach of the other as such Jacques Derrida (1993, 12) Coda: translator’s note The discourse of the author of the above is considered by the journal reviewer to perform that approach to translation theory to which it attempts to give (further) voice. Subsequent to the medium chosen by Haroldo de Campos to deliver a poetic rebuke to the perpetrators of the 1996 massacre at El Dorado dos Carajás, will there have been, will there be, a creative intervention that, similarly or comparably, addresses and challenges the contem- porary social upheavals and political manifestations of the opposition to a contemporary Brazil that projects as heaven-sent the staging of a World Cup and an Olympic Games in the best of all possible wor(l)ds? A diabolic fait accompli; or do post-Haroldo undoings—the transluciferations of successor artists—loom. . . ? The task of the present trans(at)l(antic)ator is to await texts from writers who, also, will have undertaken such “imagined and projected versions of what is to come.” Then, in a necessarily matching performative meditation, will it be conceivable to “update.” Pace academe passim. . . Ite, missa est. The sacrifice (of the masses) in the interim will have found but formulaic, liturgical, expressions of their material—street, stadium, factory, favela, commune, congress—protests, however real, however righteous; whether or not arising from the left of history. Chronicles of a dearth foretold; testimony to a lack of devilishly challenging artistic engagement? The avenging angel of poiesis awaits; translations will follow. References Anderson, Perry. 2002. “The Cardoso Legacy.” London Review of Books 24 (24): 18–22. December 12. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n24/perry- anderson/the-cardoso-legacy. Andrade, Drummond de. 1930. “Poema de sete faces.” In Alguma poesia. Belo Horizonte: Edicoes Pindorama. Reproduced in Alguma Poesia. Carlos Drummond de Andrade: Poesia e prosa, 70. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1979. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. Illuminations. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: Pimlico. Betto, Frei. 2002. “Receita para matar um sem-terra.” In Landless Voices in Song and Poetry, edited by Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira and Bernard McGuirk, 77–78. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2007. Bowie, Malcolm. 1978. Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campos, Augusto de, and Haroldo de Campos. 1962. Panorama do Finnegans Wake. n.c.: Conselho Estadual de Cultura, Comissão de Literatura. Campos, Haroldo de. [n.d.]1998. “anjo equerdo da história.” In Crisantempo: no espaço curvo nasce um, 69–72. São Paulo: Perspectiva. Originally in ptnotícias. São Paulo: Diretório Nacional do Partido dos Trabalhadores. ———. 2009. “On Mephistofaustic Transluciferation.” In McGuirk and Vieira 2009, 233–236. Translation by Bernard McGuirk. Derrida, Jacques. [1984] 1987. “Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida.” In Men in Feminism, edited by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, 189–203. New York and London: Routledge. Originally published in Subjects/Objects 2 (12). ———. 1993. “Finis.” In Aporias: dying—awaiting (one another at)the “limits of truth”; mourir—s’attendre aux “limites de la vérité”, 1–42. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1996. Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse d’origine. Paris: Galilée. Eco, Umberto. 2003. “Of Mice and Men.” The Guardian Review, November 1. Complete version available at https://free- minds.org/forum/index.php?topic=7425.0. McGuirk, Bernard, and Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira. 2009. Haroldo de Campos in conversation: in memoriam 1929–2003. London: Zoilus. Melo Neto, João Cabral de. 2000. Morte e vida severina e outros poemas para vozes. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira. Pring-Mill, Robert D. F. 1990. “Gracias a la vida”: The Power and Poetry of Song. The Kate Elder Lecture, Queen Mary University of London. An expanded version published London: University of London, Dept. of Hispanic Studies, 1999. Santiago, Silviano. 1978. “O entre-lugar do discurso latino-americano.” In Uma literatura nos trópicos, 11–28. São Paulo: Perspectiva. Salgado, Sebastião. 1997. Terra. Preface by José Saramago, and poetry by Chico Buarque. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. English edition published as Terra: Struggle of the Landless. London: Phaidon, 1997. Schwarz, Roberto. 1992. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. Edited and with an introduction by John Gledson. London and New York: Verso. Vieira, Else Ribeiro Pires, and Bernard McGuirk. 2007. Landless Voices in Song and Poetry: The Movimento dos Sem Terra of Brazil. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press. is Emeritus Professor of Romance Literatures and Literary Theory at the University of Nottingham. He is president of the International Consortium for the Study of Post-Conflict and has published widely on and translated literatures in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. His most recent books are Latin American Literature: Symptoms, Risks and Strategies of Poststructuralist Criticism (2013), Poesia de Guerra (1998), Falklands–Malvinas: An Unfinished Business (2007), and Erasing Fernando Pessoa (2017). He has also edited, with Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira, Landless Voices in Song and Poetry: The Movimento Dos Sem Terra of Brazil (2007) and Haroldo de Campos in Conversation: In Memoriam 1929–2003 (2007); and, with Constance Goh, Happiness and Post-Conflict (2007). 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15531

Abstract: “I have invented very little in the stories and voices that weave through this book. Some of them I was told and have carried in my memory for a long time. Others I found in books.” These words—from the Author’s Note of Muñoz Molina’s Sepharad—could be said to be the starting point of my article. Muñoz Molina’s novel illustrates a good example of what Michael Rothberg defines as “multidirectional memory” since the memory of the Holocaust, the multiple exiles that have taken place in Europe, and the memory of postwar Spain coexist—like the tesserae of a mosaic—in the structure of this novel. In this sense, Sepharad can be seen as a landmark in recent Spanish literature, being the first novel that provides a juxtaposition of these formerly isolated memories in a fictional work. It is, therefore, the aim of this article to explore the manner in which Muñoz Molina manages to translate into fiction the shared European memory of the twentieth century, also paying attention to the narrative techniques used by this Spanish author. 1This paper is a result of the METAPHORA research project (Reference FFI2014-53391-P), funded by State Secretariat for Research, Development and Innovation of Spain.  Cómo atreverse a la vana frivolidad de inventar, habiendo tantas vidas que merecieron ser contadas, cada una de ellas una novela, una malla de ramificaciones que conducen a otras novelas y otras vidas”.2 Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sefarad (2003, 720-721) “De te fabula. The story is about you”. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture (1976, 186) One of the most revealing passages that the reader of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad (first published in 2001) may encounter in this so-called “novela de novelas” occurs in the “Author’s Note,” which brings this novel to its end: “I have invented very little in the stories and voices that weave through this book. Some of them I was told and have carried in my memory for a long time. Others I found in books” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 383). This passage could be said to be the starting point of this essay since it helps explain the complex relationship which we find in this novel between memory and imagination, as well as between storytelling and memoir. Sefarad is described by Muñoz Molina as “un mapa de todos los exilios posibles” (a map of all possible exiles) (Valdivia 2013, 26), and in this sense the novel represents a manifold and heterogeneous approach to this theme. Similarly, this novel constitutes a landmark in Spanish literature, as it juxtaposes in a fictional work both the Spanish and European shared history of the twentieth century in an unprecedented manner (see Valdivia 2013; Hristova 2011; Baer 2011). As it could be claimed that Sefarad is founded on a multidirectional approach to memory (Valdivia 2013, 13), it is my purpose to explore the manner in which this approach is translated into fiction in this novel. Similarly, I would like to pay attention to those narrative techniques used by Muñoz Molina that enhance this multidirectional approach. In this sense, both polyacroasis (that is, the plural interpretation of discourses), as 2 All quotations in Spanish from Sefarad are from the 2013 edition (see References list) and referenced in parentheses as such in the text. All quotations in English are from the 2003 edition of Margaret Sayers Peden’s translation (see References list). The English translation will be offered throughout in footnotes, except where only short passages are cited in-text. “How, when there are so many lives that deserve to be told, can one attempt to invent a novel for each, in a vast network of interlinking novels and lives?” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 365) defined by Tomás Albaladejo (1998, 2011), and the empathetic turn of Muñoz Molina’s novel, account for an effective translation of memory, as I will try to demonstrate. Multidirectional Memory in Sefarad Instead of the idea of collective memory as competitive memory (Rothberg 2009, 3), in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization a new conceptual framework is proposed which “consider[s] memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross- referencing [. . .] as productive and not privative” (Rothberg 2009, 3). In other words, this model of competitive memory should be replaced by a dynamic multidirectional model that allows the interaction of different historical memories (Rothberg 2009, 2–3). In Rothberg’s study, the work of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs is considered crucial, since for him “all memories are simultaneously individual and collective” (Rothberg 2009, 14–15) so that an effective transmission of the past depends on the manner in which the interaction and juxtaposition of both individual and collective memory is understood. In this sense, as Pablo Valdivia has stated in his edition of Sefarad, the structure of Muñoz Molina’s novel could be said to represent a good illustration of what Michael Rothberg has defined as “multidirectional memory” (Valdivia 2013, 13). The memory of the Holocaust, the multiple exiles that have taken place in Europe, including the Spanish republican exile, and the memory of postwar Spain coexist in the structure of these seventeen intertwined chapters or “novelas” that shape Sefarad. Thus, Sefarad constitutes a landmark in recent Spanish literature since, before this novel was published in 2001, the juxtaposition of the Spanish and European shared memory of the Holocaust and its aftermath, along with the memory of the Spanish republican exile, its Civil War, and its postwar period has never been staged in a fictional work (Valdivia 2013, 14; see also Hristova 2011). As a result of this, Muñoz Molina’s novel also constitutes an attempt to connect the Spanish and European shared culture so as to fill the voids of our shared history3 (Baer 3 As Pablo Valdivia has suggested in his edition of Sefarad, in the article “Escuchando a Canetti,” published in the Spanish newspaper El País in 1997, we can clearly appreciate Muñoz 2011; Valdivia 2013). In order to illuminate those cultural links, the Spanish author creates a complex and ambitious fictional artifact haunted by voices rather than characters in the traditional sense (Valdivia 2013). Actually, voices (“voces”) is the word Muñoz Molina uses in the “Author’s Note” to refer to the characters who weave through the book. Some of these voices are fictional and others belong to real people who bore witness to their atrocious experiences, and they all constitute an “imagined community of voices” (Herzberger 2004, 85; Valdivia 2013, 15). Hence, in Sefarad we read the testimonies and listen to the voices of Victor Klemperer, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Primo Levi, Francisco Ayala, Evgenia Ginzburg, José Luis Pinillos, Franz Kafka, or Milena Jesenska, to name but a few. Marije Hristova (2011) has referred to these characters as “iconic characters” or “iconic writers”—that is, historical figures appearing in the novel who in turn have bequeathed to us their “iconic testimonies.” According to Baer, the weak connection between Spain and the memory of the Holocaust is not historical but cultural (Baer 2011, 114). In this sense, this cultural disjointedness is also suggested in the “Author’s Note,” when Muñoz Molina reveals that many of the testimonies and memoirs of victims of totalitarian regimes that led him to write Sefarad were not translated into Spanish by the time he was writing and published his novel. This is the case of Margarete Buber Neumann’s Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler. Eine Welt im Dunkel ([1947] 1997), Victor Klemperer’s “Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten.” Tagebücher 1933–1945 (1995), Jean Améry’s Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwäl- tigten (1997), and Evgenia Semyonovna Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind (1967), whose memoirs the author could only read in their French and English translations. In fact, it was Antonio Muñoz Molina himself who inserted in the novel his own translation of passages taken from the memoirs we have Molina’s reflections on what he considers a certain lack of interest in Spain regarding the international discussions on the Holocaust memory: “Me llama la atención lo poco que se ha escrito en nuestro país sobre el Holocausto, y el eco tan débil o simplemente nulo que tienen entre nosotros los grandes debates internacionales sobre ese acontecimiento que, junto a la tecnología de la guerra total y el terror de las tiranías estalinistas, ha definido este siglo [. . .] se diría que a nosotros tales cosas no nos afectan, como si España fuera ajena a la historia judía de los últimos cinco siglos, o como si nuestro país no hubiera padecido durante casi cuarenta años una dictadura que debió su triunfo, en gran parte, a la ayuda del mismo régimen que provocó el Holocausto y arrasó Europa entera” (Muñoz Molina 2007, 377–380). previously mentioned. Thus, in Sefarad the creative writer and the translator meet, as will be analyzed in the last section. In Sefarad, the author introduces a variety of testimonies and memories that had been previously overshadowed by other memories, to the extent that they were unknown for many Spanish readers, an aspect which suggests a parallelism between Rothberg’s multidirectional memory model and Muñoz Molina’s novel (Valdivia 2013, 13). In this sense, Sefarad can be contemplated as a mosaic made of many tesserae, every one of which is part of an imagined community of voices. Needless to say, every tessera is required to understand the whole picture. In “Münzenberg,” one of the seventeen chapters that make up Sefarad, Muñoz Molina’s “basic narrator” (Hristova 2011) reveals his plans to write a novel, which, quite startlingly, seems to be inspired by the same approach to fiction that Rothberg proposes for history (Valdivia 2013): He intuido, a lo largo de dos o tres años, la tentación y la posibilidad de una novela, he imaginado situaciones y lugares, como fotografías sueltas o como esos fotogramas de películas que ponían antes, armados en grandes carteleras, a las entradas de los cines [. . .] Cada uno cobraba una valiosa cualidad de misterio, se yuxtaponía sin orden a los otros, se iluminaban entre sí en conexiones plurales e instantáneas, que yo podía deshacer o modificar a mi antojo, y en las que ninguna imagen anulaba a las otras o alcanzaba una primacía segura sobre ellas, o perdía en beneficio del conjunto su singularidad irreductible. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 383)4 This passage is highly revealing since we are told that the narrator’s plan for writing his novel consists of juxtaposing snapshots in order to create a pattern where no image nullifies or overshadows the others, since each of these images is unique and necessary to produce a true and coherent mosaic. This is what we find precisely in Sefarad; different testimonies and memoirs from victims of any political regime or from any kind of exile, each of which are equally significant in a clear multidirectional approach to memory (Valdivia 2013). 4 “For two or three years I have flirted with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots, or like those posters displayed on large billboards at the entrance to a movie theatre. [. . .] Each became a mystery, illuminating the others, creating multiple links that I could break or modify at my whim, patterns in which no image nullified the others or gained precedence or lost its uniqueness within the whole” (Muñoz Molina 2003,140).  Thus, one of the essential questions that are raised while reading Sefarad is how appropriate literature may be as a vehicle for bearing witness to history (Gilmour 2011, 840). The main narrator of Sefarad does not evade this issue, something which is reflected on many occasions throughout the novel. This is the case of the chapter “Narva,” in which the narrator meets a friend of his for lunch, the Spanish psychologist José Luis Pinillos. Pinillos enlisted in the Blue Division, the Spanish Army that served in the German Army during the Second World War. The testimony that the Spanish psychologist bequeaths to the narrator is that of his dramatic experience in the Estonian city of Narva. There, Pinillos met a Jewish woman who asks him to bear witness to the extermination of the Jewish population. At a certain point of the narration, the Spanish psychologist admits that “[y]o no sabía nada entonces, pero lo peor de todo era que me negaba a saber, que no veía lo que estaba delante de mis ojos” (Muñoz Molina 2013, 630) (“I didn’t know anything then, but worst of all was my refusal to know, what was before my eyes” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 307)), attracted as he was by what German civilization represented during his student years: “no quiero ocultarlo, ni quiero disculparme, creía que Alemania era la civilización, y Rusia la barbarie” (Muñoz Molina 2013, 630) (“I don’t want to hide anything or try to excuse myself, I thought that Germany was civilization and Russia barbarism” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 307)). After that meeting, he would never see the Jewish woman again and the experience of that meeting haunted him for many decades, until the very day the narrator and the Spanish psychologist met for lunch. This chapter contains essential reflections on the role of literature as a vehicle for transmitting the memory of the past. Moreover, the very mechanisms of storytelling are unveiled in a remarkable manner. After hearing Pinillos’s testimony, and particularly what meeting the Jewish woman meant for him, the basic narrator has an epiphanic revelation, which is reflected in the following passage: Él, que no quiso ni pudo olvidarla en más de medio siglo, me la ha legado ahora, de su memoria la ha trasladado a mi imaginación, pero yo no quiero inventarle ni un origen ni un nombre, tal vez ni siquiera tengo derecho: no es un fantasma, ni un personaje de ficción, es alguien que pertenecía a la vida  real tanto como yo, que tuvo un destino tan único como el mío aunque inimaginablemente más atroz, una biografía que no puede ser suplantada por la sombra bella y mentirosa de la literatura [. . .] (Muñoz Molina 2013, 637)5 As the previous passage reflects, Muñoz Molina is aware of the risks involved in transmitting and translating memory into fiction. He is aware, in other words, of the limits of literature and invention (Gilmour 2011, 840),6 which is probably why Muñoz Molina declares in his “Author’s Note” that there is very little invention “in the stories and voices that weave through [Sefarad]” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 383). On the other hand, Sefarad never stops questioning the legitimacy of literature to approach memory. Perhaps, José Luis Pinillos’s testimony faithfully illustrates the author’s approach to memory: [. . .] si yo estoy vivo tengo la obligación de hablar por ellos, tengo que contar lo que les hicieron, no puedo quedarme sin hacer nada y dejar que les olviden, y que se pierda del todo lo poco que va quedando de ellos. No quedará nada cuando se haya extinguido mi generación, nadie que se acuerde, a no ser que alguno de vosotros repitáis lo que os hemos contado. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 644)7 At the very end of this passage, the Spanish psychologist appeals to the narrator and asks him to narrate what he has just told him (an idea that is lost in the English translation we offer below). In this sense, it is relevant to refer to Cristina Demaria’s study Semiotica e Memoria. Analisi del post-conflitto. In this study, Demaria refers to the necessity of exploring what Lotman defined as the process of translating experience into the text (“processi di traduzione dell’esperienza in testo”) when we transmit the past, paying special attention to the interaction 5 “He who has not been able to forget her for more than half a century has bequeathed her to me now, transferring the memory of her to my imagination, but I won’t give her an origin or a name, I haven’t the authority, she isn’t a ghost or a fictional character but someone who was as real as I am, who had a destiny as unique as mine although far more cruel, a biography that can neither be supplanted by the beautiful lie of literature” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 312). 6 Concerning the issue of how legitimate it is for fiction to transmit memories of traumatic experiences, Gilmour has observed that “the dilemma of how to keep memories of these experiences alive and to transmit them to future generations has become a pressing question in contemporary cultural studies, in particular in relation to the Holocaust” (Gilmour 2011, 839). 7 “[. . .] because I’m alive I have the obligation to speak for them, say what was done, so that the little that remains of them in people’s memories will not be lost for all time” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 317). between individual and collective memory (Demaria 2006, 37).8 Hence, I would affirm that the inclusion of the iconic characters’ testimonies in Sefarad accounts for this sort of translation of experience into the text. The issue of the legitimacy of literature as a vehicle for the transmission of memory and traumatic knowledge is an essential feature in Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad, which, I feel, is effectively carried out (Gilmour 2011, 840). On the other hand, it should not be overlooked that the transmission of memory may function—as we consider it does in Sefarad—as “a spur to unexpected acts of empathy and solidarity” (Rothberg 2009, 19). Empathetic polyacroasis as a narrative principle in Sefarad One of the most remarkable aspects of Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad is the importance of storytelling as a principle that articulates the novel (Herzberger 2004, 85; Valdivia 2013). As Herzberger has pointed out Sefarad “is a novel of multiple narrators, characters, and plots that turns inward to celebrate the construction of its stories.” (Herzberger 2004, 85). It is important to highlight how significant storytelling, listening, and reading are in the construction of this novel. In this sense, the inclusion of the iconic characters’ testimonies in a novel where storytelling and listening is vital accounts for what Herzberger defines as “a hybridized narrative rooted in imagination and reference” (Herzberger 2004, 86). A fruitful tension that contributes to trigger an empathetic response from the reader (Herzberger 2004, 86). On the other hand, one of the most remarkable achievements of Sefarad is its “basic narrator”—that is, the oscillating narrative voice underlying the seventeen chapters or “novelas” (Hristova 2011; Gilmour 2011; Valdivia 2012, 591– 592). Actually, this basic narrator constantly changes the grammatical person from “yo” to “tú,” “él,” “vosotros,” or “ellos” (Valdivia 2012, 591–592; see also Gilmour 2011). Thus, orality and storytelling are essential features for this basic narrator to 8 Cristina Demaria affirms in her study that “[l]a trasmissione del significato del passato, la trama in cui si intrecciano alcuni eventi che divengono così rilevanti, può cioè trovarsi a dipendere dal modo in cui, di volta in volta, memoria individuale e memoria collettiva interagiscono. È necessario dunque indagare più a fondo quelli che Lotman definisce come processi di traduzione dell’esperienza in testo, l’interazione e anche il conflitto fra una memoria individuale e una collettiva, culturale e sociale” (Demaria 2006, 37). develop his narrative possibilities. Characters, be they iconic or fictional, tell each other stories and transmit their testimonies to those who are willing to listen, to the extent that the manner in which their identities may be perceived depends to a great extent on those stories (Herzberger 2004; Gilmour 2011; Hristova 2011; Valdivia 2012; Valdivia 2013). Hence, both orality and storytelling allow us to establish a connection with the rhetorical concept of polyacroasis (Valdivia 2012, 593–594). The term polyacroasis (polyakróasis)—that is, a plural hearing, plural interpretation of an oral discourse—has been proposed by Tomás Albaladejo “to refer to the characteristic consisting of the differences between the hearers of rhetorical discourse” (Albaladejo 1998, 156). Thus, polyacroasis contributes to illuminate and elucidate the mechanisms of the plural reception of discourses taking place in a given rhetorical event (Albaladejo 1998). As this reception is not only restricted to oratorical events, Albaladejo has also proposed this concept to analyze literary works, especially those at the very core of which literary communication lies (Albaladejo 2009, 2). Polyacroasis therefore contributes to elucidate the strong link between literature and orality (Albaladejo 2009, 3–4). In this sense, Sefarad constitutes a rhetorical event where the characters or voices that dwell in the novel narrate to each other the novel they take with them.9 Yet the reader is also appealed to and turned into another character of the novel by means of empathy, to the extent that readers may experience what Northrop Frye affirmed the final message of the genre of romance was—that is, “de te fabula: the story is about you” (Frye 1976, 186). In this sense, the use in the novel of the rhetorical figure of apostrophe reinforces the sense of empathy the novel conveys, since the reader’s attention is drawn in a very effective manner (Valdivia 2013): Y tú qué harías si supieras que en cualquier momento pueden venir a buscarte, que tal vez ya figura tu nombre en una lista mecanografiada de 9In Sefarad, there are multiple references to Benito Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta. Muñoz Molina introduces in Sefarad a famous quotation taken from that novel, “Doquiera que el hombre va lleva consigo su novela,” which Margaret Sayers Peden translated into English as “Wherever a man goes, he takes his novel with him”(Muñoz Molina 2003, 44).  presos o de muertos futuros, de sospechosos, de traidores. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 243)10 Clearly, the use of apostrophe triggers an empathetic response from the reader, who may experience a total identification with the voices that dwell in Sefarad (Gilmour 2011, 851). In addition to this, empathy is similarly stimulated by manipulating the voice of the basic narrator (Gilmour 2011, 851; Valdivia 2012). What Gilmour has described as “a constant oscillation between the third person, él or ella, and the first person, yo,” (Gilmour 2011, 852; Valdivia 2012; Valdivia 2013, 258) creates a web of empathetic connections among the main narrator, the gallery of multiple voices that weave through the book, and an empathetic reader. As we have seen before, Muñoz Molina tells us in the “Author’s note” that both the testimonies he listened to and stored for a long time in his memory and the books he read were vital while plotting and writing Sefarad: the rest was invention. However, it could be affirmed that the part of the novel that stems from invention completes full circle this web of empathetic links (Gilmour 2011). In other words, as Gilmour has pointed out, the use of an empathetic imagination accounts for the manner in which Muñoz Molina, via his basic narrator, translates into fiction other people’s memories (Gilmour 2011, 847). This basic narrator has been referred to by Valdivia as a “yo fluido,” a sort of flowing manifold narrator whose nature is clearly explained in the following passage taken from the chapter “Dime tu nombre”: Nunca soy más yo mismo que cuando guardo silencio y escucho, cuando dejo a un lado mi fatigosa identidad y mi propia memoria para concentrarme del todo en el acto de escuchar, de ser plenamente habitado por las experiencias y recuerdos de otros. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 680)11 This multiple oscillation among different grammatical persons is accompanied by the use of direct speech, as we can appreciate when Muñoz Molina provides his own translation into 10 “And you, what would you do if you knew that at any moment they could come for you, that your name may already be on a typed list of prisoners or future dead, or suspects, or traitors?” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 45). 11 “I am never more myself than when I am silent and listening, when I set aside my tedious identity and tedious memory to concentrate totally on the act of listening, on the experiences of another” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 340). Spanish of the iconic characters’ testimonies he has read in books. In the following passage we can appreciate a clear example of this flowing oscillating narrator: Evgenia, te están tendiendo una trampa, y es preciso que escapes mientras puedas, antes de que te partan el cuello. Pero cómo voy yo, una comunista, a esconderme de mi Partido, lo que tengo que hacer es demostrarle al Partido que soy inocente. Hablan en voz baja, procurando que los niños no escuchen nada, temiendo que el teléfono, aunque está colgado, sirva para que les espíen las conversaciones. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 258)12 The quotation that appears in italics is an excerpt, translated into Spanish by the author himself, and taken from Evgenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, a memoir that had not yet been translated into Spanish when Sefarad was being written. Then, after that passage, without using quotation marks, the first person is used and we are told what the “basic narrator” imagines Evgenia Ginzburg might have said in the very moment she learnt she was under threat. In other words, the basic narrator haunts Ginzburg’s mind and empathetically imagines how Ginzburg might have reacted. Finally, in the last sentence, the basic narrator shifts to the third person plural (Valdivia 2013, 258). Needless to say, this masterly use of narrative technique requires an empathetic imagination on the author’s part (Gilmour 2011; Valdivia 2013, 258). The manner in which polyacroasis functions in this novel can not be explained if we are unaware of that web of empathetic connections—or “malla de ramificaciones”—among the different voices, the reader’s response, and the empathetic imagination deployed by Muñoz Molina. Therefore, a new question should now be raised. Is empathy an effective vehicle for both transmitting and translating memories? Does the author’s empathetic involvement in retelling and translating testimonies account for a successful transmission of memory? According to Rothberg, remembrance and imagination can be seen as both material and fundamentally human forces that 12“Eugenia, they’re setting a trap for you, and you must run away while you can, before they have your head. But why would I, a Communist, hide from my Party? I must show the Party that I’m innocent. They speak in low voices, trying not to let the children hear, afraid that the telephone, even though the receiver’s down, will allow someone to listen” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 53). “should not lead to assumptions of memory’s insubstantiality” (Rothberg 2009, 19). It is possible that, as Sefarad reflects, translating multidirectional memory into fiction acquires a more significant and enriched dimension when empathetic imagination is present. Translating the Other culturally in Sefarad The role of translation in postconflict cultures is an aspect that has been taken into consideration in Nergaard’s “Translating the Other: Journalism in Post Conflict Cultures” (Demaria and Wright, 2006). In this article, Nergaard analyzes examples where one culture translates another (Nergaard 2006, 189). In this sense, Nergaard proposes an understanding of translation “as the process through which concepts and discourses in one culture are interpreted and transformed in order to be introduced into another” (Nergaard 2006, 189). Translation is also referred to as “one of the privileged spaces where cultures meet [. . .] in terms of alterity and difference” (Nergaard 2006, 189). Translation thus allows us to represent the Other, a complex process that Nergaard calls cultural translation (Nergaard 2006, 191). In this epigraph I would like to explore the presence of cultural translation in Muñoz Molina’s novel, and to what extent fiction may contribute to an effective translation of the Other and, as a result of that, can contribute to create and shape knowledge. When the so-called basic narrator declares that he is never more himself than when he sets aside his identity to concentrate on the experiences of another (Muñoz Molina 2013, 680), he is suggesting that “he is never more fully himself than when experiencing both self and other” (Gilmour 2011, 849.) In this sense, it seems that the very idea of representing and translating the Other appears to be one of the engines of Sefarad, being the other and the translation of his or her experiences one of the key motifs that articulate the novel. We have previously referred to the manner in which Muñoz Molina translates into fiction the iconic characters’ testimonies. In some occasions the author himself translates passages into Spanish, which lend verisimilitude to the novel. In other occasions, the iconic characters are haunted by the oscillating narrator (“yo fluido,” as proposed by Valdivia) who imagines empathetically what these “iconic characters and writers” might have thought or said (Valdivia 2013). This exploration of the characters’ thoughts appearing in Sefarad, via an oscillating narrator, constitutes an example of what could be defined as an empathetic cultural translation. The most significant instance of this representation of the Other in Sefarad appears in the chapter “Eres.” In this chapter, Muñoz Molina appeals empathetically to the reader by means of the use of apostrophe. Thus, the chapter triggers in the reader a sense of identification between him or her and the Other (Valdivia 2013, 601). In this sense in Sefarad “the possibility of becoming ‘the other’ is a recurrent theme” (Hristova-Dijkstra and Adema 2010, 74), something that is illustrated when the reader is asked the following question: “Y tú qué harías si supieras que en cualquier momento pueden venir a buscarte, que tal vez ya figura tu nombre en una lista mecanografiada de presos o de muertos futuros, de sospechosos, de traidores”(Muñoz Molina 2013, 243) (“what would you do if you knew that at any moment they could come for you, that your name may already be on a typed list of prisoners or future dead, or suspects, or traitors?” [Muñoz Molina 2003, 45]). In the following passage from the chapter mentioned above, we encounter a representative example of the manner in which the virtual identification between reader (Self) and the Other is triggered: Eres quien mira su normalidad perdida desde el otro lado del cristal que te separa de ella, quien entre las rendijas de las tablas de un vagón de deportados mira las últimas casas de la ciudad que creyó suya y a la que nunca volverá. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 619)13 The effect these words have on the reader is that of fostering a total identification with the Other, to the extent that we come to recognize how “the ‘totally other’ constitutes one’s identity” (Hristova-Dijkstra and Adema 2010, 74). * 13 As Margaret Sayers Peden’s 2003 translation into English of the 2001 Spanish edition of Sefarad is being used throughout this article, and as this translation omits many passages from the original 2001 Spanish edition, including the passage I have just cited, no English translation is being provided in this instance. Sefarad has been described by its author as a “mapa de todos los exilios posibles” (a map of possible exiles) (Valdivia 2013, 26). In this sense, it could be affirmed that the theme of exile constitutes a subtext in Sefarad since it is the place where the narrator and the reader empathize imaginatively with the Other (Gilmour 2011, 854): Aún despojándote de todo queda algo que permanece siempre, que está en ti desde que tienes memoria [. . .] el núcleo o la médula de lo que eres [. . .]: eres el sentimiento del desarraigo y de la extrañeza, de no estar del todo en ninguna parte [. . .] (Muñoz Molina 2013, 609)14 In the Introduction to Translation and Power (2002) Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler assert that translators “as much as creative writers and politicians, participate in the powerful acts that create knowledge and shape culture” (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002, xxi). In this sense, in Sefarad both the translator and the creative writer meet. The fact that some of the books containing the iconic characters’ testimonies were not translated into Spanish implied an obvious lack of knowledge of vital testimonies that has shaped postwar Europe. Thus, the Spanish author’s decision to insert and translate passages from the previously mentioned testimonies accounts for a strong desire to create knowledge both as a creative writer and as a translator. If we take into consideration, for instance, the passages taken from Victor Klemperer’s I will Bear Witness. 1933–1941. A Diary of the Nazi Years (1999), we can appreciate a clear illustration of Muñoz Molina’s masterly use of historical reference and empathetic imagination. In “Quien espera,” a gallery of “iconic characters” weaves through this chapter, which includes Victor Klemperer himself, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Eugenia Ginzburg, Jean Améry, and even fictional characters such as Josef K. from Kafka’s Der Prozess. In the following passage we can appreciate the narrative technique deployed by the author: 14“Something persists that has been inside you for as long as you can remember [. . .] it is the marrow of what you are [. . .] You are uprootedness and foreignness, not being completely in any one place [. . .]” (Muñoz Moina 2003, 295).  El jueves 30 de marzo de 1933 el profesor Victor Klemperer, de Dresde, anota en su diario que ha visto en el escaparate de una tienda de juguetes un balón de goma infantil con una gran esvástica. Ya no puedo librarme de la sensación de disgusto y vergüenza. Y nadie se mueve; todo el mundo tiembla, se esconde. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 247)15 The journal entry corresponds to March 30, 1933. In fact, the sentence that we encounter at the end of that journal entry— that is, “In a toy shop a children’s ball with the swastika” (Klemperer 1999, 10)—occurs unexpectedly, as a juxtaposed image with no apparent connection with the rest of the paragraph.16 Thus, Muñoz Molina is clearly retelling what he has read in the diary, after which he introduces in italics his own translation of a passage extracted from the English translation of Klemperer’s diaries. Hence, Muñoz Molina sets a boundary between real testimonies and literary recreation. Yet, it should be noticed that the passage in italics does not correspond to the same day Klemperer saw the child’s ball with the swastika (that is, March 30) but to May 17 of the same year. This narrative device—which we can appreciate in other iconic testimonies throughout the novel—has significant implications from the point of view of translation, since it reveals a concept of translation that Tymoczko and Gentzler have described as “not simply an act of faithful reproduction but, rather, a deliberate and conscious act of selection [and] assemblage” (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002, xxi). In other words, Muñoz Molina’s choice constitutes a conscious act of juxtaposing his own empathetic retelling of the journal with real testimonies extracted from it (that is, “I can no longer get rid of the feeling of disgust and shame. And no one stirs; everyone trembles, keeps out of sight” (Klemperer 1999, 7) (“Ich kann das Gefühl des 15 “On Thursday, March 30, 1933, Professor Victor Klemperer, of Dresden, notes in his diary that in a toy-shop window he saw a child’s balloon with a large swastika. I can no longer rid myself of the disgust and shame. Yet no one makes a move; everyone trembles, hides” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 47). 16 We provide in this footnote the English translation of Victor Klemperer’s diaries and the original German: “Yesterday a wretched statement in the Dresdener Neueste Nachrichten—‘on your own account.’ They are 92.5 percent founded on Aryan capital, Herr Wollf, owner of the remaining 7.5 percent, has resigned as chief editor, one Jewish editor has been given leave of absence (poor Fentl!), the other ten are Aryans. Terrible!—In a toy shop a children’s ball with the swastika.” (Klemperer 1999, 10); „Gestern jämmerliche Erklärung der Dresdener NN ‚in eigener Sache’. Sie seien zu 92,5 Prozent auf arisches Kapital gestützt, Herr Wollf, Besitzer der übrigen 7,5 Prozent, lege Chefredaktion nieder, ein jüdischer Redakteur sei beurlaubt (armer Fentl!), die andern zehn seien Arier. Entsetzlich! – In einem Spielzeugladen ein Kinderball mit Hakenkreuz” (Klemperer, 1995: 15–16). Ekels und der Scham nicht mehr loswerden. Und niemand rührt sich; alles zittert, verkriecht sich.” [Klemperer 1995, 12]). In “Quien espera” we encounter a web of testimonies or voices that are intertwined throughout this chapter, including Buber-Neumann’s, Ginzburg’s, and Klemperer’s. In the last paragraph of this chapter the testimonies of both Klemperer and Buber-Neumann come together. In a masterly juxtaposition of voices and testimonies, the oscillating narrator concludes this chapter in the following manner: Llegaron una mañana muy temprano, del 19 de Julio, y al comprobar que esta vez sí que venían de verdad por ella [Margarete] no sintió pánico, sino más bien alivio [. . .]. El 12 de julio el profesor Klemperer recuerda en su diario a algunos amigos que se marcharon de Alemania, que han encontrado trabajo en Estados Unidos o en Inglaterra. Pero cómo irse sin nada, él, un viejo, y su mujer una enferma [. . .]. Nosotros nos hemos quedado aquí, en la vergüenza y la penuria, como enterrados vivos, enterrados hasta el cuello, esperando día tras día las últimas paletadas. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 267)17 The responsibility that translation may have in creating knowledge has been previously mentioned. I agree with Tymoczko and Genztler when they affirm that “translation [. . .] actively participates in the construction of knowledge [. . .] and that the act of translation is itself very much involved in the creation of [it]” (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002, xxi). Leaving aside the enormous literary value of a novel like Sefarad, I would affirm that this novel is also an example of how a fictional work can participate in that construction of knowledge through an empathetic imagination. Conclusion Throughout this article I have tried to analyze the manner in which Muñoz Molina juxtaposes in Sefarad the shared European and Spanish memory of the twentieth century via a multidirectional memory approach to fiction. In this sense, I would affirm that Michael Rothberg’s approach helps explain the narrative mechanisms underlying Sefarad. In other words, Rothberg’s 17 “They came one morning very early, on July 19, and when she realized that they had finally come for her, [Margarete] felt only a kind of relief [. . .]. On July 12, Professor Klemperer refers in his diary to some friends who left Germany and found work in the United States or England. But how do you leave when you don’t have anything? He, an old man with a sick wife [. . .]. We have stayed here, in shame and penury, as if buried alive, buried up to our necks, waiting day after day for the last spadefuls of dirt” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 60). dynamic multidirectional model accounts effectively for the interaction of different historical memories which we can appreciate in Sefarad (Rothberg 2009, 3). Muñoz Molina thus translates into fiction previously isolated memories and presents a map of all possible exiles in an unprecedented manner in recent Spanish literature. In this sense, I would state that one of Muñoz Molina’s greatest achievements is the manner in which he carries out a translation of experience into a fictional text. There are multiple instances of that translation of experiences into Sefarad, such as the iconic characters’ testimonies. In addition to this, I would like to point out that empathetic polyacroasis contributes to a great extent to this effective translation of experience. Thus, I believe that the presence of polyacroasis in Sefarad enhances that empathetic translation and transmission of memory, since it allows both a plural interpretation and a powerful interaction among the different “voices” that dwell in the novel, and it also increases the readers’ empathetic response. In my opinion, translating multidirectional memory into fiction becomes more effective when empathetic polyacroasis takes place. Needless to say, this “hybridized narrative rooted in imagination and reference” (Herzberger 2004, 86) clearly contributes and participates in the construction of knowledge. Finally, I would like to conclude this essay with an excerpt from Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad that, to a great extent, may function as a concise summary of the argument I have presented: No eres una sola persona y no tienes una sola historia, y ni tu cara ni tu oficio ni las demás circunstancias de tu vida pasada o presente permanecen invariables. El pasado se mueve y los espejos son imprevisibles. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 596)18 18“You are not an isolated person and do not have an isolated story, and neither your face nor your profession nor the other circumstances of your past or present life are cast in stone. The past shifts and reforms, and mirrors are unpredictable” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 288). References Albaladejo, Tomás. 1998. “Polyacroasis in Rhetorical Discourse.” The Canadian Journal of Rhetorical Studies/La Revue Canadienne d’Études Rhétoriques 9: 155–167. ———. 2009. “La poliacroasis en la representación literaria: Un componente de la retórica cultural.” Castilla. Estudios de Literatura 0: 1–26. PDF available at http://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/12153. Améry, Jean. 1997. Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag. Baer, Alejandro. 2011. “The Voids of Sepharad: The memory of the Holocaust in Spain.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12 (1): 95– 120. doi:10.1080/14636204.2011/556879. Buber-Neumann, Margarete. [1947] 1997. Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler. Eine Welt im Dunkel. Berlin: Ullstein Buchverlage. Demaria, Cristina. 2006. Semiotica e memoria. Analisi del post-conflitto. Roma: Carocci. Demaria, Cristina, and Colin Wright. 2006. Post-Conflict Cultures. Rituals of Representation. London: Zoilus Press. Frye, Northrop. 1976. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Gilmour, Nicola. 2011. “The Afterlife of Traumatic Memories: The Workings and Uses of Empathy in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies: Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America 88 (6): 839–862. doi:10.1080/14753820.2011.603491. Ginzburg, Eugenia Semyonovna. 1967. Journey into the Whirlwind. Translated by Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward. London: Harcourt. Herzberger, David K. 2004. “Representing the Holocaust: Story and Experience in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad.” Romance Quarterly 51 (2): 85–96. doi:10.3200/RQTR.51.2.85-96. Hristova, Marije. 2011. “Memoria prestada. El Holocausto en la novela española contemporánea: Los casos de Sefarad de Muñoz Molina y El Comprador de aniversarios de García Ortega.” MA thesis, University of Amsterdam. PDF available at http://dare.uva.nl/document/342563. Hristova-Dijkstra, Marije J., and Janneke Adema. 2010. “The exile condition. Space–time dissociation in historical experience. A reading of Sefarad.” Krisis, 1: 62–76. Klemperer, Victor. 1995. “Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten.” Tagebücher 1933–1941. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. ———. 1999. I Will Bear Witness. 1933–1941. A Diary of the Nazi Years. Translated by Martin Chalmers. New York: The Modern Library. Muñoz Molina, Antonio. 2003. Sepharad. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. London: Harcourt. ———. 2007. Travesías. Edited by Jorge F. Hernández. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. ———. 2013. Sefarad. Edited by Pablo Valdivia. Madrid: Cátedra. Nergaard, Siri. 2006. “Translating the Other: Journalism in Post-Conflict Cultures.” In Cristina Demaria and Colin Wright 2006, 189–207. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tymoczko, Maria, and Edwin Gentzler, eds. 2002. Translation and Power. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Valdivia, Pablo. 2012. “Poliacroasis, memoria e identidad en la articulación de los discursos de poder: el caso de Sefarad de Antonio Muñoz Molina.” In Retórica y política. Los discursos de la construcción de la sociedad, edited by Emilio del Río Sanz, María del Carmen Ruiz de la Cierva, and Tomás Albaladejo, 591–604. Logroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos. ———. 2013. Introduction to Muñoz Molina 2013. obtained his BA in English Philology and his PhD from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He is currently lecturer in Contemporary Literature, English Literature, and English at the Universidad CEU San Pablo, Madrid, and member of the research group C [P y R] (Communication, poetics and rhetoric) at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He is currently a member of the METAPHORA project and has been a member of a previous research project on Cultural Rhetoric. His research interests include comparative literature, rhetoric, and literary translation. 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15532

Abstract: Holocaust survivor testimonies are frequently read, explored, and interpreted in English translation—that is, beyond their original linguistic, temporal, and cultural points of telling. And yet only meager attention has been paid to the epistemological and ethical implications of translation as a mode of re-mediating Holocaust memory. Significant questions remain regarding the potentialities of translation, both positive and negative, for shaping the way in which readers come to know about, and respond to, the lived experiences of the survivors. Specifically, this article hopes to encourage more sustained and critical thinking about the decisive and moral role of the translator as a secondary witness, “one who listens to the testimony with empathy and helps to record, store and transmit it” (Assmann 2006, 9). The article presents a case study of two acts of secondary witnessing which re-mediate the experiences of French female deportees into English: Barbara Mellor’s translation of Agnès Humbert’s (1946) Notre guerre, published in 2008 as Résistance, and Margaret S. Summers’s translation of Micheline Maurel’s (1957) Un camp très ordinaire, published in 1958 as An Ordinary Camp. Attention will be paid to how the translators have listened to and re-mediated the experiences of the survivors for a new readership, while the sociocultural contexts of and influences on these acts of secondary witnessing will also be considered. Introduction Translating the written memory of an individual into another language and culture entails a twofold act of perpetuation; first, the lived experiences of that individual are recorded in an additional repository and are then carried beyond the immediate borders of the original telling. Yet, in order that this perpetuation might be realized through translation, the particular threads of memory which constitute the original narrative— whether in the form of autobiography, memoir, diary or testimony—are necessarily reworked by the hands of another, by a translator who, in most instances, has no direct connection with the remembered events or emotions.1 The warp and weft of the initial act of memory may subsequently emerge intact, preserved by translation to bear enduring and accurate witness to the life of the individual; alternatively, it may not withstand the process, becoming distorted in its appearance, texture or purpose once reconstructed in another setting. This article sets out to identify and critically examine the role of the translator in the transmission of individual memory within the specific context of survivor accounts of the Holocaust. In this respect, any exploration of how the translator re-mediates life in the camps must be fully mindful of the unique representational, epistemological and ethical complexities that can beset attempts to tell and retell those stories of suffering and survival. Many Holocaust narratives are marked by a tension between the (communicative, commemorative, and often cathartic) need to commit lived experience to writing and the aridity of words whose capacity to tell withers before the sheer horror of the events they venture to describe. The complexities of representation may be compounded further by the contingencies of memory, which can fade but also sharpen with the passing of time.2 In turn, the translator of the Holocaust narrative is potentially brought into an encounter with a text that is, deliberately or otherwise, halting, uneven; a text that may attempt to lay bare some or all of the concentrationary universe, and in so doing, charge itself with a particular moral burden to remember, to understand, or indeed to resist any such understanding. How the translator 1 A notable exception to this distance between the one who remembers and the one who translates can, of course, be found in the phenomenon of self-translation. The conflation of these two positions necessarily raises an alternative set of questions to the ones I address here. 2 Contrary to the antinarrative stance adopted by literary theorists such as Cathy Caruth (1996), scientific studies have shown that traumatic experiences are recoverable and representable, as opposed to repressed and unspeakable. As is noted by Beverley R. King in 21st Century Psychology: A Reference Handbook, “Overwhelmingly, the research supports the trauma superiority argument—memories for stressful experiences are not easily forgotten, especially the central details of the events” (2009, 452). For further criticism of Caruth, see Ruth Leys (2000), and Wulf Kansteiner and Harald Weilnböck (2008). responds to such complexities will be considered in reference to the concept of the secondary witness, 3 defined by Geoffrey Hartman as someone who “provides a witness for the witness, [and] actively receives words that reflect the darkness of the event” (1998, 48). It is precisely the nature and extent of the translator’s act of receiving that will be considered in the case study below, always heedful of what Colin Davis terms the “insidious dangers inherent in secondary witnessing” (2011, 20) which threaten to belie the experiences, pain and otherness of the Holocaust survivor. For the manner in which the translator serves as secondary witness will ultimately determine whether the target language reader has a window onto past events that is as broad or narrow, as transparent or opaque, as whole or fragmented, as the one originally offered by the survivor. The present case study centers on two remarkable French testimonies of life in and liberation from the Nazi labor camps for women. Agnès Humbert’s Notre guerre: Journal de Résistance 1940–1945 was published in the immediate aftermath of World War II in 1946; it begins with the art historian’s diary entries which record her early involvement in the French Resistance movement and then proceeds to a retrospective account of her arrest and internment in the Parisian prisons of Cherche-Midi, La Santé, and Fresnes, her subsequent deportation to the German forced labor camps of Krefeld- Anrath, Hövelhof and Schwelm, and her eventual liberation from the town of Wanfried. Micheline Maurel, a literary scholar, was also arrested for Resistance activities, and her testimony, Un camp très ordinaire, appeared in 1957. In her work, Maurel documents her experiences of daily life and hardship in the Neubrandenburg labor camp, a satellite of the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, as well as her difficult return home following liberation. These accounts will be brought into relief with their English translations— respectively, Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France translated by Barbara Mellor (2008) and Ravensbrück by Margaret S. Summers (1958)4—as a means of establishing how these translators have served as witnesses to the survivors, while 3 This present study follows on from my 2013 work in which I also draw on secondary witnessing to scrutinize the English translation of Robert Antelme’s (1947) L’espèce humaine. 4 Page references will here be given to the UK edition published in 1958 by Digit Books, an imprint of Brown Watson. See reference list for an overview of all available UK and US editions. also recognizing that the translator is not the sole agent responsible for the way in which these individual memories have been transmitted. The decision to explore these two particular female survivor accounts has been made in light Margaret-Anne Hutton’s observation that “French women deported to Nazi concentration and death camps […] have, as yet, received little to no critical attention” (2005, 2), in Holocaust studies or elsewhere. With the exception perhaps of Charlotte Delbo, analytical focus has tended to fall on male memories and narratives of life in the camps; this case study can thus be read as an attempt to bring two marginalized, eclipsed voices of female survivors further to the fore. In more general terms, the article can also be seen as a contribution towards a burgeoning body of work by scholars who situate themselves at the intersection between Translation Studies and Holocaust Studies in order to better understand how the linguistic and cultural dynamics of translation have shaped the transmission and reception of Holocaust writing. Susan Suleiman observes in 1996 that “[w ]hile students of Holocaust literature are keenly aware of problems of language and representation, they have paid surprisingly little attention to a problem one might call representing—or remembering, or memorializing—the Holocaust in translation” (1996, 640). Almost a decade later, and that much needed critical attention is beginning to emerge in revelatory studies, underpinned by comparative textual and cultural analyses across a range of language pairs and genres. Of particular note is the work of Jean Boase-Beier who approaches the poetry of Paul Celan from the dual and ethically engaged position of researcher and translator; she argues (2014) that reading a Holocaust poem for translation entails a more penetrating, exacting encounter with the silences, ambiguities, and tensions of the original and maintains (2011) that these potent features must be retained in the translation where they might be perceived and interpreted by the new reader. Conversely, Peter Davies adopts a decisively descriptive approach to the translations of Borowski (2008), Wiesel (2011), and Höß (2014) to frame textual and paratextual decisions in terms of the status and function of Holocaust testimony in the target culture, and in reference to target language reader expectations. A recent special edition of Translation and Literature (2014) on “Holocaust Testimony and Translation,” edited by Davies, further signals the upsurge in interest in questions of how, why and to what effect Holocaust writing travels in translation. In addition to Boase-Beier’s (2014) work mentioned above, specific cases in point are Sue Vice’s (2014) examination of how reading false Holocaust testimonies in translation can lay bare their constructedness, as well as Angela Kershaw’s (2014) exploration of how translation can restrict and release the complex network of intertextual references in French Holocaust fiction. Also of interest is Kershaw’s (2013) detailed examination on how translated Holocaust fiction is marketed and received within Britain’s literary landscape. More broadly, Bella Brodzki (2007) understands translation as a trope for the textual reconstruction and transmission of memory, dedicating a chapter of Can These Bones Live to the connections between memorializing, mourning, and translation in the writing of Jorge Semprùn. These studies unarguably serve to provide a more detailed and nuanced picture of the various ways in which translation functions as a mode of reinscribing and imparting Holocaust memory. In turn, this article endeavors to illustrate the strategies on which the mediation and reception of the two translated French testimonies are premised, supplementing thus the existing body of work in an empirical sense and proposing the figure of the secondary witness as a framework for better understanding the responsibility of the translator of first hand Holocaust accounts. Secondary witnessing in translation The notion of secondary witnessing can be traced back to the establishment of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies for which over 4,400 eye-witness accounts were recorded on videotape. One of the co-founders of the project, psychoanalyst Dori Laub, has reflected critically on his role as an interviewer, or “the immediate receiver of these testimonies” (1991, 76). He frames his position in relation to the survivor as “a companion on the eerie journey of the testimony. As an interviewer, I am present as someone who actually participates in the reliving and reexperiencing of the event” (1991, 76). Such companionship and participation is a decisive factor in the very elicitation of the testimony; the interviewer bears witness to the witness and, in so doing, becomes an auxiliary to the telling of the story, a secondary witness. Accordingly, an ethical onus is placed on the secondary witness; as Thomas Trezise puts it: The general lesson Laub draws from his intervention is that the listener actively contributes, for better or for worse, to the construction of testimonial narrative, that the receiving is analogous to the giving of testimony insofar as it involves a process of selection and omission, attention and inattention, highlighting and overshadowing, for which the listener remains responsible. (2013, 19) The translator of the Holocaust testimony can likewise be placed in this position of receiving and responsibility. Although the dialogic immediacy that characterizes the relationship between the survivor–witness and interviewer–secondary witness on tape is, in many cases, no longer tenable in the context of translation,5 it is nevertheless the case that the translator is a present and operative force in the bringing forth of the testimony in another language, as well as in its journey to another time and place. It is the translator who first participates in shaping the contours of the account, and only then can its content be repackaged and transmitted to a subsequent, broader audience in the target culture. The role of any secondary witness is a demanding and a complex one which entreats the listener to hear affectively and exactingly: “The listener has to feel the victim’s victories, defeats and silences, know them from within, so that they can assume the form of testimony” (Laub 1992, 58). At the same time, the secondary witness is called to be mindful of this attempt to feel and know the survivor, so as to preclude any collapse of the distinction between the two subject positions. Hartman expresses the dilemma of the secondary (or what he terms ‘intellectual’) witness as follows: “Every identification approaches over-identification and leads to a personifying and then appropriation of the identity of others. The distance between the self and other is violated and the possibility of 5 The retranslation of Wiesel’s La nuit by his wife in 2006 is a rare example of proximity between survivor and translator. intellectual witness aborted” (1998, 4). In order to avert such a failure, secondary witnessing must be predicated instead on the core value of empathy, an empathy which pertains in all contexts of the act. In the case of the historian as secondary witness, Dominick LaCapra insists on an ethically desirable form of empathy that “involves not full identification but what might be termed empathic unsettlement in the face of traumatic limit events” (2001, 102). Likewise, memory studies scholars Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer contend that the secondary witness “must allow the testimony to move, haunt and endanger her; she must allow it to inhabit her, without appropriating or owning it” (2010, 402). As I have argued elsewhere (Deane-Cox 2013), this empathic mode of bearing witness to the witness must also extend to the context of translation. However, the risk of crossing the threshold from empathy into over-identification is stronger here still given the appropriative thrust of translation and the subjective filter of the translator who may “feed [their] own beliefs, knowledge, attitudes and so on into [their] processing of texts, so that any translation will, to some extent, reflect the translator’s own mental and cultural outlook” (Hatim and Mason 1990, 11). If the translator of the Holocaust testimony is to serve as a secondary witness, as “the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time” (Laub 1992, 57), here in a new linguistic, cultural and temporal setting, then he or she must strive to engage empathically with that telling and to respect the distance that separates him or herself from the survivor. Otherwise, the testi- mony is at danger of being overwritten by the assumptions and the excesses (hearing too much) or insufficiencies (hearing too little or inaccurately) of the translator, at which point the testimony will cease to function as such. However, participation in the communicative exchange is not restricted to the witness and the secondary witness alone, for the account that emerges from this encounter can also be heard by additional audiences and used to different ends. Although Laub does not address this point explicitly in his work, Trezise sees there a “suggest[ion] that the reception of the Holocaust survivor testimony requires not only attending to the voices of witnesses while remaining aware of one’s own, but also attending, with equal self-awareness, to the voices of other listeners” (2013, 9). And within the paradigm of the translator as secondary witness, those other listeners are the translation readers as well as other interested parties such as literary agents, publishers and editors, their presence and needs positioning the translator, once again, in that familiar continuum bounded by source and target concerns. Or, as Francis Jones writes, “the call to the primary other (the source-writer or source-culture) must be tempered by a constant awareness of ‘the other other’” (2004, 723). Referring here to his experiences of translating literary texts against the backdrop of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, Jones clearly foregrounds the dual obligation of the translator whose loyalty towards the source text writer is in ever-present negotiation with the differentiated social, ethical, ideological, aesthetic, economic etc. goals of these “other others.” In this respect, the loyalty of the translator as secondary witness can never be wholly and exclusively be ascribed to the Holocaust survivor; there are no unique circumstances which might allow the translator of any published target text to stand outside the communicative context in which he or she operates. Such a position is doubtless implausible. But the impossibility of absolute loyalty does not exclude the very real possibility of privileging the original survivor’s account, of listening attentively despite, or even in the face of, the demands of other parties. For the translator is never an impartial mediator, situated squarely between source and target values; to think otherwise, according to Maria Tymozcko, leads to “the evisceration of the agency of the translator as a committed, engaged and responsible figure” (2007, 7). Indeed, the translator as secondary witness who purposely decides that their first and foremost obligation is to the survivor becomes the very embodiment of a translator as an ethically motivated agent. At the same time, this agency functions to dispel the similarly restrictive idea that translators are irrevocably beholden to the norms and expectations of the target culture. Of course, there may be implications for translation decisions that fall outside of established conventions and values; non- publication, censorship and poor sales are amongst the most obvious. But there is also a danger in overemphasizing the influence exerted by the target culture norms in the translation process. Siobhan Brownlie (2007, 155–157) has argued that adopting a broad normative approach has its blind spots since the specific motivations behind the decision to translate can vary from one text to the next, translation strategies may fluctuate within a given text, and there is often no neat concurrence between distinct norms and distinct time periods given the potential of norms to coexist, reappear or be challenged at any moment. In other words, the engaged translator will necessarily take the wider cultural context into consideration, but will proceed in accordance with their own agenda, be that in line with or in opposition to supposed prevailing norms. In her work Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimo- nials, Ethics and Aesthetics, Dorota Glowacka (2012) also gestures towards translation as an ethically charged act of bearing witness, where translation is understood to function on various levels in Holocaust testimonial writing: the original witness translates the self from past to present and often across multilingual contexts, while subsequent interlingual translations are framed in Levinasian terms as “a response to the summons from another language, the language of the other” (2012, 94). Glowacka also proceeds from the premise that the events of the Holocaust exist in the realm of the unspeakable, so that any act of witnessing will be suffused with communicative loss. Nevertheless, Walter Benjamin’s concept of “pure language” is proposed as restorative mode of telling; specifically, Glowacka suggests that the call of the other can be answered across Babelian disunities of language by means of translation that initiates “linguistic complementation” (Benjamin 2000, 21), namely the blending and synthesis of source and target languages that culminates in pure language. For Glowacka, a translation that responds ethically to the other is one that draws on multiple linguistic repertoires in order to transmit and ensure the survival of the testimony; only then can it transcend the limitations of the monolingual utterance. However, while this view of translation certainly calls attention to the responsibility of the interlingual translator in the witnessing process, numerous tensions arise if pure language is pressed into the service of concrete textual communication. First, the concept of pure language is an abstract one whose end goal is the elevation of language itself to an always distant point where language “no longer means or expresses anything but is […] that which is meant in all languages” (Benjamin 2000, 22). It is a matter of form alone, and its realization through translation “ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the innermost relationship of languages to one another” (2000, 17). Conversely, the translation of content is considered by Benjamin to be a redundant task: “any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information—hence, something inessential” (2000, 15). On the one hand, this conceptualization fits with discourses of unspeakability and trauma—the very act of telling, the manner in which it is told, is more important than what is told. But on the other, it is difficult to reconcile this stance with the demands of secondary witnessing: how will the referential function of a testimony endure if the task of the translator is to invariably defer meanings? And how will the relationship between the original and secondary witness be sustained if precedence is given to the relationship between languages? James E. Young cautions against an exclusive emphasis on poetics in Holocaust narratives: “By seeming to emphasize the ways we know the Holocaust to the apparent exclusion of the realities themselves, critics threaten to make the mere form of study their content as well” (1988, 3). This warning is particularly pertinent in the context of pure language which would seem to offer all but a restricted, abstruse mode of secondary witnessing; a mode that neglects the facts (as understood by the survivors) of existence and suffering, and one that certainly eschews over-identifi- cation, but does so by promoting the linguistic over and above the human. When we move from the abstract to the concrete to consider Benjamin’s proposal of literal translation strategies as a means of approaching pure language, obstacles to secondary witnessing are still discernible. According to Glowacka, Benjamin’s literalness will instigate a process whereby “native words are transformed from an inscription of belonging into the mark of strangeness” (2012, 99), and the translated testimony reader is forcefully confronted with and called to respond to the (multi)linguistic and experiential alterity of the other. The claim that translation, as a signal of difference, “can potentially stand guard against linguistic ethnonationalism, remaining vigilant against the sedimentation of words into tools of oppression, exclusion and discrimination” (2012, 99) strongly echoes Lawrence Venuti’s claim that foreignization “can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism” (1995, 20). But, although foreignizing translation can be revelatory and responsive to the needs of the other, it can also conceal under the weight of its impenetrability: as Tymoczko questions, “how do we distinguish resistant translations from translations that are unreadable?” (2000, 37). The danger here is that the reader finds nothing on which to hinge their reading and response, thereby rendering translation if not ineffectual as a mode of address, then at least diminished in what Glowacka regards as its “potential to create communities of speakers” (2012, 101). So, while Glowacka is right to insist on the ethical responsibility of the translator to preserve and transmit survivor testimonies, neither pure language nor its textualization as literal translation are perhaps the most enduring bridges across the divide between the other and the other other. Instead, the translator who serves as an ethically committed secondary witness is one who listens astutely and empathically to the survivor’s story, giving primacy to its preservation and not to any lofty ideas of pure language or the assumed demands of a target culture, all the while aware that some concessions must be made in the name of accessibility. Admittedly, though, discussions of the secondary witness have predominantly remained notional and detached from empirical practice. The following case studies will therefore direct attention towards more applied considerations of secondary witnessing in order to explore the implications of actual textual translation decisions, while also attempting to discern the extent to which pressure has been exerted by external factors. Given the ethical dimension of secondary witnessing, the comparisons between source and target testimonies will be openly evaluative. In this sense, my analytical stance is informed by Phil Goodwin who has challenged the displacement of ethical questions in translation by technical labels such as “free” or “literal,” “foreignizing” or “domesticating”; one of his aims is “to remind us that translation always takes place within a human context” (2010, 23) and, consequently, that it is “almost wilfully absurd to view the translation question in these circumstances as a purely technical one” (2010, 24). By consciously moving beyond the realm of objective description, the question of translation as secondary witnessing can thus be fully foregrounded as an ethical one. The stakes are high; the translator has a clear responsibility towards the Holocaust survivor, and, whether they have a conscious awareness of this obligation or not, the ways in which the translator (dis)continues the original act of witnessing merit a critical and a vigilant approach. Humbert and Maurel: translated experiences How have the translators of Humbert and Maurel engaged with the survivors’ stories and how have their translation decisions impacted on the process of secondary witnessing? Before turning to the analysis itself, it is worth briefly underscoring a basic premise of this study, namely that, although written accounts of the Holocaust may have been borne of an onerous struggle with language, such accounts should not be placed under the sign of the ineffable. This is not to deny the extremity of the events, but rather to acknowledge the efforts that witnesses have made to put their lived experiences into words. Accordingly, both content and form are fundamental to the transmission of survivor memory; neither can be omitted from the analytical approach. First, while there may be some slippage between lived experiences and their verbal representations, this should not undermine the potential of words to tell or to record. As Pascaline Lefort argues, “the existence of testimonies shows that the camp survivors [. . .] have successfully dealt with the unspeakable, moved beyond its limitations” (2012, 585, my translation), while Zoë Waxman likewise affirms that “[l]anguage may not be adequate to convey the horrors of the Holocaust, but this does not mean that nothing can be said” (2006, 175). In short, saying something is understood as the counterpoint to ineffability. Secondly, the form of that saying is also central to renouncing silence. Although Young’s (1988, 3) previously discussed warning against an exclusive focus on form is to be heeded, it would be equally restrictive to dismiss the revelatory function of poetics in Holocaust accounts, since, as Margaret-Anne Hutton contends, “such literary and rhetorical traits can be seen to function as aids to communication” (2005, 69). So, if the form and content of words have been simultaneously charged with the task of communication by the original witness, then the secondary witness is compelled to uphold and preserve those referential and aesthetic dimensions. The examples below will thus consider how and to what effect the translators have responded to the communicative efforts of Humbert and Maurel. On irony One of the most striking narrative features of the testimonies of both Maurel and Humbert is the way in which they draw on irony, verging on dark humor, in order to record their physical experiences and to signal their resistant stances in the face of such suffering. Referring to its use in Holocaust testimonies, Hutton has noted that “irony, as a non-literal mode, requires the reader to decode the unspoken message. When and if these conditions are met, a powerful bond based on what remains unsaid is created, and communication is intensified” (2005, 84). But for the reader of the translated testimony, this potential bond already hinges on an act of decoding, or hearing the unsaid, as carried out by the translator. Critically, if the translator does not pay sufficient heed to irony, then the voice of the survivor and the adverse conditions of which they speak risk being submerged in translation, which would mark a collapse of secondary witnessing. Maurel’s account is, from time to time, accentuated by litotic observations that are caustically delivered in a single sentence. Indeed, a good number of these have been heard and reinscribed in the English versions by her translator, Summers. Accordingly, where Maurel downplays her brutal treatment at the hands of the guards by remarking that “Il est apparu très vite que j’avais une tête à claques” (1957, 49), this sardonic tone is preserved in the translation as “It soon became apparent that my head invited blows” (1958, 39). And where Maurel declares that “C’est à cause de [Frau Schuppe] en grande partie que les Françaises mouraient si bien” (1957, 87), the mordant inflection is paralleled in English, where the reader learns that “It was mainly because of her that the French were dying in such satisfactory numbers” (1958, 71). By preserving Maurel’s irony, Summers offers the translation readers an insight into both the daily threat of punishment and death in the camps, as well as the survivor’s defiance in the face of such hardship. But certain restrictions seem to have been placed on the transfer of irony that is self-deprecating or particularly sensitive. In the first instance, Maurel, reflecting on her physical and emotional dishevelment, comments that “Nous devions être si ridicules à voir [We must have been such a ridiculous sight]” (1957, 81–82);6 in contrast, the translation lessens the derision in its more neutral estimation that “we must have presented an incongruous sight” (1958, 66). Secondly, Maurel is scathing in her critique of the unthinking way in which people responded to her return to France. The question most frequently posed to the survivor was whether she had been raped, leading her to react as follows: “Finalement, je regrettais d’avoir évité cela. J’avais manqué par ma faute une partie de l’aventure, et cela décevait le public. Heureusement que je pouvais au moins raconter le viol des autres [I came to regret having avoided that. Through fault of my own, I had missed out on a part of the adventure, and that disappointed the public. Fortunately, I could at least tell them about the rape of others]” (1957, 185). Although Summers retains the ironic sense of regret expressed by Maurel, a few telling attenuations of the full force of the irony occur in the translation. The survivor’s wry self-blame is first limited by the shift from the original active construction of “having avoided” rape to a much more passive state in which she “regretted having been spared this” (1958, 154, italics mine). Secondly, a tentative adverb is added to the passage: “Seemingly, by my own fault, I had missed one part of the adventure” (1958, 154, italics mine) which detracts once again from the sardonic notion that she is guilty by deliberate omission. In addition, the discordantly positive “Fortunately” of the original is replaced by a concessive adverb in the statement that “However, I could at least tell them of the rape of others” (1958, 154), which has the potential to be read in a more straightforward manner. 6 All back translations in square brackets are mine and they serve two purposes: as normal, they allow non-French speaking readers access to the original, but they also demonstrate that a more attentive translation is possible.  Perhaps these changes were motivated by a sense of probity on the part of the translator, but this lessening of Maurel’s irony effectively dampens a form of communication that the survivor relied on as both a means of communicating and of coping. Indeed, the cumulative effect of this strategy can be read in the Kirkus Review which describes the translation in the following terms: “More as a reminder, than as recrimination, this sensitive and softspoken memoir patterns the days spent over a period of two years in the concentration camp of Neubrandenburg” (n.d.). But the original is scathing, bold, outspoken. The review thus points to the potential of translation to fundamentally alter the tone of a given testimony. The piercing use of irony comes even further to the fore in Humbert’s writing, extending over entire passages. By way of illustration, Humbert describes the harmful and humiliating effects of working with acid in the rayon factory as follows: J’ai passé l’âge des costumes genre Folies-Bergère. L’acide brûle naturellement non pas seulement notre peau, mais il brûle aussi le tissu de notre uniforme. Chaque goutte fait un trou… plusieurs petits trous réunis en font un grand. […] Je fais voir à la gardienne que j’ai maintenant le sein gauche à l’air… elle a refusé de me faire donner une autre chemise, refusé une aiguillée de fil, refusé une épingle, il faudra que je travaille le sein à l’air ! [I’m past the age of wearing Folies-Bergère style costumes. Of course, the acid doesn’t just burn our skin, it burns the fabric of our uniform too. Each drop makes a hole… several small holes join up and make a large one. […] I let the female guard see that my left breast is hanging out now… she has refused to let me have another shirt, refused a needle and thread, refused a pin, I’ll just have to work with my breast hanging out!] (1946, 217) Although the translation starts off by capturing Humbert’s glib tone in the statement that “I really do believe I am too old for this Folies-Bergère lark” (2008, 161), the remainder of the episode is conveyed in a more dispassionate manner which conceals the original flippancy: The acid burns holes not only in our skin, but also, naturally, in our uniforms. Every drop makes a hole, and the little holes join up to make big holes. […] I have shown the wardress how my left breast is now on view.  She has refused to let me have a new shirt, a needle and thread, or a pin, declaring that I’ll just have to work as I am. (2008, 161) The comparative reduction in irony stems first from the shift in register from the irreverent allusion to “le sein à l’air,” her breast hanging out, to the more factual statement that “my left breast is now on view.” Mellor’s translation also neglects to repeat the phrase at the end of the passage and to retain the exclamation mark, thereby eliding the dry humor and self- ridicule of the original interjection. Another significant alteration comes at the same point in the translation with the introduction of reported speech as signaled by the verb “declaring.” So, whereas the free indirect speech of the original echoes Humbert’s attempt to make light of her deplorable work conditions, the translation effectively takes the words from the survivor’s mouth and reattributes them to the female guard. This is a move that strips Humbert’s words of the power to resist her inhumane treatment at the hands of the one who now speaks in her place. Also suppressed in this passage is Humbert’s use of aposiopesis whereby the unfinished sentences silently, but deliberately, communicate the frustrating impossibility of her situation. The translation reader is thus no longer called on to sense the futility that lies in these discontinuities, which in turn detracts from Humbert’s ironic treatment of the scene. In point of fact, the use of irony is diminished elsewhere in the translation through the reduction in or omission of exclamation points and ellipsis; such is the case, for example, in Humbert’s account of an underwear inspection (1946, 180; 2008, 130) and the shared drinking bowl (1946, 184-5; 2008, 134). The examples above reveal that, in some instances at least, the irony of both Maurel and Humbert has been palpably conveyed to the translation reader. At the same time, however, where the tone of that irony is neutralized, misappropriated, or its typographic markers discarded, the reader will be left with less immediate and identifiable clues on which to base their interpretation. If the irony should cease to function as such, then the critical and unyielding voice of the survivor is also submerged by and in translation, marking thus a collapse of secondary witnessing. On narrative time Lawrence Langer draws a fundamental distinction between the linear movement of “chronological time” and the more oblique dynamics of “durational time” in Holocaust testimonies, where the latter “relentlessly stalks the memory of the witness, imprinting there moments immune to the ebb and flow of chronological time” (1995, 22). This durational past does make its haunting presence felt in the accounts of Maurel and Humbert, albeit in different ways, with both survivors slipping between and across temporal perspectives in their shifting use of tense. The translator as secondary witness is then called on to listen attentively to the subtleties and significances of how the past is retold in the present of the survivor. The passage in which Maurel recounts her arrival and processing at Ravensbrück is a revelatory example of how tense and aspect can serve to unsettle the narrative and point towards the abiding anguish of the survivor. It opens with alternating moves between narration in an imperfect tense that intimates the horrifyingly unending nature of the ordeal for the survivor and the use of the infinitive, an impersonal and timeless form that reverberates with the inhumanity and ubiquity of the guards’ orders. This sequence is followed by a sudden shift to the present tense, heavy with the weight of inescapable immediacy and dread, while the subsequent use of the perfect tense situates the survivor in the close aftermath of the event to convey a transitory moment of reprieve: Les choses se passaient vite derrière les portes. Déposer les valises, se déshabiller en vitesse; on vous arrachait les vêtements à mesure. Se coucher sur une table, où une femme vous maintenait pendant qu’une autre explorait du doigt tous vous orifices naturels. S’asseoir sur un tabouret pour être tondue. Une main fourrage dans mes cheveux. Je n’ai pas été tondue cette fois. [Things were happening quickly behind the doors. Put down the suitcases, quickly get undressed; your clothes were being snatched away as you went along. Lie on a table where a women was holding you down while another was exploring all your natural orifices with a finger. Sit on a stool to be shorn. A hand rummages through my hair. I have not been shorn this time.] (Maurel 1957: 18, emphasis mine)  The translated narrative undergoes an aspectual reframe- ing that obscures the inescapable, interminable and durational thrust of the time to which these temporal manoeuvres attest in the original. Maurel’s arrival at the camp has been wholly recast by the translator in a simple past that dissembles the difficult relationship between the survivor and the lived experience: Things happened fast behind those doors: a moment to set the bags down, to undress quickly, hastened on by hands that reached out to tear the clothing off; a moment to lie on a table, where one woman held us down while another passed an exploring finger into all our natural orifices; a moment to sit on a stool to have our hair cut off. A hand rumpled my hair, but on this occasion I was not shorn. (1958, 13, emphasis mine) The elision of the present tense marks, above all, a breach of attentiveness on the part of the translator as it fails to herald what Oren Stier has termed “the palpable presence of the past […] [that] disrupts the space-time of the survivor” (2003, 87). But the use of the imperfect tense has also been passed over in the translation, leaving little indication that Maurel found herself suspended in the dreadful moments she described, while the replacement of the infinitive imperatives with the temporal phrase “a moment to” further masks the threatening persistence of the guards’ orders. Although objective details about Maurel’s arrival at the camp remain, the translation reader can no longer discern the more subjective painful blurring of temporal boundaries enacted by the survivor, and the appropriation of the narrative flow into one of chronological time therefore blunts the act of secondary witnessing. The use of the present tense in Holocaust writing is widely held to be a narrative marker of trauma. As Anne Whitehead explains, “This method of narration emphasizes the traumatic nature of the memories described, which are not so much remembered as re-experienced or relived” (2004, 35). However, an altogether different dynamic emerges from the writing of Humbert; her account begins with the diary entries made in the months prior to her arrest, and her ensuing experiences of imprisonment and deportation are also recounted in this immediate narrative style of the diarist. In his afterword to Mellor’s translation, Julien Blanc writes that Humbert “was consistent in using the present tense throughout” (2008: 275), but this statement is only partly true. On the one hand, the use of the present tense is undeniably frequent, signalling less the steely grip of durational time on the survivor, and more her own lucid control over chronological time. On the other hand, though, Humbert’s work does bear the traces of tense switching, from this dominant use of the present tense that speaks of resistance and strength to a sparing, but nevertheless compelling, use of the past tense that speaks too, in its own way, of defiance and escape. The following example is telling in its understated shift from the immediacy of the present to the completedness of the perfect tense, transitioning through free indirect speech back to the present in an episode that details the survivor’s increased suffering due to acid burns and her descent into the confines of the cellar where prisoners supposedly had the opportunity to convalesce. Humbert writes: Mes mains me font autant souffrir que les yeux ; j’ai connu, car j’étais seule à la cave, la signification de cette locution, « se taper la tête contre le mur » ; oui, j’ai tapé ma tête contre le mur, et puis je me suis reprise. [. . .] Pour mes mains, il faudrait des pansements humides, oui, mais il n’y avait pas d’eau… Alors, essayons autre chose. J’urine sur mes malheureuses mains, les chiffons qui me servent de pansements sont imprégnés de pipi… [My hands are making me suffer as much as my eyes; because I was alone in the cellar I’ve known the meaning of this saying, ‘to bang your head against the wall’; yes, I’ve banged my head against the wall, and then I’ve pulled myself together again. […] For my hands, some damp bandages would be needed, yes, but there was no water… So, let’s try something else. I urinate on my pitiful hands, the rags that serve me as bandages are soaked in pee. . .] (1946, 252, emphasis mine) Here, the slippage into the use of the past perfect tense might be read as an attempt on the part of the survivor to contain her most unnerving memory of the event, marking it off as one concluded, isolated incident before she finds the determination once more to take charge of her situation. If durational time is indeed pursuing Humbert, she turns its trap on itself to restrict and defy its reach, distancing herself temporally and emotionally from this horrific moment. The return to the present tense indicates thus a return to resistance, a return that is further paralleled in Humbert’s flippant lexical choice and the dry humor of her ellipsis. These fleeting, yet important, variations in narrative time are indiscernible in the translation, where the episode is retold consistently in the present tense: My hands are as agonizing as my eyes; finding myself alone in the cellar, I understand the true significance of the phrase “banging your head against a brick wall.” Yes, I bang my head against the wall. Then I pull myself together. […] What I need for my hands is damp dressings, but there is no water. So let’s try something else. I urinate on my wretched hands, soaking the rags that serve as dressings. (2008, 190, emphasis mine). The translator does not appear to have heard the undertones of defiance in Humbert’s singular step into the past; or, this move may have been ignored in a misled endeavor to unify the temporal aspect of the narrative. The result stands as a warning against the potential dangers of inattention and appropriation in secondary witnessing; the lack of aspectual contrast mitigates the force of Humbert’s renewed refusal to give up, while the omission of the ellipsis and self-deprecating tone once again hides the survivor’s tenacity in the face of suffering. On language For many prisoners, experience of the Nazi camps was also marked by a confrontation with and assimilation of the language of their German oppressors, but also the Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, to name but the predominant tongues, of their fellow prisoners. The result of this linguistic conflation was the emergence of a “Lagersprache,” a vernacular particular to the camps that was necessary for communication between the prisoners themselves, as well as between the guards and the prisoners. In her testimony, Humbert remarks that, rather than speak fluent German, “Je ne parle que ce charabia international, cet espéranto étrange que vingt million de déportés ont dû apprendre [I speak only this international gobbledygook, this strange esperanto that twenty million deportess have had to learn]” (1946, 296). Her narrative is interspersed with individual German words that resounded throughout her internment and served to shape her experience. Mellor retains, in large part, the echo of these discordant and often terrifying lexical items; by way of illustration, the English language reader is introduced to the concept of the “kommando” (2008, 115), to the “little coshes, known here as ‘gummi Knüppel’” (2008, 128, italics in the original), to the “Spinnerei, or rayon mill” (2008, 147, italics in the original) and to the markings, “G=Gefangene: convict” (2008, 148, italics in the original) on the prisoners’ work uniforms. Nevertheless, there are a few occasions on which the lexical specificity of the camps is subsumed into standard modes of expression by Mellor. First, Humbert’s observation that the food in the Ziegenhain prison is “acceptable, mais knap [sic]” (1946, 286, italics in the original), is simply remediated as “tolerable but scarce” (2008, 219), without any attempt to retain the German term. Consequently, the translation silences the linguistic hybridity and alterity of Humbert’s “strange Esperanto,” while simultaneously obscuring the misspelling (German: knapp) which attests to the survivor’s adequate but imperfect use of a German idiom, undoubtedly acquired as a result of constant food privations. In addition, the prisoners would often create new turns of phrase, or rework existing ones, to convey the extreme conditions of their existence. Such is the case when Humbert and her fellow inmates adapt an idiom to capture the caustic effects of working in the rayon factory: “Selon notre expression « mes yeux coulaient dans ma bouche »” [According to our expression, “my eyes were running in my mouth”] (1946, 245). The translation omits reference to the singularity of the expression and also undoes its distinctiveness, reverting instead to the recognizable idiom of “eyes streaming” (2008, 184). The reader is at once disallowed access to the extent of the suffering and the process of linguistic inventiveness that characterized life in the camps. Language too plays a prominent role in the testimony of Maurel which bears the traces of the German, Polish and Russian with which she came into contact. Summers’ transla- tion, in turn, demonstrates a keen sensitivity to these markers of otherness, preserving a vast array of German orders (Raus!; Schnell!; Aufstehen!), insults (Schweinehund; Schmutzstück), and the nomenclature that designates the reality of the camps (Revier; Verfügbar; Strafstehen; Kretze). Snatches of Russian and Polish are also to be heard in the translation, while verses of French poetry and song are retained in their original form and then followed by their interpretation in English. The preservation strategy is an effective one, serving to provide a distant reverberation of the Babelian disquiet that prevailed in the camps. It is only on the rare occasion that the non-translation is discontinued, that the real force of appropriation comes to the fore. Notably, this occurs when the German command “Achtung!” (1957, 50, italics in the original) is articulated in the translation as “Atten-shun!” (1958, 40). Instead of a German imperative, an order now rings out that suggests the diction of a stereotypical British sergeant major in an act of appropriation that closes the reader off from a distinguishing verbal feature of the camps. Of further linguistic significance is the process whereby Maurel and her companions “Frenchify” some of the camp vocabulary: “Nous avons transformé Kopftuch en « coiffe- tout », Schüssel en « jusselle », Nachtschicht en « narchiste », Schmutzstück en « schmoustique ». Et les brutes en uniforme qui nous surveillaient, les Aufseherinnen était pour nous les « officerines »” [We transformed Kopftuch/headscarf into “coiffe-tout,” Schüssel/bowl into “jusselle,” Nachtschicht/ nightshift into “narchiste,” Schmutzstück/piece of dirt into “schmoustique.” And the brutes in uniform who guarded us, the Aufseherinnen/female overseers were for us the “officerines”] (1957, 15, italics in the original). This assimilation of German words into a French pronunciation resonates with Reiter’s reflection that “The highest priority for concentration camp prisoners was to lessen the alien character of their experience. They were helped in this if they could name new things with their existing vocabulary and thus include them in the horizon of the familiar” (2000, 99). However, the significance of this use of language as survival has been overlooked by Summers who, in her translator’s preface, begins by explaining the etymology and pronunciation of “coiffe-tout,” “schmoustique,” and “officerine,” but then goes on to undermine the prevalence and dismiss the importance of the remaining terms, claiming: “Certain other words, like Schüssel, a bowl or basin, pronounced jusselle by the French, Nachtschicht, nightshift, which became narchiste, occur only once or twice in the French text and have been omitted in this translation for simplicity’s sake, though they might have added local colour” (1958, 10). This approach to the survivor’s own appropriation of the German words attests to a further act of appropriation on the part of the translator, one that fails to heed the importance of the re-naming process. For these words lend more than a touch of “local colour” to the depiction of life in the camps; they represent a strategy of survival and of resistance. Evidently, Summers has made the decision to privilege simplicity over complexity in order to facilitate a more fluid reading experience in English. In so doing, though, Summers also closes the reader off from the entangled linguistic landscape of the camps and from Maurel’s coping mechanism amidst the unfamiliar. At this point, the translation strategy stands as a barrier to secondary witnessing. On accuracy Survivor testimonies are generally not held to be reliable sources of fact given the reconstructive fallibility of memory and the alleged representational failings of words. As Aleida Assman has noted, “The survivors as witness do not, as a rule, add to our knowledge of factual history; their testimonies have, in fact, often proved inaccurate” (2006, 263). But this does not preclude the possibility that, at any moment in the telling, survivors can fully and precisely convey the kind of empirical, objective information valued by historians.7 Although it may reasonably be presumed that this latter type of information is more readily discernible and less problematic for the translator as secondary witness, the following example from Summers’ translation of Maurel’s testimony would suggest otherwise. At the beginning of her account, Maurel records that: Le convoi dont je faisais partie […] a été immatriculé à Ravensbrück sous les numéros 22.000. J’étais le numéro 22.410. Au bout d’un mois de quarantaine, le convoi des 22.000 a été envoyé à Neubrandebourg [The convey I was part of […] had been registered in Ravensbrück in the 7 For a discussion of how historians have rejected personal testimony on the basis of its supposed inaccuracies, see Laub 1992, 59–63.  22,000s. I was number 22,410. After a month in quarantine, the convoy of the 22,000s was sent to Neubrandenburg]” (1957, 13). As prisoners entered the concentration and work camps, they were assigned a matriculation number; for Maurel’s particular French convoy, registration began at the number 22,000 and her own number was 22,410. However, it becomes clear that Summers has misinterpreted this numerical information as in the English version we read that the convoy was “registered and given numbers. I was number 22,410. At the end of a month of quarantine, the 22,000-odd were sent to Neubrandenburg” (1958, 8, emphasis mine). Here, the number that assigns identity to the group—that is, the “convoy of the 22,000s”—has been misattributed by Summers to the size of the group. Nor is this erroneous tally an isolated occurrence, for the translator then reworks Maurel’s observations in Chapter Four in line with her own reckonings. Consequently, where Maurel documents that “En automne 1943 le camp de Neubrandebourg contenait environ 2.000 femmes [In the autumn of 1943 the Neubrandenburg camp contained around 2,000 women]” (1957, 38), that “le convoi des 22.000 était pourtant bien mélangé [the convoy of the 20,000s was nevertheless well mixed]” in terms of political and religious beliefs (ibid., 41) and that “nous étions 2.000 sur le terrain [there were 2,000 of us on the parade ground]” (ibid., 46), Summers purports that “the camp at Neubrandenburg contained approximately 22,000 women” (1958, 30), the French “numbered 2,000” (ibid., 32) and the camp was “22,000 strong on the parade ground” (ibid., 37). Whether the reversal of the numbers stems from a misplaced attempt on the part of the translator to “correct” an inferred inaccuracy can itself only be surmised. But it does seem as though Summers was not fully aware of the dehumanizing Nazi practice of replacing prisoner names with numbers. Nor does Summers appear to have an understanding of the camp classification system of colored markings. Following liberation, Maurel has her friend remake “mon numéro et mon triangle rouge [my number and my red triangle]” (1957: 171) in order to avoid being mistaken for a German; these items are stripped of their specificity and their personal resonance for Maurel in the translation as “a triangle and some numerals” (1958: 143). The implications of such an inattentive treatment of the serial numbers and statistics are such that, not only does Summers obscure the imposed identity of the convoy, but the capacity of the labor camp is also inflated well beyond its actual dimensions. In line with Maurel, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos places the number of female prisoners in Neubrandenburg at “almost 2,000 at the end of February 1944” (Strebel 2009, 1215); the translation thus runs the risk of misinforming its readership, and of giving ammunition to the Holocaust deniers who “are quick to seize upon errors and inaccuracies in witness accounts” (Hutton 2005, 33). Regrettably, the errors and inaccuracies in this case are all those of the translator; worse, they have made their way into both reviews and scholarship, as a result of which the misinformation becomes more broadly disseminated. In 1959, the Catholic Herald printed a review of Ravensbrück in which it is noted that at Neubrandenburg “some 22,000 women, including 2,000 French, were engaged in munition works” (1959, 3). The Kirkus Review similarly goes on to record that “Neubrandenburg numbered some 22,000 women” (n.d.) on the basis of the translation, while the entry for Maurel in The Jewish Holocaust: An Annotated Guide to Books in English also states that “Over 22,000 women were sent to Neubrandenburg during the war” (1995, 192). Of even more significance is Rochelle G. Saidel’s (2004) work, The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Drawing explicitly on the English translation of Maurel’s account, Saidel challenges the statistics of another scholar as follows: “Morrison cites Maurel that there were two thousand women in the camp in late 1943, but she wrote there were twenty-two thousand women,” and she then refers the reader to An Ordinary Camp (the title under which the US edition was published) “regarding this discrepancy” (ibid., 250n. 12). Of course the unfortunate irony here is that the real discrepancy is to be found in the translation, not the original. In reference to Holocaust scholarship, Kuhiwczak notes that “large quantities of primary source material have been translated into English, and many conclusions have been drawn from texts read only in translation” (2007, 62). The above is a clear example of how translation can substantially (in both senses of the word) alter this interpretation of the camps that is presented to the translation receiver. And yet, in the face of such distortion, it is also important to bear in mind that translation has the potential to retransmit the accuracy and precision with which life in the camps has been reported in the original testimony. Such is the case in Mellor’s translation of Humbert’s account; although the survivor focuses less on the quantitative dimensions of the various camps to which she is sent, there is sustained evidence of a high degree of concordance between the details presented by the primary and secondary witnesses. Take for example the exactitude with which the classification system at Krefeld has been explained in the translation: “The Russian girls have a label sewn on their clothes, a little rectangle of blue material with the word ‘Ost’ in white” while the Polish women wear a “yellow lozenge with a dark-blue ‘P’” (2008, 132, italics in the original). Similarly, the complex mechanical process Humbert was forced to learn in the rayon factory has been recorded with careful adherence to the original telling, to reveal the torturous work of the spinner who, amongst other tasks, “grasps the filament in her left hand and, holding it between her index and middle fingers, takes it on to the glass wheel, follows it through and pulls it towards the funnel slightly” (2008, 153). There does appear to be one isolated instance in which Mellor has misheard the dynamics of life in the camps. The bartering (and theft) of commodities was widespread amongst prisoners, and Humbert recounts that “Mon amie Martha […] me promet, contre deux tartines, de me ravoir ma défroque [My friend Martha […] promises, in return for two slices of bread, to get my old rag back for me]” (1946, 204, italics mine). However, it would seem that Mellor has heard “entre” as opposed to “contre,” and thus reworks the situation into one where Martha “promises me between two slices of bread that she will get my old rag back” (2008, 150). Although evidence of the theft remains in the translation, one of the common and vital practices that shaped the (often and necessarily unscrupulous) relationship between prisoners has been obscured on the basis of a prepositional slip. Nevertheless, Mellor’s translation rigorously attends to the cruel physical realities of the labor camps as experienced by Humbert, thereby attesting to the re-presentational contingencies of interlingual secondary witnessing. Memory mediation in context It goes without saying that the translator is not the only figure involved in the transmission of the survivor’s account; when a translation appears, its packaging and intended audience are all shaped, to some degree, by context of production. By this token, the readership (the “other others”) that the translator as secondary witness reaches and their response to the testimony will be in large part be determined by the publisher, and not least by the ways in which the account is reframed by paratextual material. Although it is difficult to reconstruct a comprehensive account of all the editorial and contextual factors that have influenced the translations of Summers and Mellor, and therefore their reception, it is nevertheless possible to retrace some of the wider sociocultural and economic backdrop against which they appeared and offer some suggestions as to how the process of secondary witnessing is affected under such circumstances. Despite the parallels between the original testimonies of Humbert and Maurel in terms of referential content and style, the moment of publication and the paratextual presentation of the English translations differ widely. Whereas the translation of Maurel’s account is separated from its source text by just one year (i.e. 1957 to 1958), Humbert’s work does not appear in English until some sixty years after its publication in France (i.e. 1946 to 2008). This discrepancy may in part be explained by the dynamics of both the source and target cultures, and in particular by changes in the prevailing attitudes towards survivor accounts. To begin with Humbert’s Notre guerre, its appearance in France in 1946 came at a moment when the literary field was becoming (over-)saturated with testimonial writing from recently returned deportees. According to Damien Mannarion, the accounts which appear between 1944 and 1951 are not simply motivated by a desire to tell: “in this period when [the survivors] say “remember,” they are really addressing their contemporaries and not future generations, […] they want to denounce those responsible and see them condemned” (1998, 20, my translation). Given both the volume of published accounts and the contextual immediacy of their goals (acknowledgment of and justice for their sufferings), Humbert’s source text may well have been rendered invisible to British publishers or translators alike. Neither was there an expansive audience for any such translation in the target audience at that time. This is not to suggest that British readers were closed to accounts from the Nazi camps; on the contrary, the problem, as identified by David Cesarani, was one of a market flooded by very raw, disturbing writing, as a consequence of which readership began to dwindle: “Reading these memoirs and testimonies it is easy to understand why, by the end of the 1940s, the public turned away” (2012, 20). And so source and target conditions contrived to obscure Humbert’s work. But in France, a recovery of her writing was instigated by the publishing house Tallandier in 2004 when they issued a re- edition of Notre guerre, thereby introducing the survivor to a new, broader audience. The text’s journey was succinctly described by Daniel Rondeau, a journalist for L’Express, as follows: “out of sight for years, often quoted by historians, here is Notre guerre once again” (2004, n.p.). However, there seems to be no direct link between the appearance of the new French edition and the introduction of Humbert to English readers in translation, for this second recovery came about only when Mellor happened across the original 1946 edition on French ebay (Mellor, 2008, np.) and initiated the translation process herself. Likewise, the English version of Maurel’s Un camp très ordinaire appeared as a direct result of the translator. In this case, though, the link was of a more personal nature since Summers and Maurel shared a mutual acquaintance. According to a reviewer in The Vassar Chronicle: Mrs. Margaret Summers of the French Department has just completed a translation of AN ORDINARY CAMP by Micheline Maurel. […] Mrs. Summers became interested in this factual account of the author’s life in a German concentration camp through Mlle. Louisiene [Lucienne] Idoine, formerly of the Vassar French Department. Mlle. Idoine met Mlle. Maurel, the author of the original version at the German concentration camp of Ravenbruck [sic]. […] Mrs. Summers decided to undertake the translation  of Mlle. Maurel’s book, for she wanted people to know about these German camps. (1958, 3) The relatively quick appearance of the target text can thus be explained through the biographical circumstances of the translator, as well as her desire to raise awareness of Nazi atrocities. For even though the translation was published more than a ten years after the liberation of the camps, Anglo- American audiences would still not have been familiar then with the full scale and horror of the events we now know as the Holocaust.8 As Andy Pearce has argued, “We cannot speak of ‘Holocaust consciousness’ in the opening postwar decade or so no simply because the substantive concept of ‘the Holocaust’ did not yet exist, but because […] there remained considerable ignorance, ambiguity and variance” (2014, 12–13). Indeed, this rather patchy understanding is likely to have extended to Summers herself and may go some way to explaining some of her more problematic translation decisions, especially the treatment of the Lagersprache and matriculation numbers as discussed above. Events in the source culture may also have had a bearing on the appearance of Summers’ translation, for the prominence of Un camp très ordinaire was greatly enhanced by the involvement of François Mauriac who helped to secure its publication in 1957.9 Interest in survivor testimonies was on the wane in France at this time, and Mauriac felt a duty to remember “an abomination that the world has determined to forgot” (1957, 9, my translation). His presence as a preface writer inevitably lent weight and authority to the source text, and so, while Summers may have shared Mauriac’s ideological agenda, the additional symbolic and potential economic capital generated by his name would also have been appealing to Anglo-American publishers. Both Mellor and Summers then played integral roles in bringing the testimonies of Humbert and Maurel respectively to an English-speaking readership. But target culture publishers also made an undeniable contribution to this process of transmission, and a close examination of 8 The Eichmann trial is, at this point, still some years off. See Annette Wieviorka (2006) for a discussion of how the trial came to be a global watershed moment in Holocaust witnessing. 9 A year later, Mauriac would also help to bring about the publication of Elie Wiesel’s La nuit. editorial paratext can reveal some of their underlying motivations and agendas. What is instantly remarkable about Bloomsbury’s publication of Humbert’s account is the use of a modified title. Rather than adopt a literal translation of the original—that is, “Our War: Diary of Resistance 1940–1945,” the publisher has instead opted for Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France. On the one hand, this alteration can perhaps be explained by the reticence, first, to retain a possessive marker that would jar in a new cultural setting, and secondly, to present the work as a diary when only parts of the work can be claimed as such. But on the other hand, the revised title introduces some misconstruals of its own; for the account is not restricted in scope to Humbert’s time in an occupied France, but rather, the greatest proportion of the work deals with her experiences as a deportee. Indeed, this discrepancy has been noted by historian Simon Kitson who remarks in his review of the translation that “the English title is slightly misleading. Whilst the author’s spirit of resistance is present throughout, almost two-thirds of the book is set in Nazi Germany” (2008, n.p.). Furthermore, the cover graphics which show two lovers on the banks of the Seine, with a barbed-wire barricade in the foreground, also accentuates an occupied Paris that figures only in the beginning of the memoir. It may well be the case that cynical ploys of marketing lie behind this repositioning of focus; it is perhaps no coincidence that the cover image in many respects mirrors that of Suite Française, the highly successful novel written by Holocaust victim Irène Némirovsky and published in English translation by Chatto and Windus in 2006. Likewise, the revised subtitle, “Memoirs of Occupied France” also suggests a thematic correlation with the latter. Rather than present the work on its own terms, the publisher may have skewed its title in line with market forces. However, within the covers of the translation, the reader is afforded an abundance of supporting editorial and allographic paratextual material, including a preface by writer William Boyd, photographic illustrations, an afterword by French historian Julien Leblanc (who provided the introduction to the French 2004 re-edition of the work), historical documents on the Resistance movement, and a bibliography for further reading. In contrast to, or perhaps as compensation for, the title of the work, this material ensures that the interested reader has the opportunity to arrive at a more informed understanding of Humbert’s experiences, her character and her writing style. The first UK edition of Maurel’s Un camp très ordinaire was published in 1958 by Digit Books (an imprint of Brown Watson publishers) under the tile Ravensbrück, leaving the Catholic Herald reviewer unable to answer the “mystery why it should have been misleadingly re-christened” (1959, 3). One possible reason may be that Ravensbrück was becoming more recognizable to Anglo-American readers as part of the Nazi apparatus. For example, in 1954 Lord Russell published his book The Scourge of the Swastika which “enjoyed immense commercial success” (Pearce 2014, 16) and contained details of Ravensbrück and sketches of the camp drawn by former inmate Violette Lecoq, meaning that knowledge of its deadly function was expanding. The book cover also makes the prominent claim that the work is “As Real as THE DIARY of ANNE FRANK…” (1958, emphasis in the original), thereby suggesting that the publishers were tapping into an existing market demand for Holocaust writing, especially given the bestselling success of the latter’s translation in 1952. But other factors suggest that interest in the work was being generated not along the lines of understanding, but of sensationalism. At the top of the cover is the quote from a Sunday Times reviewer that this is “a coarse, savage book.” Below this appears the bold and fallacious depiction of a voluptuous, perfectly coiffed, red-lipped prisoner who bears more than a passing resemblance to Vivian Leigh, gripping a barbed-wire fence, and dressed in a well-tailored, low-cut khaki dress. For Maurel’s work has found its way on to the list of a publisher who caters for an audience that enjoys tales of derring-do such as Jungle Pilot, Against the Gestapo and Conscript. Interestingly, writer Ken Worpole recalls his own experiences of Ravensbrück in his work on popular literature in Britain, placing it on a list of nineteen WWII-related titles (mostly written by men) that “were sold in millions and read in even larger numbers” (1983, 50). The popularity of these books appears to have been enormous, with Worpole claiming that “they were the staple reading diet of myself and my school peers, and the sales figures also suggest that they were the staple reading diet of the adult male British reading public, and, possibly, of a significant portion of the female reading public” (1983, 50–51). But Worpole also sounds a strong note of concern about the way in which the Digit Books edition has been visually presented to its readers, defining it “as part of the pornography of sadism” (1983, 64). There can be no doubt the cover sets out to titillate, not educate; it sells a sexualized image of the survivor, rather than depict the arduous, unrelenting conditions of her captivity. Worse still is the US edition issued by Belmont in 1958 whose cover page depicts a distressed, yet appealing, blond behind whom stands a menacing SS figure, whip in hand. The original title has also been eschewed in favor of The Slave, while the cover carries an extract from Maurel’s text (but wrongly attributed to Mauriac) that asks “Were you raped? Were you beaten? Were you tortured?” and in so doing, overtly fetishizes the testimony. Unquestionably, these two publishers are extreme in their misappropriation; other editions released in the US by Simon and Schuster (1958) under the title An Ordinary Camp and in the UK by Anthony Blond (1958) as Ravensbrück are more muted in their cover design, opting instead for a plain barbed-wire motif. Nevertheless, both Digit Books and Belmont serve as an example of how publishers are positioned as initial gatekeepers to the survivor’s story, attracting a particular type of reader seeking action or cheap thrills. If Mauriac was troubled about forgetting in the source culture in the 1950s, there are parallel concerns to be raised in the target culture about the dubious ways in which the Holocaust was being remembered then. The last issue to be addressed in reference to the framing of the target texts is that of the translatorial paratext. 10 In Résistance, Mellor has provided a “Translator’s Acknowl- edgements” section in which she thanks those who helped in the process and alludes to her reasons for undertaking the translation of the original: “Surely it deserved to be more widely known? Surely it should be made available in an English 10I use this term as a means of supplementing Genette’s (1987) paradigm of authorial, editorial, and allographic paratext in order to carve out a more visible and definite space for the translator. See also Deane-Cox 2014, 27–29. translation?” (2008, vi). There are also extensive “Translator’s Notes” (2008, 325–357) at the back of the work which provide detailed explanations of references in the text to people, places and events. As discussed above, Summers also establishes her presence around the text by means of the “Translator’s Note” which focuses on the use of Lagersprache and Maurel’s Frenchification of certain words (1958, 10–11). So, although the translatorial paratext is a clear signal to the reader that they are reading a text in translation, neither translator provides any sustained or penetrating reflection on the challenges and possibilities they may have confronted during their engagement with the source text. I would like to argue that the paratext offers a space in which the translator can make explicit their role as secondary witness, in contrast to the text itself where “the task of the listener is to be unobtrusively present” (Laub 1992, 71). Accordingly, the position of the translator as secondary witness can be mapped once more on to that of the interviewer for the Fortunoff project. Hartman observes that throughout the recording process, “the interviewers are almost completely out of sight [and] seem not to intrude into the testimony, even as they continue to direct it” (Young 1988, 166). In the same way as the interviewers are visible on the margins of the screen, so too can the translator be visible on the margins of the text, whether in a preface, in footnotes or any other form of translatorial paratext. This peripheral material can thus function as a record of how the translator has interacted with the original witness, how they have elicited and facilitated the transmission of a testimony from one setting to another, what obstacles they might have encountered, and how they regard their own ethical responsibility. Trezise has noted that, in the video testimonies, “the audible and occasionally visible presence of the interviewer(s) lends to the dialogical relation of witnessing a concreteness far removed from what may seem, in written testimony, to be only a disembodied interaction of pronouns” (2013, 34). The translator as secondary witness can thus add a concrete dimension to the transmission process by acknowl- edging their own role as listener to and perpetuator of the original act of witness. In so doing, the community of receivers will be more informed, more alert to any potential barriers to communication and more conscious of the survivor behind the pronouns. Conclusion: Remembering Forwards Translation, as a mode of remembering forwards, is not an unshakable one. Despite resisting a more perfidious and total lapse of memory, the above inquiry has shown that translation equally has the potential to distort, amongst other aspects, the factual, linguistic and tonal qualities encoded in the original telling, while paratextual material can also function as a site of appropriation and transformation. The extent to which a translator listens closely to the original telling may be the result of numerous factors: over-identification with the survivor, the onset of secondary trauma that leads to a distancing or a numbing of the translator, or, more prosaically, the temporal and editorial constraints imposed by publishers. In turn, the listening realized by the translator has the capacity to shape the response of the reader to the events of the past. In other words, the manner in which the reader positions him or herself on an ethical and epistemological level in relation to the Holocaust, as well as to the specific struggles of the survivors, will hinge on the strength and integrity of the bond established between the original and secondary witness. It has also become evident that the ties of that bond hold more securely in some parts of a translation than in others; within the boundaries of a given text, translation can serve either as an empathic re-telling or as a trespass. Granted, this article has given more space to what, following Antoine Berman (2000), could be termed a “negative analytic” of translation, the emphasis here being on the forces that deform the survivor’s account. Peter Davies has warned against such a focus on the negative in reference to Holocaust translations, claiming that “What is missing from the discussion of translation is a sense of the far-reaching achievement [of translators]. If we move beyond melancholy reflections on loss, we are able to shed a much fuller light on the role that translation and translators have played” (2014, 166–167). However, the reasoning behind my negative approach is twofold. First, the wider empirical evidence that emerged from my comparative analyses had a discouraging tendency to point in this direction, particularly in the Summers translation; the examples discussed above are a small, but representative sample of this trend. Secondly, the study should in no way be understood as a personal attack against the translators, but rather, as a means of accentuating the very real transgressive potential of translation as a form of secondary witnessing. By flagging up the lapses in secondary witnessing in these texts and underlining the translation strategies from which they stemmed, it becomes possible to inform future Holocaust translation practice and to prevent such breaks in transmission from reoccurring elsewhere. It may well be the case that the all-hearing, non- appropriating figure of the secondary witness is an impossible ideal, but this does not mean that it is not one worth striving for. Speaking more broadly about the readers of Holocaust narratives, Colin Davis points out that “the best we can do may be to try to attend as honourably as possible to the traces of that which remains foreign to us” (2011, 40). Similarly, Francis Jones has proposed some basic guidelines for the translator working in sensitive circumstances, namely “a principle of maximum awareness of ethical implications together with one of least harm” (2004, 725). And so the translator as secondary witness is one who undertakes to be attentive and self-reflexive, and who weighs the better part of translation decisions in favor of the survivor. Although some of these endeavors will inevitably fall short of their mark, the crucial step is in the trying. It has often been noted in recent times that the need to document Holocaust testimonies is growing as the survivors themselves diminish in number. As these accounts continue to be committed to paper or audiovisual media, or are recovered from the past, so too does the potential increase for the communicative force of translation be brought consciously and effectively into the service of the original witness and the perpetuation of his or her memory. References “An Ordinary Camp.” Review of Ravensbrück, by Micheline Maurel, translated by Margaret M. Summers. Kirkus Reviews. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/micheline-maurel/an- ordinary-camp/. Assmann, Aleida. 2006. “History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony.” Poetics Today 27(2): 261–273. “Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. How Much We Must Learn!” 1959. Review of Ravensbrück, by Micheline Maurel, translated by Margaret M. Summers. Catholic Herald, April 3. 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Humbert, Agnès. 1946/2004. Notre guerre: Journal de Résistance 1940- 1945. Paris: Tallandier. ———. 2008. Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France. Translated by Barbara Mellor. London: Bloomsbury. Hutton, Margaret-Anne. 2005. Testimony from the Nazi Camps: French women’s voices. London & New York: Routledge. Jones, Francis. 2004. “Ethics, Aesthetics and Décision: Literary Translating in the Wars of the Yogoslav Succession.” Meta: journal des traducteurs/ Meta: Translators’ Journal 49 (4): 711–728. Kansteiner, Wulf and Harald Weilnböck. 2008. “Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma or How I Learned to Love the Suffering of Others without the Help of Psychotherapy.” In Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 229–240. Berlin: De Gruyter. Kershaw, Angela. 2014. “Complexity and unpredictability in cultural flows: two French Holocaust novels in English translation.” Translation Studies 7(1): 34–49. ———. 2014. “Intertextuality and Translation in Three Recent French Holocaust Novels.” Translation and Literature 23: 185–196. King, Beverley R. 2009. “Repressed and recovered memory.” In 21st Century Psychology: A Reference Handbook, edited by Stephen Davis and William Buskist, 450–460. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Kitson, Simon. 2008. “Agnès Humbert’s Wartime Diary ‘Résistance.’” The New York Sun, September 24. http://www.nysun.com/arts/agnes- humberts-wartime-diary-resistance/86444/. Kuhiwczak, Piotr. 2007. “Holocaust Writing and the Limits of Influence.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 43 (2): 161-172. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Langer, Lawrence. 1995. Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays. New York: Oxford University Press Laub, Dori. 1991. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle”. American Imago 48(1): 75-91. ———. 1992. “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening”. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 57–74. London and New York: Routledge. Lefort, Pascaline. 2012. “Le dire impossible et le devoir de dire: des gloses pour dire l’indicible.” SHS Web of Conferences. Volume 1 of 3e Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française: 583–597. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20120100041. Leys, Ruth. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mannarion, Damien. 1998. “La mémoire déportée.” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah; le monde juif 162: 12–42. Maurel, Micheline. 1957. Un camp très ordinaire. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. ———. 1958. An Ordinary Camp. Translated by Margaret M. Summers. New York: Simon and Schuster. ———. 1958. Ravensbrück. Translated by Margaret M. Summers. London: Anthony Blond. ———. 1958. Ravensbrück. Translated by Margaret M. Summers. London: Digit Books. ———. 1958. The Slave. Translated by Margaret M. Summers. New York: Belmont Books. Mauriac, François. 1957. Preface to Un camp très ordinaire, by Micheline Maurel. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Mellor, Barbara. 2008. “Bold defiance in Nazi Paris.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7634000/7634154.stm. “M. Summers Translates French Book Describing Life in Concentration Camps.” 1958. The Vassar Chronicle, December 13. http://newspaperarchives.vassar.edu/cgi- bin/vassar?a=d&d=vcchro19581213-01.2.19. Pearce, Andy. 2014. Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain. London: Routledge. Reiter, Andrea. 2000. Narrating the Holocaust. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London & New York: Continuum. Rondeau, Daniel. 2004. “Nous étions des enfants.” Review of Notre guerre by Agnès Humbert. L’Express, December 6. http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/notre-guerre-souvenirs-de- resistance_820118.html. Saidel, Rochelle G. 2004. The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. Stier, Oren Baruch. 2003. Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Strebel, Bernhard. 2009. “Neubrandenburg.” Translated by Stephen Pallavicini. In The United States Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, Volume I, edited by Geoffrey P. Megargee, 1215–1216. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 1996. “Monuments in a Foreign Tongue: On Reading Holocaust Memoirs by Emigrants.” Poetics Today 17(4): 639–657. Trezise, Thomas. 2013. Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony. New York: Fordham University Press. Tymoczko, Maria. 2000. “Translation and Political Engagement: Activism, Social Change and the Role of Translation in Geopolitical Shifts.” The Translator 6(1): 23-47. ———. 2007. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Waxman, Zoë. 2006. Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitehead, Anne. 2004. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. The Era of the Witness, translated by Jared Stark. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Worpole, Ken. 1983. Dockers and Detectives. London: Verso Editions. Young, James, E. 1988. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. joined the University of Strathclyde as a lecturer in translation and interpreting in 2016, having previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, where she also completed her PhD in 2011. Her research is anchored in the field of Translation Studies, but currently intersects with Memory Studies, Holocaust Studies, and Museum Studies. She is particularly interested in the translation of French individual and collective memories of occupation and deportation during World War II. She is author of the monograph Retranslation: Translation, Literature and Reinterpretation (2014) and a member of the IATIS Regional Workshops Committee. 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15533

Abstract: This article explores how memory—the central issue of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977)—has induced a specific type of writing that makes its translation a more challenging task in terms of stylistic, lexical, and syntactical choices. Tayo, the main character, is haunted by painful memories of his traumatic war experience, powerful nightmares and daytime visions blending seamlessly into the vacuity of his present life on the reservation. However, memory is also a healing force when it means going back to the traditional Indian way and adapting it to the broken present. Silko navigates between storytelling and storywriting, weaving a circular vision of time into the linear format of the novel and bridging the gap between her Indian ancestry and her white academic education. Translating Ceremony raises many interesting issues, three of which are discussed here: the treatment of intermingling narratives whose chronology the readers have to reconstruct for themselves, the network of echoes and repetitions that structure the novel, and the description of the Indian landscape. The article finally asserts that translation contributes to the circulation of memory and is a positive force ensuring the survival of texts written to resist acculturation. Introduction Ceremony is a landmark publication in the advent of Native American literature. Published in 1977 by Leslie Marion Silko, it received much critical acclaim and soon became a commercial success and was translated intoseveral foreign language (Norwegian, German, Japanese, Italian, French, Dutch). It is often part of the selection of Native American novels on university syllabi next to House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1968) and The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch (1979). Those are the titles readers remember as they have become the “memory” of Native American literary Renaissance. Whether they should be seen in terms of “ethnic minority fiction” or as part of mainstream American fiction is subject to debate. For instance, Joseph Bruchac states that the “‘mainstream’ in America is being turned back by a tide of multiculturalism” (Bruchac 1994, xviii). According to Robert N. Nelson, Native American novels have distinct features that set them apart: their authors are “Native American” (like the protagonists), the settings “include Indian reservations,” they allude to, or widely incorporate, “tribal traditions” 1 (Nelson 1993, 3). As a consequence some of their content is perceived as being difficult to grasp for the readers who are not “tribally literate” (to use Nelson’s word), those who do not share the memory of the tribal heritage. Memory is an essential dimension to Native American fiction and to Ceremony. According to Robert Dale Parker, Native American Literature was “invented” by “Indian writers,” drawing on both “Indian and literary traditions” (Parker 2003, 1). In trying to keep tribal culture alive, Native American writers have explored memory in different ways. Memory is what is left of all that has been destroyed and eradicated by colonization, industrialization, and forced assimilation. It is the main force enabling Native Americans to resist acculturation. Cultural memory was traditi- onally transmitted through storytelling, an endangered activity in a world ruled by the written word, where communities and families have been increasingly scattered across the whole 1 The choice of the most appropriate word to designate the people from Native American tribes is still highly controversial. The issue has not yet been settled, which explains what may seem like confusion in most essays and books about Native American art and fiction. Christina Berry writes in her article published on the All Things Cherokee website: “So what is it? Indian? American Indian? Native American? First Americans? First People? We all hear different terms but no one can seem to agree on what to call us” (Berry, 2013). Although the word “Native American” seems more neutral, many Native Americans object to it as it is seen as a creation by the Federal government aiming at erasing the sufferings of the Native tribes and making the colonial past more acceptable. The actor and political activist Russell Means declares: “I am an American Indian, not a Native American! I abhor the term Native American. It is a generic government term used to describe all the indigenous prisoners of the United States” (Means, 1996). Silko uses both the word “Indian” and “Native American.” In this article the word “Native American” has been kept to refer to the ethnic origin of the people involved but the word “Indian” has been preferred to indicate the cultural connotations as in “the Indian way” or “Indian memory” since it is closer to the ideas developed by Silko. country. Native American writers therefore invented a new type of storytelling that can survive and thrive in their new environment, translating traditional memory and storytelling into novels. Those novels are hybrid forms, close enough to the template of the Western novel to be recognized and understood by all while being innovative enough to cater for values and notions radically alien to Western culture. However, Indian memory is also a traumatic memory and offers many common points with other works and narratives problematizing memory such as writings by holocaust survivors and by victims of intense trauma (see Brodski 2007). Writing is not only a means of transmitting memory and struggling against oblivion, but it also transforms the unbearable memory of the trauma—which lies on the side of death and destruction—into a resilient force that makes life possible. The memory of the horror beyond the scope of human understanding is translated into words in order to help the victims make sense of the events and reappropriate their lives. Through the case study of Ceremony, I will demonstrate how memory can be a haunting force of destruction as well as a healing type of energy. Memory is both the theme and the material chosen by Silko for her novel. Her literary approach is characterized by a specific type of writing that makes interlingual translation particularly challenging in terms of stylistic, lexical, and syntactic choices. The novel was translated into French by Michel Valmary, who later translated two other books—Archie Fire Lame Deer’s Gift of Power (Le cercle sacré) and James Welch’s Killing Custer (C’est un beau jour pour mourir). The translation was published in 1992 by Albin Michel in the Terre Indienne collection, which specializes in Native American fiction (director: Francis Geffard), and its French title was Cérémonie. After studying how memory is at the core of the themes and textual identity of Ceremony, I will focus on three points: 1) writing/translating the fluctuating and unstable time of memory through a limited choice of possible grammatical tenses; 2) the construction/destruction of echoes, memories, and correspon- dences; 3) the translation of words and names referring to the landscape that is central to Indian memory. Finally, I will examine the close relationship between writing and translating in the case of Indian memory and discuss whether the trans- lation of Native American fiction is possible/advisable/neces- sary. Memory as the Main Theme and Material of Ceremony The theme of memory is crucial to Ceremony. The protagonist, Tayo, is a Laguna Pueblo of mixed ancestry, a “half-breed”2 living on the reservation near Albuquerque in New Mexico. When the story begins, he is back from the Second World War. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or “battle fatigue” according to the white psychiatrists who have discharged him from the hospital, he is unable to resume his old life. He is haunted by memories of the war and overwhelmed by guilt as he feels responsible for all the disruption that took place when he was away: the death of his cousin who went to war with him, the death of his uncle Josiah, and finally the drought that he sees as retribution for his swearing at the rain in the prisoner camp in the Philippines: “The old people used to say that droughts happen when people forget, when people misbehave”(Silko 1977, 46). These destructive memories disrupt his present life and make him mentally and physically ill as they invade his everyday life in the form of nightmares and daytime visions that leave him empty. His war memories are interspersed with his childhood memories as he is also trying to cope with his sense of alienation as a “half-breed” brought up by his aunt after his own mother left him. However the past, which is a source of suffering, is also the key to his recovery. Knowing that white medicine cannot save him, Grandma convinces him to visit a medicine man because “The only cure/I know/is a good ceremony” (Silko 1977, 3). Although the visits to Ku’oosh and then Old Betonie do not succeed immediately and the healing ceremony cannot be completed, Tayo gradually recovers his ancestral memory. He learns to understand the traditional signs and rites, becomes able to read the landscape around him again and to realign his life with a broader universal pattern of meaning. Thanks to his recovering the traditional cultural memory of his ancestors, Tayo can complete the ceremony by himself, adjust, and find his place back on the reservation. His 2Although “half-breed” may seem offensive, it is the word used by Silko to describe Tayo’s as well as her own ancestry (Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white). healing is symbolic of and preparatory to a more global change as rain returns to the region saving the crops and cattle. Tayo’s journey, out of his destructive memories, which are manifestations of evil and witchcraft and back to the healing memory of the Indian way, enables him to restore balance and harmony in the universe as thought can again circulate between the fifth world (the world inhabited by human beings) and the other worlds inhabited by spirits. Memory is at the core of Ceremony. The different encounters with the medicine men, the traditional one and Old Betonie, the modern one, with the women Tayo loves, all avatars of Tse’pina, the spirit of the mountain, are various memories of the same quest or the same healing ceremony. It is by remembering them and understanding their correspondences that Tayo progresses on his way to recovery and that the readers gradually understand the way the novel is structured and what it means. The novel functions like memory itself, giving birth to seemingly disconnected episodes that make sense when put together, reassembled and realigned. Moreover the conventional narrative structure of Tayo’s quest is framed by and intertwined with traditional stories and poems, memories of traditional Laguna storytelling, as if the real creator of the story was not Silko but Thought Woman. The book begins with the poem: Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears [. . .] I’m telling you the story she is thinking. Those traditional passages draw on Silko’s personal memories of the stories she was told when a child on the reservation or memories she has revived from the collection of stories published in Franz Boas’s Keresan Texts (a transcription of traditional tales published in 1928, see Nelson 2001). There are altogether 28 “storytelling memories” (whose length varies from a few lines to four pages). Silko blends traditional Indian forms—based on circular patterns, repetitions and circulation from memory and myth to reality—into a novel, a genre favoring a linear conception of time, a sequential and historical development of the story, and a clear-cut distinction between past and present, memory, and reality. She thus creates her own language, one that can express memory. Moreover, the novel is a way for Silko to come to terms with her own mixed ancestry and her sense of alienation. She started writing Ceremony after having been away in Alaska for two years where she felt she had been exiled. The novel is a personal remembrance ceremony enabling Silko to weave the loose threads of her attachment to her Native ancestry and of her white academic education back into significance: “Writing a novel was a ceremony for me to stay sane” (Arnold 2000, 24). Memory and the Blurred Frontiers between Past and Present The treatment of diegetic time is quite unconventional in Ceremony, as noted by most critics and reviewers. Although analepsis is a common device in most conventional novels, time shifts are so frequent in Ceremony that they blur the frontier between the main narrative and the secondary narratives that are Tayo’s various memories and visions. The story shifts to and fro between the time of Tayo’s return to the reservation after he is back from the war, and various memories—childhood scenes, war episodes, and other times before he left for the war. Those shifts back in time are not systematically signaled as such— there are few dates, few accurate references to places which would help the readers to chronologically reorganize the diverse fragments constituting Tayo’s story. The fragmented narratives are the representations on paper of the disruptive forces released by Tayo’s memories and the readers must agree to getting lost in the succession of embedded stories going back in circles rather than following a straight time line from beginning to end. Like Tayo, the readers will understand later and what they remember will then make sense, as Night Swan (one of the female characters Tayo meets during his quest) tells him: “You don’t have to understand what is happening. But remember this day. You will recognize it later” (Silko 1977, 100). Only when the tense of the first verb of the analepsis is a pluperfect is the shift clearly indicated. Even then, the following verbs are in the simple past (also the prevailing tense of the main narrative), which creates ambiguity as to the exact point where the main narrative is resumed, as in the following example:3 “You see,” Josiah had said, with the sound of the water trickling out of the hose into the empty wooden barrel [. . .]. He pointed his chin at the springs [. . .]. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead [. . .]. Tayo knelt on the edge of the pool and let the dampness soak into the knees of his jeans. (Silko 1977, 45–46) Although it is quite clear that the first paragraph is a memory because of the use of the pluperfect and the situation (Josiah is dead by the time Tayo returns from the war), the status of the following paragraph (“Tayo knelt…”) is ambiguous, and the similarity of the setting misleads the readers into believing initially that it is part of the same memory sequence whereas the main narrative has been resumed. The translation into French reads thus: “Tu vois, lui avait dit Josiah par-dessus le bruit de l’eau qui dégoulinait du tuyau dans les tonneau de bois vide [. . .]. Du menton, il avait montré les sources [. . .]. Il avait enlevé son chapeau et essuyé son front [. . .]. Tayo s’agenouilla au bord du bassin sans se soucier de l’eau qui trempait les genoux de ses jeans. (Silko 1992, 55) The translator has made a grammatically safe choice. The shift from pluperfect to past, which is quite frequent in English fiction, has been neutralized through a more consistent use of a plus que parfait in French. The passé simple, used for the main narrative, is deemed inadequate as soon as the diegetic chronology is upset—a stylistic rule many, but not all, French novelists adhere to. That “safe” choice is not consistently applied. For other time shifts the passé simple is used for anterior actions but only after a series of plus que parfait has clearly delineated the time frame: He stood outside the train depot in Los Angeles and felt the sunshine; he saw the palm trees [. . .] he realized why he was here and he remembered Rocky and he started to cry. [. . .] 3 Words discussed in the ensuing analysis are given in bold in the quotes.  The new doctor asked him if he had ever been visible and Tayo spoke to him softly and said that he was sorry but nobody was allowed to speak to an invisible one. (Silko 1977, 15) Devant la gare de Los Angeles, il avait senti la caresse du soleil; il avait vu les palmiers [. . .] il comprit pourquoi il était là, il se souvint de Rocky et il se mit à pleurer. [. . .] Quand le nouveau docteur lui avait demandé s’il avait jamais été visible, Tayo lui avait répondu d’une voix douce qu’il était désolé mais que personne n’avait le droit de parler à un être invisible. (Silko 1992, 23) Whereas the English original allows for more indeterminacy (the readers will not immediately understand that the first passage is the memory of a scene that took place just before Tayo’s return and that the second passage is another shift in time, neither the continuation of the preceding passage nor the resuming of the main narrative), the French readers are guided by the translator’s choice, which clarifies the order of the successive time sequences. Although choosing between imparfait, plus que parfait, passé simple, and passé composé to render a simple past is a controversial point, the passé simple—even if it is an obvious choice for a translator—may not be the most appropriate tense in the case of Ceremony. The use of the imparfait in some passages makes it possible to keep some referential indeterminacy as shown in that example where it is not clear if the second passage is still part of Tayo’s memory of the war or of the main narrative: Rocky had reasoned it out with him; […] Tayo nodded, slapped at the insects mechanically [. . .]. He had to keep busy; he had to keep moving so that the sinews connected behind his eyes did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull where the scenes waited for him. (Silko 1977, 8–9) Rocky s’était efforcé de le ramener à la raison ; [. . .] Tayo avait acquiescé; d’un geste machinal de la main, il avait écrasé quelques insectes [. . .]. Il fallait qu’il s’occupe ; il fallait qu’il reste actif pour que les muscles qui se rejoignent à l’arrière de ses yeux ne se relâchent pas, les faisant ainsi pivoter vers l’intérieur du crâne, là où toutes ces scènes l’attendaient. (Silko 1992, 16–17)  Even if it is not conventional to use the imparfait for single past actions, that tense might have the potential to accommodate Silko’s literary treatment of memory, as some French writers have done to give extra depth to their past narratives, J. M. G. Le Clézio, for instance (see Lepage 2008). Alternatively, using a passé composé instead of a passé simple as the prevailing tense for both the main narrative and the memories would have been a way to signal the shift from conventional fiction writing and would have insisted on the connection with oral tradition. Grammatical constraints and the translator’s wish to conform to the more conventional writing norms do not explain all the occurrences of plus que parfait in the French text. They illustrate the translator’s symptomatic wish to guide his readers, to help them through the maze of the original novel, as in the following example where a whole sentence has been added: They unloaded the cows one by one, looking them over carefully. (Silko 1977, 77) Quand Tayo eut ouvert le grand portail du couloir d’entrée du corral, Robert ouvrit la porte de la bétaillère. Ils firent sortir les vaches une par une, en les inspectant attentivement. (Silko 1992, 88) The time of the action as well as the identity of the characters have been made explicit in French. However, reducing ambiguity and reordering Tayo’s memories imposes a Eurocentric vision on a hybrid text. In fact, it brings more confusion to the readers as it prevents them from being aware of the blurred frontiers between past and present and between memory and reality, essential to the understanding of the novel. Indeed Ceremony reintroduces in the linear development of the novel the memory of a more ancient time, the Indian vision of time, which is circular, cyclical, always moving but not going directly from one point to another: The Pueblo people and the indigenous people of the Americas see time as round, not as a long linear string. If time is round, if time is an ocean, then something that happened 500 years ago may be quite immediate and real, whereas something inconsequential that happened an hour ago could be far away. Think of time as an ocean always moving. (Arnold 2000, 149) Memory as Repetitions, Echoes, and Resonances Repetitions and echoes are the backbone of the writing in Ceremony, and the coherent structure they create counter- balances the confusion brought about by Silko’s fluctuating treatment of diegetic time. Repetitions work at the level of sentences and paragraphs but also at the higher level of the whole novel. In sentences, repetitions give rhythm to the narrative and endow it with a typically oral dimension. The following passage illustrates how repetitions structure the sentences and help the readers/listeners keep track of the important notions: He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present, tangled up like colored threads from old Grandma’s wicker sewing basket when he was a child [. . .]. He could feel it inside his skull—the tension of little threads being pulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more. So Tayo had to sweat through those nights when thoughts became entangled; he had to sweat to think of something that wasn’t unraveled or tied in knots to the past (Silko 1977, 6–7) Il ne pourrait trouver le repos tant que les souvenirs et le présent s’enchevêtreraient comme les fils de couleur dans le panier à couture de Grand-mère : [. . .] Sous son crâne, c’est cela qu’il sentait, la tension des fils minces que l’on tirait, et les choses emmêlées, attachées ensemble, qui, lorsqu’il essayait de les démêler et de les rembobiner, chacune à sa place, s’accrochaient et s’emmêlaient encore davantage. C’est ainsi que Tayo devait passer de longues nuits en sueur quand ses pensées s’embrouillaient; il devait faire d’énormes efforts pour penser à quelque chose dont le fil ne soit pas défait ou attaché au passé par des nœuds inextricables (Silko 1992, 14–15) The translator has reduced the number of repetitions by erasing some occurrences (the two occurrences of tangled have been reduced to one in the first sentence) and by resorting to synonyms (s’enchevêtrer, emmêlées, s’emmêler, s’embrouiller for tangled; en sueur and faire d’énormes efforts for sweat). The destruction is not systematic, however. For instance, the translator manages to keep the repetition of comfort and comfortable (a word difficult to translate into French) by using bien and bien-être which work on both material and moral levels: We know these hills, and we are comfortable here.” There was something about the way the old man said the word “comfortable.” It had a different meaning—not the comfort of big houses or rich food or even clean streets, but the comfort of belonging with the land and the peace of being with these hills. (Silko 1977, 117) Nous connaissons ces collines, et nous y sommes bien. » Il y avait quelque chose de spécial dans la façon dont le vieil homme avait dit le mot « bien ». Il prenait un sens différent : ce n’était pas le bien-être que procuraient les grandes maisons, une nourriture riche ou même des rues propres, mais le bien-être né du fait d’être à l’unisson de la terre, la paix ressentie à se trouver dans ces collines. (Silko 1992, 129–130) At the macro level of the whole novel, repetitions give meaning to the various interconnected episodes. Repetitions of words create a textual memory that enables the readers to interpret the story correctly, exactly like Tayo who will gradually learn to recognize the pattern underlying what he goes through. For instance, when Tayo walks to the toilets in a bar (Silko 1977, 56), the dirty wet floor mentally takes him back to his ordeal in the jungle (Silko 1977, 11). The shift from a real situation to a memory is textually signified by the repetition of the same phrase—“It was soaking through his boots/it soaked into their boots”—in the two passages. In the translation, although the readers will understand the situation, there is no textual link between the two scenes but only a semantic link as two different phrases are used: “qui pénétrait dans ses bottes” (Silko 1992, 66)/“s’infiltrait dans les chaussures” (Silko 1992, 19). Many passages echo each other as if the various episodes and the various characters were diverse avatars of the same event, Tayo’s encounter with the spirit of the mountain and his becoming whole again. Repeated words form a network of key words whose occurrences weave a significant textual material connecting and reuniting what first seems disconnected. Through their reiteration the readers can recognize the resemblance and understand that time and storytelling are cyclical as Old Grandma concludes: “It seems like I already heard these stories before . . . only thing is, the names sound different” (Silko 1977, 260). The network of recurring words organizes the novel around key themes such as dampness and dryness, circles and whirls, weaving and scattering. In the translation, the structure is less obvious because of lexical variety. For instance, the word scatter which is central to Tayo’s broken psyche is translated by two different verbs, disséminer and disperser, as well as by a whole range of words according to the cotext: l’entouraient (Silko 1992, 117), franchirent le sommet (Silko 1992, 195), faire voler (Silko 1992, 231), laisser derrière (Silko 1992, 250), s’effriter (Silko 1992, 214), parmi (Silko 1992, 168), and s’égaillèrent (Silko 1992, 243). The important word scatter has virtually disappeared from the French translation, made invisible by the translator’s decision not to maintain its repetition. The destruction of repetitions is not systematic, how- ever, as the recurrences of some words are maintained. For instance whorls (of flesh, of skin), which appears in the morbid episodes dealing with witchcraft, is systematically translated by volute, making it possible for the French readers to link the various scenes together and to establish the connection with the poems relating the invasion of the evil spirit: “il se peignit le corps/les volutes de chair” (the poem about Pa’caya’nyi who tricks people into witchcraft, Silko 1992, 56), “D’autres défirent des paquets en peau/pleins d’objets répugnants:/des silex sombres, des cendres de hogans brûlés/où reposaient les morts,/Des volutes de peau” (the poem about a witchcraft competition during which white people are invented and turned loose to destroy the Indian world, Silko 1992, 147), “Pinkie lui maintint la jambe, et Leroy trancha la volute de chair sous le gros orteil de Harley” (the torture scene in which witchcraft attempts to engulf Tayo’s life and the world in general, Silko 1992, 271). By reducing the number of repetitions, the translator brings considerable changes to the material texture of Silko’s novel of textual memory. His motivations may be an adherence to French stylistic norms that still consider repetition to be inelegant despite its use by great writers. He thus imposes his own view, his own cultural memory on the original text and destroys its inner rhythm and its signifiance (to use Meschonnic’s (1999) word). Repetitions are essential to Silko’s endeavor to write a text which reads as a memory of the oral tradition of storytelling and deliberately blurs the frontier between genres (tales, songs, poems, and novels), between storytelling and story-writing, between Indian traditions and Western culture: “So I play with the page and things that you could do on the page, and repetitions. When you have an audience, when you’re telling a story and people are listening, there’s repetition of crucial points” (Arnold 2000, 71). Systematicity is essential to maintain the way lexical networks function. Each repetition is important. As Berman states when he studies how the deforming tendencies transform a text, each word must be chosen carefully and the use of synonyms is deceptive. Words have their own lives, their own textual bodies from which they derive their power: “The words of the story poured out of his mouth as if they had substance, pebbles and stone extending to hold the corporal up” (Silko 1977, 12). Silko’s writing is like weaving: the intricate patterns suffer no mistakes, no holes. Storytelling and story-writing is a sacred act, a ceremony in which each word has its part to play. Memory and the Landscape The landscape is the central character of Ceremony. As stated in Place and Vision, in which Nelson dedicates a whole chapter to the landscape of Ceremony, the geophysical landscapes “serve not only as the ‘settings’ of these [Native American] fictions but also as principal ‘characters’ in them” (Nelson 1993, 9). It is only after being reunited with the landscape that Tayo can recover his vital energy. The landscape is the place where Indian memory lies, the landscape is Indian memory: “We are the land. [. . .] More than remembered, the earth is the mind of the people as we are the mind of the earth” (Paula Gunn Allen in Nelson 1993, 1). Describing and naming the landscape is therefore a delicate part of the ceremony of writing. Locations and directions are given with accuracy. The words connected to the landscape are the names of the places, the words describing those places as well as the names of the plants, animals, and spirits inhabiting the land. All those names recreate the landscape of the American Southwest where the Laguna Pueblo reservation is located and they bear the memory of its history. The original Indian names have been largely replaced by English names or by Spanish names, the languages of the enemy, to use Gloria Bird’s phrase in Reinventing the Enemy’s Language (Harjo and Bird 1997), that is to say the languages of the settlers: “But the fifth world had become entangled with European names: the names of the rivers, the hills, the names of the animals and plants—all of creation suddenly had two names: an Indian name and a white name” (Silko 1977, 68). The Pueblo names are still there, though, in the names of the characters of the traditional stories and the names of the spirits inhabiting the land. They stand out in the English text as their morphology is quite different from that of the European names and display a characteristic apostrophe: Tse-pi’na orTs’eh, K’ou’ko, Ck’o’yo, A’moo’ooh, Ku’oosh. . . The Pueblo names have been used in the translation without any change as if they had resisted one more displacement. Most Spanish names are maintained too: mesa, arroyo, Casa Blanca . . . with the exception of burro (âne, bourricot). It is the English names that are problematic for the translation into French. When they are kept, which is the case of many place-names, they stand out as memories or traces of the original English text, whereas in the original they blend seamlessly into the main narrative in English. In Cérémonie, place-names such as Wake Island, Dixie Tavern, Purple Heart, or Prairie Dog Hill remind the readers of the European settlers’ imprint on the American landscape but also suggest that the “entanglement” with English names is only a passing stage in the history of the landscape. The names and languages may change, but the landscape and its ancient memory will remain unchanged. The English language, which dominates the text of Ceremony, is pushed back to the margin through translation. The names of plants and animals are translated into French and raise many difficulties. Most English names are both simple and precise. As they are based on a simple generic word (grass, tree, weed, hill. . . ), names such as wild rose bush, salt bushes, snakeweed, rabbit brush, foothills create a realistically complex environment (Silko has drawn on her accurate knowledge of the Southwest landscape). The geographically- literate readers will recognize it. However, those who are unfamiliar with such settings will not be lost and will manage to find their way among grass, trees, weeds, and hills. In French, the translator has to negotiate between two options. He can favor the exact translation which is very often a scientific term unknown to most readers: Salt bushes/atriplex, arroche; snakeweed/bistorte, gramma grass/ bouteloue. . . Alternatively, he may opt for a literal translation that will be understood but may not refer to an actual plant or animal. The few cases when literal translations correspond to the reality of the environment (rock sage/sauge de rocher, bee-wee plants/l’herbe-aux- abeilles, rabbit weed/herbe-aux-lapins. . . ) are not enough to compensate for the different vision of the world the numerous scientific names produce. Moreover, the scientific words in French do not allow the correspondence between geography and myth. The words of the landscape in Ceremony are meaningful and contribute to weave a consistent memory of the universe that reinforces the links between the human world and the spirits. When Tayo meets the mountain lion (puma in French), he also meets the hunter spirit, the companion of Tse’pina, the mountain spirit. When he meets Tse, she is sitting next to a moonflower plant (marguerite dorée) that indicates the feminine power she represents. Tse is a woman and a spirit and the earth, as this passage underlines: “He dreamed he made love with her. He felt the warm sand on his toes and knees; he felt her body, and it was as warm as the sand, and he couldn’t feel where her body ended and the sand began” (Silko 1977, 222). It echoes Josiah’s comment: “This is where we come from, see. This sand, this stone” (Silko 1977, 45). Once Tayo acknowledges he is sand and stone like the sandstone cliffs around him, he can be whole again. In the translation, the link connecting sand (sable), stone (pierre), and sandstone (grès) is severed. The landscape in Cérémonie is therefore more scientific and more obscure than in the original; it does not work as the main representation and memory of the harmony of the Indian way. It is not the “living text” mentioned by Nelson, which can be read by the readers. Memory and Translation as Transformation Beyond the linguistic and stylistic difficulties the translator has to face when translating a narrative of memory such as Ceremony, broader questions must be addressed. Is it possible or even legitimate to translate memory in the case of Native American fiction? Can Indian memory, which is so deeply rooted in the ancient languages and in the local environment, survive when uprooted and transferred into a culturally and linguistically alien environment? Silko has already provided part of the answer. Drawing on Indian memory to write her novel, she has opened up a new frontier and contributed to the invention and development of the Native American novel, essentially transgenre and multilingual. She is the one who has translated—that is to say, transformed and rewritten—the oral traditional stories: “I write them down because I like seeing how I can translate this sort of feeling or flavor or sense of a story that’s told and heard onto the page” (Arnold 2000, 71). Therefore, translating Ceremony into another language is doing a second-hand translation in which the main choices have already been made: the degree of multilingualism, of obscurity to which the readers—and more particularly the “tribally illiterate” ones—will be submitted. The inherent tension between the source and target languages, between what we understand and what we do not, between what the translator chooses to reveal and what he/she leaves unexplained is already present in the original. Even the reception of her work and the issue of the target reader has been addressed, as Silko is aware that her readership falls into two categories—Native Americans (who know a lot about Indian memory) and non-Natives (whom she does not want to alienate). For her, making Indian memory accessible to all through her translation is a political choice: “I’m political, but I’m political in my stories. That’s different. I think the work should be accessible and that’s always the challenge and task of the teller—to make accessible perceptions that the people need” (Arnold 2000, 26). Translators have always been suspected of betrayal and Silko is no exception. Being of mixed ancestry, born on the reservation but educated outside it, she is the perfect go-between and a highly suspicious one. Paula Gunn Allen criticized her for giving away tribal secrets which should only be known by Native people, as Nelson reminds us: “In fact, a few years ago another Laguna writer, Paula Gunn Allen, criticized Silko for using some of this oral traditional material, contending that by including a clan story in her novel Ceremony Silko has violated local conventions regarding proper dissemination of such stories” (Nelson 2001). For Silko, translating and rewriting Indian memory is not a betrayal but, on the contrary, a way to redeem Native traditions. Those must not be kept as museum artifacts which are the dead collectible pieces recorded and translated by ethnologists such as Boas, but they must be given the possibility to carry on as living entities. Memory pines for transmission as a way out of oblivion and eradication. Through her translation, Silko reminds the American readers of the Native American heritage of their country and promotes it as a living force in today’s world. Interlingual translation goes one step further in the same direction. Translating Indian memory strengthens it as it will be kept in the minds of more and more readers across the world, and in turn they will pass it on. It will then be safe from destruction, as when kept in the belly of the storyteller (Silko 1977, 2). Paradoxical though it may seem, translating Indian memory is a form of repatriation as it takes it back to its original purpose, helping the people understand and live in harmony. In a globalized world, the people may just mean people in general: “Something in writing Ceremony that I had to discover for myself was indeed that the old stories still have in their deepest level a content that can give the individual a possibility to understand” (Arnold 2000, 147). On a more practical level, the translation and transmission of memory may increase people’s awareness and support of the Native cause and give more visibility to the Indian alternative to the materialistic “American way of life” taking over the world. Silko is aware of the potential impact of Native memory across languages and nations: “In other words, we feel that we get cultural, intellectual, spiritual support from all the people outside the United States. [. . .] There are no isolated people, there is truly now a global village and it matters” (Arnold 2000, 151). The teller/writer is one link in the long chain of the circulation of memory, and the translator another one. The important point is to keep the transmission going even if it means changes on the way. Changes are not always for the worse. In the case of Indian memory, the displacement brought about by the interlingual translation opens up new possibilities. In the French translation, the stories may thrive better in a new medium, freed from the English language (the linguistic memory of the trauma of colonization). Memory itself is not a fixed form. It is based on repetitions and differences, like translation—two notions at the core of Deleuze’s early philosophical thought and analyzed at length in Différence et Répétition in link with the power of language: “La répétition est la puissance du langage” (“Repetition is the power of language”—translation mine—Deleuze 1968, 373). The memory of an event is a repetition of the event, both similar to and different from it. Each time the memory comes back it is slightly modified, too, as repetitions are never identical. The same relationship links the text and its translations, which are the memory of the text. They are not equivalents but repetitions of the original, different but not necessarily less valuable, less trustworthy, or less authentic. The transformation process at the core of memory and translation is a regenerative power that keeps life going. The old stories, like the old healing ceremonies, must be adapted to their new environment—be it linguistic or cultural—the way Betonie has managed to devise a new ceremony to cure Tayo of his modern disease. Translation and memory are two modes of survival (“‘survival’ as a cultural practice and symbolic action, and above all as a process that extends life” (Brodzki 2007, 5)) and revival, a way to share the gift of the healing force or the burden of the trauma. Conclusion Memory as the main theme and material of Ceremony has shaped the novel’s language. It is based on correspondences and resonances that can evoke the chaos of traumatic memory and of witchcraft but that also symbolize the redeeming force of the Indian way whose ceremonies can restore harmony. The specificity of Silko’s writing requires attentive translating strategies that enable the transmission of its textual and poetic density. The memory of the text is particularly threatened when the translator yields to some of the deforming tendencies defined by Berman in his chapter “L’analytique de la traduction et la systématique de la déformation” (Berman 1985, 65–82), and more particularly clarification (thus replacing cyclical time with linear time), the destruction of rhythm (the rhythm of oral tradition), and the loss of meaningful networks which equate writing with healing ceremonies. Like all poetical texts, Ceremony challenges easy solutions. Those texts need transformation rather than stereotyped equivalences. To translate them is to listen to the text and its resonances, to its signifiance rather than concentrate on its superficial narrative meaning. Translators will then be able to draw on that intimate memory of the text to rewrite it in an act of sharing and transformation, not a move of appropriation. Narratives of memory ask for translation more than anything else as transformation and circulation are their essence. Like the Indian stories they have “a life of their own” (Arnold 2000, 72) whose natural development is translation. Translators are similar to Betonie, the modern healer. “But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies [. . .] things which don’t shift and grow are dead things” (Silko 1977, 126). Translators, as life-givers of those narratives, have the responsibility of choosing carefully and creatively so that reading the translated text will be a renewed ceremony that revives the power of the original and transmits its memory. References Allen, Paula Gunn, ed. 1996. Song of the Turtle: American Indian literature, 1974–1994. New York: Ballantine Books. Arnold, Ellen L., ed. 2000. Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Berman, Antoine. 1985. Les Tours de Babel: Essais sur la traduction. Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress. Berry, Christina. 2013. “What’s in a Name? Indians and Political Correctness.” All Things Cherokee website. Accessed November 20, 2013: http://www.allthingscherokee.com/articles_culture_events_070101.html. Brodzki, Bella. 2007. Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bruchac, Joseph, ed. 1994. Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First North American Native Writers’ Festival. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1968. Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Harjo, Joy, and Gloria Bird, eds. 1997. Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America. New York: W. W. Norton. Lepage, Pierre. 2008. “Le Clézio et l’oubli de l’Afrique.” Le Monde des Livres, September 9. Accessed November 20, 2013. http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2008/10/09/le-clezio-et-l-oubli-de- l-afrique_1105152_3260.html. Means, Russell. 1996. “I am an Indian American, not a Native American!” Accessed November 20, 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20010208120908/http://www.peaknet.net/~ aardvark/means.html. Meschonnic, Henri. 1999. Poétique du traduire. Lagrasse: Verdier. Momaday, N. Scott. [1968] 2010. House Made of Dawn. New York: HarperCollins. Nelson, Robert M. 1993. Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction. New York: Peter Lang. ———. 2001. “Rewriting Ethnography: the Embedded Texts in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony.” In Telling the Stories: Essays on American Indian Literatures and Cultures, edited by Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson and Malcolm Nelson, 47–58. New York: Peter Lang. PDF available at https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~rnelson/ethnography.html Parker, Robert Dale. 2003. The Invention of Native American Fiction. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Silko, Leslie Marmon. 1977. Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books. ———. 1992. Cérémonie. Translated by Michel Valmary. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 1997. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. New York: Simon & Schuster. Welch, James. [1979] 2008. The Death of Jim Loney. London: Penguin Classics. Wright, Anne, ed. 1986. The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright. Saint Paul MN: Graywolf. is senior lecturer in Translation Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris 3. Her research concentrates on the interaction between form and meaning, on the translation of the voice, and the syntactic organization as well as normalizing effect at play in the translation process. She has either edited or coedited Palimpsestes 18 (Traduire l’intertextualité, 2006), Palimpsestes 24 (Le réel en traduction: greffage, traces, mémoire, 2011), and Translating the Voices of Theory (2015). She is also interested in intersemiotic forms of translation and Native American voices. 

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Abstract: Over the course of the last five years my research has led me to conclude that the literary representation of a trauma is not the immediate step after the historical event and that there are other, intervening layers in between. First is the occurrence of the historical event. What then follows is the translation of that event in the minds of the survivors—that is, in their memory and interpretation of the event. Then, memory becomes the subject of oral history. This oral history enters the minds of the writers of memoir and fiction, where it becomes a literary translation. Finally, the filmmaker, if such a story makes it to this step, translates the text in order to render her interpretation of it as film. If we acknowledge that translation involves interpretation, then what exists here are different layers of translation. The aim of the paper is to analyze the different effects that each medium (literature, translation, cinema) may have on the experience of its readers and audience—what that medium is trying to cultivate, the limitations of each, and how all of them in different ways bring greater attention to the historical phenomenon of the Armenian Genocide. Introduction Thinking about the contribution of literature to raising awareness about the Armenian Genocide, I have asked myself whether literature is the immediate step after the historical event. My research has led me to think that it is not. In this paper, I will propose the following schema to chart the development in Genocide awareness from the historical event to its interpretation within an act of artistic representation. First is the occurrence of the historical event. What then follows is the translation of that even in the minds of the survivors—that is, in their memory and  interpretation of the event. Memory then becomes the subject of oral history, and this oral history enters the minds of the writers of memoir and fiction, where it becomes a literary translation. Finally, the filmmaker, if such a story makes it to this step, translates the text in order to render his or her interpretation of it as film. In effect, we have here different layers of translation upon translation—to use memoirist Günter Grass’s term, with this theory we are “peeling the onion” (Grass 2008). With a focus on the renowned Italian–Armenian novelist Antonia Arslan’s Genocide narrative La masseria delle allodole (2004; English translation Skylark Farm, Arslan 2006), I’ll first discuss the literary genre as an instrument that brings greater attention to the historical memory of the Armenian Genocide. Then the power of translation related to the Genocide as an instrument of cultural, historical, and linguistic interaction will be both explored and problematized. For example, why has this particular book been chosen for translation into sixteen languages?1 In what ways have these translations contributed to the awareness of the Genocide in their given countries? Exploring the impacts these translations have had in their given countries, there will also be an examination of readers’ reactions following their respective publications in various languages by presenting interviews with some of the translators. Finally, I will focus on the theme of the Armenian Genocide in cinema and will deal with the dramatized version of the Genocide narrative La masseria delle allodole by the Italian directors the Taviani brothers (Taviani and Taviani 2007).2 The Armenian Genocide in Literature In every trauma, in every situation, there are always at least two sides, two prevalent stories, and the power dynamics are strong. On the one hand, the side that “successfully” commits Genocide usually determines the way its history is written (or not written), as is the case of the Armenian Genocide, which is varied and has been contested for many years. Then there is the side of the 1 So far, the book has been translated into Dutch, English (four editions), Eastern Armenian (two editions), Finnish, French, German (two editions), Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Persian, Romanian, Russian, Western Armenian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish. 2 The present study springs directly from my experience in translating Armenian Genocide narratives and from the outcomes of the course I taught at California State University, Fresno— Armenian Genocide and Translation while being the 10th Henry S. Khanzadian Kazan Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies at CSUF. people who have suffered the overwhelming trauma. This side, especially when silenced by the perpetrator, attempts to record any history of the event, albeit painful, and often, as we look over these testimonies, it is clear that any proper investigation or analysis of this traumatic event should be undertaken by someone with psychoanalytic and linguistic skills. One of the consequences of the Armenian Genocide was the dispersal of those who survived into a global Diaspora. Traumatized and impoverished, involuntary exiles and immigrants in a new land, they struggled to survive. Part of their survival strategy was to write what they had experienced and witnessed. Survivor stories emerged painfully and with great difficulty. The obstacles were many: a fragmented, traumatized community with far too few resources. The challenges they faced included the fact that they were either forced to write in a language that few in their new lands understood or that they had to struggle to describe the indescribable in a foreign tongue. Despite all the trauma and difficulties, the immigrants decided to put pen to paper to document that which the world needs to better know and comprehend. Even though the potential audience and publishers were greatly limited, these important survivor memoirs emerged, often in isolation, in small print runs and sometimes as unpublished manuscripts. They emerged in a variety of locales and conditions that characterized the global Diaspora. These Diaspora fragments disseminate Armenian culture and seeds across differing landscapes. In so doing, the Armenian identity has evolved and become more diverse and complex and has contributed to an emerging multiculturalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The survivor memoirs provided and continue to constitute an invaluable research tool not only for researchers but also for Genocide fiction writers, who take their insights from those stories and, in thousands of literary flavors, offer the reader the historical dimension of the Armenian Genocide. It is true that it is not possible to penetrate the world of the Armenian Genocide without reading the history. However, as Rubina Peroomian asserts (Peroomian 2012, 7), documents, statistics, and data do not provide the whole story. On the other hand, the extremely important memoirs and eye witness accounts alone often cannot express the unthinkable horror of the Genocide as the blockages and psychological borders can impede the author’s revealing the whole trauma. Hence the importance of historical fiction, which, by fusing historical fact and creative writing, can provide access to a larger readership in terms of global impact. An example of this phenomenon, with a particular symbolic and powerful radiation and with a priority function of meaning, is the Italian–Armenian novelist Antonia Arslan’s Genocide novel La masseria delle allodole (Arslan 2004). Antonia Arslan, who was born and grew up in Italy and was professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature at the University of Padua, has published on Italian popular fiction and Italian women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, her most recent publications have focused on her Armenian heritage. Her first approach to her Armenian heritage was, surprisingly, through translation. With the help of two Armenians (as she doesn’t know Armenian) she has translated/edited two volumes by Daniel Varujan, one of the most significant Armenian poets of the twentieth century, into Italian: Il canto del pane (Varujan 1992) and Mari di grano (Varujan 1995).3 Here is Antonia Arslan’s testimony about her translation: Poetry functions in an immediate and unexpected way. I discovered Daniel Varujan, his strength and his grace, when reading some of his poems in Italian and the entire The Song of Bread in French, translated by Vahé Godel. So it was that I concentrated on the text of his last work, which completely fascinated me. I already had a lot of experience translating poetry—from French, English and German—but my work with Varujan was a great adventure, also because of my collaboration with two young and enthusiastic scholars, C. H. Megighian and A. H. Siraky. The Italian edition of The Song of Bread (Varujan 1992) became the seventh one, and it enjoyed much success within the Italian secondary schools. I further translated other pieces of Varujan’s poetry; I published twenty of them in the volume Seas of Wheat (Varujan 1995) and the others in magazines. I also want to remind us that he was a great poet, one of the major ones since the beginning of the 1900s, equal to no one, but less known because he wrote in a minority language. (Haroutyunian 2012a) Translating Varujan’s poetry became part of the process of 3 In 1915 at the age of thirty-one, Daniel Varujan was on the verge of becoming an internationally renowned poet but he was brutally murdered by the government of the Young Turks, like other Armenian poets such as Siamanto, Grigor Zohrab, and so on. discovery of her own Armenian identity.4 It brought her to the unknown path of her lost ancestry and the birth of her first novel, the best-seller Skylark Farm, in which, drawing on the history of her own ancestors, she tells of the attempts of the members of an Armenian family caught up in the Armenian Genocide to escape to Italy and join a relative who had been living there for forty years. This book won many prestigious awards in Italy and worldwide.5 Skylark Farm belongs to a genre that mixes autobiography and biography, history and fiction, documentary and memory. First of all, Arslan introduces her fifty-three-year- old grandfather Yerwant, an important physician living in his adopted Italian hometown of Padua in the months leading up to the Second World War. [H]is mother, Iskuhi, the little princess, died at nineteen giving birth to him. My great-grandfather then remarried an “evil stepmother,” who bore him many other children; my grandfather couldn’t stand her, and so, at the age of thirteen, he requested and was granted permission to leave the little city and go to Venice, to study at Moorat-Raphael, the boarding school for Armenian children. (Arslan 2006, 17) Yerwant never again returned home. Now, after forty years, he hopes to reunite with his brother Sempad, a successful pharmacist, who continued living in his little city in Anatolia. In 1915, Yerwant enters his fiftieth year, and he is satisfied—and alone. . . “I am now a citizen of Italy; the Ottomans can’t touch me any more,” he thinks. (Arslan 2006, 45) But World War I begins, and the ruling Young Turk party closes the border and when Italy enters the war on May 24, 1915, Yerwant’s dream vanishes. He will never be able to return to his country of origin in his red Isotta Fraschini, the doors of which were encrusted with the silver coat of arms that featured an intertwined Y and A, standing for Yerwant Arslanian. He will 4 She then went on to edit different works on the Armenian Genocide, including Hushèr: la memoria. Voci italiane di sopravvissuti armeni (Arslan, Pisanello, and Ohanian 2001); she has worked with Boghos Levon Zekiyan on the Italian version of Gérard Dédéyan’s Histoire du peuple arménien (Dédéyan 2002) and Vahakn Dadrian’s Storia del genocidio armeno (Dadrian 2003); and translated Claude Mutafian’s brief history of the Armenian genocide from the French (Mutafian 2001). 5 Arslan’s more recent publications include Il libro di Mush (2012), which is an account of the largest extant Armenian manuscript that was preserved in two halves by two separate women, each of whom took one half when escaping the city of Mush during the Armenian Genocide; Il rumore delle perle di legno (2015); and Lettera a una ragazza in Turchia (2016). never see his family again as they will be exterminated almost entirely by the Young Turks. From that moment on for Yerwant the distant Fatherland remained forever remote, and when his children got older Yerwant even changed their names. Antonia Arslan talks about a contradiction in the behavior of her grandfather: at first he did not want to deny his ancestry, and gave his children four Armenian names each—Yetward, Erwand, Armenak, and Vardan; Khayel, Anton, Aram, and Maryam—but later tried to erase their origin: “And in 1924, he will petition the Italian government to allow him to legally remove from his surname that embarrassing three- letter suffix, -ian, that exposes so plainly his Armenian origin” (Arslan 2006, 160). During the deportation, the women performed a crucial role not only by bravely making sacrifices to protect the children, but by persistently working to preserve memories of their land. These are a few stories, objects, and photographs, “relics or icons from a terrible shipwreck” (Arslan 2006, 19), and a few other items shipped from Sempad as a gift to his relatives in Italy. Thanks to this “act of memorial transmission,” the author can now see and touch objects and images belonging to her Armenian family and therefore be reunited with its indefinite past (Alù 2009, 369). Here, as readers, we are made witness to familiar historical narratives—perhaps we share similar ones, perhaps we’ve read firsthand accounts in books. But what happens when a historical event penetrates literature? First of all, the literary genre is a powerful medium that is able to bring the historical phenomenon to the attention of the masses. By reconstructing her family history in the novel, Arslan is merging both historical research and imagination culled from collective memory; she also becomes the protector of her familial memory and historical archive. Taking an input from Bella Brodzki’s idea that “[c]ulture’s necessarily overarching orientation toward the future only obtains by sharing its past” (Brodzki 2007, 113), I conducted an experiment on collective memory and testimony in an assignment I gave to my students at Fresno State. I set an assignment in which they were called to write the story of their ancestor’s survival. Most of them said to me, “I know something about my great grandparents, but I’m missing a lot of details. What should I do?” This is exactly what I was hoping for, and advised them to fill in the gaps with their imaginations and to take advantage of their parents and grandparents and ask them questions. As evidenced by Brodzki, “[t]hinking both psychoanalytically and historically also means that while we harbor the dream of plentitude, we always begin with a gap” (Brodzki 2007, 113). For their assignment, some of my students contacted their relatives living in other countries to inquire about their grandparents and, as the students shared some amazing stories in class.6 This assignment contributed to raising their personal awareness of their ancestors’ voyages towards refuge. Antonia Arslan has done the same in filling in the gaps of an unknown past. In the meantime the geography, the places, and the itineraries that she describes in her novel reveal not only significant moments of family history but also its inclusion in a determinate social space and national history (Alù 2009, 364).7 This is important because it gives the historical part to “historical fiction.” For yet another class assignment, based on the concept of Rushdie’s “translated man,” students worked together to write the names of the native cities and villages of their ancestors, as well as the places through which they passed on their long journeys of migration before arriving in the United States.8 We also included in the map the languages they had learnt along the way. This initial exercise helped the students to visualize, re-realize, and appreciate both their ancestors’ geographical passages and the students’ indelible connection to them. Further, the act of writing it on the board—taking pen in hand—implicated them as the bearers and continuers of their ancestral memories. I have always been obsessively diligent throughout my academic career to erase whatever is on the board after any given lesson. However, what 6 Some of these stories have already been published in the Hye Sharzhoom newspaper (Fresno 2013, 35/1, 2). 7 In her article, Alù refers to Anne Muxel who in her Individu et mémoire familiale explains how rediscovering familiar places and spaces can help us to recover a biographical path as well as the origin, progress, and decline of a social, individual, and collective destiny (Muxel 1996, 47). 8 In his book of essays Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie asserts that “Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained” (Rushdie 1992, 17). was created on the board that day was an interwoven tapestry of names, places, times, and languages that neither my students nor myself even dared to erase. The memory seemed at once too fresh and validated yet again. So, we decided to leave it as it was. I took a picture before the next instructor could “erase our ancestors,” preserving this image at least through another medium—if not the word, the image. We were all excited and surprised to discover that among all our ancestors, they collectively spoke sixteen languages including Armenian, English, Arabic, French, Turkish, Spanish, Vai, Pele, Fula, Russian, German, Romanian, Bulgarian, Latin, Greek, and Kurdish. In the same way, Antonia Arslan’s undertaking the mission of retelling the story continues the voyage of her ancestors. In one of her numerous public lectures Antonia said: “The idea of my past was bothering me for years, so one morning I decided to write: ‘Zio Sempad è solo una leggenda, per noi: ma una leggenda su cui abbiamo tutti pianto.’”9 This is the very first sentence of the novel, and Antonia once told me that, while many passages of the book have undergone editing, that sentence remained unchanged. What is interesting is that Antonia never mentions the name of her grandfather’s birthplace, calling it “little city.” “No one, patient reader, ever went back to the little city,” finishes Antonia Arslan in her book (Arslan 2006, 268). She does this intentionally— firstly because this is a novel and not a memoir and secondly because she doesn’t want to personify but rather render the idea more globally and not to give the reader the impression that the Armenians were persecuted in that specific place. I’d like to share the last classroom example from my California State University experience, which dealt with the question of the story’s transmission. By using their part of the genealogical tapestry I spoke of before, each student illustrated the geographic and linguistic journeys of their ancestors. I asked the students, as an extension, to report their family history to one partner in the classroom. It was then the task of the partner to re- reflect the story and report it. After a series of retellings, the students eventually had to report these stories back to the class, 9 Uncle Sempad is only a legend, for us—but a legend that has made us all cry (Arslan 2006, 17). thus directly engaging in the process of transmission and translation. Our aim was to internalize the process of a story’s transmission and to show how feelings, details, chronology, and so forth are translated as they pass from one person to another. Thus, the story, especially the oral tale, is a shared substance between interlocutors, and simply does not exist without both the teller and the listener, the writer and the reader. So when we return to consider the gravity of Arslan’s work in the telling of the Armenian Genocide from a very personal perspective, we come to the realization that, by sharing her own family history, we also become a responsible player of that story as readers. In this case, we are both called upon to consider and remember the Genocide and are also invited to enter its discourse. To consider Arslan’s work on such a global scale, then, is of tantamount importance. Through the pen of the writer Antonia Arslan, the Armenian Genocide is thus carried beyond its historical limits, slipping from the desks of historians and entering the minds and imaginations of ordinary people. Of course, when a historical event becomes literature it is enriched with new shades and colors. New heroes are born who are given names and are assigned identities. Families are born belonging to one nationality or to another who are placed in this or that social class. This is where literary fiction comes into play. And she weaves the plot. Through a love story, a common conversation in the home, or between neighbors, and through a description of a relationship between two individuals of two different nationalities (such as the Armenian and Turkish) or minorities (Armenians and Greeks), Antonia Arslan introduces the historical dimension to the story. A sentence from the prologue that was also used for the blurb on the book cover reads: My aunt always used to say: When I’ve finally had it with you, when you get too mean, I’m leaving. I’ll go stay with Arussiag in Beirut, with Uncle Zareh in Aleppo, with Philip and Mildred in Boston, with my sister Nevart in Fresno, with Ani in NY, or even with Cousin Michel in Copacabana—him last, though, because he married an Assyrian. (Arslan 2006, 5) With this sentence, the author introduces the complex phenomenon of the Armenian Diaspora created by the Armenian Genocide. When a non-Armenian reader, completely ignorant of not only the essence but also the existence of the Armenian Genocide, buys the book for its literary value, while reading this sentence, asks herself: How can a single person, Antonia’s aunt, have so many relatives around the world? The answer will come on reading the book. Before writing her Genocide narrative, Antonia Arslan consulted many history books. But the plot also came to her through saved photographs. As Daniel Sherman has it: “Sight is the only sense powerful enough to bridge the gap between those who hold a memory rooted in bodily experience and those who, lacking such experience, nonetheless seek to share the memory” (Sherman 1999, 14). Thus the picture becomes a complicated form of self- portrait that reveals the ego of the writer that is necessarily relational and at the same time fragmentary. Similarly, descriptions of group photographs in Skylark Farm are used by Antonia Arslan to recover the bonds with her dispersed Armenian relatives (Alù 2009, 373): Arussiag, Henriette, and Nubar, two girls and a little boy dressed as a girl. Along with Nevart they are the numb survivors who will, after escaping Aleppo, come to the West. These children now look out at me from a snapshot taken in Aleppo in 1916, one year after their rescue, just before they embarked for Italy: their grave, childish eyes are turned mysteriously inward, opaque and glacial, having accepted—after too many unanswered questions—the blind selection that has allowed them to survive. They are wearing decent orphan clothes, but they seem dressed in uniforms of rags, and at a quick glance the eye sees prison stripes. Their dark Eastern eyes, with their thick brows tracing a single line across their foreheads, repeat four times, wordlessly, the fear of a future that will be inexorable and the hidden nucleus of a secret guilt. (Arslan 2006, 23) Transforming and translating the protagonists of the pictures into the characters of the book, Antonia is linking herself through a bridge towards her ancestors: But it will be Zareh the skeptic, the European, who will save the family legacy, the children, and the photographs: the four little malnourished bodies curled together like dying birds, their small skulls all eyes, and the precious packet of family portraits, sewn up along with Gregory of Narek’s  prayer book inside a velvet rag and passed from hand to hand from the dying to the survivors. Parched, dried skeletons—memorials of a life that had been cordial and boisterous, with plenty of water, plenty of hospitality and mirth. (Arslan 2006, 29) These images, along with a few objects protected by the women during the massacre and deportation, become relics of which the author becomes the possessor through the acts of postmemory. In addition, the images included or only described in Skylark Farm, along with the text, are the subject of memory and commemoration as well as collective pain, the lieux de mémoire that stop time, block forgetfulness, immortalize death and materialize the immaterial (Alù 2009; Nora 1989). In her 2007 book Can These Bones Live, Bella Brodzki directs her attention to processes of intergenerational transmission, conceived as acts of translation, to how the value of memory or remembrance as an instrument of historical consciousness is inscribed in a culture [. . .] What connects and divides two generations and their respective cultural narratives, where are the borderlines of a life and text, what are the ways in which processes of translation perform as well as disrupt the work of cultural memory? (Brodzki 2007, 111– 112). In the case of Antonia Arslan, the intergenerational transmission took place through her beloved grandfather who entrusted her with the task of retelling his trauma and memories for a country that no longer exists, for the columns of deportees, for a family dying beneath a poisonous sun, for the unmarked graves along the dusty roads and paths of Anatolia; and for everything that disappeared with them, everything alive and fragrant, exhausted and joyous, painful and consoling: the country’s soul. (Arslan 2006, 40) The Armenian Genocide in Translation When we talk about Genocide and translation in a global sense, we inevitably enter a discourse about memory. Let’s think for a moment of the psychological state of the trauma victim: they are pained, they block things out, sometimes repress the memories that are too painful. The Armenian Genocide survivors’ silence was also due to the fact that they were over-protective of their children considering them a representation of survival and treating them as substitutes for the relatives who perished and communities that had been wiped out. Thus with the aim to ensure their protection, the parents often refused to share the trauma with the second generation.10 Genocide trauma is translated by the very person who experienced it by the memory they retain of the event. What about when a trauma is translated into artistic literature? Are we obliged to then preoccupy ourselves with less important “factual” matters—was it really fifty days that the woman walked through the desert, or thirty? Historical fiction is a genre that fuses a historical fact with creative writing. Thus, as a fiction, we are ultimately obliged as readers to be less preoccupied with the precision of less important facts, but rather occupy ourselves with the rendering of feeling and narrative form within a historical space. And it is in this moment of not being preoccupied with the fact or fiction of memoir, biography, or a historical text that we are able to immerse ourselves in the heart of the matter. How do we feel about this situation? How can we relate to it? How do we interpret it ourselves? Certainly a lot of truth also comes out through creative writing and not only through memoir or biography or other forms of factual writing where the blockages and psychological borders stop the author from revealing the whole trauma. *** Every book has its birth story, and analogously every 10 While exploring the impact of World War II on the second-generation Armenian–American identity, Aftandilian (2009) noticed that the war brought the memory of the Armenian Genocide to the forefront within Armenian–American families, as survivors of the Genocide had to send their sons off to war. Aftandilian interviewed World War II Armenian–American veterans and found that the topic of returning home was more emotional than the topic of their combat experience. His research on the children of survivors found that many children were named after the murdered relatives. These children felt special, because an obligation was placed on them, directly or indirectly, to bear the hopes and aspirations of the survivors not only for the family, but also for the Armenian people as a whole. One of my students at California State University, A. Pilavian, wrote in her final paper: “I never really knew the details about how my family began or how much they sacrificed to live a better life. I used to get angry with my family when they wouldn’t tell me things that I wanted to know from their past experiences. What I came to realize is that when people don’t speak of something tragic that has happened in their life, it actually eats at them more. The reason they feel that it’s better to keep quiet is so that they don’t disrupt the peace in their life that they finally have now.” translation has its birth story. Most of the translations of Antonia Arslan’s Skylark Farm have been executed according to the standard ways when a publisher decides to commission a book’s translation. However, there is something immediately striking about the book’s Hungarian edition. The Hungarian translation was published in Romania, and not in Hungary (Arslan 2008). Here is the explanation given by the book dealer Kinga Kali: As you perhaps know Hungary still does not recognize the Armenian Genocide—and there is not much knowledge about it in the Hungarian book publishing. The publishers I contacted simply did not respond to my proposal—to publish the Hungarian translation of Skylark Farm. I had the idea to go to Mentor, a Hungarian publishing house in Transylvania, Romania. I also offered a complete plan for advertising the book in Hungary. They accepted the proposal. Mentor publishers in Romania took all the risks in dealing with a theme intentionally kept from public view in Hungary. This is why Antonia was able to go and give her book tour in both Hungary and Romania. The circulation of Antonia’s Genocide novel, thanks to its Hungarian translation, among common Hungarians is extremely important because Hungary has yet to recognize the Armenian Genocide.11 After the publication of Skylark Farm in Romania, the book dealer together with the publishing house managed to organize several book presentations in Budapest and in a few Transylvanian towns in Romania with a Hungarian majority. While I was in Budapest for a conference, I met the dealer and asked her about the impact of the translation and its contribution to raising awareness in Hungary. She replied that The majority of the people I gave the book [to] as a present and [who] 11 Hungary was the country where, in 2004, Ramil Safarov, a lieutenant of the Azerbaijani army, used an axe to hack the twenty-six-year-old Armenian lieutenant Gurgen Margaryan to death in his sleep. Both were participating in an English language training course within the framework of the NATO-sponsored Partnership for Peace initiative in Budapest. Ramil Safarov was imprisoned in Budapest for the murder until he was extradited to Azerbaijan in 2012. To the shock of many, Azerbaijan promoted him and made a hero of the murderer. In reaction, Armenia formally suspended ties with Hungary.  shared it with their friends said that by reading it for the first time, they were able to understand what the Armenian Genocide meant. They usually had knowledge about the Jewish Holocaust, but not about the Armenian one—at least, the younger generation did not know anything about it. The mother of a friend of mine was revolted, and cried, “why are people in Hungary not informed about all of this, and why is this not included in the history classes at the school?” Here we see a Hungarian girl dreaming of bringing knowledge to her people about the historical event of the Armenian Genocide, by translating the Genocide narrative Skylark Farm: When I met Antonia Arslan in 2004 during her book presentation, I decided to let my Hungarian nation learn about this book, and my dream came true within four years. In June 2008, the book was released and presented for the very first time at the Budapest Book Fest. Narrative and translation therefore once more prove themselves valid tools in the raising of awareness about the historical event. Later I had the chance to contact Kinga Júlia Király, the Hungarian translator of the novel. Antonia Arslan’s Skylark Farm was the most shocking translation I’ve ever made, she said. When I got the book from Italy and I started reading it for the first time, I couldn’t even imagine that such a horrible national destiny does exist. After reading one fourth of the novel I had to buy a new armchair, which I still call my “Skylarkfarmchair”: I needed a new position, a new posture for my body in order not to be absorbed by the novel, not to read as a whatsoever fiction, but keep my awareness till the end of it. As I have Armenian origins, too, since my family came to Transylvania in the seventeenth century, the novel had awakened in me, somewhere deep inside, a never felt receptivity toward suffering and misery. And I struggled for good amidst with my shamefacedness which [incapacitated] me in my translation. How should I translate those terrifying events, bring the best close to the reader, what Sempad’s family had endured? How should I repaint the “Armenian blood- flowers” on the walls (Arslan 2006, 118)? Am I allowed to do such things? Is this reasserting, recommitting a Genocide? It was much more than [a] matter of ethics or aesthetics. More than literature, as well. I still remember the deep impact which Nevart’s death in the thunderbolt made on me (Arslan 2006, 175). When I had to read a sequence from the  book for the first time in front of an audience, I [chose] Nevart’s death. But I could not do it. I felt such discomposure, such sorrow, such mourning, that I started to cry. That was too much for me as translating is an intimate act while sharing Genocide, in fact, [. . .] is a reaction. I owe this translation a brand new life, since I became wide open for suffering. Skylark farm – in a sacred sense – had made my life. Further, I also interviewed Hillary Creek, who translated into English a section of Antonia Arslan’s second novel A Road to Smyrna, which has now been entirely translated into Armenian (Arslan 2012): I am a historian (economic and social), she said, with a special interest in the Middle East from 1890 on, as my research has in some part been on petroleum politics in the area. As a social historian I am obviously interested in the life of ordinary people and find a rich source in the literature, drama, art, and music of the period. I researched [the] bare facts, chronological history of the time, movements, and main characters, before starting translating. But I was born into postwar London when the city was in large part rubble, rationing didn’t stop till I was six. The war was still very close, my mother (a teacher) had spent the Blitz finding and taking care of young kids who escaped from evacuations and returned to find nothing. So I had her memories. Then I have many friends who have had to flee from political persecutions and I have long been interested and involved in human rights questions. So if anything it was not one event, but rather a combination of first, second and third hand tales and memories that were my points of reference. Now, some of my personal thoughts about the Genocide novel as an Armenian experience and the Armenian translator of Antonia Arslan’s Genocide narratives. In 2004, when I read Skylark Farm all in one sitting, I could not imagine that three years later I would have the honor of being the Armenian translator of this best-seller. It all began in the fall of 2005, when a Festival of Friendship between Armenia and Italy was organized in Yerevan and there were many events held both on academic (conferences, round tables) and popular (Italian opera or cinema evenings) topics. At that time I was in Armenia participating in a conference at the Academy of Sciences with a paper on Dante’s Armenian translations (Haroutyunian 2006, 2012b). Of course, among the events, I could not miss the presentation of Skylark Farm, which had just been published in Italy and was already proving to be very successful. At the event, the author and the directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani were supposed to be there to present the book and forthcoming film. Antonia suggested that I translate the three most moving episodes of the book so they could be read at the presentation. It was after this that Antonia asked me about going forward with the translation. But the deadlines were very precise. The Armenian translation had to be ready for the release of the film by the Taviani Brothers. There was very little time, and the responsibility was huge. The heroes of the story were talking to me, just as Antonia says in her acknowledgments: I must first thank those who spoke to me: Sempad and Shushanig, Ismene and Isaac, Nazim the beggar, and Yerwant, with his neat Pirandello goatee. And then Azniv and Veron, the great aunts I never knew; funny, tiny Henriette, who spoiled me; Zareh and Rupen, my legendary great uncles. I thank my audacious, whimsical mother, who raised me unleniently; Khayel, my serious, sly father, who worried about everything; my uncle Yetwart, and my cousins Yerwant, Ermanno, and Teresa; my little brother Carlo . . . (Arslan 2006, 271) I was too emotionally involved in the story. I was feeling a kind of duty to make their story available to Armenians. I often skipped lunch. I was so immersed in the book and its characters that I was almost ashamed to take a break to eat while they were walking along the dusty roads of Anatolia, hungry and exhausted, destroyed by deportation. It seemed that they were beckoning me to tell their story because they desperately wanted to be heard. When I go to the episode that tells of the horrific massacre at the Farm, I was completely blocked as it was too hard to switch off emotionally and think about the word order of the sentence or make a choice of adjectives when the plot was describing the murder of the little boys in front of their mother: Garo lies placidly with his handsome smile, holding his little hands over his open belly. Leslie, scurrying on all fours, tries to hide beneath the sideboard sparkling with crystal, but he’s dragged out by his feet and flung against the wall, where his small round head smashes like a ripe coconut, spraying  blood and brain across the delicate floral design. Thus are flowers born from the blood of the Armenian Calvary. (Arslan 2006, 118) After a while, emotionally drained, I decided to skip those passages and return to them once I’d completed the book. I finally managed to keep my promise, finishing the book before the screening of the film, which took place July 10, 2007, at the opening of the Golden Apricot Film Festival in Yerevan (Arslan 2007). In the translation I have maintained the foreign expressions in Turkish, French, and English used by the author in the Italian text, because it was worth reviving those expressive nuances in Armenian, especially taking into account that these terms not only precisely characterized the cultural environment of that generation during the Genocide, but were also a part of the characters’ everyday lives. So I precisely preserved foreign words in transliteration, inserting notes to facilitate comprehension and reading. From Text to Reel: Cinematic Translation of Arslan’s Skylark Farm to the Taviani brothers’ film The Lark Farm There is always the matter of fidelity of the film to the novel, generally expressed as a function of adequacy and acceptability, whereby the former is more or less what we mean by equivalence, and the latter is more or less what we mean by audience believability. For example, many readers usually watch movies based on the books they’ve read and end up being disappointed. Why? Because so many parts of the story are cut out. So we as readers look for mistakes and sometimes disregard whether the movie was well directed, produced, and so on. I think we should never compare them, but rather consider them separately. When a book is translated into a movie, questions inevitably arise. One of the first is to ask about the film genre (documentary, drama, historical narrative, etc.) that the filmmaker has chosen since each film genre creates a different kind of viewing experience for the audience. The famous Italian film directors and screenwriters the Taviani brothers’ Lark Farm is based on a historical novel, so the goal is to awaken curiosity, interest, even engagement in a historical event; the limitations and strengths of a film translation are evident in the selection of passages from the novel, the filmic treatment of those passages, the omission of passages, and so on. The Taviani brothers announced right away that the film would be “liberally” based on Skylark Farm—that is, the plot would be relatively the same but the directors had the right to change things or make additions, and in fact they editorialized and accessorized the film and inserted fictional material in the movie such as love interests and so on. This is quite normal because, even if it originates in a novel, the filmmaker translates her or his perception/translation of the fiction into film. This reflection leads into the relationship of the source (novel) and the target (film) and opens up such questions as what other source modeling material is evident in the film. In fact, the Tavianis have not only cut episodes from the novel but they have also added some. There is an episode in the film that recalls a passage from another Genocide narrative by Alice Tachdjian, Pietre sul cuore (Stones on the heart), published in Italy in 2003. In the book there is a scene where two women are forced to dispose of the child by suffocating him between them as they sit back to back (Tachdjian 2003): We were terrorized by the Turks’ cruelty, writes Tachdjian in her memoir. We understood that they were trying to annihilate us all, but before they found joy in killing the children in front of their mothers, who were going mad throwing themselves from the cliffs. The Turks were opening the wombs of pregnant women with yatağan, they were stabbing children and then drowning [them] in the rivers. They even took [the] clothes from the dead, to resell them afterwards. [. . .] Our two-month-old baby was crying because he was hungry, there was no milk in Hripsimé’s breasts, the grass that she ate on the streets caused terrible stomachache for the child. However the poor creature [was] destined to die of hunger, diarrhea, or by the sword. To avoid being discovered by his cries, our mother and sister suffocated the baby in the middle of their backs, one against the other, without looking at him. He [was] extinguished like a candle . . .12 When the Taviani brothers asked Antonia Arslan to dramatize Skylark Farm, there was also much interest from 12 Tachdjian’s book hasn’t been translated into English yet. We translated this piece of a memoir as a class assignment during my Armenian Genocide course at Fresno State as I wanted my students to experience what Genocide translation meant. Since the memoir was in Italian, the process of translation took place with me providing the initial translation into English, and then working collectively with the students. Hollywood in acquiring the movie rights. But Arslan was aware that in the past the several attempts to produce a Hollywood film about the Armenian Genocide were blocked. She knew that prominent directors and actors throughout the decades had attempted to produce a film based on Franz Werfel’s novel Forty Days of Musa Dagh, but without success.13 Antonia Arslan therefore agreed to the Taviani brothers’ suggestion. The film is a Spanish coproduction and the Spanish actress Paz Vega is a central character in the movie. Even the Spanish translation of the movie Skylark Farm is entitled El Destino di Nunik as she interprets Nunik’s role.14 In fact when the film had just come out some Armenians were concerned by the fact that the filmmaker had inserted a double love story for Nunik with two Turkish officers played by two actors, the Italian actor Alessandro Preziosi and the German Moritz Bleibtreu. In her novel Antonia has only one love story. A change I dislike in the film is Nunik’s second romance with a Turkish soldier, one who is helping lead a caravan of Armenian women to their death in Syria, wrote one of my students at California State University Fresno in his final paper. I feel like Nunik must have a very deep case of Stockholm Syndrome, as she seems to only fall in love with Turkish soldiers. Besides catering to fans of romance movies I can’t understand why this change was made. It almost seems to pander to a Turkish audience by showing a sympathetic Turkish participant in the Genocide, who we’re meant to feel sorry for because he doesn’t really want to be there. Was he added to make any Turk watching feel less guilty? Obviously, the Turkish audience for this movie would be small if not nonexistent, so the addition of this character is puzzling. The two characters are both serving the same purpose as a sympathetic perpetrator and love interest, so it would make a lot more sense to merge them together, from a storytelling perspective. As it is the second Turkish soldier is redundant at best, and raises a lot of unfortunate implications.15 During the “film vs novel” discussion with cinema critic Dr. Artsvi Bakhchinyan from Armenia, he confessed: 13 According to Variety magazine, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh has become “the most on- again and off-again motion picture production in Hollywood history” (Torosyan 2012). 14 This character is Azniv in the book, and unlike the film is not a central character in the volume. 15 An excerpt from the final paper by Suren Oganessian.  Like from any artistic display of the Armenian Genocide, Armenians had great expectations from the Tavianis’ film, and as a general rule these expectations were unjustified. Of course, we should be grateful to the great masters of cinema for being able to bring the pain of our people to the public at large, which was not sufficiently informed of the history of this tragedy. However, in my humble opinion as a film critic, the extremely classical shape, style, and language in which the story was presented was at least half a century late. The same cannot be said about the book. The presented motivations for the film as a tragedy remain almost undiscovered. According to the film, one perceives the false notion that those motivations were purely economic. From historical and psychological points of view, the behavior of the main heroine of the film is not characteristic of an Armenian woman at the beginning of the twentieth century and gives the wrong idea that the Armenian women, like Nunik, were throwing themselves into the arms of the Turks. In fact, the opposite occurred. The fictional part of the film suffers due to the dialogues that are not characteristic of everyday home speech. Perhaps the film’s small budget caused some “artistisms” inappropriate to present-day cinematography (for example, in the deportation scene, the clothes the deportees are wearing are not convincing). From my perspective, the film works especially well for an audience with little or no knowledge about the Armenian Genocide. By contrast, Armenians, more aware of the Genocide, have more mixed sensations, either of gratitude towards the filmmakers or of disappointment due to the dubious accuracy of some aspects, as we saw above. A completely unaware person however would begin to learn about the historical phenomenon of the Armenian Genocide. The filmmakers managed to put together an excellent cast. They stated in one of their interviews that the actors were not only involved professionally but also emotionally. According to the directors, after watching the whole film for the first time the Turkish-born Greek–Jewish actor Tchéky Karyo burst into tears and when he calmed down he said that he had not only watched the tragedy that they had played, but he had also seen his Jewish uncle and grandfather. So in the imagination of the actor Karyo the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust all of a sudden were superimposed.16 16 Il genocidio dimenticato: intervista ai Fratelli Taviani [Parte 1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pnyzq4kROA.  When we ask about the effect of a film, we are dealing with the rhetorical and artistic purposes of the film—that is, we are probing into the film’s skopos or purpose with regard to the audience. A novel would have similar artistic and rhetorical purposes, but executed along different lines since the experience of reading a novel is stretched out over several hours if not days while the experience of viewing a film is usually contained in under two hours. And this is a very important point as movies usually reach an even larger audience, and sometimes viewing a massacre with your own eyes might prove more powerful than reading about it. The grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of film create meaning in their own right but also invite the viewers to make meaning out of the viewing experience. Film has the potential to be an excellent tool in raising awareness about a historical event in less than two hours to an audience of hundreds of thousands.17 When in 2006 the Taviani brothers were shooting the film, their intention was to raise awareness about the Armenian Genocide and show the world the need to stop such crimes against humanity from reoccurring. Their desire also was to see their movie circulating in the schools. Today their goal has been fulfilled as the film is shown in many Italian schools mainly to eighth-graders who are learning about World War I and students doing their last year of high school. This film has two major advantages: it stimulates reflection on a story known only by a few, in part because few film makers have brought this Genocide onto the screens before. Secondly, this film shows that good and evil are not at all on one side or the other. Conclusion In his Les Lieux de Mémoire, Nora asserts that In fact, memory has never known more than two forms of legitimacy: historical and literary. These have run parallel to each other but until now always separately. At present, the boundary between the two is blurring; following closely upon the successive deaths of memory–history and memory–fiction, a new kind of history has been born, which owes its 17For audiovisual translation, among others see Zatlin 2005; Díaz-Cintas 2009; Cronin 2009; and the collection of essays by Agost, Orero, and di Giovanni 2012.  prestige and legitimacy to the new relation it maintains to the past [. . .] History has become the deep reference of a period that has been wrenched from its depths, a realistic novel in a period in which there are no real novels. Memory has been promoted to the center of history: such is the spectacular bereavement of literature. (Nora 1989, 24) In the novel, by reconstructing her family history Arslan is merging both historical research and the imagination from a collective memory. Historical research and imagination that have both been brought together by a collective memory are very important even independently, and the merging of them all is quite fascinating, especially with regards to the collective. And the consequence of the novel is a sort of catharsis for Arslan and her family as she becomes both receptacle and protector. Here we can also call into question the very genre of art and literature, depending on the author’s intention. For example, “art for art’s sake” or art for a social cause, or testimony for catharsis. Literature and testimony are different, and then there is the literature of testimony, which is another genre altogether. Why is the “literature of testimony” an actual genre? And, further, even if it is not exactly Arslan’s testimony but a retelling of a retelling, Arslan’s text is a literature of testimony. Collecting personal and public memories affords coherence and integrity to interrupted stories that have been fragmented or compromised by loss, dislocation, and division. In our case, the journey into Arslan’s family’s past transcends the silence and fills the gaps in a personal history. Family history, personal history, and national history are, in fact, interrelated and at times one. Finally, in Skylark Farm, through the research of original documents and acts of postmemory, the author unites her present to the lost world of her family, and in this way strengthens her roots and anchors her identity. With the memory what is past returns to be actual. The memory is not only an act of remembering, but it can become a living entity, can become a vibrant emotion. Antonia Arslan’s Genocide narrative with its thirty-six reprints in Italy alone, where the Armenian community only has 2,000 members, has sold over 500,000 copies to an Italian readership for the most part previously unaware of the Armenian Genocide. However, it is through the power of translation into fifteen languages that Skylark Farm has surpassed the borders of Italy, taking the knowledge of the Armenian Genocide throughout the globe and thereby contributing to its “afterlife”—to use the word of Walter Benjamin (Benjamin 1999)—as well as its cinematic rendering to a global audience. References Aftandilian, Gregory (2009), “World War II as an Enhancer of Armenian- American Second Generation Identity,” JSAS 18:2, 33–54. Agost, Rosa, Pilar Orero, and Elena di Giovanni. 2012. Multidisciplinarity in Audiovisual Translation. Alicante: University of Alicante Press. Alù, Giorgia. 2009. “Sulle tracce del passato: memoria e frammentazione familiare in Vita di Melania Mazzucco e La masseria delle allodole di Antonia Arslan.” In Tempo e memoria nella lingua e nella letteratura italiana. Vol. III: Narrativa del Novecento e degli anni Duemila, edited by Bastiaensen et al., 363–374. Brussels: Associazione Internazionale Professori d’Italiano. Arslan, Antonia. 2004. La masseria delle allodole. Milan: Rizzoli. ———. 2006. Skylark Farm. Translated by Geoffrey Brock. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 2007. Artuytneri agarake (Skylark Farm). Second edition 2012. Edited by Sahak Partev. Translated by Sona Haroutyunian. Yerevan: Sahak Partev. ———. 2008. Pacsirtavár. Translated by Kinga Júlia Király. Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureș: Mentor Kiadó. ———. 2009. La strada di Smirne. Milan: Rizzoli. ———. 2012. Il libro di Mush. Milan: Skira. ———. (2015). Il rumore delle perle di legno. Milan: Rizzoli. ———. (2016). Lettera a una ragazza in Turchia. Milan: Rizzoli. Arslan, Antonia, Laura Pisanello, and Avedis Ohanian. 2001. Hushèr: la memoria. Voci italiane di sopravvissuti armeni. Milan: Guerini e Associati. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. “The Task of Translator: An introduction to the translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens.” Translated by Harry Zohn. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge. Brodzki, Bella. 2007. Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cronin, Michael. 2009. Translation goes to the Movies. Abingdon: Routledge. Dadrian, Vahakn N. 2003. Storia del genocidio armeno. Conflitti nazionali dai Balcani al Caucaso. Edited by Antonia Arsland and Boghos Levon Zekiyan and translated by Alessandra Flores d’Arcais. Milan: Guerini e Associati. Dédéyan, Gérard, ed. 2002. Soria degli armeni. Edited by Antonia Arslan and Boghos Levon Zekiyan. Milan: Guerini e Associati. Original French edition Histoire du peuple arménien. Edited by Gérard Dédéyan. Toulouse: Éditions Privat, 1982. Díaz-Cintas, Jorge. (2009). New Trends in Audiovisual Translation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Grass, Günter. 2008. Peeling the Onion. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Haroutyunian, Sona. 2006. “La Commedia dantesca in armeno.” In IX Rassegna armenisti italiani, 20–26. Venice: Padus-Araxes. Accessed February 16, 2017. PDF available at http://www.24grammata.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/04/Armenisti-Italiani-24grammata.com_.pdf. ———. 2012a. “Interview with world famous novelist Antonia Arslan.” PDF available at book platform: your gateway to book culture in Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine. Accessed February 16, 2017. http://www.bookplatform.org/images/activities/417/docs/interviewantoniaar slanen.pdf. ———. 2012b. “‘The Homer of Modern Times’: The Reception and Translation of Dante in the Armenian World.” In Like doves summoned by desire: Dante’s New Life in 20th Century Literature and Cinema. Essays in memory of Amilcare Iannucci, edited by Massimo Ciavolella and Gianluca Rizzo, 89–109. New York: Agincourt Press. Accessed February 16, 2017. https://www.academia.edu/18710985/_The_Homer_of_Modern_Times_the _Reception_and_Translation_of_Dante_in_the_Armenian_World. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations (26), special issue Memory and Counter-Memory, 7–24. doi:10.2307/2928520. Muxel, Anne. 1996. Individu et mémoire familiale. Paris: Nathan. Mutafian, Claude. 2001. Metz Yeghérn: Breve storia del genocidio degli armeni. Translated and edited by Antonia Arslan. Milan: Guerini e Associati. Peroomian, Rubina. 2012. The Armenian Genocide in Literature: Perceptions of Those Who Lived through the Years of Calamity. Yerevan: The Armenian Genocide Museum–Institute. Rushdie, Salman. 1992. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Vintage Books. Sherman, Daniel J. 1999. The Construction of Memory in Interwar France. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Tachdjian, Alice. 2003. Pietre sul cuore. Milan: Sperling & Kupfer Editori. Taviani, Paolo, and Vittorio Taviani, directors. 2007. La masseria delle allodole. Released in English as The Lark Farm (2007). Ager 3, France 2 cinéma, Flach Film et al. Torosyan, Lilly. 2012. “New Documentary on ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’ and Hollywood.” The Armenian Weekly, October 5. Accessed February 16, 2017. www.armenianweekly.com/2012/10/05/new-documentary-on-the- forty-days-of-musa-dagh-and-hollywood/. Varujan, Daniel. 1992. Il canto del pane. Translated by Antonia Arslan. Milan: Guerrini e Associati. ———. 1995. Mari di grano e altre poesie armene. Translated by Antonia Arslan. Paoline. Zatlin, Phyllis. 2005. Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation. Buffalo: Multilingual Matters. teaches Armenian language and literature at the Università degli Studi di Venezia—Ca’ Foscari (Venice, Italy). She received her first PhD in philology and translation (Yerevan State University) and her second in linguistics (Università degli Studi di Venezia—Ca’ Foscari). She has been visiting professor at the Nida School of Translation Studies, Yerevan State University, California State University Fresno, and City University of New York. She has authored many scholarly papers and translated books, including Antonia Arslan’s bestsellers. In her recent monograph The Theme of the Armenian Genocide in the Italian Literature she metaphorically analyses Genocide literature as “translation of trauma.” 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15536

Siri Nergaard: Marianne, I would like to start by asking you to introduce yourself, to tell us how you started to work on memory, and how you developed the idea of postmemory. Marianne Hirsch: I was very late coming to questions of memory. I really started to think about it in the late 1980s which was, I guess, the beginning of Memory Studies and Holocaust Studies, when it became a field of inquiry. But actually, thinking back, my Master’s thesis in 1970 was already on memory. It was a thesis in Comparative Literature and it was on Nabokov’s Lolita and Musil’s novella Tonka, and it was, in each case, about the protagonist’s memory of a lost love. So it is in some ways an old topic, and also a much newer and different one, though it did not concern me for a very long time, because I was actually interested in the new. The new novel, the new wave, postmodernism and the beginnings of second-wave feminism, and the issue about how to remake the world: the past was very far from my consciousness for over a decade. If someone had told me in the ’70s that I would be working on memory, and particularly my family history and the history of my parents during the Second World War, I would have said, “who’s interested in that?” and “why would I be interested in that?” When I did come to the study of memory, I think that it was actually through my work in feminism which was very much about analyzing, contesting, critiquing the ethos of family, of traditional family structures. I wrote a book on mothers and daughters in literature that then led me to genealogies: the story of genealogies that of course also leads to memory. This trajectory is not just about my own formation, it’s really about my generation where actually, strangely, a number of people working in feminism and women’s literature and feminist theory ended up working on issues of memory. I see a lot of threads of continuity between these fields and how we all suddenly, it seemed, moved from one interest to another. Not that we left behind the questions of gender. On the contrary, they’re still infused in the work. It’s a work that has a similar commitment to tell untold stories, to ensure that stories of suffering and catastrophe aren’t forgotten—those kinds of commitments. So, this is how I see the relationship. Cristina Demaria: I have a very similar itinerary. This is also how I started moving toward memory. Marianne Hirsch: . . . How do you explain the continuities? Cristina Demaria: . . . In a very similar way to the one you said: to give voice to untold stories, or narratives that can be told differently. And as you said before, in the 1970s the tendency of critical theory was oriented towards the new and the future. Nowadays memory is often seen in connection to the future; memory of course is written in the present to rewrite the past, but also for a future. So, the very role of memory has changed very much, but to me its connection to gender studies is still very important. I remember that the first essay I read of yours is the one on Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah and the women. Marianne Hirsch: . . . that’s really the beginning of my getting involved in that field, that was the very beginning. . . Cristina Demaria: Do you agree with those who say that the concept of memory became important as a category in order to bring history and materiality back into theory? Marianne Hirsch: Yes, I agree though it may not be the only explanation. In fact, materiality and bodies didn’t really disappear: to say that deconstruction was completely antimaterial is not really true. But I think people saw it as the linguistic turn and, so, saw that not only materiality was missing but also history, in a sense. So, then we had the new historicism that was also about material objects, and memory studies kind of grew up around the same time. I think that there are many other reasons for the appeal of memory, one of them, the attractiveness of the interdisciplinarity of this field, that anthropologists, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and psychoanalysts, literary and visual culture theorists could actually work together. That didn’t really happen for me in any other context as vibrantly as around questions about memory. Siri Nergaard: And also translation studies, later on, can be, in many ways, connected to memory. Bella Brodzki, with her book has demonstrated how strongly connected these two themes are. In regards to this interdisciplinary connection I would like you to develop what you just told us about your starting your research on memory through Shoah, a film in which you noticed the absence of women, but where the women were translators. Marianne Hirsch: Exactly, Shoah shows a particular relation to the Holocaust, which was a very central site of the development of memory studies. Shoah really shows how central translation is to the whole, I mean, first of all to the experience of the Holocaust and its aftermath, and then to the representation and the study of it. Many films wouldn’t do it that way, but because Lanzmann decided to take time to show the process of translation and to foreground it, I think he points to something that’s actually very much a part of the field, which is that, a lot of people who lived through that historical moment, may not have had a primary language but lived their daily lives, at home, in the ghettos and camps, and in the aftermath, in and through translation. You asked me earlier, “what's your first language?” and I said “German,” but neither my parents nor I lived in a German- speaking country, except for one year in Vienna, so we were always minority speakers of a language that we claimed as ours, but that was actually denied us as Jews. So, it’s a very complicated relationship to a first language, but many survivors of the Holocaust, may not have had a first language at all. Many people were young and they might have grown up speaking Yiddish in school and then Polish on the street, they were deported to a camp where they learned German, and later they ended up in a DP camp in Italy, and in the end they went to Israel or the United States. When you listen to or watch their testimonies, they are most often speaking a “foreign” language. What is the status of those testimonies? In the study of memory, testimony, and witness in the first person is really important, but the witness’s relation to the language she speaks is very often mediated by the multilingualism in which she lived and lives. Siri Nergaard: Yes, and when you then have the person to whom the memory is transmitted, the generation of postmemory, further languages are involved. As you told us, you spoke German with your mother, but the language you are writing in is English, so you are really translating these memories again, for I don’t know, the third, fourth, or fifth time. Marianne Hirsch: Well, you know, it’s very complicated and, I’m always wondering, what am I doing to these stories, to their authenticity. The book that Leo Spitzer and I wrote on the community that my family grew up in, Czernowitz, Ghosts of Home, was based on a lot of interviews, a lot of readings and documents and literature as well, but a lot of interviews. We interviewed people in German, we interviewed them in English, we interviewed them in Romanian, you know, whatever they wanted to speak. But the book is in English, so most of the quotes we used had not only to be edited but also translated. We also used my father’s memoir quite extensively. He wanted to write it in English because he wanted to write it for his grandsons. His English was a language acquired very late in life, and the experiences he wrote about were in German and Romanian. So, his words are already a process of translation, of multiple translations. I think these language issues are at the core of memory studies. Siri Nergaard: There is also the time of translation in the metaphorical and literal way. Marianne Hirsch: It is time, but it’s also the mediation of the translator, especially significant if the translator is the child of the person and wants to hear certain things, then it’s more than just a professional translation, right? There’s a kind of investment that’s part of what I talk about as postmemory; the personal investments and the desires, and the curiosities of the second generation. Then, you get the parents’ words but you have to translate them; how do you trust that your investments aren’t somehow also structuring the translation? Siri Nergaard: As I see it from a translation point of view again, what you are telling here about the transmission and mediation of a memory, through language, the personal involvement by the translator, her investments, are assuming in a way what I see as the core aspects of what translation is about. In the translation of the other’s memory you can find a kind of archetype of what translation really is. Translation always implies change because of personal and cultural investments giving memory a new nature, a new identity of that memory since you have put it into another context and another language. Marianne Hirsch: Yes, I think that’s true. And then, of course, a lot of these stories are diaspora stories with memories of migration and refugeehood that are inherent as well. There, of course, you have multiple translations, cultural translations, and linguistic [translations] as well. Siri Nergaard: Could you tell us how you define and how you developed this concept that has been so helpful and fruitful for us—the concept of postmemory? Cristina Demaria: And together with that, let us include the question Bella Brodzki wanted to ask you: Have there been applications or appropriations—translations into new and different contexts—of your very generative term “postmemory” that have surprised or perhaps even enlightened you in ways you hadn’t anticipated or envisioned? Marianne Hirsch: Well, it started as a very personal need for a term, not just for me but also for a number of colleagues who met at feminist conferences in the 1980s. Informally, at lunch or breakfast we started talking about our family history and then it turned out that we had similar family histories, and similar symptoms and syndromes that came from them. It was the moment when important texts like Art Spielgeman’s Maus and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, monuments about memory were starting to come out. We realized that we are the inheritors of these histories but we hadn’t really thought about what that meant. For me it was really reading Maus and thinking about it and talking to people like Bella, who had actually gone through similar family experiences. We all felt like our parents’ memories of their youth were overshadowing our own memories of our childhoods. It was a really powerful sensation that demanded a term that was like memory but it wasn’t actually memory. So, that’s where the idea actually came from, so it was quite personal and it was rooted in this history of inherited histories. But of course this is part of a much larger story. Just yesterday, we had a discussion with the filmmaker Laurent Bécue- Renard who made the film Of Men and War, based on interviews with traumatized veterans of the Iraq War in a treatment program in California. He said that the reason he made this film, and his previous film about Bosnian widows called Tired of War, is because he felt like he needed to understand his own grandparents. His two grandfathers fought in the First World War; he never met them, but he wanted to understand how these very young men went into trench warfare, came back, started a family of which he is the product. The widows, wives, grandmothers whom he met lived with an unspoken history. As he said, “aren’t we all the inheritors of the wars of the twentieth century?” If this is postmemory, it is so in the sense not even of stories, it’s really about the affects and the behaviors and the kinds of. . . Cristina Demaria: As you said, “products.” Marianne Hirsch: . . . Yes, the products, it’s really in the DNA that we have inherited, we are all the products of that. We all live with those legacies. Laurent Bécue-Renard is trying to understand how that shapes masculinity and femininity and the culture, and how these histories are transmitted even if they’re not really told. And that really kind of subsumed what I wanted to do with that term. It was fascinating that he’s third generation and he didn’t talk about his parents in France during the Second World War, but about his grandfathers. When he was interviewing the veterans of Iraq who were, probably, twenty years younger than he is, it was as their grandson, in a sense. This is something I didn’t quite understand in the beginning—that the temporal implications [. . .] are so complex that history stops being linear and is somehow simultaneous rather than genealogical. So, something else I learned is that although I never saw postmemory as a strictly biological, biographical, or familial structure, for some the literal connections are supremely important. I saw it more as a generational structure and I think that memory is always mediated through stories, through narratives, through images, through media. Even when it’s within the family, it’s still mediated. So, I was always very insistent on that, but then people who are children or grandchildren of survivors or actors within certain histories, wanted to preserve a special place for that literal relationship. In my book on postmemory, I tried to make space for them by distinguishing between familial and affiliative postmemory. At first it surprised me that people felt very protective of that space which is a position I’m not always that sympathetic to, because it feels like identity politics to me, or some sort of authenticity that I’ve always been suspicious of. The other thing that happened in the time that I’ve been working on postmemory is that a lot of interesting work in queer theory that complicates linearity, linear histories emerged. A critique that complicates the idea of genealogy and that looks at alternative kinds of family structures. And so I felt like my work was, in some ways, already doing that, even though it looked like it was about family, it wasn’t really, it was about a contestation about a kind of traditional family structure. Those are things that surprised me because I felt like there were some conversations that I didn’t quite realize I would be in but, I ended up in. Cristina Demaria: I was thinking of this very idea of affiliation and the ways in which different forms of commemoration of post dictatorship have developed in Latin America, very much linked memory is preserved, as in the movements of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo: the bearer of a certain memory is legitimized as such through a family connection. But there is a tendency now in Argentinean Memory Studies to go towards a more affiliative idea of memory and postmemory, since the very idea of family in a Latin culture can be also very much of a problem; it can be very traditional and has been used to support the dictatorship: God, the traditional family, and the country. . . Marianne Hirsch: Well it’s fascinating in Argentina because of course, that’s where family have DNA tests actually, so that a very literal, biological definition of identity has a political impact unlike many other places. Each context has its own politics and I think that’s what’s so interesting about working transnationally as you do and as I have. It is actually, if I can say it in more metaphorical terms, the untranslatabilities between these contexts: in any other context, if you wanted to do a DNA test to find out if you’re really the daughter of this person who’s already handed down to you all of these histories, you might think that that was a kind of identity politics, but, in Argentina it’s actually really important, because the people raising you could be the perpetrators of the crimes against your biological parents. Cristina Demaria: In the same context there are different layers. This idea of limiting the “property” of memory to the biological family, and to the associations of direct victims had stopped the more affiliative and cultural ways of elaborating the past. But now it is changing. I would like to move to your work within Women Creating Change, where there are scholars but also artists and performers. How do you work together, do you translate? And what happens when you go to a place like Istanbul, as you recently did, where you confront, different cultures, a very particular past and a troubled present. . . Marianne Hirsch: The larger project is called Women Creating Change but the working group within that that some of us have started, is called Women Mobilizing Memory and it really has to do with what you said before: how can memory be mobilized for to the idea of family transmission. Think of Argentina and how change in the future? Rather than being weighted down by a past that you can never get over. The trauma paradigm that came out of this wonderfully rich theoretical work of the 1990s is very much about keeping the wounds open and understanding the unspeakability of certain crimes, the kind of crushing of the human and of language through acts of persecution and genocide and the destruction of a culture. That’s been a very powerful paradigm in the study of memory. Our thought in working more comparatively and transnationally was to look at whether the practices of memory look the same in different places. One of the key questions is how can memory become activist and how can it become more future-oriented? How can the past be transmitted, how can we make sure that certain histories aren’t forgotten… Cristina Demaria: Not just to be “preserved,” but as living memories… Marianne Hirsch: Right, and not for monumentalization in some kind of a museum, but for change. That’s where the feminist angle is coming in. To do that work, we really thought it would be interesting not just to have an interdisciplinary academic group but to work together with practictioners—artists, activists, curators, museologists. . . and to see what kind of collaboration would emerge from that. We are working together with the Hemispheric Institute on Performance and Politics: Performance Studies is already the field that takes the kind of embodied nature of memory very much into account. In those conferences, in the Encuentros of the Hemispheric Institute, we’ve had working groups in which we talked about mobilizing memory, but we also always talked about embodiment. It’s really interesting to have academic conversations in a room with artists, dancers, theater practitioners, visual artists, and scholars. Now, I think that question about embodiment and how memory functions in the body is a very different question for a dancer than it is for an academic like me who’s going to write about it. That’s also a process of translation when you think about it, it’s really understanding the multidimensionality of knowledge. When we have visual artists in the group, they’re translating our ideas into a visual work and I feel that we could use that work to think with. As literary critics we do that anyway with the texts that we read, but the multiple texts are very interesting. And, then, you have the embodied practices of memory, like the walk of the mothers on Thursdays in Buenos Aires, or the walk of the Saturday Mothers in Istanbul; similar strategies, very different kind of impact, politically different moments in the histories of these mothers–activists. These practices are a kind of performance, and its cultural impact then becomes a way through which ideas about memory and memory practices can be developed. I find these multidimensional conversations really helpful. So far, we’ve worked in a triangular structure with Chile, Turkey, and the US but people in the group may be working on other sites as well, so it’s more about the conceptual connections than just about the sites. Often we think we understand something and we really don’t. So I think, in terms of translation, one of the things we decided from the very beginning is that we should just assume that we don’t understand. We shouldn’t just assume that things can be easily translated. For example, when the group was in Chile, we went to the Museo de la Memoria, which is a museum commemorating the coup against Allende and the crimes of the dictatorship of Pinochet. The narrative of the museum starts on September 11, 1973—that is, the day of the Golpe. Where’s the background? How are people supposed to understand how this happened? Isn’t there a prehistory? To us from the US, it seemed flawed as a museological choice. But our Chilean partners responded, “here in Chile, when you talk about the background, that's the right-wing thing to do,” because the right said the reason Allende was toppled was because he was failing, and there were strikes because of his bad government. . . The progressive history starts on the day and its aftermath. This is the kind of untranslatability that I think is at the core of this kind of work which I don’t even want to call comparative work anymore, because it implies that you can compare things, so I’m trying to talk about “connective” histories; we provide the connections but often, they’re not easily connectable. We have to start with, “maybe we don't understand,” rather than walking into a situation assuming you know how it should be done, because it’s different in different contexts. Siri Nergaard: It’s very interesting what you are saying about untranslatability and that you don’t want to use the comparative concept. . . Marianne: I mean, I was in comparative literature so you can imagine it’s not so easy for me to say that. . . Siri Nergaard: I understand. I am saying this also because recently there has been a sort of shift in translation studies towards a stronger attention towards untranslatability, an aspect that has been somehow neglected. We have been so focused on translatability, and recognizing it everywhere, that we have almost forgotten that untranslatability exists. Untranslatables exist: as you said, sometimes universes are uncomparable because they are untranslatable, but we can create the connections. Marianne Hirsch: In the conference that we had in Turkey, which was about mobilizing memory for change, there was a really interesting talk by the anthropologist Leyla Nezi who interviewed Kurdish youth and Turkish young people, about the relationship between the two cultures. She said, “in these interviews, nobody meets anybody else,” because for the Turkish young people, the important moments of their lives are ahead of them, but for the Kurdish young people, the important things have already happened for them in the losses that preceded their birth. They live in the same country, but they’re not in the same time zone. I think that’s a really interesting idea of the nonmeeting. How might their lost past be turned toward the future as well? What will make these histories translatable to each other? What kinds of solidarity might be forged between them? And what can we learn from each other’s experiences of memory and activism? These are some of the questions that I’ve been thinking about and translation is at their core. Thank you for giving me a chance to think with you about this. Cristina Demaria and Siri Nergaard: Thank you very much. writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in a global perspective. Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012); Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010), coauthored with Leo Spitzer; and Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (2011), coedited with Nancy K. Miller. Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She is one of the founders of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. She is a former President of the Modern Language Association of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15527

Translation does not concern a comparison between two languages but the interpretation of two texts in two different languages. Umberto Eco (2001) Ever since we started publishing this journal I have wanted to dedicate a special issue to memory. Memory and translation are so obviously connected, yet so little studied. Memory—as the retrieval, reconstruction, inscription, and leaving of traces and their effects—plays a central role in any translation process, and translation, in its inherently transformative character, is intrinsic to every memory and memorializing act. Loss, furthering, circulation, redefinition, distancing, transmigration, rewriting are all possible aspects and effects of translation that could not take place if not for some sort of memorialization. * Since the initial planning of this special issue, my editors of choice were also clear to me. I am so grateful to the two fine scholars—and dear friends—Bella Brodzki and Cristina Demaria for having accepted to serve as guest editors for this issue. Their backgrounds and research make them a perfect duo for the present issue. Bella Brodzki’s brilliant Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007) is perhaps the most important publication bringing together translation and memory, demonstrating how “excavating or unearthing burial sites or ruins in order to reconstruct traces of the physical and textual past in a new context is also a mode of translation, just as resurrecting a memory or interpreting a dream are acts of translation.” I found reading this book truly illuminating.  Bringing Bella together with Cristina, who for years has studied memory from the somewhat different angle of the semiotics of culture, was a fortunate choice. Cristina’s research is in the most various expressions and testimonies of memory— from reconciliation processes in South Africa and Chile to documentaries of events and experiences of trauma. “Studying memory [as a cultural phenomenon] means considering not only the material conditions, means, or devices through which it is inscribed and transmitted, but also the models, forms, and practices that define those genres that orient, and also retranslate or reenunciate, narrations of the past” (2012, 10; my translation). * I would like to thank Bella and Cristina for their wonderful work in putting this issue together. I also want to thank the authors for their contributions, each of which provides new and diversified insights into how translation works through memory. I am also very grateful for their patience during the many publication delays. Regrettably, it took much longer than expected and originally programmed to publish this special issue. On behalf of the board, I want to apologize to our guest editors, authors, and readers for the unconscionable delay in delivering our journal. Over the past few years, we moved from one publisher to another but now, after a lengthy hiatus, we have finally found a new home with Eurilink University Press in Rome. * Reading this issue’s essays has enriched my under- standing of the relations between translation and memory. I have learned new things, and I have been surprised and pleased. I hope you will join me in appreciating this special issue. * This issue is dedicated to the memory of Umberto Eco, who passed away more than a year ago while we were busy preparing this issue. Translation was one of the themes to which he devoted much interest and writing in his last few years, and his contributions on translation as negotiation, based on his experience both as a translator and as a widely translated author, will continue to accompany us. I am most grateful for the opportunity he gave me to discover and investigate translation through the lens of semiotics, and Cristina Demaria and I, who both completed our doctorates under his supervision, share fond memories of the lively discussions on translation and its limits during our university seminars. S. N. References Brodzki, Bella. 2007. Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Demaria, Cristina. 2012. Il trauma, l’archivio e il testimone. La semiotica, il documentario e la rappresentazione del “reale”. (Trauma, archive, and witness. Semiotics, documentaries, and the representation of the “real”). Bologna: Bononia University Press. Eco, Umberto. 2001. Experiences in Translation. Translated by Alastair McEwen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Eco, Umberto. 2003. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. Translator/s not specified. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15528

0. A preface on the translational internationalization of the humanities This special volume is the result of a very long, exciting, yet rather difficult struggle, involving translations and self- translations. Who writes here is the “effect” of two people’s endeavors; two people who have come to know each other to some extent across text, screen, and phone line—who, surely, respect and cherish one another, without ever having met. One is American, the other Italian; they have been invited to write for an International Journal in English, a journal that hosts articles that engage, obviously, not only translation, but that are themselves the product of self-translations. This very process has necessarily become part of the volume’s introduction, since one of its authors is not a native speaker. This is a “fact” that nowadays has become routine at least in the Western-Eurocentric worlds, and none dares question it: we must write in English. Otherwise, our international status will be affected, and not only will we go back to being provincial, addressing only a limited audience, but we will be devalued, score lower on all the national evaluations that determine individual and institutional research funding. This seems to be a one-way trajectory that everyone acknowledges, that some occasionally criticize, but is never actually resisted, since it is the way the global production of knowledge and educational systems work. One might wonder why we are foregrounding the obvious, when we should be writing about translation and memory. As many of the essays here demonstrate, however, the relationship between translation and memory has very much to do with not only the position of the person who is translating, but also with that of the person who is writing about translation, and thus creating an archive–memory of all the lives a text might have, along with its histories and narratives, its former and new translated meanings. If all critical analysis and meditation on the differences between languages—which includes the memory that sustains them, and the memory-texts in the languages that manage to survive—are but a translation/self-translation, often erasing nuances and disregarding untranslatability, then in which recesses of translation (from and into English and into every other language) and memory does the future of the humanities reside? 1. Memory and translation of past intercourses Isn’t this what a translation does? [. . .] By elevating the signifier to its meaning or value, all the while preserving the mournful and debt-laden memory of the singular body, the first body, the unique body that the translation thus elevates, preserves, and negates [relève]? Since it is a question of a travail—indeed, as we noted, a travail of the negative—this relevance is a travail of mourning, in the most enigmatic sense of this word [. . .] The measure of the relève or relevance, the price of a translation, is always what is called meaning, that is, value, preservation, truth as preservation (Wahrheit, bewahren) or the value of meaning, namely, what, in being freed from the body, is elevated above it, interiorizes it, spiritualizes it, preserves it in memory. A faithful and mournful memory. (Derrida 2013, 378) Among the many theoretical perspectives from which one can look at translation, as well as the many objects that can be considered from the point of view of translation theories and practices, the translation/memory nexus is among the most fraught, precisely because memory is by definition contesta- tory, and always mediated, and thereby the most complex and difficult to qualify on almost every level. Because of their tight intertwining, one runs the risk of reiterating or echoing what has been said and done already (see, for example, the recent book by one of the author of this volume: Brownlie 2016). Oversaturated, we struggle to find what else could come from further confrontations between these two concepts: how to consider and render truly heuristic an encounter between translation and memory now, in the age of posttranslation studies (Gentzler 2017)? The quoted passage above from Jacques Derrida dates back many years, and, in the domain of translation theories influenced by poststructuralism, it serves as a milestone in the encounter between translation and memory. In what follows, we would like to go back to what might belong to even older history of memory and translation engagements. If for literary critics and translation specialists this history sounds passé, it is not the case for philosophers or scholars working with language and meaning. One of the first fields of confrontation and exchange between translation and memory was the study of the “meaning of meaning”—semiotics, philosophy of language— whereby the implications of any act of translation became part of many theories and speculations on the working of meaning between languages and cultures (Nergaard 1995). Should this seem peripheral to the main event, we could point to structuralism, and even to the beginnings of poststructuralism, up to its recent neomaterialist transformations, as a way of rethinking languages, cultures, and their relation with history and the “material” world. There we find the crucial work of translation and memory as perspectives and/or as epistemic positions that have enabled the study of languages and cultures and the effects of different temporalities, politics, subjectivities and bodies—that is, of the transformative character of translation in memorializing act. As clarification, let us start from some basic assumptions underlining not a post-, but a no-longer- structuralist, interpretative, and translational conception of how semiosis works, looking at the work of Umberto Eco, to whom this issue is dedicated. Even though his work is recognized as having significantly contributed to the development of Roman Jakobson’s three-fold classification of translation (Eco 2001),1 here we want to mention briefly another concept that he used to explain the workings of semiosis, along with that of memory. The operative first assumption is that every act of interpretation that comprises acts of translation has recourse to an encyclopedia, in the semiotic sense that Umberto Eco (1976, 1984) has given to the term—that in its turn refers to semantic and iconic memories that are part not only of every langue system, but of every act of parole, to go back to Ferdinand de Saussure. In other words, the very idea of how meaning works had already changed in the 1980s, thanks also to Eco’s perspective for which the idea of a semiotic universe is made not so much of signs, but of cultural units; entities that absorb and reflect the influence of the culture in which they find themselves, and which are no longer the lemmas [word; term] of a rigid system of content organization (a dictionary), but rather the nodes of a network of meanings that can be treaded upon in multiple directions, depending on the inferences and the interpretive connections one chooses: a semiotic universe that takes the shape of an encyclopedia. (Lorusso 2015, 81) In respect to translation processes, this concept is relevant for two different reasons. The first is that, in accepting semiosis as operating within encyclopedias, what is most relevant is that every term composing a code is always already interpreted, bringing along the history of its uses and translations; the working of languages moving from its structure to the actual effects and transformations of every signifying practices that define not so much what is a 1 One of the most significant contributions to Jakobson’s classification was made by Eco in Experiences in Translation (2001), starting from Charles S. Peirce’s influence on Jakobson. Even though Eco emphasizes that for Peirce “meaning, in its primary sense, is a ‘translation of a sign into another system of signs’” (Eco 2001, 69), he also argues that Peirce “uses translation in a figurative sense: not like a metaphor, but pars pro toto (in the sense that he assumes ‘translation’ as a synecdoche for ‘interpretation’)” (Eco 2001, 69). language, but what concurs to its different kinds of circulation and transmissions, that is, to its translations. As Patrizia Violi summarizes: “The encyclopaedia marks the transformation of the code from a rule that defines signification and interpretation, into the idea of a system of possible inferences, in which even a principle of choice and of freedom may find a place” (Violi 1992, 99). In a culture conceived as an encyclopedia, the hierarchies fall, because the priorities and the dependencies change according to circumstances (thus locally, and bodily). Meaning starts to be thought of as always already constructed and reconstructed, hence translated, in time (and space), within a dialectic between what is already deposited in the encyclopedia and what is historically and culturally negotiated; between consolidated habits2 and their possible transform- ations. And here is the second reason this concept might play a role: collective memories, thought of in their contingent political, social and historical formations, are what is filtered and negotiated and transformed from local, national and cultural encyclopedia. Memory and its processes are what, in different contexts, emerge as different processes of cultural translation. Every translator, therefore, deals not only with those memories belonging to the cultural and historical contexts in which she operates, and with the different politics of memory surrounding the particular text being translated, but also with the semantic and pragmatic fields (scripts, genres, frames) of which each term, each name, is part. In other words, languages, and not only natural languages but images and sounds as well, are thought of as forms of cultural and historical memory, often capable of directing, but, at least, influencing, what we now think of as the fluxes of linguistic traffic that are produced in those border and contact zones— again, temporal and spatial—wherein translation operates. In other words, whenever we look at the processes of archiving and preserving cultures, we find the modeling, and translating, nature of memory. Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky wrote more than forty years ago that the “implanting 2 We refer here to the notion of habit as theorized by Charles S. Peirce (see especially Collect- ed Papers V.4000). of a fact into the collective memory, then, is like a translation from one language into another—in this case, into the ‘language of culture’” (Lotman and Uspensky 1971, 214). And they add—prior to much more recent theorizations of what an “event” is in light of transmedia and current transnational thinking: “Events have multilayered interpretations, they are subject to corrections, revisions. The construction of the historical event is nothing but the translation of something into the language of memory” (Lorusso 2015, 101). A visual example of such influence is the concept of Pathosformel by, recently rediscovered and much discussed in memory studies and aesthetic theory. Developed throughout his life, the unfinished project of the atlas of Mnemosyne, Pathosformeln refers to all those images and forms of pathos (emotions, passions such as fear, awe, and horror) that survive as a cultural heritage imprinted in our collective memory. There are, in other words, antique roots sustaining modern images, their translations—the very way in which their meaning can be reversed—that is at stake whenever we analyze visual cultures.3 2. Memory and translation current transactions However, even though the intersections and exchanges between memory and translation are undeniable, indisputable, and generative, they do not exclude several critical issues: how can these intersections be truly heuristic? Is any confrontation possible without ironing out the actual differences between the two concepts? That is, on the one hand, to think of translation as a way to construct collective memories, their survival, and on the other hand, of memory as always requiring a transfer of time and space, a recontextualizing of its representations and expressions? And even more so if we think of translation as the transformation of one’s own traditions and identity, in itself a process that implies the fatigue of welcoming and of hospitality, the hard work of transmitting one’s own otherness; 3 In the past few years, there has been an increasing interest in Warburg’s project and his idea of Pathosforlmen in many fields (visual studies, aesthetics, history) dealing with the construction and circulation of memory images. Amongst the many author, see the work of Georges Didi-Huberman (2005, 2011). moreover, as a widening of the very concept of multidirec- tional memory (Rothberg 2009). One has to remember all the different practices— individual and collective, linguistic and social—that are at stake in every engagement, to think of practices of translation as both a metaphorical transfer and, as Barbara Godard (see Karpinski, Henderson, Sowton, and Ellenwood 2013) suggests, as metonymical links (see also Tymoczko 1999). In other words, one must not forget the implications of using translation as a metaphor standing in for the encounter with the other that is, also, a transformation of one’s own tradition and memory. This is a choice that is always conveyed by the real labor that accompanies welcoming not only another language, but also another future and another possible past into the negotiations between the translator, the texts, the discourses, and the places, spaces, and times surrounding them. What happens when translation is “translated,” transferred as an expansion and an extension of memories through the figure of testimony and witnessing? And how does translation function in the dynamics of postmemory, as conceptualized by Marianne Hirsch4 and others (see Hirsch 1997, 2012) , in the intergenerational passage that structures both filiation and affiliation? In as much as the concepts and processes of translation and memory are understood to be mutually implicating, if not interpenetrating, in literary critical studies, philosophy, linguistics, distinctions between individual (or autobiographic- al memory) and collective or cultural memory are often not acknowledged. Even when the topic is traumatic memory, in particular, and the analytic categories are drawn from the familiar models of psychoanalytic theory, memory as a phenomenon and a practice is considered to operate across (hence our volume’s title) realms and registers. Likewise, we—as the editors of this volume—are not inclined to privilege either personal or public memory, or engage in debate over the question of priority or precedence. Our essays treat translation in regard to both social and individual memory, reflecting our conviction that, for our 4See the interview with Marianne Hirsch in this issue, in which she revisits the concept of postmemory in its relationship with practices of translation. interpretive purposes, both draw from the same well. There is analytic force and ethical impact in studying the uses and effects of each, and their interconnectedness, as autobiogra- phical narratives, fiction, as well as other forms of literary and cultural expression demonstrate. However, in the disciplines of psychology and the social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, political science, and history, these distinctions do matter, differently; indeed, they are foundational. Having said that, there appears to be a strong drift now in the direction of stressing the effects of the social and the public on personal memory, or an attempt to bridge social science and psychological approaches. This is the case in cutting-edge empirical research in the neurosciences and cognitive psychology, where arguably the greatest advances in memory studies have recently taken place. “Mnemonic consequences,” or what is otherwise referred to as the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, are attributed to the role of conversation/the impact of silence, the said and the unsaid (Stone et al. 2012); this is also true for studies in the reconstructing of memory, which reached its greatest visibility (and notoriety) in the 1990s. Whereas in psychoanalysis the agent of repression is the unconscious (both singular and collective, though to different effect), recent research in cognitive and neurobiological science finds the suppressing or controlling of unwanted memories to be the product of brain systems similar to the mechanisms that stop reflexive motor responses (Anderson and Levy 2009). In studies that seek to bridge psychology—which is method- logyically individually based and functional in its perspective—and the disciplines more generally focused on groups, whether they are nations, tribes, generations, or other units, an important connection is psychology’s recent affirmation that individuals are embedded in complex social networks. Memory, according to neuroscientists, has an epidemiological dimension in the sense of social contagion, which is now exacerbated by social media. Whether mnemonic formations are primarily biological or social in origin, psychology is not interested in the individual qua individual, but in general or universal principles or features that can be extracted. In other words, just because the locus is the individual doesn’t mean that the investment is in the subject or subjectivity. Despite this fundamental difference between the various disciplinary approaches that, nevertheless, needed to be mentioned, what steers much of this work back to literary and cultural perspectives on memory and translation of psychic phenomena is the centrality accorded to narrative and identity. In this respect, Aleida Assmann’s (2015) recent reflections on the working of cultural memory merits mention. Assmann comments not only on neuroscience’s and media studies’ shared “basis in the constructivist hypothesis that events and experiences have no ontological status but are made and remade over and over again” (Assmann 2015, 42), as Lotman and Uspensky (1978) have also said. Her work is also relevant because of her perspective on cultural memory as a domain that must engage with the role of affects—both individual and collective, along with their intertwining— within a diachronic and transgenerational analytical gaze. What does her “model” suggest? Arguably, a sort of rearticulation of the very notion of postmemory, with the added insights of a constructivist point of view. The latter emphasizes the synchronic and embedded quality of a memory fabricated according to actual needs and demands in the present, calls for approaches that focus on the affective dimension of memory in a long-term diachronic perspective, both at the individual and at the collective transgenerational transmission levels. It is probably in this very rearticulation of the relationship between cultural memory and postmemory that processes of translation and rewriting of memories are not only significant because they create an “afterlife of repeated transformations, but also a prehistory”: what is at stake are the ways in which “memory traces interact with previous experiences and cultural patterns; how both of these provide templates that gain a steering function within our mental cosmos” (Assmann 2015, 43). Resonance is thus a form of “stimulating and strengthening the affective charge in the process of remem- bering” (44), where  [t]he concept of resonance implies the interaction of two separate entities, one located in the foreground, one in the background. In this case, the element in the foreground does not cover up or elide what exists in the background; on the contrary, the element in the foreground triggers the background and fuses with it. We may also speak of a cooperation, in which the background element nonconconsciously or unconsciously guides, forms, shapes the foreground element. My emphasis here is on the hidden correspondence and the tacit agreement between a surface stimulus and its response on a deeper and nonconscious level, which can enlarge our understanding of the nonconscious but not necessarily unconscious, let alone occult, dynamics of memory. (Assmann 2015, 45) Resonance and a prehistory of memories can be found in the ways in which translation processes, when dealing with the past, are forms of cooperation between background and foreground that might differ, involving both temporalization and spatialization strategies, as our essays and interviews amply demonstrate. As the interview with James Young that we present online (http://translation.fusp.it) amply suggests, ongoing interest in the link between language and landscape, memorial sites, ruins, and layered translations points to the manifold ways that translation is instrumentalized for different memorializing ends, whether they be in the service of creation, reclamation, or effacement of a memory or former version (one’s own or another’s). Arguably, every act of translation displaces a previous one; sometimes, they continue to coexist, even if one of the languages or versions is in the ascendant or dominant position. Translation works in two directions, toward both remembrance/reification and oblivion, along a continuum which is, of course, subject to change over time. Although, for example, we witness the erasing and mistranslating of place names in Brian Friel’s (1981) famous play Translations—in which in 1883 British surveyors are redrawing the map, that is, converting Gaelic names to English ones—in 1922 both Irish and English were made the official languages of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Linguistic appropriation is the primary form of displacement of the other; linguistic imperialism in this form has been one of the great weapons of choice in history. It is important to note, however, that translation involves reaction and resistance, as well as aggression and enactment. Isabelle Jenin’s essay in our volume addresses the replacement of place names in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, in which the original Indian names for the American landscape are changed to English and Spanish ones. The text, she argues, shows that the “translated” landscape is in some way fundamentally untranslatable, that the Laguna Pueblo spirits that haunt the European settlers’ imprint are exercising their own dominion, keeping their names alive. Toponymy isn’t inherently political, but the history and meaning of place names are dramatically associated with changes of regime, occupation, settlement, and linguistic/ cultural imperialism in general; acts of translation— renaming—are complicit with memorializing and monument- alizing efforts that represent symbolic as well as economic capital investments. They shape, even distort, cultural memory and identity by ensuring certain legacies while effacing, sometimes even burying others. 4. Traces of translatability and untranslatability The working of memory and translation as a kind of urban archaeology has recently been reclaimed and further developed by Sherry Simon (2012). Simon’s overarching project deals with those urban spaces that are divided and polyglot, such as Nicosia, Trieste, and Montreal, addressing translation studies in relation to its growing engagement with those cultural, economic, and political disparities and variations that act on each process of “mediation”. According to Simon, “[s]uch an enlarged understanding of translation includes acts of mediation which are not language transfers in the conventional sense, but are more broadly practices of writing that take place at the crossroads” (8), and “[t]ranslation is a useful and often neglected entry point into questions of diversity and accommodation, identity and community, and the kinds of durable links that can be established across histories and memories” (156). Processes of translation are capable of mobilizing and circulating divergent, indeed conflictual, memories. Therefore, if translation can be thought of as an act that contributes to redefining not only cultural spaces, but also the very spaces where citizenship is identified, it becomes something more than the acknowledgement and the expression of differences. It is also in this sense that translation become a mode, a dispositif in the Foucauldian employment of the term, thanks to which what has passed away, what is apparently past, disappeared, removed, and suppressed, overtakes and exceeds its own predetermined destiny through a rebirth in other contexts, in other times and places, with renewed images. At the same time, the very nature of a dispositif might direct us to reflect again on the status and condition of translatability and untranslatability, whereby speaking of untranslatability does not mean to deny the potentiality of any translation; on the contrary, it means accepting, and always interrogating translation as an actual transformation and interpretation of the memory of cultures or, better yet, of the cultures of memories, their resilience and their resonances. It means continually interrogating the discontinuities and heterogeneities inhabiting every memory construction and tracing of borders, in regards to which we should always exercise not only the work of comparison but, as Marianne Hirsch expresses in her interview in this volume, an effort to imagine new possible political connections and affiliations, new ways of mobilizing memories and their visual, verbal, and performative translations. For Simon, it is undeniable that in every context in which there is a strong awareness of the border—of different languages coexisting, along with competing and often conflicting memories—the suspicion of the “other language” prevails, the other language here acquiring another kind of “untranslatability” entailing any deviation from one’s own, or any inclusion of the translated histories and stories of those living across the material or symbolic border that separates them from us. Both acts of inclusion and exclusion are charged with deep ideological valence: how can we translate what we do not want to translate? Most times, the enemy is the one whose story we do not want to hear; that we do not want to recognize and actually translate, since we might understand it, thus allowing the other’s memory possibly to haunt us. However, as Simon says, cities crossed by linguistic borders— more Trieste and Montreal (to mention her examples) than Jerusalem, or Cape Town (to mention other examples)—are places in which translation can become a very powerful tool, first by bringing along in its very practice the social force of distancing. That is in the confirmation of alterity in the emphasis on social and cultural differences, in the recognition and yielding to religious and national belonging. Second, by calling on the force of furthering, that is, in the creation of new links and bonds through deviant and excessive forms of cross- over: interferences, self-translation, rewriting, transmigration, and countermemorialization. The practice of furthering does not entail a presupposition of sameness; on the contrary, it presumes the integration of memories in conflict or, rather, of their relocation within their own cultural and historical contexts. But is this really possible? 5. Trauma and translation Many of the essays we present here reflect on the practice of translation as a means of managing not only internal borders and conflicting memories. At the same time they address the challenges any translator faces when converting traumatic memories into diverse contexts and spaces with different or competing Histories, whether of the Shoah, the Native American, or the Armenian genocide. It is risky to enter here into a multifaceted debate that some may regard as already “old,” or over-utilized as a trope. However, some of the most significant contemporary “thinking [about] trauma’s future” (Rothberg 2014, xii) includes voices that try to understand the ways in which the category of trauma as an interpretive model might still have an impact on our experience of temporality and its structure. One option is to look at trauma along with its implicated concept of belatedness (Freud’s idea of Nachträglichkeit) This suggests reading trauma not in and for itself, but for its possible representations—verbal, visual, spatial—for when it tries to express a structure of feeling for a (no longer unclaimed) experience; it also implies looking at the coming together of different times, whereby the category of trauma does not point to the disruptive nature of experienced time, but to how we write about it, translate it. These are the complexities of belatedness weaving into the writing, or the (re)calling and the repealing, of past experiences within which trauma is made manifest: questions of narrative and time that are inseparable from ethical and political questions. A further level of confrontation between “new” trauma theory and translation studies emerges once it has become almost unavoidable for any discourse on trauma to travel elsewhere, geographically and geoculturally, to go beyond a Eurocentric and monocultural orientation, to move to another affect-world, in order to better apprehend its impact (Rothberg 2014); to test its future-tense and its slow violence (Kaplan 2015). In so doing, a paradigm in which translation and trauma meet might also start to answer different questions: how do states colonize a disruptive temporality into sovereign chronologies, and how do they translate them; or how is the changing biopolitical horizon in which trauma is both produced and policed affecting its very experience—an example of which is when what is produced and policed regards different people, different places, refugees and exiles; different bodies? There is no doubt that the contemporary technological versions of subjectivity and identity have moved the idea of trauma through many translations and transmutations. We must contemplate the cultural and historical specificity of the concepts and categories of trauma, thanks to its translations, as Michael Rothberg reminds us: “The category of trauma ought to trouble the historicist gesture of much contemporary criticism as well as its concomitant notions of history and culture” (Rothberg 2014, xv). As much as the category of trauma might enable the political, cultural, and social impact of translation, it involves the dislocation of subjects, histories, and cultures. And even though there could be multiple forms of dislocation, deriving from “punctual” events (a massacre, for example) or from systemic violence or transhistorical structural trauma (LaCapra 2001), there is continuity, nonetheless. The task of “theory” is to find it, to look for connections, overlaps, similitude, and translation across the cultural and historical contexts under scrutiny. We discern connections and similarities in the current climate of History and its forms of violence involving different scales of temporality and modes of subjectivity; these are pertinent to both in trauma and in translation studies, but they have probably not, thus far, been addressed sufficiently. In sum, the challenge seems to be how to critically engage with classical trauma theory’s dominant paradigm by rethinking and rewriting how to connect events of extreme violence, disjunctive structures of subjective and collective experience, and discursive and aesthetic forms of rewriting and translation. 6. Media transmediality and the archive Yet another question comes to mind: what is specific to the concept and practices of translation when the current mobilizing of memory results in new and different representations of form and content, which are transformed by what is being called a post-roadcast era (Hoskins 2011)? What does it mean today to move from the unknown to the known, to render something from the past familiar, within the ever-changing forms and formations of contemporary mediascapes and memoryscapes, or else to accept their untrans- latability? In order to answer these questions in their intertwining with memory, one could engage in dialogue with Media- Specific Analysis, which deals mainly with contemporary examples of how a literary genre, as Hayles states, “mutates and transforms when it is instantiated in different media [. . .] MSA insists that texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of these embodiments interacts dynamically with linguistic, rhetorical, and literary practice to create the effects we call ‘literature’” (Hayles 2014, 21). Or, also, it could confront itself with a more sociologically oriented tendency that maintains that media “functions” have been unhooked from both the tools and the objects with which they have been traditionally associated. To give the most common example, what we once normally thought of as television has now gone beyond the television set itself, its content released from its “container,” from its specific embodiment, its own materiality. In other words, what used to be defined as a media product—even what is labeled as “literature”—is now a transmedia set of translated events and practices of consumption: programs are seen through streaming or downloaded from the Internet in different countries, fandom providing almost instantaneous subtitles; books and their characters cannot be launched without a YouTube trailer that immediately receives global comments; programs have websites and Facebook pages, their actors living many other lives as characters of a proliferation of narratives produced and archived in fan fiction websites from all over the world, where they become adaptations and local versions of the “original,” of a matrix that is changed through on-going transmedia storytelling (Demaria 2014). What we have briefly described here is now almost a cliché in Media Studies; it is part of a phenomenon that has been called, and from then on overtly quoted as, a convergent and participative culture, of media spreadability (Jenkins, Green, Ford 2013) that endlessly rewrites the return of history and memory through prosthetic tools (Landsberg 2004). The narrative complexity on one hand and the transmedia overflows exemplified by fanfic websites on the other supposedly constitute the evidence of a participatory and spectator-centered culture of prosumers, of a diffuse audience whose agency has helped to blur the boundaries between an original “text” (such as, for example, a TV series) and its transformations and local translations (how the characters and their stories are transformed and reimagined, and their format readapted in different countries). Hence, we still need a reflection on a language of the text that does not exclude the “materiality” of the screen or the computer, as well as the effects of the notion that content outside its containers might induce the very thinking of new forms of translation. The different media and screens implicated in all studies of contemporary digital transmu- tations, their specificity but also their syncreticity—that is, the simultaneous presence of different languages and their particular intertwining effects and affects (verbal, visual, textual, aural)—can allow us to reflect on the peculiar ways in which content might migrate from one digital space to another. Moreover, different—or else very similar—stories might be told. What might be at stake are the main transformations undergone by narrative imaginations (Montani 2010)—from a mimetic account of time (as in epic or ancient theatre), to a more productive projection, first helped by the narrative configurations allowed by the novel and cinema, and currently by contemporary media narratives—remediations and translations of all previous forms and genres (the novel, cinema, TV, and so on) and of the memory of all the antique images (Pathosformeln), languages, and cultures they involve. What is the role of translation in those processes of selection and management of what becomes part of an archive as a set of rules and criteria, as a collection, as a process of distribution and delivery of memory? This problem involves a critical reading of those technologies of memory that are supported by different politics of digital archives, whereby one faces the double and ambivalent dimension of archive as origin and archive as law, of the authority and authorship of the archive. It is the case, to quote but one example, of the recent transfer of CIA and other former classified verbal, visual, and audiovisual documents dealing with the US involvement with the Pinochet dictatorship to the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago de Chile.5 These political documents rest on a techno-ethical paradox: between providing free access to memory as a civil or human right and the opacity of a history preserved as a trace of and a testimony to its very secrecy. More generally speaking, when translation meets the archive, it encounters its possible displacements and various transnational administrations of memory (NGOs, humanitarian agencies that demand to speak and designate, to classify and preserve documents in the name of other people’s memories). Hence, how can one analyze such performative acts, this verbal and visual documentality? This refers to the exercises of power that affect subjective and collective investments, the comprehensive power of knowledge-production in relation to the rights and meanings of contemporary archives. 5 For more on this project led by Cristián Gomez-Moya on the archive and human rights, see http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-91/gomezmoya#sthash.g0wBGq8a.dpuf; and http://www.wordsinspace.net/lib-arch-data/2013-fall/?ai1ec_event=declassifying-the- archive-declassification-documentation-human-rights&instance_id. Accessed July 1, 2016. In conclusion The articles that make up this issue of translation: an interdisciplinary journal offer indeed a range of meditations on an intriguing set of case studies that bring new perspectives on many of the topics we have raised. Each elaborates, in its own fashion, on the author’s respective engagement with the act of translation and transmission as an act that opens up memory’s archive and its various resonances. Instead of individually summarizing the contents of our volume’s contributors’ articles, we have chosen to continue weaving our shared considerations by incorporating some of their principal insights as an ongoing discussion and highlighting the questions they have provoked us into posing. The essays are bookended by interviews with Marianne Hirsch and James Young, respectively. Their impact on this most consequential field of study, as it engages history, architecture, literature, and art, has been extraordinary. Indeed, the field of Memory Studies as such would not exist without their definitive, groundbreaking work. One regards the role of memory when the author is both a translator and a critic of translational processes, as in Adams Bodomo’s essay, in which we find the author’s own poems that he himself translates, and Bernard McGuirk’s article, where he meditates on his own translation both of Haroldo De Campos’s poems and of Brazilian protest songs. Here we find the challenge posed by the echoes, influences, hybridities, and intertexts of contemporary transculturations, whereby the task of the translator involves not abandoning but suspending certain spontaneous choices of literal translation in favor of interaction and indeed transaction. Moreover, underlying all the works, the role translation plays in changing—and even in radically transforming—local, national, and global memories emerges in all its effects, as in the case of the Armenian genocide thanks to the many translations and the cinematic version of Antonia Arslan’s 2007 novel Skylark Farm, which Sona Haroutyunian analyzes, focusing on the relationship between the historical event and its various kinds of representations. Along with these questions, what is put under scrutiny is both the role of the writer as the translator of a fading oral memory (as in Bodomo’s, Jenin’s, and McGuirk’s articles) and of the translator as a witness or a second-degree witness (Deane-Cox); coming into contact with—and sometimes be- traying—the memory of the texts and the memory the texts sought to convey. Or else preserving memory by transforming it into a new genre, a new type of storytelling, as Isabelle Jenin shows us in her analysis of Silko’s novel. These questions are raised and further problematized in Brownlie’s article, where she addresses the ways in which two autobiographical stories by Katherine Mansfield—“Prelude” and “At the Bay”—reflect in style and structure the processes of autobiographical memory. They are also articulated in David Amezcua Gomez’s study of Muñoz Molina’s novel Sefarad, in which he traces how in multidirectional memory (of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and post-Civil War Spain) “empathetic connections” are translated into monumental fiction. Or yet into monuments tout court, as James Young here (see infra) discusses with Bella Brodzki and Siri Nergaard, pointing to how, in order to understand traumatic memories and their translations, topography, literature, diaries, ruins all collapse into a fragmented yet resonant text, of which one element cannot be read without the other. The problem of accountability and responsibility remains paramount: how much do we really want to translate? And how much can we translate when it comes to postmemories of the Holocaust? Language issues and questions emerging from the translation of first and second generation testimonies are at the core of memory studies, as both Young and Hirsch comment in their interviews, referring both to their own work, and to the influence that a graphic novel such as Art Spieglman’s Mauss and a documentary such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah had on their own thinking. Moreover: what to give to, or for, the “other”? How is the other constructed as such? How is the other interchangeable with oneself under diasporic conditions; is it a fluid category or status? How is nostalgia translated across these different contexts? Here we go back to the very ambivalent notion of who is a witness in translation and to what she is a witness of, and for whom, given the complexities of postmemory, and the consequences of legacy and identification that this category invokes (see the interview, infra), since processes of trans- mission and forms of aesthetic affiliation are both modes of translation. What emerges from all the contributions is that public, cultural, and national memories (with all the due distinctions) are rewritten every day no matter how previous institutionalized versions have prevailed. The construction of homogeneous cultural and national memories takes place notwithstanding their potential translations, ruins, and ghosts; yet, new translations can affect and determine different politics of memory, changing their archival prospects. What keeps translation itself alive is the tension between self-referentiality and extrareferentiality; it is simultaneously an open and a closed system. There are countless examples throughout history of the dialectic between preservation and destruction (through neglect as well as abuse), and, as a result, of active struggles for restoration of sites of memory, however contested their value. But memory, given that it projects both forward and backward, provides residual rewards for those who desire the new. For this volume’s editors and contributors, the question of how we translate translation—as a carrying over and a covering over of the past—is the means by which, the gesture towards which, we name and rename until infinity. References Anderson, Michael C., and Benjamin J. Levy. 2009. “Suppressing Unwanted Memories.” Currents Directions in Psychological Science 18 (4): 189– 194. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01634.x. 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Questioning the Ends of a Certain Theory of Art. Translated by John Goodman. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Sate University Press. ———. 2011. Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet. L’oeil de l’histoire, 3. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. ———. 1984. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, London, MacMillan. ———. 2000. Experiences in Translation, Toronto, Buffalo, London, Toronto University Press. Friel, Brian. 1981. Translations. London: Faber and Faber. Gentzler, Edwin. 2017. Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post- Translation Studies. London, New York: Routledge. Hayles, N. Katherine. [2004] 2014. “Print is Flat, Code is deep: the Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” In Transmedia Frictions. The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities, edited by Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson, 20–33. Oakland: University of California Press. 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Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Lorusso, Anna Maria. 2015. Cultural Semiotics. For a Cultural Perspective in Semiotics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lotman, Yuri, and Boris Uspensky. 1978. “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture.” In Soviet Semiotics and Criticism: An Anthology, special issue of New Literary History, 9 (2): 211–232. doi:10.2307/468571. Montani, Pietro. 2010. L’immaginazione intermediale: perlustrare, rifigurare, testimoniare il mondo visibile. Rome–Bari: GLF Editori Laterza. Nergaard, Siri, ed. 1995. Teorie contemporanee della traduzione. Milan: Bompiani. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Volumes I–VI. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2014. “Beyond Tancred and Clorinda—trauma studies for implicated subjects.” Preface to The Future of Trauma Theory. Contemporary  Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, xii–xviii. London and New York: Routledge. Simon, Sherry. 2012. Cities in Translation. Intersections of Language and Memory. London and New York: Routledge. Stone, Charles B., Alin Coman, Adam D. Brown, Jonathan Koppel, and William Hirst. 2012. “Toward a Science of Silence: The Consequences of Leaving a Memory Unsaid.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7 (1): 39–53. doi:10.1177/1745691611427303. Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Translation in Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Violi, Patrizia. 1992. “Le molte enciclopedie.” In Semiotica: storia teoria interpretazione. Saggi intorno a Umberto Eco, edited by Patrizia Magli, Giovani Manetti, and Patrizia Violi (99–113). Milano: Bompiani. is Professor of Comparative Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. She teaches courses in autobiography; modern and contemporary fiction; literary and cultural theory; and translation studies. Her articles and essays on the critical intersections with and impact of translation on other fields and disciplines have appeared in a range of publications, most recently in the collection, Translating Women, edited by Luise von Flotow (2011). She is the coeditor of Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography (1989) and author of Can These Bones Live?: Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007). Her current project is coediting a special volume of Comparative Literature Studies entitled Trials of Trauma. is Associate Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna (Italy), where she teaches Semiotics of Media and Semiotics of Conflict. She has worked on gender and translation and, in the past ten years, on collective and cultural memories and their visual, trans-media, performative and artistic representations, focusing recently on traumatic memories of postdictatorship in Argentina and Chile, along the way they intersect with questions regarding biological identity and documentality. 

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Abstract: This paper proposes a theoretical and methodological strategy for reconceptualizing African literature in the twenty-first century. Twentieth-century African literature was characterized by colonial concepts through which literature in indigenous African languages was largely neglected while literature in colonial languages was promoted with problematic notions such as “Anglophone African literature,” “Francophone African literature,” and “Lusophone African literature.” African literature needs to be reconceptualized as Afriphone literature, where the notion of African literature must prototypically subsume literature in languages indigenous to Africa. African literature must be reconceptualized first and foremost as African language literature. Many scholars interested in the documentation and revitalization of African languages and cultures, which constitute attempts to preserve the collective memory of these African traditional knowledge systems, are largely in agreement with this, but how to go about doing Afriphone literature remains a research challenge. This paper proposes an approach to addressing the problem based on the theoretical and methodological notion of parallel text. 1. Introduction The Ivorian writer Ahmadou Kourouma, author of the novel Les Soleils des indépendances (1968), has invented the term “diplosie” (Kourouma 1991) to express what he considers to be the reality that the vast majority of African writers presumably think in one language and express themselves (speak, enchant, or write) in another. It is indeed true that many African writers of the twentieth century and earlier did speak their native African languages on the one hand and then wrote many of their works in the former colonial language of their countries, including English, French, or Portuguese, on the other hand. It is also true, however, that while this has continued into the twenty-first Century more and more writers, conscious of the need to document their traditional verbal art and other collective cultural memories of their societies, are beginning to “translate” their own work. This exercise is what I call parallel text practice or parallel-texting. More and more African writers have resolved that the only major way forward to produce literature in African languages and thus preserve these languages, big and small, is for Western-educated writers who still speak their African languages to write parallel texts—that is, produce the same texts that they wrote in English, French, or Portuguese in their African language following the theme, genre, and style of the original as much as possible but not necessarily a word for word translation. Of course, more importantly, they should write first in the African language and then translate into English or other languages, but irrespective of which language the original text is in it has the same effect of producing literature in African languages and making it available for a wider readership because the practice of parallel texts means that the two or more texts must be published concurrently and contiguously—that is, side by side. Parallel text practice as described here is part of a comprehensive agenda by myself (Bodomo 2013, 2014a, 2014b) and a group of academics dedicated to the promotion of African language literature, as part of the general program of documenting the languages and cultures of Africa to reconceptualize African literature and general humanities in the twenty-first century. One of the earliest African writers to set the agenda for producing literature in African languages is the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Ngugi started his writing career by writing in English but then later realized that the best, and indeed most natural, way to promote African literature is through writing in African languages, so he started writing in Kikuyu and Swahili and translating many of his works into English, especially with works such as Caitani Matharabaini (translated as Devil on the Cross). Indeed, Ngugi at some point did not recognize as African literature any literature that was not produced in indigenous African languages, preferring to call literature in European languages written by Africans Afro-European literature, and decried the constant “Europhonism” of African writers (Ngugi 1986, 2009). The following excerpt from his seminal work of literary criticism, Decolonizing the Mind (1986), captures this thinking: What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages? While we were haranguing enemies in European tongues, imperialists have continued to spout their lies in our native tongues (such as translating the Bible into all African languages...). So, we’re losing the battle because we haven’t been fighting. And the literature that’s been created should be called Afro-European, not African. (Ngugi 1986, 26) From this angle, then, it does not make sense to Ngugi and many African writers who push for an African language literature agenda to describe African literature in seemingly obsolete, contradictory terms such as “Anglophone African literature,” “Francophone African literature,” or “Lusophone African literature,” terms whose definitions we will have to reconsider in the “Discussion” section of this essay. Of course, other African writers had and still have a very different position from that of Ngugi and other campaigners for an African language literature agenda. They often give reasons for why we must not worry about writing in African languages and why we must continue to write in European languages. Some of these include the fact that not all African languages have a script, and that the market share for a writer of African literature in African languages would be insignificant. They also point to the fact that European languages continue to be official languages in African countries where they serve as a lingua franca to speakers who speak a diverse set of languages, so writing in English, French, or Portuguese would be a way of developing a certain kind of “national” literature. The late Chinua Achebe, one of Nigeria’s and Africa’s most renowned novelists, belongs to this group and, in a long polemical argumentation with Ngugi, expressed many of his counterpoints to Ngugi in his seminal “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature” (Achebe 1989). Defending why he writes in English in terms of its serving as a unifying “national” language, he states the following: I write in English. English is a world language. But I do not write in English because it is a world language. My romance with the world is subsidiary to my involvement with Nigeria and Africa. Nigeria is a reality which I could not ignore. (Achebe 1989, 100) Ngugi, however, points to the glaring “abnormality” of arguing for writing African literature in European languages in the following telling statement: The very fact that what common sense dictates in the literary practice of other cultures [to write in your own spoken language] is being questioned in an African writer is a measure of how far imperialism has distorted the view of African realities. It has turned reality upside down: the abnormal is viewed as normal and the normal is viewed as abnormal. Africa actually enriches Europe: but Africa is made to believe that it needs Europe to rescue it from poverty. Africa’s natural and human resources continue to develop Europe and America: but Africa is made to feel grateful for aid from the same quarters that still sit on the back of the continent. Africa even produces intellectuals who now rationalise this upside-down way of looking at Africa. (Ngugi 1986, 28) The foregoing shows that there is clearly a great debate going on within African literature about which language/s is/are best suited for African literature. It is of course not simply an “either–or” scenario, and it is indeed possible to write in both African languages and in European languages. In this essay, I propose how we can write in African languages and still not lose the visibility that is implicit in many of the arguments against the use of African languages. In section 2, I define and sketch the idea of parallel texts as a theoretical methodology for doing African language literature which involves actually having parallel texts in African languages and in European or other languages of wider communication. The theory subsumes the following definition of African literature: African literature is any form of artistic creation produced in the medium of African languages, first and foremost, or any other natural language (written, spoken, or enchanted) by an artist or group of artists with substantial enough experiences of the landscape of the continental landmass of Africa and its associated islands, along with diasporic exportations of the cultures of this continental landmass. (Bodomo 2013, 2014a, 2014b) This definition,1 as can be seen, emphasizes the import- ance of African languages without necessarily excluding a role played by other natural languages, and the literature can be written, spoken or even enchanted as done in libation pouring practices in West Africa. The authors do not have to be African, but must have enough substantial experiences of Africa to be able to express its cultures, both as seen on the continent itself and also in its diaspora communities. In section 3, I use two of my poems written in both Dagaare—my mother tongue, a language spoken by some two million people who live in northwestern Ghana and adjacent parts of Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast—and in English. The two are poems about important events in recent African history that might continue to be in the collective memory of many Africans for a long time: the death of Nelson Mandela in December 2013 and the kidnapping of about three hundred schoolgirls by Boko Haram militants in northeastern Nigeria in April 2014. Section 4 contains a brief discussion of the consequences of such an approach that involves the redefinition of a number of issues in African literature and the renaming of African language literature as Afriphone literature, along with a relation of this discussion to a society’s collective memory, while section 5 concludes the essay with a recap of the major points, and points to how we might sustain the agenda for Afriphone literature in the future. 1 Other ways of defining African literature include cataloguing the major themes and stylistic devices that recur in texts by African writers (magic, witchcraft, proverbs, etc). Ayuk (2014) is an example of such an approach. 1. Parallel texts: theory and methodology A parallel text, as used here, is a set of texts in which written (or even spoken and sung) literary expressions in two or more languages are mediated in the form of translation at various levels, including the graphemic, the morphological, the syntactic, the phonological, and certainly the semantic. In effect, the end result of the translation at one or more of these levels is a set of texts existing side by side for ease of cognitive processing by the recipient. A theory of parallel texts is postulated as follows: in a bilingual and biliterate (or multilingual and multiliterate) environment, for more effective and optimal knowledge and information dissemination, language users should produce contiguous texts in at least two of the languages within the bilingual and biliterate environment. The raison d’être for translation is in the fact that multilingualism within a speech community doesn’t necessarily guarantee that all individuals within a community will be polyglottic. There is often a rather intricate distinction between plurality of language at the community level and plurality of language at the individual level. An individual who has lived all her life in a rural area and speaks only one language fluently who now arrives to live in a city where many languages are spoken may be called a monoglot in a multilingual community; on the other hand a person born in a multilingual city and most likely speaking many languages who now gets posted as a civil servant to a rural area where only one language is spoken would be a polyglot functioning within a monolingual community. Theoretically then, since multilingualism is not synonymous with polyglottism, in a multilingual environment where one might have some monoglots, parallel texts as a form of translation are justified if we want to achieve optimal knowledge acquisition and information dissemination within the community. The concept of parallel texts is both a theory and a methodology in the sense that, theoretically, it mediates any dissonance that exists between the number of languages at the community level and the number of languages within individuals; parallel texts mediate and try to resolve the discords between multilingualism and polyglottism, between “lingualism” and “glottism.” Methodologically, it gives writers an opportunity to optimally express themselves by “placing” oral or written texts side by side within a given context, so simultaneous translation or interpretation is a parallel text, and poems written on the same theme and style and placed side by side constitute a parallel text, as I will illustrate in the next section. 2. An illustration with two poems Two important events that attracted much of Africa’s and the world’s attention and are now arguably part of our global collective memory occurred in December 2013 and April 2014— only about four months apart. The first involved the death of the legendary South African freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela, which occurred on December 5, 2013. The other event involved the capture of almost three hundred schoolgirls in the town of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria, where Islamic militants calling themselves Boko Haram are fighting for a separate polity. I captured each of these events in the form of a parallel text, first writing in my mother tongue, Dagaare, spoken in Ghana as mentioned above, and in English. So each of these two poems about important African events are parallel-texted in Dagaare and English—and here parallel-texting actually means producing them side by side. A piece of work written and published in a volume and later written and published in another volume is not a parallel text, it is simply a (delayed) translation. Pairs of text about the same topic and genre qualify as parallel texts only if they exist side by side, on the same page or on contiguous pages. With this background clarification, I now present the two parallel texts, beginning first with the “Mandela” poem to be followed by the “Chibok girls” poem: MANDɛLA GAA LA DAPARE N bakori mine woi Friends N mabiiri woi Children of one Mother Zenɛ Dizemba beraanuu Today December 5 bebiri News coming in bodes not Te yelpaala na ba taa nimiri well N gaa la BBC I flipped unto BBC Ka N noɔre maa fɛlɛlɛ And the news was tasteless A gaa CNN Clicked unto CNN Ka N polaa teɛ kpelele And my heart pumped A yuo CCTV ka a ne a zu CCTV was not any different A gaa GBC ka a le ang deɛ And GBC confirmed it all: la Grandfather, ancestor Ka te saakoma Mandɛla Mandela Deɛ ba la be a tengɛ nyɛ zu Is no longer with us on Earth Te GANDAA Mandɛla na It is our HERO Mandela! la! There he goes as always! O paa yaa deɛ wa yie la! Majestically, in his Dagakparoo, Gangalang! dagakparoo! Kurilane, Sangsalang! Gallantly, in his kurilane! A zɛle tammo ne logiri Bow, army of arrows in tow A te kulo o yiri He is on his way home A kyaare sapare Facing East A te gɛrɛ Dapare On the ultimate journey to Dapare CHIBOK MAMINE HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY WHISPERS FROM BOKO HARAM Yɛ Mamine Bebiri Yaane! A year ago Deyang: 300 sweet little voices said to you: A yɛ pɔgsarebilii kɔɔre ata Mom, mama, mma, Da wa age mare yɛ la Happy Mother's Day! A vare poɔre yɛ You saw them smile, cry A yeli ko yɛ: tears of love Plastering you with ever so Mma, ne fo Mamine Bebiri gentle hugs of gratitude Yaane! In Nico Mbargan language: N puori fo la yaga “Sweet Mother, I no go Ne fo nang wong tuo forget you, Kaa ma ka N baa I no go forget this suffer Kyɛ zenɛ wey you suffer for me” A yɛ pɔgsarebilii kɔɔre ata Today nyɛ 300 sweet little voices are quietened, you may think Yɛ deɛ ba la wong ba yɛlɛ But listen, listen carefully Togitogitogi To the gentle caressing A mang boɔle ka winds of Chibok Ligiligiligi To the chirping little birds over the hills of Maiduguri Yɛ na teɛre ka ba wa yele yeli zaa To the hissing sonics of the praying mantis up on the Kyɛ yɛ kyɛlle, a kyɛlle Jos plateau velaa Kyɛlle a Chibok saseɛ nang And you will hear 300 fuuro lɛ sweet little voices Kyɛlle a Maidugri nuuli From Boko Haram nang kono lɛ dungeons Kyɛlle a Jos tangazu salingsobo nang voorɔ lɛ Yɛ na wong la a yɛ Obstinately whispering to pɔgsarebilii kɔɔre ata kanga you: na zaa Mom, mama, Mma, Happy Mother’s Day! Boko Haram nang pɔge bare (Vienna, May 2014) Kyɛ ka ba nang sɔgle yele: Mma, Ne fo Mamine Bebiri Yaane! (Veɛna, Mee 2014) In the “Mandela” poem, after hearing breaking news on most of the news media of the world, we are imagining how Mandela, our newly minted ancestor, is preparing for the journey to Dapare—the mythical homeland of all departed spirits, of our ancestors—like all men, all warriors in our Dagaare culture, he would have had to wear the smock, our war uniform, arm himself with bows and arrows, face East, and walk away majestically. . . The smock is not only the traditional dress of the Dagaaba, the people who speak Dagaare, it is also a warrior dress etymologically, and is thus appropriate for a man like Mandela who has been a warrior all his life. Indeed, when Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana, was declaring the independence of Ghana on March 6, 1957, after a long struggle, he and his lieutenants wore the smock as a dress for the victorious warriors they were. The bow and arrow are further symbols for a great warrior but also meant to help him protect himself as he goes home, and even to hunt for some game if he so desires. As for the symbolism of facing East in Dagaare culture, it expresses the idea that a good man, a good farmer must always rise early in the morning, and make sure he goes before sunrise to the farm. Women in the culture are metaphorically facing West since they stay at home and must particularly check that by sunset they prepare food for the man who comes back home from the farm, from the hunting grounds, or from the war front after a hard day’s job in the wilderness.  The “Chibok girls” poem is imagining how the mothers of these girls would have enjoyed their company on Mothers’ Day and other days when they stayed close together and enjoyed each other’s company. It then imagines how it would be without them when the next Mothers’ Day comes around and they would be without these children. The poem, which may be termed a “telepathic poem,” then evokes instances in which the girls may be communicating with their mothers through the medium of the birds, the winds, and the singing insects in the vicinity of the Jos plateau, the most important landmark in that region of Nigeria. 3. Discussion What are some of the consequences for an agenda of parallel texts for the promotion of African literature, and how might we relate the need to produce literary works in African languages to the issue of a society’s collective memory? Reconceptualizations. First, a number of recon- ceptualizations have to take place to put things in perspective as a consequence of this agenda. We agree with Ngugi that the “normal” for African literature should be African language literature. We reconceptualize that here as Afriphone literature, and claim in this paper and in previous work (Bodomo 2013, 2014a, 2014b) that the most prototypical form of African literature is Afriphone literature. This does not in any way exclude the use of European languages in African literature, but those cannot be the norm. Indeed, terms like Anglophone African literature, Francophone African literature, and Lusophone African literature are obsolete, twentieth-century colonial notions about African literature. Rather, we reconceptualize that Anglophone African literature as used in the twentieth century is literature that was written about Africa in English. It is essentially English literature about Africa. The new conceptualization of Anglophone African literature is one of translated literature. A piece of work is, first and foremost, considered Anglophone African literature if it was first written in an African language and then translated into English. Any piece of work that was first written in English about Africa (whether or not by an African) is English literature about Africa. However, if a piece of work is written in English and translated into an African language, that translated version is African literature. In the same vein, Francophone African literature as used in the twentieth century meant literature that was written in French about Africa. But we shall not refer to it like that now— we shall refer to it as French literature about Africa (whether or not written by an African). In the twenty-first century, the reconceptualization of Francophone African literature is literature that was first written in an African language and then translated into French. If a piece of work is written in French about Africa and translated into an African language, that piece of work qualifies as African literature. Finally, Lusophone African literature in the twentieth century meant literature written in Portuguese about Africa. However, in the twenty-first century, where there is a robust agenda for the promotion of Afriphone literature, Lusophone African literature qualifies as such if the original text was written in an African language. Lusophone African literature is not literature first written in Portuguese but that which was translated into Portuguese from an African language. If however a piece of work originally written in Portuguese now gets translated into an African language, the translated text is African literature. As can be seen from this reconceptualization of Anglophone African literature, Francophone African literature, and Lusophone African literature, the parallel text pair is a pair comprising Afriphone literature and Europhone African literature; in the case of the “Mandela” and “Chibok girls” poems, a Dagaare-phone African literature and an Anglophone African literature. Afriphone, then, in itself is a cover term for the many African language literatures that are expected to blossom from the Afriphone literary agenda in the twenty-first century. Parallel texts and collective memory. The practice of parallel texts as outlined in this paper is clearly a specialized form of translation. This specialized form of literary translation connects to an important discussion on the relationship between literary translation and cultural memory (what I call collective memory here), as espoused in works like Long’s (2008). In Long’s paper, she investigates “the relationship between literary translation and cultural memory, using a twentieth century film version of one of Shakespeare’s plays as a case study in inter-semiotic translation” (1). The work goes on to clarify that the common perception of translation is often confined to its use as a language learning tool or as a means of information transfer between languages. The wider academic concept embraces not only inter-lingual translation, but both intra-lingual activity or rewording in the same language and inter-semiotic translation defined by Roman Jacobson as “the interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (Jakobson 1959, 114). (Long 2008, 1) If more and more African writers do parallel-texting, as proposed here, the end result of this literary practice would be the documentation of the verbal art and other traditional linguistic knowledge systems, including ideophones, proverbs, and other kinds of verbal indirection towards preserving and enriching the collective memory of contemporary African societies. The term “collective memory” as I use it here could form the basis of what one may term “African memory” 1 in the sense that it evokes some typically traditional African ways of remembering the past—including not just the oral transmission modes involved but also of recognizing some older individuals with experiences of the society’s past as repositories of the history and culture of their society. In short, knowledgeable elders are considered as authoritative custodians of each rural African society’s past. This fact is encoded by an African saying that whenever an old man dies it is like a library that burns down! These traditional collective memory practices have formed the basis of memory documentation in contemporary African polities, with two of the most prominent ones being attempts to document the painful apartheid past in South Africa through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) sittings (Gade 2013), and the attempt to document the collective 1 I would like to thank Critina Demaria, one of the editors of the present journal, for suggesting that I connect my idea of parallel text as a translation/writing process to the idea of memory documentation, and for questioning whether one can indeed talk of an “African memory.” memory of the 1994 Rwandan genocide (Rettig 2008) in which more than half a million people lost their lives. Parallel texts in the Curriculum. To summa- rize this discussion section, further consequences for the practice of African literature in school and university curricula are that African literature programs ought to focus on African language literatures and not literature in European languages about Africa. They may, obviously, do courses on Anglophone African literature, Francophone African literature, and Lusophone African literature but, in line with the twenty-first- century definition of these literatures, these must be translations into English, French, and Portuguese respectively from African language literature. In sum then, African literature in the twenty-first century is literature that is written originally in an indigenous African language or that has been translated from an African language into other languages. It is Afriphone literature if it stays in the original African language, Anglophone African literature if it is translated from an African language into English, Francophone African literature if it is translated from an African language into French, and Lusophone African literature if it is translated from an African language into Portuguese. 5. Conclusion In this paper, we have proposed the concept of parallel texts as a theoretical and methodological strategy for reconceptualizing African literature in the twenty-first century. As described in the paper, a theory of parallel texts stipulates that in a multilingual and multiliterate environment, for more effective and optimal knowledge and information dissemination, users of language should produce contiguous texts in at least two of the languages within the said environ- ment. Drawing from this, a parallel text would then be a set of texts in which written literary expressions in two or more languages are mediated in the form of translation at various levels, including the graphemic, the morphological, the syntactic, the phonological, and certainly the semantic. Conclusively, the end result of the translation at one or more of these levels is a set of texts existing side by side for ease of cognitive processing by the recipient, and may serve to document the collective memories of African traditional societies in the form of preserving various kinds of indigenous verbal art. Two poems by the author have been used as illustrations of these concepts and it is expected that more writers would set about practicing parallel-texting, and indeed that publishers will from now onwards encourage the publication of parallel-texted volumes. Many scholars of African languages, linguistics, and literatures are interested in the documentation and revitalization of African languages and their associated cultures. They are largely in agreement that this is an urgent task, but how to go about doing this remains a research challenge. This paper has proposed an approach to addressing the problem with the theoretical and methodological notion of parallel texts. It is hoped that more parallel-texted volumes will be published within the next ten years for the promotion of Afriphone literatures. This parallel-text approach as a special kind of writing and translation process could indeed be contributing to the construction of a new and richer collective memory which is an instance of the idea of African memory, as discussed above. References Achebe, Chinua. 1989. “Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature.” In Historical and Cultural Contexts of Linguistic and Literary Phenomena/Contextes historiques et culturels des phénomènes linguistiques et littéraires (Proceedings of the Seventeenth Triennial Congress of the Fédération Internationale del Langues et Littératures Modernes held at the University of Guelph, August 18–25), edited by G. D. Killam, 3–8. Guelph, Ontario: University of Guelph. Ayuk, Hamilton. 2014. What is African literature? Accessed June 6, 2014. http://princehamilton.blogspot.co.at/2009/06/what-is-african- literature.html. Bodomo, Adams. 2013. Lecture notes for “Language, Literacy, and Literature: The Language Question in African Literary Expression” (Course no. 140251), Department of African Studies, University of Vienna. ———. 2014a. “Survey Report on African Languages and Literatures.” Unpublished manuscript, University of Vienna, Austria. ———. 2014b. “The Language Question in Defining African literature: Contributions from Linguistics and Cognitive Science.” Paper presented at the Vereinigung für Afrikawissenschaften in Deutschland (VAD), Bayreuth University, June 11–14, 2014. Gade, Christian B. N. 2013. “Restorative Justice and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Process.” South African Journal of Philosophy 32(1): 10–35. doi:10.1080/02580136.2013.810412. Jakobson, Roman. 1959. On Linguistics aspects of Translation. Accessed November 12, 2014. http://complit.utoronto.ca/wp- content/uploads/COL1000H_Roman_Jakobson_LinguisticAspects.pdf Kourouma, Ahmadou. 1968. Les Soleils des indépendances. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Repr. Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1970. ———. 1991. Comments. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on African Literatures. Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization, Lagos, Nigeria. Long, Lynne. 2008. “Literary translation and cultural memory.” Unpublished article, draft version, University of Warwick, UK. Last accessed November 12, 2014. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/202/. Ngugi, wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers Ltd. ———. 2009. Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance. New York: BasicCivitas Books. Rettig, Max. 2008. “Gacaca: Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation in Postconflict in Rwanda?” African Studies Review 51 (3):25–50. doi: 10.1353/arw.0.0091. is Professor of African Studies and holds the chair of African Languages and Literatures at the University of Vienna. He specializes in African linguistics, African language literatures, global African diaspora studies, and digital humanities with particular reference to the digitization of African languages and their oral cultures. As Director of the Global African Diaspora Studies (GADS) research platform at the University of Vienna, he has expertise and broad interests in the study of the sociocultural and sociopolitical aspects of Africa and its global relations. 

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Abstract: “Get thee behind me Satan, I want to resist”. . . To translate memory across cultures and disciplines is an act of defiance, a proud sign of disobedience, tacitly performed by one of the most celebrated and internationally renowned practitioners and seminal theoreticians of the tasks facing the translator, the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos. In “On Mephistofaustic Transluciferation,” he writes: “If it has no Muse, it could be said to have an Angel; translation has an angelical function, that of bearer, of messenger. It is a messianic point or a semiotic place of convergence of intentionality.” Addressed here are the challenges posed in translating memory, memories, as the retrieval, reconstruction, inscription, and leaving of the traces and effects of a markedly memorializing act. The task of the trans(at)l(antic)ator involves not abandoning but suspending certain spontaneous choices of literal translation in favor of inter- and trans-action. The responses are: differ, defer, never with indifference, always without deference; address not only urgently political issues of The Movimento dos Sem Terra, primordial in Brazil, but also the transactions, with and in the Movement, of so many poets and songwriters and now, perhaps even more defiantly, with a Brazilian-inflected countertheory to the rescue. Remembering (belated) versions The invitation to “establish a dialogue with and among scholars working on the intersections between translation studies and memory studies as they are presently configured and might be envisioned in the future,” keynote of this special issue on translating memory across cultures and disciplines, proleptically, had been tacitly accepted avant la lettre and throughout his career by one of the most celebrated and internationally renowned practitioners and seminal theoreticians of the tasks and challenges facing the translator, the Brazilian poet and transcreator, Haroldo de Campos. In “Committing Translation or the Task of the Trans(at)l(antic)ator,” the introductory essay to my translations of the ineradicably political memories and cultural expressions of ideological indignation of the MST (Movement of the Landless Rural Workers in Brazil) in Landless Voices in Song and Poetry. The Movimento dos Sem Terra of Brazil (Vieira and McGuirck 2007, XXI–XXIV), I addressed and now return to the challenges posed in translating memory, memories, as the retrieval, reconstruction, inscription, and leaving of traces and their effects of a markedly “memorializing act” (Vieria and McGuirck 2007); in and for a Brazil confronting its own secular inequalities and injustices, alerted to that sovereign state’s and that nation’s continuing struggle to emerge from the cliché-ridden inscription on its national flag, the ever-ironic “Ordem e Progresso.” Under whose orders and for the progress of whom was national memory to be reinscribed, translated, indeed transferred from the hegemonies of a very recent twenty-year military regime and its transitional legacies in the period of rebuilding a democracy from 1984? Further, on undertaking this commission, I recalled the advice of Umberto Eco as I reflected on the experience of having worked, together with the Brazilian critic and translation theorist, Else Vieira, in preparation of Haroldo de Campos in Conversation (McGuirck and Vieira 2009), the volume that arose, in memoriam, not least from the numerous meetings that, as editors, we held between 1999 and 2002 with Haroldo and his wife Carmen Arruda Campos in the hospitality of their Library of Babel home:1 I frequently feel irritated when I read essays on the theory of translation that, even though brilliant and perceptive, do not provide enough examples. I think translation scholars should have had at least one of the following experiences 1 This volume contains renderings in English of the following Haroldo de Campos essays touching variously on his theories of translation: ”On Translation as Creation and Criticism,” ”Constructivism in Brazil: Concretism and Neo-Concretism. A Personal Post Scriptum,” “On Mephistofaustic Transluciferation,” “On Homerotherapy: Translating The Iliad,” and “The Ex- centric Viewpoint: Tradition, Transcreation, Transculturation.”  during their life: translating, checking and editing translations, or being translated and working in close co-operation with their translators [. . .] Between the purely theoretical argument that, since languages are differently structured, translation is impossible, and the commonsensical acknowledgement that people, after all, do translate and understand each other, it seems to me that the idea of translation as a process of negotiation (between author and text, between author and readers, as well as between the structure of two languages and the encyclopaedias of two cultures) is the only one that matches experience. (Eco 2003, 36) In such “a process of negotiation,” in that multiple “in- betweenness,” here evoked by Eco but previously the subject of an indispensable meditation on a specifically Latin American project, the “entre-lugar” of Silviano Santiago, “between sacrifice and play, between prison and transgression, between submission to the code and aggression, between obedience and rebellion” (Santiago 1978, 11), and as translator of the poems and songs of the Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST, or Movement of the landless rural workers), I soon confronted commitment, in various of its encyclopaedic forms. What had they done to my song? The preceding decades had witnessed the revitalizing of popular music as a vehicle for political activisms in Brazil. One obvious source had been the música sertaneja of land-deprived migrant workers, driven to the cities and taking with them their country music, be it traditional or, more recently, influenced by the commercial brands of the southern cultures of the United States. No less influential had been the pagode movement’s samba- esque registering of the violent tensions of poverty in hardly couched critiques of repressive regimes, military or otherwise. The performances echoed, consciously or subliminally, the prosodies—high and low—of Brazilian Portuguese and the broadsheet and cordel strains of popular imaginaries from across and beyond the nation. For Brazil has never ceased to explore and express its sensitivity to the ideological power of the protest song; not least, and latterly, against the imagined and projected versions of what is to come peddled, for many of its displaced, unrepresented and unlikely-to-be-remembered vic- tims, by the invasive myth-makers of a nation awarded the Trojan horses of a World Cup and an Olympic Games.  At the time of committing myself to undertake the translations of unabashedly radical texts, it was the centenary of the birth of the celebrated Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Inspiration of politically committed poetry and song for not a continent but a world, he had long ago been described by Federico García Lorca as being closer to blood than to ink. It was on such a note—often indissociable from tears or from wine—that the anguish and euphoria, the despair and hope that suffuse the texts I translated were approached and embraced. My locus of transcreation was, and is, unavoidably and unapologetically, Anglophone; it is also, though tempered, European. As a critic and translator of, primarily, literatures in Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian, I exploited the availability of translation alternatives from those traditions as well as from any Brazil-specific contexts that informed the choices made. Pace Umberto Eco, I often wrote as both Mouse and Rat, chewing or munching in a further in- betweenness or the negotiated hybridity that I had experienced in tussling with Haroldo de Campos himself.2 For part of our “translating, checking and editing translations, or being translated and working in close co-operation” had been the daunting enterprise of revisiting “o anjo esquerdo da história”; beginning with the resonantly intertextual reference to Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history. His face [. . .] turned towards the past” (Benjamin 1999, 249), broached at once in the title of this long de Campos poem. Written to commemorate the victims of the notorious massacre in 1996 of nineteen protesting members of the MST at El Dorado dos Carajás in the State of Pará, and originally rendered into English by Haroldo as “the left-winged angel of history.” Engagement with the calculatedly syntagmatic disconti- nuity and attendant staccato rhythms of the Brazilian Portuguese text also had to take into account a context of commitment and contributions, to and in the Movement, of such distinguished Brazilian artists as Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento, Frei Betto, and many others, including Haroldo de Campos himself, and thus readdress previous tasks of the other—cultural inseparably from linguistic—translator(s). 2See the facsimile of Haroldo de Campos’s scribbled distinction between chewing and munching with reference to my translation of “quoheletic poem 2: in praise of the termite,” in McGuirck and Vieira 2009, 339.  The Latin American protest song explosions of the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, of which Robert Pring-Mill reminded us in “Gracias a la vida” The Power and Poetry of Song (1990), had hardly left Brazil unaffected by the echoes, influences, hybridities, and intertexts of contemporary transculturations. He listed civil rights, the peace movement, and the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in the US; Italian CantAcronache; the Greece of Theodorakis; the Catalan Nova Cançó; the Portuguese Nova Canção; Irish songs of “the troubles”; and Asian and African instances from the Philipines, East Timor, and Mongolia, to Mozambique and Angola. Not least of the intertexts of Brazilian protest song and poetry were the Cuban, Argentine, and Chilean expressions that sprinkled the MST artists with inspirations taken from the archives of the Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and nueva canción traditions. If any one element of Pring-Mill’s seminal analysis can be said to have informed the texts of the MST, it is this evocation: “Asked about his own songs (in 1973), the Uruguayan Daniel Vigliette said firmly that they were as much de propuesta as de protesta: designed not merely to protest but to propose—in other words not merely to ‘tear down fences’ (quite literally so in Viglietti’s own anti-latifundista ‘A desalambrar!’) but also ‘to build bridges’ and to be constructive” (Pring-Mill 1990, 10). Pring-Mill identified three functions of such texts: “response to an immediate environment”; “instrument of political and social change”; communicating a “horizon of expectations” and “presuppositions.” Yet he was quick to add a vital rider on cultural difference: “the whole rhetoric of such poems and songs is very different from ours, partly because Spanish [and here read Portuguese] handles issues more violently—more dramatically and emotionally—than English (sometimes in ways which we may find indecorous)” (Pring-Mill 1990, 10–14). He continued: The messages of individual Latin American songs function within the framework of belief they foster and reinforce, in that extremely different social context. In countries where illiteracy is as high as it is in most of Latin America, where censorship and repression are so often at work, and where the official media are so rarely to be trusted, the message-bearing function of poesía de compromiso—sung or unsung—has an importance which it is not easy for a more literate academic audience to appreciate. Its messages perform a varied series of useful social functions [. . .] all of which are doubly  important in the context of predominantly oral cultures. Thus they serve both to report and to record events (interpreting them, naturally enough, from specific points of view, which will strike all those who disagree with them as prejudiced); they praise, or lament, heroes and denounce tyrants; they protest against abuses and propound solutions (whether these are viable or not); and they teach many kinds of practical lessons, which their listeners are encouraged to put into practice. (Pring-Mill 1990, 77) Pring-Mill, a decade or so on, would hardly have been surprised not to have the last word. He might also have smiled at the risky certainty, in respect not only of rhetoric but also of politics, of Perry Anderson, as a heady mixture of denunciation and the recuperation of misappropriated national memories promised to turn to propounded solution in the form of a first left- wing figure, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, democratically elected in 2002, on the crest of the MST wave of popular protest: “the symbolism of a former shoe-shine boy and street vendor achieving supreme power in the most unequal major society on earth speaks for itself [. . .] A climate of popular expectation surrounds Lula that no President of the New Republic has ever enjoyed at the outset of his mandate. Hope of relief from the misery of the last years will not vanish overnight” (Anderson 2002, 21). Get thee behind me Satan, I want to resist. . . The risk of failing to render the textual wrath of a poem written in the indignation of 1996 protest amidst the 2002 days of heady triumphalist expectation—with popular memory of tyranny and criminality and a consciousness of the threat of impunity all too readily fading—seemed but one looming contention. The task of the trans(at)l(antic)ator therefore involved not abandoning but suspending certain spontaneous choices of literal translation in favor of inter- and trans-action. The challenges were: differ, defer, never with indifference, always without deference; address not only issues dear to the MST, primordial in Brazil, but also the transactions, with and in the Movement, of so many poets and songwriters and now, perhaps even more challengingly, but with a Brazilian inflected countertheory to the rescue, of Haroldo de Campos himself, from his essay on “On Mephistofaustic Transluciferation”:  Translation, like philosophy, has no Muse [. . .] says Walter Benjamin (“Die Aufgabe des Uebersetzers”). And yet, if it has no Muse, it could be said to have an Angel [. . .] translation has an angelical function, that of bearer, messenger [. . .] it is even, for the original [. . .] a messianic point or, in lay terms of modern theory of signs, a semiotic place of convergence of intentionality [. . .] Benjamin inverts the relation of servitude which, as a rule, affects ingenuous conceptions of translation as a tribute to fidelity. Fidelity (so-called translation literal to meaning, or, simply, inverted, servile, translation) [. . .] Therefore, in the Benjaminian perspective [. . .] the original is what in a certain way serves the translation, at the moment when it unburdens it from the task of transporting the unessential content of the message [. . .] and permits it to dedicate itself to an other enterprise of fidelity [. . .] the “fidelity to reproduction of form” [. . .] It is oriented by the rebellious slogan of non serviam, of non-submission to a presence which is exterior to it, to a content which remains intrinsically unessential to it [. . .] a satanic enterprise. The “cursed” counterpart of the angelical nature of translation is Hubris, the semiological sin of Satan, il trapassar del segno (Paradiso XXXVI, 117), the transgression of sign limits [. . .] A translator of poetry is a choreographer of the inner dance of languages [. . .]. (Haroldo de Campos 2009, 233–236) How many angels? On the head of opin. . . ionated Manicheans be it, however, whether scholastic or materialist, to limit the inspirers of Brazilian or any other translators to but two angels: the good, the bad. And the ugly configuration of Haroldo’s predecessor poet Drummond de Andrade’s anjo torto (“crooked angel”), in “Poema de sete faces” (Poem of seven faces), as long ago as 1930, should have alerted subsequent and would-be theorists to both the revelations and the dangers of going transcendental in “the retrieval, reconstruction, and inscription” of remembering, as surely as the Shakespearean “seven” it echoes had led to “mere oblivion/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”3 The figure of the postmodern angel, always and already fallen, was also one too easily overlooked, left behind (Drummond’s “gauche na vida”/ “gauche in life”?), in the long march of historical materialism. . . 3 The caution of such philosophers as Richard Rorty in respect of the temptation to go transcendental in the memorializing of historical events had long ago been poeticized by Drummond de Andrade and, inherited, by Haroldo de Campos, not least in echo of William Shakespeare’s Jaques in As You Like It, Act II scene VII: “Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history.” often the most dogmatic of “the imagined and projected versions of what is to come” on the part of de Campos’s Marxisant Brazilian detractors, as will be revealed in and after a reading of the poem; and of its guest.4 For into the space of neglect—of suppressed memory—Haroldo de Campos had injected “o anjo esquerdo da história,” for him “the left-winged angel of history”; “the angel on the left of history” in my transjection, my inherently “transformative” but necessarily subsequent swerve, my own anxious clinamen). o anjo esquerdo da história the angel on the left of history os sem-terra afinal the landless at last estão assentados na are settled in pleniposse da terra: full possession of the land: de sem-terra passaram a from landless to com-terra: ei-los landed: here they’re enterrados interred desterrados de seu sopro their life’s breath de vida unearthly aterrados earthed terrorizados terrified terra que à terra earth which onto earth torna returns pleniposseiros terra- land-holders pleni- tenentes de uma potentiary of a (single vala (bala) comum: bullet) common grave: pelo avesso afinal outside in at last entranhados no holed deep into lato ventre do the broad-bellied latifúndio acres of the latifundio- que de im- land once barren produtivo re- so sudden- velou-se assim u- ly shown to be most f- bérrimo: gerando pingue ecund: udder-spawning profit messe de crop of sangue vermelhoso reddening blood 4 In ”Constructivism in Brazil: Concretism and Neo-Concretism. A Personal Post Scriptum,” Haroldo de Campos offers his riposte to Roberto Schwarz, as emblematic propagator of the attacks levied against the concretists and de Campos’s notion of a postutopical poetry. My “Laughin’ again he’s awake: de Campos a l’oreille de l’autre celte” addresses the polemic extensively in McGuirck and Vieira 2009, 126–152. lavradores sem un-labored lavra ei- labor: here they’re los: afinal con- larvaed at vertidos em larvas last em mortuá- on mortal rios despojos: remains ataúdes lavrados coffins labored na escassa madeira from the scanty timber (matéria) (timbre) de si mesmos: a bala assassina of themselves: the assassin bullet atocaiou-os stalks them mortiassentados thirst-squatting sitibundos death-settlers decúbito-abatidos pre- decumbents cut down pre- destinatários de uma destined for a agra (magra) meagre (earth) acre a- re(dis)(forme) forma grarian —fome—a- —famine— grária: ei- re (de)(formed) form los gregária here they are: gregarious comunidade de meeiros commune share-cropping do nada: nothingness: enver- shame- gonhada a- faced in goniada agony avexada vexed —envergoncorroída de —shamecorroded by imo-abrasivo re- inmost abrasive re- morso - morse- a pátria landless (como ufanar-se da?) (‘how shall we extol thee?’) apátrida homeland pranteia os seus des- laments its dis- possuídos párias – possessed pariahs – pátria parricida: parricide patria que talvez só afinal a for maybe only at last the espada flamejante fiery sword do anjo torto da his- of the crooked angel of his- tória cha- tory flam- mejando a contravento e ing against the wind and afogueando os burning the agrossicários sócios desse agrokilltural cronies of that fúnebre sodalício onde a somber sodality where morte-marechala comanda uma field-marshal death commands a torva milícia de janízaros-ja- grim militia of janissary-gun- gunços: men: somente o anjo esquerdo only the angel on the left da história escovada a of a history groomed against contrapelo com sua the grain shall manage with its multigirante espada po- multiswirling sword derá (quem dera! ) um dia (if only!) one day to convocar do ror convoke from the nebulous nebuloso dos dias vin- mass of days to douros o dia come the at last afinal sobreveniente do overriding day of the justo just ajuste de adjustment of contas accounts (Haroldo de Campos, 1996 © Translation Bernard McGuirk 2002) The task of transacting—trans/dancing—with Haroldo de Campos’s poetry was made the more challenging by his Mephistofaustic promptings. In the essay, he had willingly reen- gaged with both Marx and Nietzsche in a reminder that translation in particular and writing in general always perform the act of transcreation, a refutation of original (etiology) and target (teleology), not only linguistically but also culturally and, let it be stressed, ideologically. Self-consciously, he had echoed Marx’s precursor complaint against the censuring of his style. Self- mockingly, he had appropriated Nietzsche’s plea for the neces- sarily sublime “maldade”—the “evil”—of mischievous content and form. Radical content radical form radical translation Countless Brazilian artists had reacted, in creative political interventions, to the obscenity of the murderous repressions perpetrated against the MST—as did de Campos, here, to the massacre of Eldorado dos Carajás. Cyclical repetitions of organized violence, the option against the poor—in cynical inversion of the “for the poor” slogan of Liberation Theology— had triggered the indignation and the artistry of such as Frei Betto’s “Receita para matar um sem-terra”/“Recipe for Killing the Landless”, Sebastião Salgado’s (1997) photography, in Terra, and Chico Buarque’s “Levantados do chão” (Raised from the ground). These contemporary artists, however, no less than their predecessors Graciliano Ramos, João Cabral de Melo Neto, or Glauber Rocha, will not be remembered for their indignation alone. Each—and differently—had had to make another option, broadly definable as the style of mischief-making that is the prerogative of any radical art. Style also functions as a sharecropping, a participating in the intertextuality available to the individual artist; or, in de Campos’s formulation, Karl Marx’s “property of form,” inseparable from his “individual spirituality.” Such an option, being for the poor, should never be poor. Even to think as much would be either to neglect the need for creativity or to misread it. To confuse, say, Graciliano Ramos’s calculatedly daring minimalism, in Vidas secas (Barren lives) of 1938, with some unmediated response to the prescriptive exclusions of the Soviet Writers’ Congress of 1934. To ignore João Cabral de Melo Neto’s career-long engagement with the materiality of words or with what Francis Ponge called Le parti pris des choses. To undersell, perversely, the difficulty of his own challenge: “É difícil defender/só com palavras a vida” (It’s hard to defend/only with words life) (Morte e vida severina [Death and Life of Severino]), of 1956. To imagine a tabula rasa (inter-cine-text- less) Glauber Rocha, deprived, in the 1960s, of a dialogical relationship with Italian neorealism. To conceive that, in postmodernity, the compassions of Sebastião Salgado did not reflect, and reflect on, Don Macullin’s 1970s photography of the oppressed. To fail to hear in Chico Buarque’s song the 1990s echo of José Saramago’s “Do chão pode levantar-se um livro, como uma espiga de trigo ou uma flor brava. Ou uma ave. Ou uma bandeira” (From the ground a book can rise, like an ear of wheat or a wild flower. Or a bird. Or a banner). But there is neither need nor time for doubt. The urgent indivisibility of radical content from radical form is better demonstrated by critical artistry than by artless criticism. An unapologetic option for the inseparably transcendental and material underpins the very title of “o anjo esquerdo da história.” Whether God is dead or not (and whether such a dominant metaphysics of absence might be Marxian or Nietzschean in inspiration), the conspiracies of history are still played out amidst the configurations of narrative. Which is not to see history as narrative (that is, only as troped)—for that would be to deradicalize both history’s powers and any reading of it. In Le monolinguisme de l’autre (1996), Derrida elaborated on the “call for an outside.” In “o anjo. . . ,” de Campos called upon a figure, that of the avenging angel, which inhabits, simultaneously, both the inside and the outside of “a história.” He even staked out for it a particular location, the place of enunciation for a nuncio to a nation, for a committed messenger. Yet the call is not voiced until after that necessary delay that enables the poem to revisit, to reinhabit, to relive the arduous struggle for a hearing, paradoxically, on behalf of a voice—that of poetry—no less excluded, traditionally, than the referents of its echoing anger. Thus, by way of (not) analyzing the poem, I prefer to comment on aspects of my own transjection of it. Cheek to cheek. . . and the ear of the other Cast at me as a throw of the dice, the poem impelled me to reject paraphrase. Haphazardly, I projected it, rather, only as recastable. For the game was too serious to stop at a single appropriation. The ear of this other, too, had its particularity, its “properties of form,” its “individual spirituality.” An Irish specific of a past inherited, part-interred (ex-patria), in an England pre- , pro- , and post-Thatcher, suffused and infused my option for an irony that filtered distorted echoes of another, unofficial, “national” anthem: “Land of Hope and Glory.” “How shall we extol Thee?” who were born not of, but only on, Thee. Here I played with another geopolitics, one of parallel clichés, terra firma, “broad acres,” “field-marshals” of a homeland unheimlich and—sublime “maldade”—of the Mal-vinas, with their no less somber soldiery.5 That the translation must speak for, and of, itself is but part of the point. In language, for Bakhtin, the word was always half someone else’s. . . whether spoken or written. Had de Campos not taken but half of Mallarmé’s angelism, appropriating 5“Land of Hope and Glory” operates as a much appropriated English national hymn. It has been adopted as the official anthem and is sung at the annual conferences of the Conservative Party. poetry’s power of memory but adding to it a specifically Brazilian infernal vision (“quem dera!”), that of Canudos, and of Antônio Conselheiro? A post-Blake m(isc)arriage wherein the legacy of revolutionary mysticism assailed, as forcefully as does dialectical materialism, the hell-on-earth of landless utopians yet to glimpse a Brazilian heaven of agrarian reform? Such a politico-poetics could not presume to deprive those sem terra of the configurations, including the martyrs, saints, and avenging angels, of their local narratives, small or grand. . . sem céu? Heaven-less? Who knows? Who would impose? If their collective history had certainly been groomed against the grain (where every day was—is?—a last day), at least the poem leaves its protagonists “lying still” with their theology and with its (dis-) placements.6 Haroldo de Campos was no angel, least of all in his own poetic practice. He was unstintingly confident, certainly enough to lampoon critical and ideological rigidities and excesses. Acutely alert to the fact that Brazilian neo-Hegelians, no less than their counterparts elsewhere, in their determination to confront the brutality of much of Latin American society, have fallen precisely into the lure of a discourse too mimetic of brute reality, too mirroring ever to achieve a cutting edge, Haroldo de Campos convoked the figure of poetry itself. He knew that poetry is a master teaser, a baiter of stiff contemporary realists or the limp lamp bearers of reflection theories past and present. The inter- and intracultural transluciferations of his textual performances had allowed for the inter-action of Brazilians speaking and listening to Brazilians being listened and spoken to; in turn, they inspired that other, the present trans(at)l(antic)ator whose sign/ature shuttles to and fro, ever seeking to perform intra-, but never faithful, ever faith-less, illusorily face-less, scorn-fully masking source, mourn-fully eschewing target, settling (lawlessly), for an ever extra-trans-mission of occupations, pre- occupations, needs, urgencies. 6 The reference is to the 1902 foundational memorializing of the Canudos war of 1896–1897 in the seminal text of Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões, in which the rebellion and massacre of the sertanejo inhabitants of the Brazilian interior, in the State of Bahia, prefigure the plight, a century on, of the sem terra of El Dorado dos Carajás. Stormy (whether you like it or not. . . ) Whence, for Haroldo de Campos, the “anjo esquerdo da história”? In his unapologetic rejection of “unacceptable cognitive models,” the challenge of de Campos is consistent, not least when addressing the angel as an appropriated icon of the left, inherited from Walter Benjamin’s seminal formulation: This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 1999, 249) His reconfiguration, in poetry, of the readily packaged but not so smoothly imported “anjo,” regarded by Else Vieira as a de Campos “mutation” in the poet’s resistance to allowing Benjamin’s “Angelus Novus” cum “angel of history” to be unproblematically appropriated as emblematic of a Brazilian historical materialism, must also be seen as an instrument of Haroldo’s staunch debunking of those theorists who would unquestioningly identify their ideological stance with “the storm of progress.”7 Most notoriously, Roberto Schwarz, “sociologizing critic, of vocational incompatibility with the new in poetry” (de Campos, in McGuirk and Vieira 2009,197): The basic scheme is as follows: a tiny élite devotes itself to copying Old World culture [. . .] As a result, literature and politics occupy an exotic position, and we become incapable of creating things of our own that spring from the depths of our life and history [....] But why not reverse the argument? Why should the imitative character of our life not stem from forms of inequality so brutal that they lack the minimal reciprocity [. . .] without which modern society can only appear artificial and “imported”? (Schwarz 1992, 85– 89). 7 See the sections “Protean Angels: Shifting Spectres of Walter Benjamin” and “Crooked Angels, Satanic Angels: From Determinism to the Recovery of Revolutionary Possibility” in “Weaving Histories and Cultural Memories. The (Inter)National Materialisms of o anjo esquerdo da história,“ in McGuirck and Vieira 2009, 170–175.  Far from resembling “devoted copying,” such Haroldo de Campos performances as I have dealt with here, whether in his criticism or in his poetry, are, to use his own formulation, “textos de ruptura”(rupture texts). In Panorama do Finnegans Wake (1962), the de Campos brothers, Augusto and Haroldo, had already embarked—for a hybrid genre of transl-iter-ation—on the journey of strenuous excursions demanded, by the modern artist par excellence, Stéphane Mallarmé.8 As has been seen in respect of “o anjo esquerdo da história”, any “angelism” inherited from Mallarmé is supplemented by the daemonic; is traced (as even Roberto Schwarz might admit) by the diabolic. The recuperative moves of the poem play with “fallen” transcendentalism and that corrective shift which—for Haroldo de Campos, no less than for any Marxist—tugs “a história” (history and the story of history) always to the Left. Not “going transcendental,” but refusing to forget that particular -ism (without being “-ista”). Not appropriating an already unbalanced Brazilian history (which ever was and still is on the Right). Rather, engaging with it and in it through concrete performances. Destabilizing the dubious claim that we judge our own time by its politicians, the past by its artists. Searching for poetry’s readmission to a Res Pública Brasileira in which the artist (in academic freedom, pace Roberto et al) might also stage the still-to be-negotiated identities of the nation. Writ(h)ing, in agon, so that sub-alterity (sic) might no longer be a leper’s bell to be hung, by the dark forces of any “sociologizing” thought-police, about the neck of Brazil’s excluded artists. Are Haroldo de Campos’s “o anjo esquerdo da história” and my transjection of it—as not abandoned or to be forgotten, mutilatedly only “left winged” and but formerly “of history,” but rather ever active, whole, uncut, as ”the angel on the left of history”—merely a further negotiated staging? Or just a plea for the performative poet–critic to be heard as also improvising politically against, in counterpoint to, “unacceptable cognitive 8 “The double effort required to allow Mallarmé’s gaps their full disjunctive and destructive power, yet at the same time remain attentive to the multitude of invisible currents which pass back and forth between the separated segments, will strike many readers as inexcusably arduous and unrewarding,” and “such moments are of the essence in Mallarmé [. . .] the type of modern artist [. . .] intent on breaking up ready-made Gestalten and smooth surface textures in order to compel his audience to look elsewhere for artistic coherence, to venture beneath the surface into the difficult, undifferentiated world of unconscious process, to interrupt the easy flow of horizontal perception with strenuous excursions into multi-level, all-at-once ‘verticality’” (Bowie 1978, 6 and 16, respectively). models” of a Brazil in construction. . . though sorely lacking in deconstruction? Trans memoriam To Jacques Derrida’s “there is always something sexual at stake in the resistance to deconstruction” (1987, 196), this particular re- reader—and re-hearer—of Haroldo de Campos would add: “and cultural, and ideological.” But isn’t that where the guest translator came, invited, between 1999 and 2002, by and with Haroldo and Carmen, and with Else, into the hospitality of the Babelic home of Brazil and Brazilian letters? Unheimlich? Years on, I am still questioning the possibility of speaking or hearing “do exterior,” “from abroad”; but, now, it is because I have listened, learned, read, and may even write, that intra- has a history which includes extra-; that il n’y a pas d’hors contexte. At, and beyond, the limits of the languages and the antics of nations—not least in transatlantications—the sting and the contamination of the tse-tse flies in the face of hygienic, much less immune, bodies such as text, context, literary, semiotic, cultural, or translation studies. In aporetic threshold perfor- mances, where differences between some “outside” and some “in” are never abolished but ever undermined, not merely inverted but politically subverted, “transtextuality” is a new wor(l)d. . . but it is readable, habitable, pleasurable; like tsextuality. This place of aporia is before a door, a threshold, a border, a line, or simply the edge or the approach of the other as such Jacques Derrida (1993, 12) Coda: translator’s note The discourse of the author of the above is considered by the journal reviewer to perform that approach to translation theory to which it attempts to give (further) voice. Subsequent to the medium chosen by Haroldo de Campos to deliver a poetic rebuke to the perpetrators of the 1996 massacre at El Dorado dos Carajás, will there have been, will there be, a creative intervention that, similarly or comparably, addresses and challenges the contem- porary social upheavals and political manifestations of the opposition to a contemporary Brazil that projects as heaven-sent the staging of a World Cup and an Olympic Games in the best of all possible wor(l)ds? A diabolic fait accompli; or do post-Haroldo undoings—the transluciferations of successor artists—loom. . . ? The task of the present trans(at)l(antic)ator is to await texts from writers who, also, will have undertaken such “imagined and projected versions of what is to come.” Then, in a necessarily matching performative meditation, will it be conceivable to “update.” Pace academe passim. . . Ite, missa est. The sacrifice (of the masses) in the interim will have found but formulaic, liturgical, expressions of their material—street, stadium, factory, favela, commune, congress—protests, however real, however righteous; whether or not arising from the left of history. Chronicles of a dearth foretold; testimony to a lack of devilishly challenging artistic engagement? The avenging angel of poiesis awaits; translations will follow. References Anderson, Perry. 2002. “The Cardoso Legacy.” London Review of Books 24 (24): 18–22. December 12. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n24/perry- anderson/the-cardoso-legacy. Andrade, Drummond de. 1930. “Poema de sete faces.” In Alguma poesia. Belo Horizonte: Edicoes Pindorama. Reproduced in Alguma Poesia. Carlos Drummond de Andrade: Poesia e prosa, 70. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1979. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. Illuminations. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: Pimlico. Betto, Frei. 2002. “Receita para matar um sem-terra.” In Landless Voices in Song and Poetry, edited by Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira and Bernard McGuirk, 77–78. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2007. Bowie, Malcolm. 1978. Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campos, Augusto de, and Haroldo de Campos. 1962. Panorama do Finnegans Wake. n.c.: Conselho Estadual de Cultura, Comissão de Literatura. Campos, Haroldo de. [n.d.]1998. “anjo equerdo da história.” In Crisantempo: no espaço curvo nasce um, 69–72. São Paulo: Perspectiva. Originally in ptnotícias. São Paulo: Diretório Nacional do Partido dos Trabalhadores. ———. 2009. “On Mephistofaustic Transluciferation.” In McGuirk and Vieira 2009, 233–236. Translation by Bernard McGuirk. Derrida, Jacques. [1984] 1987. “Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida.” In Men in Feminism, edited by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, 189–203. New York and London: Routledge. Originally published in Subjects/Objects 2 (12). ———. 1993. “Finis.” In Aporias: dying—awaiting (one another at)the “limits of truth”; mourir—s’attendre aux “limites de la vérité”, 1–42. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1996. Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse d’origine. Paris: Galilée. Eco, Umberto. 2003. “Of Mice and Men.” The Guardian Review, November 1. Complete version available at https://free- minds.org/forum/index.php?topic=7425.0. McGuirk, Bernard, and Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira. 2009. Haroldo de Campos in conversation: in memoriam 1929–2003. London: Zoilus. Melo Neto, João Cabral de. 2000. Morte e vida severina e outros poemas para vozes. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira. Pring-Mill, Robert D. F. 1990. “Gracias a la vida”: The Power and Poetry of Song. The Kate Elder Lecture, Queen Mary University of London. An expanded version published London: University of London, Dept. of Hispanic Studies, 1999. Santiago, Silviano. 1978. “O entre-lugar do discurso latino-americano.” In Uma literatura nos trópicos, 11–28. São Paulo: Perspectiva. Salgado, Sebastião. 1997. Terra. Preface by José Saramago, and poetry by Chico Buarque. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. English edition published as Terra: Struggle of the Landless. London: Phaidon, 1997. Schwarz, Roberto. 1992. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. Edited and with an introduction by John Gledson. London and New York: Verso. Vieira, Else Ribeiro Pires, and Bernard McGuirk. 2007. Landless Voices in Song and Poetry: The Movimento dos Sem Terra of Brazil. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press. is Emeritus Professor of Romance Literatures and Literary Theory at the University of Nottingham. He is president of the International Consortium for the Study of Post-Conflict and has published widely on and translated literatures in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. His most recent books are Latin American Literature: Symptoms, Risks and Strategies of Poststructuralist Criticism (2013), Poesia de Guerra (1998), Falklands–Malvinas: An Unfinished Business (2007), and Erasing Fernando Pessoa (2017). He has also edited, with Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira, Landless Voices in Song and Poetry: The Movimento Dos Sem Terra of Brazil (2007) and Haroldo de Campos in Conversation: In Memoriam 1929–2003 (2007); and, with Constance Goh, Happiness and Post-Conflict (2007). 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15531

Abstract: “I have invented very little in the stories and voices that weave through this book. Some of them I was told and have carried in my memory for a long time. Others I found in books.” These words—from the Author’s Note of Muñoz Molina’s Sepharad—could be said to be the starting point of my article. Muñoz Molina’s novel illustrates a good example of what Michael Rothberg defines as “multidirectional memory” since the memory of the Holocaust, the multiple exiles that have taken place in Europe, and the memory of postwar Spain coexist—like the tesserae of a mosaic—in the structure of this novel. In this sense, Sepharad can be seen as a landmark in recent Spanish literature, being the first novel that provides a juxtaposition of these formerly isolated memories in a fictional work. It is, therefore, the aim of this article to explore the manner in which Muñoz Molina manages to translate into fiction the shared European memory of the twentieth century, also paying attention to the narrative techniques used by this Spanish author. 1This paper is a result of the METAPHORA research project (Reference FFI2014-53391-P), funded by State Secretariat for Research, Development and Innovation of Spain.  Cómo atreverse a la vana frivolidad de inventar, habiendo tantas vidas que merecieron ser contadas, cada una de ellas una novela, una malla de ramificaciones que conducen a otras novelas y otras vidas”.2 Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sefarad (2003, 720-721) “De te fabula. The story is about you”. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture (1976, 186) One of the most revealing passages that the reader of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad (first published in 2001) may encounter in this so-called “novela de novelas” occurs in the “Author’s Note,” which brings this novel to its end: “I have invented very little in the stories and voices that weave through this book. Some of them I was told and have carried in my memory for a long time. Others I found in books” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 383). This passage could be said to be the starting point of this essay since it helps explain the complex relationship which we find in this novel between memory and imagination, as well as between storytelling and memoir. Sefarad is described by Muñoz Molina as “un mapa de todos los exilios posibles” (a map of all possible exiles) (Valdivia 2013, 26), and in this sense the novel represents a manifold and heterogeneous approach to this theme. Similarly, this novel constitutes a landmark in Spanish literature, as it juxtaposes in a fictional work both the Spanish and European shared history of the twentieth century in an unprecedented manner (see Valdivia 2013; Hristova 2011; Baer 2011). As it could be claimed that Sefarad is founded on a multidirectional approach to memory (Valdivia 2013, 13), it is my purpose to explore the manner in which this approach is translated into fiction in this novel. Similarly, I would like to pay attention to those narrative techniques used by Muñoz Molina that enhance this multidirectional approach. In this sense, both polyacroasis (that is, the plural interpretation of discourses), as 2 All quotations in Spanish from Sefarad are from the 2013 edition (see References list) and referenced in parentheses as such in the text. All quotations in English are from the 2003 edition of Margaret Sayers Peden’s translation (see References list). The English translation will be offered throughout in footnotes, except where only short passages are cited in-text. “How, when there are so many lives that deserve to be told, can one attempt to invent a novel for each, in a vast network of interlinking novels and lives?” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 365) defined by Tomás Albaladejo (1998, 2011), and the empathetic turn of Muñoz Molina’s novel, account for an effective translation of memory, as I will try to demonstrate. Multidirectional Memory in Sefarad Instead of the idea of collective memory as competitive memory (Rothberg 2009, 3), in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization a new conceptual framework is proposed which “consider[s] memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross- referencing [. . .] as productive and not privative” (Rothberg 2009, 3). In other words, this model of competitive memory should be replaced by a dynamic multidirectional model that allows the interaction of different historical memories (Rothberg 2009, 2–3). In Rothberg’s study, the work of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs is considered crucial, since for him “all memories are simultaneously individual and collective” (Rothberg 2009, 14–15) so that an effective transmission of the past depends on the manner in which the interaction and juxtaposition of both individual and collective memory is understood. In this sense, as Pablo Valdivia has stated in his edition of Sefarad, the structure of Muñoz Molina’s novel could be said to represent a good illustration of what Michael Rothberg has defined as “multidirectional memory” (Valdivia 2013, 13). The memory of the Holocaust, the multiple exiles that have taken place in Europe, including the Spanish republican exile, and the memory of postwar Spain coexist in the structure of these seventeen intertwined chapters or “novelas” that shape Sefarad. Thus, Sefarad constitutes a landmark in recent Spanish literature since, before this novel was published in 2001, the juxtaposition of the Spanish and European shared memory of the Holocaust and its aftermath, along with the memory of the Spanish republican exile, its Civil War, and its postwar period has never been staged in a fictional work (Valdivia 2013, 14; see also Hristova 2011). As a result of this, Muñoz Molina’s novel also constitutes an attempt to connect the Spanish and European shared culture so as to fill the voids of our shared history3 (Baer 3 As Pablo Valdivia has suggested in his edition of Sefarad, in the article “Escuchando a Canetti,” published in the Spanish newspaper El País in 1997, we can clearly appreciate Muñoz 2011; Valdivia 2013). In order to illuminate those cultural links, the Spanish author creates a complex and ambitious fictional artifact haunted by voices rather than characters in the traditional sense (Valdivia 2013). Actually, voices (“voces”) is the word Muñoz Molina uses in the “Author’s Note” to refer to the characters who weave through the book. Some of these voices are fictional and others belong to real people who bore witness to their atrocious experiences, and they all constitute an “imagined community of voices” (Herzberger 2004, 85; Valdivia 2013, 15). Hence, in Sefarad we read the testimonies and listen to the voices of Victor Klemperer, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Primo Levi, Francisco Ayala, Evgenia Ginzburg, José Luis Pinillos, Franz Kafka, or Milena Jesenska, to name but a few. Marije Hristova (2011) has referred to these characters as “iconic characters” or “iconic writers”—that is, historical figures appearing in the novel who in turn have bequeathed to us their “iconic testimonies.” According to Baer, the weak connection between Spain and the memory of the Holocaust is not historical but cultural (Baer 2011, 114). In this sense, this cultural disjointedness is also suggested in the “Author’s Note,” when Muñoz Molina reveals that many of the testimonies and memoirs of victims of totalitarian regimes that led him to write Sefarad were not translated into Spanish by the time he was writing and published his novel. This is the case of Margarete Buber Neumann’s Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler. Eine Welt im Dunkel ([1947] 1997), Victor Klemperer’s “Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten.” Tagebücher 1933–1945 (1995), Jean Améry’s Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwäl- tigten (1997), and Evgenia Semyonovna Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind (1967), whose memoirs the author could only read in their French and English translations. In fact, it was Antonio Muñoz Molina himself who inserted in the novel his own translation of passages taken from the memoirs we have Molina’s reflections on what he considers a certain lack of interest in Spain regarding the international discussions on the Holocaust memory: “Me llama la atención lo poco que se ha escrito en nuestro país sobre el Holocausto, y el eco tan débil o simplemente nulo que tienen entre nosotros los grandes debates internacionales sobre ese acontecimiento que, junto a la tecnología de la guerra total y el terror de las tiranías estalinistas, ha definido este siglo [. . .] se diría que a nosotros tales cosas no nos afectan, como si España fuera ajena a la historia judía de los últimos cinco siglos, o como si nuestro país no hubiera padecido durante casi cuarenta años una dictadura que debió su triunfo, en gran parte, a la ayuda del mismo régimen que provocó el Holocausto y arrasó Europa entera” (Muñoz Molina 2007, 377–380). previously mentioned. Thus, in Sefarad the creative writer and the translator meet, as will be analyzed in the last section. In Sefarad, the author introduces a variety of testimonies and memories that had been previously overshadowed by other memories, to the extent that they were unknown for many Spanish readers, an aspect which suggests a parallelism between Rothberg’s multidirectional memory model and Muñoz Molina’s novel (Valdivia 2013, 13). In this sense, Sefarad can be contemplated as a mosaic made of many tesserae, every one of which is part of an imagined community of voices. Needless to say, every tessera is required to understand the whole picture. In “Münzenberg,” one of the seventeen chapters that make up Sefarad, Muñoz Molina’s “basic narrator” (Hristova 2011) reveals his plans to write a novel, which, quite startlingly, seems to be inspired by the same approach to fiction that Rothberg proposes for history (Valdivia 2013): He intuido, a lo largo de dos o tres años, la tentación y la posibilidad de una novela, he imaginado situaciones y lugares, como fotografías sueltas o como esos fotogramas de películas que ponían antes, armados en grandes carteleras, a las entradas de los cines [. . .] Cada uno cobraba una valiosa cualidad de misterio, se yuxtaponía sin orden a los otros, se iluminaban entre sí en conexiones plurales e instantáneas, que yo podía deshacer o modificar a mi antojo, y en las que ninguna imagen anulaba a las otras o alcanzaba una primacía segura sobre ellas, o perdía en beneficio del conjunto su singularidad irreductible. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 383)4 This passage is highly revealing since we are told that the narrator’s plan for writing his novel consists of juxtaposing snapshots in order to create a pattern where no image nullifies or overshadows the others, since each of these images is unique and necessary to produce a true and coherent mosaic. This is what we find precisely in Sefarad; different testimonies and memoirs from victims of any political regime or from any kind of exile, each of which are equally significant in a clear multidirectional approach to memory (Valdivia 2013). 4 “For two or three years I have flirted with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots, or like those posters displayed on large billboards at the entrance to a movie theatre. [. . .] Each became a mystery, illuminating the others, creating multiple links that I could break or modify at my whim, patterns in which no image nullified the others or gained precedence or lost its uniqueness within the whole” (Muñoz Molina 2003,140).  Thus, one of the essential questions that are raised while reading Sefarad is how appropriate literature may be as a vehicle for bearing witness to history (Gilmour 2011, 840). The main narrator of Sefarad does not evade this issue, something which is reflected on many occasions throughout the novel. This is the case of the chapter “Narva,” in which the narrator meets a friend of his for lunch, the Spanish psychologist José Luis Pinillos. Pinillos enlisted in the Blue Division, the Spanish Army that served in the German Army during the Second World War. The testimony that the Spanish psychologist bequeaths to the narrator is that of his dramatic experience in the Estonian city of Narva. There, Pinillos met a Jewish woman who asks him to bear witness to the extermination of the Jewish population. At a certain point of the narration, the Spanish psychologist admits that “[y]o no sabía nada entonces, pero lo peor de todo era que me negaba a saber, que no veía lo que estaba delante de mis ojos” (Muñoz Molina 2013, 630) (“I didn’t know anything then, but worst of all was my refusal to know, what was before my eyes” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 307)), attracted as he was by what German civilization represented during his student years: “no quiero ocultarlo, ni quiero disculparme, creía que Alemania era la civilización, y Rusia la barbarie” (Muñoz Molina 2013, 630) (“I don’t want to hide anything or try to excuse myself, I thought that Germany was civilization and Russia barbarism” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 307)). After that meeting, he would never see the Jewish woman again and the experience of that meeting haunted him for many decades, until the very day the narrator and the Spanish psychologist met for lunch. This chapter contains essential reflections on the role of literature as a vehicle for transmitting the memory of the past. Moreover, the very mechanisms of storytelling are unveiled in a remarkable manner. After hearing Pinillos’s testimony, and particularly what meeting the Jewish woman meant for him, the basic narrator has an epiphanic revelation, which is reflected in the following passage: Él, que no quiso ni pudo olvidarla en más de medio siglo, me la ha legado ahora, de su memoria la ha trasladado a mi imaginación, pero yo no quiero inventarle ni un origen ni un nombre, tal vez ni siquiera tengo derecho: no es un fantasma, ni un personaje de ficción, es alguien que pertenecía a la vida  real tanto como yo, que tuvo un destino tan único como el mío aunque inimaginablemente más atroz, una biografía que no puede ser suplantada por la sombra bella y mentirosa de la literatura [. . .] (Muñoz Molina 2013, 637)5 As the previous passage reflects, Muñoz Molina is aware of the risks involved in transmitting and translating memory into fiction. He is aware, in other words, of the limits of literature and invention (Gilmour 2011, 840),6 which is probably why Muñoz Molina declares in his “Author’s Note” that there is very little invention “in the stories and voices that weave through [Sefarad]” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 383). On the other hand, Sefarad never stops questioning the legitimacy of literature to approach memory. Perhaps, José Luis Pinillos’s testimony faithfully illustrates the author’s approach to memory: [. . .] si yo estoy vivo tengo la obligación de hablar por ellos, tengo que contar lo que les hicieron, no puedo quedarme sin hacer nada y dejar que les olviden, y que se pierda del todo lo poco que va quedando de ellos. No quedará nada cuando se haya extinguido mi generación, nadie que se acuerde, a no ser que alguno de vosotros repitáis lo que os hemos contado. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 644)7 At the very end of this passage, the Spanish psychologist appeals to the narrator and asks him to narrate what he has just told him (an idea that is lost in the English translation we offer below). In this sense, it is relevant to refer to Cristina Demaria’s study Semiotica e Memoria. Analisi del post-conflitto. In this study, Demaria refers to the necessity of exploring what Lotman defined as the process of translating experience into the text (“processi di traduzione dell’esperienza in testo”) when we transmit the past, paying special attention to the interaction 5 “He who has not been able to forget her for more than half a century has bequeathed her to me now, transferring the memory of her to my imagination, but I won’t give her an origin or a name, I haven’t the authority, she isn’t a ghost or a fictional character but someone who was as real as I am, who had a destiny as unique as mine although far more cruel, a biography that can neither be supplanted by the beautiful lie of literature” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 312). 6 Concerning the issue of how legitimate it is for fiction to transmit memories of traumatic experiences, Gilmour has observed that “the dilemma of how to keep memories of these experiences alive and to transmit them to future generations has become a pressing question in contemporary cultural studies, in particular in relation to the Holocaust” (Gilmour 2011, 839). 7 “[. . .] because I’m alive I have the obligation to speak for them, say what was done, so that the little that remains of them in people’s memories will not be lost for all time” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 317). between individual and collective memory (Demaria 2006, 37).8 Hence, I would affirm that the inclusion of the iconic characters’ testimonies in Sefarad accounts for this sort of translation of experience into the text. The issue of the legitimacy of literature as a vehicle for the transmission of memory and traumatic knowledge is an essential feature in Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad, which, I feel, is effectively carried out (Gilmour 2011, 840). On the other hand, it should not be overlooked that the transmission of memory may function—as we consider it does in Sefarad—as “a spur to unexpected acts of empathy and solidarity” (Rothberg 2009, 19). Empathetic polyacroasis as a narrative principle in Sefarad One of the most remarkable aspects of Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad is the importance of storytelling as a principle that articulates the novel (Herzberger 2004, 85; Valdivia 2013). As Herzberger has pointed out Sefarad “is a novel of multiple narrators, characters, and plots that turns inward to celebrate the construction of its stories.” (Herzberger 2004, 85). It is important to highlight how significant storytelling, listening, and reading are in the construction of this novel. In this sense, the inclusion of the iconic characters’ testimonies in a novel where storytelling and listening is vital accounts for what Herzberger defines as “a hybridized narrative rooted in imagination and reference” (Herzberger 2004, 86). A fruitful tension that contributes to trigger an empathetic response from the reader (Herzberger 2004, 86). On the other hand, one of the most remarkable achievements of Sefarad is its “basic narrator”—that is, the oscillating narrative voice underlying the seventeen chapters or “novelas” (Hristova 2011; Gilmour 2011; Valdivia 2012, 591– 592). Actually, this basic narrator constantly changes the grammatical person from “yo” to “tú,” “él,” “vosotros,” or “ellos” (Valdivia 2012, 591–592; see also Gilmour 2011). Thus, orality and storytelling are essential features for this basic narrator to 8 Cristina Demaria affirms in her study that “[l]a trasmissione del significato del passato, la trama in cui si intrecciano alcuni eventi che divengono così rilevanti, può cioè trovarsi a dipendere dal modo in cui, di volta in volta, memoria individuale e memoria collettiva interagiscono. È necessario dunque indagare più a fondo quelli che Lotman definisce come processi di traduzione dell’esperienza in testo, l’interazione e anche il conflitto fra una memoria individuale e una collettiva, culturale e sociale” (Demaria 2006, 37). develop his narrative possibilities. Characters, be they iconic or fictional, tell each other stories and transmit their testimonies to those who are willing to listen, to the extent that the manner in which their identities may be perceived depends to a great extent on those stories (Herzberger 2004; Gilmour 2011; Hristova 2011; Valdivia 2012; Valdivia 2013). Hence, both orality and storytelling allow us to establish a connection with the rhetorical concept of polyacroasis (Valdivia 2012, 593–594). The term polyacroasis (polyakróasis)—that is, a plural hearing, plural interpretation of an oral discourse—has been proposed by Tomás Albaladejo “to refer to the characteristic consisting of the differences between the hearers of rhetorical discourse” (Albaladejo 1998, 156). Thus, polyacroasis contributes to illuminate and elucidate the mechanisms of the plural reception of discourses taking place in a given rhetorical event (Albaladejo 1998). As this reception is not only restricted to oratorical events, Albaladejo has also proposed this concept to analyze literary works, especially those at the very core of which literary communication lies (Albaladejo 2009, 2). Polyacroasis therefore contributes to elucidate the strong link between literature and orality (Albaladejo 2009, 3–4). In this sense, Sefarad constitutes a rhetorical event where the characters or voices that dwell in the novel narrate to each other the novel they take with them.9 Yet the reader is also appealed to and turned into another character of the novel by means of empathy, to the extent that readers may experience what Northrop Frye affirmed the final message of the genre of romance was—that is, “de te fabula: the story is about you” (Frye 1976, 186). In this sense, the use in the novel of the rhetorical figure of apostrophe reinforces the sense of empathy the novel conveys, since the reader’s attention is drawn in a very effective manner (Valdivia 2013): Y tú qué harías si supieras que en cualquier momento pueden venir a buscarte, que tal vez ya figura tu nombre en una lista mecanografiada de 9In Sefarad, there are multiple references to Benito Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta. Muñoz Molina introduces in Sefarad a famous quotation taken from that novel, “Doquiera que el hombre va lleva consigo su novela,” which Margaret Sayers Peden translated into English as “Wherever a man goes, he takes his novel with him”(Muñoz Molina 2003, 44).  presos o de muertos futuros, de sospechosos, de traidores. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 243)10 Clearly, the use of apostrophe triggers an empathetic response from the reader, who may experience a total identification with the voices that dwell in Sefarad (Gilmour 2011, 851). In addition to this, empathy is similarly stimulated by manipulating the voice of the basic narrator (Gilmour 2011, 851; Valdivia 2012). What Gilmour has described as “a constant oscillation between the third person, él or ella, and the first person, yo,” (Gilmour 2011, 852; Valdivia 2012; Valdivia 2013, 258) creates a web of empathetic connections among the main narrator, the gallery of multiple voices that weave through the book, and an empathetic reader. As we have seen before, Muñoz Molina tells us in the “Author’s note” that both the testimonies he listened to and stored for a long time in his memory and the books he read were vital while plotting and writing Sefarad: the rest was invention. However, it could be affirmed that the part of the novel that stems from invention completes full circle this web of empathetic links (Gilmour 2011). In other words, as Gilmour has pointed out, the use of an empathetic imagination accounts for the manner in which Muñoz Molina, via his basic narrator, translates into fiction other people’s memories (Gilmour 2011, 847). This basic narrator has been referred to by Valdivia as a “yo fluido,” a sort of flowing manifold narrator whose nature is clearly explained in the following passage taken from the chapter “Dime tu nombre”: Nunca soy más yo mismo que cuando guardo silencio y escucho, cuando dejo a un lado mi fatigosa identidad y mi propia memoria para concentrarme del todo en el acto de escuchar, de ser plenamente habitado por las experiencias y recuerdos de otros. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 680)11 This multiple oscillation among different grammatical persons is accompanied by the use of direct speech, as we can appreciate when Muñoz Molina provides his own translation into 10 “And you, what would you do if you knew that at any moment they could come for you, that your name may already be on a typed list of prisoners or future dead, or suspects, or traitors?” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 45). 11 “I am never more myself than when I am silent and listening, when I set aside my tedious identity and tedious memory to concentrate totally on the act of listening, on the experiences of another” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 340). Spanish of the iconic characters’ testimonies he has read in books. In the following passage we can appreciate a clear example of this flowing oscillating narrator: Evgenia, te están tendiendo una trampa, y es preciso que escapes mientras puedas, antes de que te partan el cuello. Pero cómo voy yo, una comunista, a esconderme de mi Partido, lo que tengo que hacer es demostrarle al Partido que soy inocente. Hablan en voz baja, procurando que los niños no escuchen nada, temiendo que el teléfono, aunque está colgado, sirva para que les espíen las conversaciones. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 258)12 The quotation that appears in italics is an excerpt, translated into Spanish by the author himself, and taken from Evgenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, a memoir that had not yet been translated into Spanish when Sefarad was being written. Then, after that passage, without using quotation marks, the first person is used and we are told what the “basic narrator” imagines Evgenia Ginzburg might have said in the very moment she learnt she was under threat. In other words, the basic narrator haunts Ginzburg’s mind and empathetically imagines how Ginzburg might have reacted. Finally, in the last sentence, the basic narrator shifts to the third person plural (Valdivia 2013, 258). Needless to say, this masterly use of narrative technique requires an empathetic imagination on the author’s part (Gilmour 2011; Valdivia 2013, 258). The manner in which polyacroasis functions in this novel can not be explained if we are unaware of that web of empathetic connections—or “malla de ramificaciones”—among the different voices, the reader’s response, and the empathetic imagination deployed by Muñoz Molina. Therefore, a new question should now be raised. Is empathy an effective vehicle for both transmitting and translating memories? Does the author’s empathetic involvement in retelling and translating testimonies account for a successful transmission of memory? According to Rothberg, remembrance and imagination can be seen as both material and fundamentally human forces that 12“Eugenia, they’re setting a trap for you, and you must run away while you can, before they have your head. But why would I, a Communist, hide from my Party? I must show the Party that I’m innocent. They speak in low voices, trying not to let the children hear, afraid that the telephone, even though the receiver’s down, will allow someone to listen” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 53). “should not lead to assumptions of memory’s insubstantiality” (Rothberg 2009, 19). It is possible that, as Sefarad reflects, translating multidirectional memory into fiction acquires a more significant and enriched dimension when empathetic imagination is present. Translating the Other culturally in Sefarad The role of translation in postconflict cultures is an aspect that has been taken into consideration in Nergaard’s “Translating the Other: Journalism in Post Conflict Cultures” (Demaria and Wright, 2006). In this article, Nergaard analyzes examples where one culture translates another (Nergaard 2006, 189). In this sense, Nergaard proposes an understanding of translation “as the process through which concepts and discourses in one culture are interpreted and transformed in order to be introduced into another” (Nergaard 2006, 189). Translation is also referred to as “one of the privileged spaces where cultures meet [. . .] in terms of alterity and difference” (Nergaard 2006, 189). Translation thus allows us to represent the Other, a complex process that Nergaard calls cultural translation (Nergaard 2006, 191). In this epigraph I would like to explore the presence of cultural translation in Muñoz Molina’s novel, and to what extent fiction may contribute to an effective translation of the Other and, as a result of that, can contribute to create and shape knowledge. When the so-called basic narrator declares that he is never more himself than when he sets aside his identity to concentrate on the experiences of another (Muñoz Molina 2013, 680), he is suggesting that “he is never more fully himself than when experiencing both self and other” (Gilmour 2011, 849.) In this sense, it seems that the very idea of representing and translating the Other appears to be one of the engines of Sefarad, being the other and the translation of his or her experiences one of the key motifs that articulate the novel. We have previously referred to the manner in which Muñoz Molina translates into fiction the iconic characters’ testimonies. In some occasions the author himself translates passages into Spanish, which lend verisimilitude to the novel. In other occasions, the iconic characters are haunted by the oscillating narrator (“yo fluido,” as proposed by Valdivia) who imagines empathetically what these “iconic characters and writers” might have thought or said (Valdivia 2013). This exploration of the characters’ thoughts appearing in Sefarad, via an oscillating narrator, constitutes an example of what could be defined as an empathetic cultural translation. The most significant instance of this representation of the Other in Sefarad appears in the chapter “Eres.” In this chapter, Muñoz Molina appeals empathetically to the reader by means of the use of apostrophe. Thus, the chapter triggers in the reader a sense of identification between him or her and the Other (Valdivia 2013, 601). In this sense in Sefarad “the possibility of becoming ‘the other’ is a recurrent theme” (Hristova-Dijkstra and Adema 2010, 74), something that is illustrated when the reader is asked the following question: “Y tú qué harías si supieras que en cualquier momento pueden venir a buscarte, que tal vez ya figura tu nombre en una lista mecanografiada de presos o de muertos futuros, de sospechosos, de traidores”(Muñoz Molina 2013, 243) (“what would you do if you knew that at any moment they could come for you, that your name may already be on a typed list of prisoners or future dead, or suspects, or traitors?” [Muñoz Molina 2003, 45]). In the following passage from the chapter mentioned above, we encounter a representative example of the manner in which the virtual identification between reader (Self) and the Other is triggered: Eres quien mira su normalidad perdida desde el otro lado del cristal que te separa de ella, quien entre las rendijas de las tablas de un vagón de deportados mira las últimas casas de la ciudad que creyó suya y a la que nunca volverá. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 619)13 The effect these words have on the reader is that of fostering a total identification with the Other, to the extent that we come to recognize how “the ‘totally other’ constitutes one’s identity” (Hristova-Dijkstra and Adema 2010, 74). * 13 As Margaret Sayers Peden’s 2003 translation into English of the 2001 Spanish edition of Sefarad is being used throughout this article, and as this translation omits many passages from the original 2001 Spanish edition, including the passage I have just cited, no English translation is being provided in this instance. Sefarad has been described by its author as a “mapa de todos los exilios posibles” (a map of possible exiles) (Valdivia 2013, 26). In this sense, it could be affirmed that the theme of exile constitutes a subtext in Sefarad since it is the place where the narrator and the reader empathize imaginatively with the Other (Gilmour 2011, 854): Aún despojándote de todo queda algo que permanece siempre, que está en ti desde que tienes memoria [. . .] el núcleo o la médula de lo que eres [. . .]: eres el sentimiento del desarraigo y de la extrañeza, de no estar del todo en ninguna parte [. . .] (Muñoz Molina 2013, 609)14 In the Introduction to Translation and Power (2002) Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler assert that translators “as much as creative writers and politicians, participate in the powerful acts that create knowledge and shape culture” (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002, xxi). In this sense, in Sefarad both the translator and the creative writer meet. The fact that some of the books containing the iconic characters’ testimonies were not translated into Spanish implied an obvious lack of knowledge of vital testimonies that has shaped postwar Europe. Thus, the Spanish author’s decision to insert and translate passages from the previously mentioned testimonies accounts for a strong desire to create knowledge both as a creative writer and as a translator. If we take into consideration, for instance, the passages taken from Victor Klemperer’s I will Bear Witness. 1933–1941. A Diary of the Nazi Years (1999), we can appreciate a clear illustration of Muñoz Molina’s masterly use of historical reference and empathetic imagination. In “Quien espera,” a gallery of “iconic characters” weaves through this chapter, which includes Victor Klemperer himself, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Eugenia Ginzburg, Jean Améry, and even fictional characters such as Josef K. from Kafka’s Der Prozess. In the following passage we can appreciate the narrative technique deployed by the author: 14“Something persists that has been inside you for as long as you can remember [. . .] it is the marrow of what you are [. . .] You are uprootedness and foreignness, not being completely in any one place [. . .]” (Muñoz Moina 2003, 295).  El jueves 30 de marzo de 1933 el profesor Victor Klemperer, de Dresde, anota en su diario que ha visto en el escaparate de una tienda de juguetes un balón de goma infantil con una gran esvástica. Ya no puedo librarme de la sensación de disgusto y vergüenza. Y nadie se mueve; todo el mundo tiembla, se esconde. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 247)15 The journal entry corresponds to March 30, 1933. In fact, the sentence that we encounter at the end of that journal entry— that is, “In a toy shop a children’s ball with the swastika” (Klemperer 1999, 10)—occurs unexpectedly, as a juxtaposed image with no apparent connection with the rest of the paragraph.16 Thus, Muñoz Molina is clearly retelling what he has read in the diary, after which he introduces in italics his own translation of a passage extracted from the English translation of Klemperer’s diaries. Hence, Muñoz Molina sets a boundary between real testimonies and literary recreation. Yet, it should be noticed that the passage in italics does not correspond to the same day Klemperer saw the child’s ball with the swastika (that is, March 30) but to May 17 of the same year. This narrative device—which we can appreciate in other iconic testimonies throughout the novel—has significant implications from the point of view of translation, since it reveals a concept of translation that Tymoczko and Gentzler have described as “not simply an act of faithful reproduction but, rather, a deliberate and conscious act of selection [and] assemblage” (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002, xxi). In other words, Muñoz Molina’s choice constitutes a conscious act of juxtaposing his own empathetic retelling of the journal with real testimonies extracted from it (that is, “I can no longer get rid of the feeling of disgust and shame. And no one stirs; everyone trembles, keeps out of sight” (Klemperer 1999, 7) (“Ich kann das Gefühl des 15 “On Thursday, March 30, 1933, Professor Victor Klemperer, of Dresden, notes in his diary that in a toy-shop window he saw a child’s balloon with a large swastika. I can no longer rid myself of the disgust and shame. Yet no one makes a move; everyone trembles, hides” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 47). 16 We provide in this footnote the English translation of Victor Klemperer’s diaries and the original German: “Yesterday a wretched statement in the Dresdener Neueste Nachrichten—‘on your own account.’ They are 92.5 percent founded on Aryan capital, Herr Wollf, owner of the remaining 7.5 percent, has resigned as chief editor, one Jewish editor has been given leave of absence (poor Fentl!), the other ten are Aryans. Terrible!—In a toy shop a children’s ball with the swastika.” (Klemperer 1999, 10); „Gestern jämmerliche Erklärung der Dresdener NN ‚in eigener Sache’. Sie seien zu 92,5 Prozent auf arisches Kapital gestützt, Herr Wollf, Besitzer der übrigen 7,5 Prozent, lege Chefredaktion nieder, ein jüdischer Redakteur sei beurlaubt (armer Fentl!), die andern zehn seien Arier. Entsetzlich! – In einem Spielzeugladen ein Kinderball mit Hakenkreuz” (Klemperer, 1995: 15–16). Ekels und der Scham nicht mehr loswerden. Und niemand rührt sich; alles zittert, verkriecht sich.” [Klemperer 1995, 12]). In “Quien espera” we encounter a web of testimonies or voices that are intertwined throughout this chapter, including Buber-Neumann’s, Ginzburg’s, and Klemperer’s. In the last paragraph of this chapter the testimonies of both Klemperer and Buber-Neumann come together. In a masterly juxtaposition of voices and testimonies, the oscillating narrator concludes this chapter in the following manner: Llegaron una mañana muy temprano, del 19 de Julio, y al comprobar que esta vez sí que venían de verdad por ella [Margarete] no sintió pánico, sino más bien alivio [. . .]. El 12 de julio el profesor Klemperer recuerda en su diario a algunos amigos que se marcharon de Alemania, que han encontrado trabajo en Estados Unidos o en Inglaterra. Pero cómo irse sin nada, él, un viejo, y su mujer una enferma [. . .]. Nosotros nos hemos quedado aquí, en la vergüenza y la penuria, como enterrados vivos, enterrados hasta el cuello, esperando día tras día las últimas paletadas. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 267)17 The responsibility that translation may have in creating knowledge has been previously mentioned. I agree with Tymoczko and Genztler when they affirm that “translation [. . .] actively participates in the construction of knowledge [. . .] and that the act of translation is itself very much involved in the creation of [it]” (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002, xxi). Leaving aside the enormous literary value of a novel like Sefarad, I would affirm that this novel is also an example of how a fictional work can participate in that construction of knowledge through an empathetic imagination. Conclusion Throughout this article I have tried to analyze the manner in which Muñoz Molina juxtaposes in Sefarad the shared European and Spanish memory of the twentieth century via a multidirectional memory approach to fiction. In this sense, I would affirm that Michael Rothberg’s approach helps explain the narrative mechanisms underlying Sefarad. In other words, Rothberg’s 17 “They came one morning very early, on July 19, and when she realized that they had finally come for her, [Margarete] felt only a kind of relief [. . .]. On July 12, Professor Klemperer refers in his diary to some friends who left Germany and found work in the United States or England. But how do you leave when you don’t have anything? He, an old man with a sick wife [. . .]. We have stayed here, in shame and penury, as if buried alive, buried up to our necks, waiting day after day for the last spadefuls of dirt” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 60). dynamic multidirectional model accounts effectively for the interaction of different historical memories which we can appreciate in Sefarad (Rothberg 2009, 3). Muñoz Molina thus translates into fiction previously isolated memories and presents a map of all possible exiles in an unprecedented manner in recent Spanish literature. In this sense, I would state that one of Muñoz Molina’s greatest achievements is the manner in which he carries out a translation of experience into a fictional text. There are multiple instances of that translation of experiences into Sefarad, such as the iconic characters’ testimonies. In addition to this, I would like to point out that empathetic polyacroasis contributes to a great extent to this effective translation of experience. Thus, I believe that the presence of polyacroasis in Sefarad enhances that empathetic translation and transmission of memory, since it allows both a plural interpretation and a powerful interaction among the different “voices” that dwell in the novel, and it also increases the readers’ empathetic response. In my opinion, translating multidirectional memory into fiction becomes more effective when empathetic polyacroasis takes place. Needless to say, this “hybridized narrative rooted in imagination and reference” (Herzberger 2004, 86) clearly contributes and participates in the construction of knowledge. Finally, I would like to conclude this essay with an excerpt from Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad that, to a great extent, may function as a concise summary of the argument I have presented: No eres una sola persona y no tienes una sola historia, y ni tu cara ni tu oficio ni las demás circunstancias de tu vida pasada o presente permanecen invariables. El pasado se mueve y los espejos son imprevisibles. (Muñoz Molina 2013, 596)18 18“You are not an isolated person and do not have an isolated story, and neither your face nor your profession nor the other circumstances of your past or present life are cast in stone. The past shifts and reforms, and mirrors are unpredictable” (Muñoz Molina 2003, 288). References Albaladejo, Tomás. 1998. “Polyacroasis in Rhetorical Discourse.” The Canadian Journal of Rhetorical Studies/La Revue Canadienne d’Études Rhétoriques 9: 155–167. ———. 2009. “La poliacroasis en la representación literaria: Un componente de la retórica cultural.” Castilla. Estudios de Literatura 0: 1–26. PDF available at http://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/12153. Améry, Jean. 1997. Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag. Baer, Alejandro. 2011. “The Voids of Sepharad: The memory of the Holocaust in Spain.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12 (1): 95– 120. doi:10.1080/14636204.2011/556879. Buber-Neumann, Margarete. [1947] 1997. Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler. Eine Welt im Dunkel. Berlin: Ullstein Buchverlage. Demaria, Cristina. 2006. Semiotica e memoria. Analisi del post-conflitto. Roma: Carocci. Demaria, Cristina, and Colin Wright. 2006. Post-Conflict Cultures. Rituals of Representation. London: Zoilus Press. Frye, Northrop. 1976. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Gilmour, Nicola. 2011. “The Afterlife of Traumatic Memories: The Workings and Uses of Empathy in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies: Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America 88 (6): 839–862. doi:10.1080/14753820.2011.603491. Ginzburg, Eugenia Semyonovna. 1967. Journey into the Whirlwind. Translated by Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward. London: Harcourt. Herzberger, David K. 2004. “Representing the Holocaust: Story and Experience in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad.” Romance Quarterly 51 (2): 85–96. doi:10.3200/RQTR.51.2.85-96. Hristova, Marije. 2011. “Memoria prestada. El Holocausto en la novela española contemporánea: Los casos de Sefarad de Muñoz Molina y El Comprador de aniversarios de García Ortega.” MA thesis, University of Amsterdam. PDF available at http://dare.uva.nl/document/342563. Hristova-Dijkstra, Marije J., and Janneke Adema. 2010. “The exile condition. Space–time dissociation in historical experience. A reading of Sefarad.” Krisis, 1: 62–76. Klemperer, Victor. 1995. “Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten.” Tagebücher 1933–1941. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. ———. 1999. I Will Bear Witness. 1933–1941. A Diary of the Nazi Years. Translated by Martin Chalmers. New York: The Modern Library. Muñoz Molina, Antonio. 2003. Sepharad. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. London: Harcourt. ———. 2007. Travesías. Edited by Jorge F. Hernández. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. ———. 2013. Sefarad. Edited by Pablo Valdivia. Madrid: Cátedra. Nergaard, Siri. 2006. “Translating the Other: Journalism in Post-Conflict Cultures.” In Cristina Demaria and Colin Wright 2006, 189–207. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tymoczko, Maria, and Edwin Gentzler, eds. 2002. Translation and Power. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Valdivia, Pablo. 2012. “Poliacroasis, memoria e identidad en la articulación de los discursos de poder: el caso de Sefarad de Antonio Muñoz Molina.” In Retórica y política. Los discursos de la construcción de la sociedad, edited by Emilio del Río Sanz, María del Carmen Ruiz de la Cierva, and Tomás Albaladejo, 591–604. Logroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos. ———. 2013. Introduction to Muñoz Molina 2013. obtained his BA in English Philology and his PhD from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He is currently lecturer in Contemporary Literature, English Literature, and English at the Universidad CEU San Pablo, Madrid, and member of the research group C [P y R] (Communication, poetics and rhetoric) at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He is currently a member of the METAPHORA project and has been a member of a previous research project on Cultural Rhetoric. His research interests include comparative literature, rhetoric, and literary translation. 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15532

Abstract: Holocaust survivor testimonies are frequently read, explored, and interpreted in English translation—that is, beyond their original linguistic, temporal, and cultural points of telling. And yet only meager attention has been paid to the epistemological and ethical implications of translation as a mode of re-mediating Holocaust memory. Significant questions remain regarding the potentialities of translation, both positive and negative, for shaping the way in which readers come to know about, and respond to, the lived experiences of the survivors. Specifically, this article hopes to encourage more sustained and critical thinking about the decisive and moral role of the translator as a secondary witness, “one who listens to the testimony with empathy and helps to record, store and transmit it” (Assmann 2006, 9). The article presents a case study of two acts of secondary witnessing which re-mediate the experiences of French female deportees into English: Barbara Mellor’s translation of Agnès Humbert’s (1946) Notre guerre, published in 2008 as Résistance, and Margaret S. Summers’s translation of Micheline Maurel’s (1957) Un camp très ordinaire, published in 1958 as An Ordinary Camp. Attention will be paid to how the translators have listened to and re-mediated the experiences of the survivors for a new readership, while the sociocultural contexts of and influences on these acts of secondary witnessing will also be considered. Introduction Translating the written memory of an individual into another language and culture entails a twofold act of perpetuation; first, the lived experiences of that individual are recorded in an additional repository and are then carried beyond the immediate borders of the original telling. Yet, in order that this perpetuation might be realized through translation, the particular threads of memory which constitute the original narrative— whether in the form of autobiography, memoir, diary or testimony—are necessarily reworked by the hands of another, by a translator who, in most instances, has no direct connection with the remembered events or emotions.1 The warp and weft of the initial act of memory may subsequently emerge intact, preserved by translation to bear enduring and accurate witness to the life of the individual; alternatively, it may not withstand the process, becoming distorted in its appearance, texture or purpose once reconstructed in another setting. This article sets out to identify and critically examine the role of the translator in the transmission of individual memory within the specific context of survivor accounts of the Holocaust. In this respect, any exploration of how the translator re-mediates life in the camps must be fully mindful of the unique representational, epistemological and ethical complexities that can beset attempts to tell and retell those stories of suffering and survival. Many Holocaust narratives are marked by a tension between the (communicative, commemorative, and often cathartic) need to commit lived experience to writing and the aridity of words whose capacity to tell withers before the sheer horror of the events they venture to describe. The complexities of representation may be compounded further by the contingencies of memory, which can fade but also sharpen with the passing of time.2 In turn, the translator of the Holocaust narrative is potentially brought into an encounter with a text that is, deliberately or otherwise, halting, uneven; a text that may attempt to lay bare some or all of the concentrationary universe, and in so doing, charge itself with a particular moral burden to remember, to understand, or indeed to resist any such understanding. How the translator 1 A notable exception to this distance between the one who remembers and the one who translates can, of course, be found in the phenomenon of self-translation. The conflation of these two positions necessarily raises an alternative set of questions to the ones I address here. 2 Contrary to the antinarrative stance adopted by literary theorists such as Cathy Caruth (1996), scientific studies have shown that traumatic experiences are recoverable and representable, as opposed to repressed and unspeakable. As is noted by Beverley R. King in 21st Century Psychology: A Reference Handbook, “Overwhelmingly, the research supports the trauma superiority argument—memories for stressful experiences are not easily forgotten, especially the central details of the events” (2009, 452). For further criticism of Caruth, see Ruth Leys (2000), and Wulf Kansteiner and Harald Weilnböck (2008). responds to such complexities will be considered in reference to the concept of the secondary witness, 3 defined by Geoffrey Hartman as someone who “provides a witness for the witness, [and] actively receives words that reflect the darkness of the event” (1998, 48). It is precisely the nature and extent of the translator’s act of receiving that will be considered in the case study below, always heedful of what Colin Davis terms the “insidious dangers inherent in secondary witnessing” (2011, 20) which threaten to belie the experiences, pain and otherness of the Holocaust survivor. For the manner in which the translator serves as secondary witness will ultimately determine whether the target language reader has a window onto past events that is as broad or narrow, as transparent or opaque, as whole or fragmented, as the one originally offered by the survivor. The present case study centers on two remarkable French testimonies of life in and liberation from the Nazi labor camps for women. Agnès Humbert’s Notre guerre: Journal de Résistance 1940–1945 was published in the immediate aftermath of World War II in 1946; it begins with the art historian’s diary entries which record her early involvement in the French Resistance movement and then proceeds to a retrospective account of her arrest and internment in the Parisian prisons of Cherche-Midi, La Santé, and Fresnes, her subsequent deportation to the German forced labor camps of Krefeld- Anrath, Hövelhof and Schwelm, and her eventual liberation from the town of Wanfried. Micheline Maurel, a literary scholar, was also arrested for Resistance activities, and her testimony, Un camp très ordinaire, appeared in 1957. In her work, Maurel documents her experiences of daily life and hardship in the Neubrandenburg labor camp, a satellite of the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, as well as her difficult return home following liberation. These accounts will be brought into relief with their English translations— respectively, Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France translated by Barbara Mellor (2008) and Ravensbrück by Margaret S. Summers (1958)4—as a means of establishing how these translators have served as witnesses to the survivors, while 3 This present study follows on from my 2013 work in which I also draw on secondary witnessing to scrutinize the English translation of Robert Antelme’s (1947) L’espèce humaine. 4 Page references will here be given to the UK edition published in 1958 by Digit Books, an imprint of Brown Watson. See reference list for an overview of all available UK and US editions. also recognizing that the translator is not the sole agent responsible for the way in which these individual memories have been transmitted. The decision to explore these two particular female survivor accounts has been made in light Margaret-Anne Hutton’s observation that “French women deported to Nazi concentration and death camps […] have, as yet, received little to no critical attention” (2005, 2), in Holocaust studies or elsewhere. With the exception perhaps of Charlotte Delbo, analytical focus has tended to fall on male memories and narratives of life in the camps; this case study can thus be read as an attempt to bring two marginalized, eclipsed voices of female survivors further to the fore. In more general terms, the article can also be seen as a contribution towards a burgeoning body of work by scholars who situate themselves at the intersection between Translation Studies and Holocaust Studies in order to better understand how the linguistic and cultural dynamics of translation have shaped the transmission and reception of Holocaust writing. Susan Suleiman observes in 1996 that “[w ]hile students of Holocaust literature are keenly aware of problems of language and representation, they have paid surprisingly little attention to a problem one might call representing—or remembering, or memorializing—the Holocaust in translation” (1996, 640). Almost a decade later, and that much needed critical attention is beginning to emerge in revelatory studies, underpinned by comparative textual and cultural analyses across a range of language pairs and genres. Of particular note is the work of Jean Boase-Beier who approaches the poetry of Paul Celan from the dual and ethically engaged position of researcher and translator; she argues (2014) that reading a Holocaust poem for translation entails a more penetrating, exacting encounter with the silences, ambiguities, and tensions of the original and maintains (2011) that these potent features must be retained in the translation where they might be perceived and interpreted by the new reader. Conversely, Peter Davies adopts a decisively descriptive approach to the translations of Borowski (2008), Wiesel (2011), and Höß (2014) to frame textual and paratextual decisions in terms of the status and function of Holocaust testimony in the target culture, and in reference to target language reader expectations. A recent special edition of Translation and Literature (2014) on “Holocaust Testimony and Translation,” edited by Davies, further signals the upsurge in interest in questions of how, why and to what effect Holocaust writing travels in translation. In addition to Boase-Beier’s (2014) work mentioned above, specific cases in point are Sue Vice’s (2014) examination of how reading false Holocaust testimonies in translation can lay bare their constructedness, as well as Angela Kershaw’s (2014) exploration of how translation can restrict and release the complex network of intertextual references in French Holocaust fiction. Also of interest is Kershaw’s (2013) detailed examination on how translated Holocaust fiction is marketed and received within Britain’s literary landscape. More broadly, Bella Brodzki (2007) understands translation as a trope for the textual reconstruction and transmission of memory, dedicating a chapter of Can These Bones Live to the connections between memorializing, mourning, and translation in the writing of Jorge Semprùn. These studies unarguably serve to provide a more detailed and nuanced picture of the various ways in which translation functions as a mode of reinscribing and imparting Holocaust memory. In turn, this article endeavors to illustrate the strategies on which the mediation and reception of the two translated French testimonies are premised, supplementing thus the existing body of work in an empirical sense and proposing the figure of the secondary witness as a framework for better understanding the responsibility of the translator of first hand Holocaust accounts. Secondary witnessing in translation The notion of secondary witnessing can be traced back to the establishment of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies for which over 4,400 eye-witness accounts were recorded on videotape. One of the co-founders of the project, psychoanalyst Dori Laub, has reflected critically on his role as an interviewer, or “the immediate receiver of these testimonies” (1991, 76). He frames his position in relation to the survivor as “a companion on the eerie journey of the testimony. As an interviewer, I am present as someone who actually participates in the reliving and reexperiencing of the event” (1991, 76). Such companionship and participation is a decisive factor in the very elicitation of the testimony; the interviewer bears witness to the witness and, in so doing, becomes an auxiliary to the telling of the story, a secondary witness. Accordingly, an ethical onus is placed on the secondary witness; as Thomas Trezise puts it: The general lesson Laub draws from his intervention is that the listener actively contributes, for better or for worse, to the construction of testimonial narrative, that the receiving is analogous to the giving of testimony insofar as it involves a process of selection and omission, attention and inattention, highlighting and overshadowing, for which the listener remains responsible. (2013, 19) The translator of the Holocaust testimony can likewise be placed in this position of receiving and responsibility. Although the dialogic immediacy that characterizes the relationship between the survivor–witness and interviewer–secondary witness on tape is, in many cases, no longer tenable in the context of translation,5 it is nevertheless the case that the translator is a present and operative force in the bringing forth of the testimony in another language, as well as in its journey to another time and place. It is the translator who first participates in shaping the contours of the account, and only then can its content be repackaged and transmitted to a subsequent, broader audience in the target culture. The role of any secondary witness is a demanding and a complex one which entreats the listener to hear affectively and exactingly: “The listener has to feel the victim’s victories, defeats and silences, know them from within, so that they can assume the form of testimony” (Laub 1992, 58). At the same time, the secondary witness is called to be mindful of this attempt to feel and know the survivor, so as to preclude any collapse of the distinction between the two subject positions. Hartman expresses the dilemma of the secondary (or what he terms ‘intellectual’) witness as follows: “Every identification approaches over-identification and leads to a personifying and then appropriation of the identity of others. The distance between the self and other is violated and the possibility of 5 The retranslation of Wiesel’s La nuit by his wife in 2006 is a rare example of proximity between survivor and translator. intellectual witness aborted” (1998, 4). In order to avert such a failure, secondary witnessing must be predicated instead on the core value of empathy, an empathy which pertains in all contexts of the act. In the case of the historian as secondary witness, Dominick LaCapra insists on an ethically desirable form of empathy that “involves not full identification but what might be termed empathic unsettlement in the face of traumatic limit events” (2001, 102). Likewise, memory studies scholars Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer contend that the secondary witness “must allow the testimony to move, haunt and endanger her; she must allow it to inhabit her, without appropriating or owning it” (2010, 402). As I have argued elsewhere (Deane-Cox 2013), this empathic mode of bearing witness to the witness must also extend to the context of translation. However, the risk of crossing the threshold from empathy into over-identification is stronger here still given the appropriative thrust of translation and the subjective filter of the translator who may “feed [their] own beliefs, knowledge, attitudes and so on into [their] processing of texts, so that any translation will, to some extent, reflect the translator’s own mental and cultural outlook” (Hatim and Mason 1990, 11). If the translator of the Holocaust testimony is to serve as a secondary witness, as “the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time” (Laub 1992, 57), here in a new linguistic, cultural and temporal setting, then he or she must strive to engage empathically with that telling and to respect the distance that separates him or herself from the survivor. Otherwise, the testi- mony is at danger of being overwritten by the assumptions and the excesses (hearing too much) or insufficiencies (hearing too little or inaccurately) of the translator, at which point the testimony will cease to function as such. However, participation in the communicative exchange is not restricted to the witness and the secondary witness alone, for the account that emerges from this encounter can also be heard by additional audiences and used to different ends. Although Laub does not address this point explicitly in his work, Trezise sees there a “suggest[ion] that the reception of the Holocaust survivor testimony requires not only attending to the voices of witnesses while remaining aware of one’s own, but also attending, with equal self-awareness, to the voices of other listeners” (2013, 9). And within the paradigm of the translator as secondary witness, those other listeners are the translation readers as well as other interested parties such as literary agents, publishers and editors, their presence and needs positioning the translator, once again, in that familiar continuum bounded by source and target concerns. Or, as Francis Jones writes, “the call to the primary other (the source-writer or source-culture) must be tempered by a constant awareness of ‘the other other’” (2004, 723). Referring here to his experiences of translating literary texts against the backdrop of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, Jones clearly foregrounds the dual obligation of the translator whose loyalty towards the source text writer is in ever-present negotiation with the differentiated social, ethical, ideological, aesthetic, economic etc. goals of these “other others.” In this respect, the loyalty of the translator as secondary witness can never be wholly and exclusively be ascribed to the Holocaust survivor; there are no unique circumstances which might allow the translator of any published target text to stand outside the communicative context in which he or she operates. Such a position is doubtless implausible. But the impossibility of absolute loyalty does not exclude the very real possibility of privileging the original survivor’s account, of listening attentively despite, or even in the face of, the demands of other parties. For the translator is never an impartial mediator, situated squarely between source and target values; to think otherwise, according to Maria Tymozcko, leads to “the evisceration of the agency of the translator as a committed, engaged and responsible figure” (2007, 7). Indeed, the translator as secondary witness who purposely decides that their first and foremost obligation is to the survivor becomes the very embodiment of a translator as an ethically motivated agent. At the same time, this agency functions to dispel the similarly restrictive idea that translators are irrevocably beholden to the norms and expectations of the target culture. Of course, there may be implications for translation decisions that fall outside of established conventions and values; non- publication, censorship and poor sales are amongst the most obvious. But there is also a danger in overemphasizing the influence exerted by the target culture norms in the translation process. Siobhan Brownlie (2007, 155–157) has argued that adopting a broad normative approach has its blind spots since the specific motivations behind the decision to translate can vary from one text to the next, translation strategies may fluctuate within a given text, and there is often no neat concurrence between distinct norms and distinct time periods given the potential of norms to coexist, reappear or be challenged at any moment. In other words, the engaged translator will necessarily take the wider cultural context into consideration, but will proceed in accordance with their own agenda, be that in line with or in opposition to supposed prevailing norms. In her work Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimo- nials, Ethics and Aesthetics, Dorota Glowacka (2012) also gestures towards translation as an ethically charged act of bearing witness, where translation is understood to function on various levels in Holocaust testimonial writing: the original witness translates the self from past to present and often across multilingual contexts, while subsequent interlingual translations are framed in Levinasian terms as “a response to the summons from another language, the language of the other” (2012, 94). Glowacka also proceeds from the premise that the events of the Holocaust exist in the realm of the unspeakable, so that any act of witnessing will be suffused with communicative loss. Nevertheless, Walter Benjamin’s concept of “pure language” is proposed as restorative mode of telling; specifically, Glowacka suggests that the call of the other can be answered across Babelian disunities of language by means of translation that initiates “linguistic complementation” (Benjamin 2000, 21), namely the blending and synthesis of source and target languages that culminates in pure language. For Glowacka, a translation that responds ethically to the other is one that draws on multiple linguistic repertoires in order to transmit and ensure the survival of the testimony; only then can it transcend the limitations of the monolingual utterance. However, while this view of translation certainly calls attention to the responsibility of the interlingual translator in the witnessing process, numerous tensions arise if pure language is pressed into the service of concrete textual communication. First, the concept of pure language is an abstract one whose end goal is the elevation of language itself to an always distant point where language “no longer means or expresses anything but is […] that which is meant in all languages” (Benjamin 2000, 22). It is a matter of form alone, and its realization through translation “ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the innermost relationship of languages to one another” (2000, 17). Conversely, the translation of content is considered by Benjamin to be a redundant task: “any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information—hence, something inessential” (2000, 15). On the one hand, this conceptualization fits with discourses of unspeakability and trauma—the very act of telling, the manner in which it is told, is more important than what is told. But on the other, it is difficult to reconcile this stance with the demands of secondary witnessing: how will the referential function of a testimony endure if the task of the translator is to invariably defer meanings? And how will the relationship between the original and secondary witness be sustained if precedence is given to the relationship between languages? James E. Young cautions against an exclusive emphasis on poetics in Holocaust narratives: “By seeming to emphasize the ways we know the Holocaust to the apparent exclusion of the realities themselves, critics threaten to make the mere form of study their content as well” (1988, 3). This warning is particularly pertinent in the context of pure language which would seem to offer all but a restricted, abstruse mode of secondary witnessing; a mode that neglects the facts (as understood by the survivors) of existence and suffering, and one that certainly eschews over-identifi- cation, but does so by promoting the linguistic over and above the human. When we move from the abstract to the concrete to consider Benjamin’s proposal of literal translation strategies as a means of approaching pure language, obstacles to secondary witnessing are still discernible. According to Glowacka, Benjamin’s literalness will instigate a process whereby “native words are transformed from an inscription of belonging into the mark of strangeness” (2012, 99), and the translated testimony reader is forcefully confronted with and called to respond to the (multi)linguistic and experiential alterity of the other. The claim that translation, as a signal of difference, “can potentially stand guard against linguistic ethnonationalism, remaining vigilant against the sedimentation of words into tools of oppression, exclusion and discrimination” (2012, 99) strongly echoes Lawrence Venuti’s claim that foreignization “can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism” (1995, 20). But, although foreignizing translation can be revelatory and responsive to the needs of the other, it can also conceal under the weight of its impenetrability: as Tymoczko questions, “how do we distinguish resistant translations from translations that are unreadable?” (2000, 37). The danger here is that the reader finds nothing on which to hinge their reading and response, thereby rendering translation if not ineffectual as a mode of address, then at least diminished in what Glowacka regards as its “potential to create communities of speakers” (2012, 101). So, while Glowacka is right to insist on the ethical responsibility of the translator to preserve and transmit survivor testimonies, neither pure language nor its textualization as literal translation are perhaps the most enduring bridges across the divide between the other and the other other. Instead, the translator who serves as an ethically committed secondary witness is one who listens astutely and empathically to the survivor’s story, giving primacy to its preservation and not to any lofty ideas of pure language or the assumed demands of a target culture, all the while aware that some concessions must be made in the name of accessibility. Admittedly, though, discussions of the secondary witness have predominantly remained notional and detached from empirical practice. The following case studies will therefore direct attention towards more applied considerations of secondary witnessing in order to explore the implications of actual textual translation decisions, while also attempting to discern the extent to which pressure has been exerted by external factors. Given the ethical dimension of secondary witnessing, the comparisons between source and target testimonies will be openly evaluative. In this sense, my analytical stance is informed by Phil Goodwin who has challenged the displacement of ethical questions in translation by technical labels such as “free” or “literal,” “foreignizing” or “domesticating”; one of his aims is “to remind us that translation always takes place within a human context” (2010, 23) and, consequently, that it is “almost wilfully absurd to view the translation question in these circumstances as a purely technical one” (2010, 24). By consciously moving beyond the realm of objective description, the question of translation as secondary witnessing can thus be fully foregrounded as an ethical one. The stakes are high; the translator has a clear responsibility towards the Holocaust survivor, and, whether they have a conscious awareness of this obligation or not, the ways in which the translator (dis)continues the original act of witnessing merit a critical and a vigilant approach. Humbert and Maurel: translated experiences How have the translators of Humbert and Maurel engaged with the survivors’ stories and how have their translation decisions impacted on the process of secondary witnessing? Before turning to the analysis itself, it is worth briefly underscoring a basic premise of this study, namely that, although written accounts of the Holocaust may have been borne of an onerous struggle with language, such accounts should not be placed under the sign of the ineffable. This is not to deny the extremity of the events, but rather to acknowledge the efforts that witnesses have made to put their lived experiences into words. Accordingly, both content and form are fundamental to the transmission of survivor memory; neither can be omitted from the analytical approach. First, while there may be some slippage between lived experiences and their verbal representations, this should not undermine the potential of words to tell or to record. As Pascaline Lefort argues, “the existence of testimonies shows that the camp survivors [. . .] have successfully dealt with the unspeakable, moved beyond its limitations” (2012, 585, my translation), while Zoë Waxman likewise affirms that “[l]anguage may not be adequate to convey the horrors of the Holocaust, but this does not mean that nothing can be said” (2006, 175). In short, saying something is understood as the counterpoint to ineffability. Secondly, the form of that saying is also central to renouncing silence. Although Young’s (1988, 3) previously discussed warning against an exclusive focus on form is to be heeded, it would be equally restrictive to dismiss the revelatory function of poetics in Holocaust accounts, since, as Margaret-Anne Hutton contends, “such literary and rhetorical traits can be seen to function as aids to communication” (2005, 69). So, if the form and content of words have been simultaneously charged with the task of communication by the original witness, then the secondary witness is compelled to uphold and preserve those referential and aesthetic dimensions. The examples below will thus consider how and to what effect the translators have responded to the communicative efforts of Humbert and Maurel. On irony One of the most striking narrative features of the testimonies of both Maurel and Humbert is the way in which they draw on irony, verging on dark humor, in order to record their physical experiences and to signal their resistant stances in the face of such suffering. Referring to its use in Holocaust testimonies, Hutton has noted that “irony, as a non-literal mode, requires the reader to decode the unspoken message. When and if these conditions are met, a powerful bond based on what remains unsaid is created, and communication is intensified” (2005, 84). But for the reader of the translated testimony, this potential bond already hinges on an act of decoding, or hearing the unsaid, as carried out by the translator. Critically, if the translator does not pay sufficient heed to irony, then the voice of the survivor and the adverse conditions of which they speak risk being submerged in translation, which would mark a collapse of secondary witnessing. Maurel’s account is, from time to time, accentuated by litotic observations that are caustically delivered in a single sentence. Indeed, a good number of these have been heard and reinscribed in the English versions by her translator, Summers. Accordingly, where Maurel downplays her brutal treatment at the hands of the guards by remarking that “Il est apparu très vite que j’avais une tête à claques” (1957, 49), this sardonic tone is preserved in the translation as “It soon became apparent that my head invited blows” (1958, 39). And where Maurel declares that “C’est à cause de [Frau Schuppe] en grande partie que les Françaises mouraient si bien” (1957, 87), the mordant inflection is paralleled in English, where the reader learns that “It was mainly because of her that the French were dying in such satisfactory numbers” (1958, 71). By preserving Maurel’s irony, Summers offers the translation readers an insight into both the daily threat of punishment and death in the camps, as well as the survivor’s defiance in the face of such hardship. But certain restrictions seem to have been placed on the transfer of irony that is self-deprecating or particularly sensitive. In the first instance, Maurel, reflecting on her physical and emotional dishevelment, comments that “Nous devions être si ridicules à voir [We must have been such a ridiculous sight]” (1957, 81–82);6 in contrast, the translation lessens the derision in its more neutral estimation that “we must have presented an incongruous sight” (1958, 66). Secondly, Maurel is scathing in her critique of the unthinking way in which people responded to her return to France. The question most frequently posed to the survivor was whether she had been raped, leading her to react as follows: “Finalement, je regrettais d’avoir évité cela. J’avais manqué par ma faute une partie de l’aventure, et cela décevait le public. Heureusement que je pouvais au moins raconter le viol des autres [I came to regret having avoided that. Through fault of my own, I had missed out on a part of the adventure, and that disappointed the public. Fortunately, I could at least tell them about the rape of others]” (1957, 185). Although Summers retains the ironic sense of regret expressed by Maurel, a few telling attenuations of the full force of the irony occur in the translation. The survivor’s wry self-blame is first limited by the shift from the original active construction of “having avoided” rape to a much more passive state in which she “regretted having been spared this” (1958, 154, italics mine). Secondly, a tentative adverb is added to the passage: “Seemingly, by my own fault, I had missed one part of the adventure” (1958, 154, italics mine) which detracts once again from the sardonic notion that she is guilty by deliberate omission. In addition, the discordantly positive “Fortunately” of the original is replaced by a concessive adverb in the statement that “However, I could at least tell them of the rape of others” (1958, 154), which has the potential to be read in a more straightforward manner. 6 All back translations in square brackets are mine and they serve two purposes: as normal, they allow non-French speaking readers access to the original, but they also demonstrate that a more attentive translation is possible.  Perhaps these changes were motivated by a sense of probity on the part of the translator, but this lessening of Maurel’s irony effectively dampens a form of communication that the survivor relied on as both a means of communicating and of coping. Indeed, the cumulative effect of this strategy can be read in the Kirkus Review which describes the translation in the following terms: “More as a reminder, than as recrimination, this sensitive and softspoken memoir patterns the days spent over a period of two years in the concentration camp of Neubrandenburg” (n.d.). But the original is scathing, bold, outspoken. The review thus points to the potential of translation to fundamentally alter the tone of a given testimony. The piercing use of irony comes even further to the fore in Humbert’s writing, extending over entire passages. By way of illustration, Humbert describes the harmful and humiliating effects of working with acid in the rayon factory as follows: J’ai passé l’âge des costumes genre Folies-Bergère. L’acide brûle naturellement non pas seulement notre peau, mais il brûle aussi le tissu de notre uniforme. Chaque goutte fait un trou… plusieurs petits trous réunis en font un grand. […] Je fais voir à la gardienne que j’ai maintenant le sein gauche à l’air… elle a refusé de me faire donner une autre chemise, refusé une aiguillée de fil, refusé une épingle, il faudra que je travaille le sein à l’air ! [I’m past the age of wearing Folies-Bergère style costumes. Of course, the acid doesn’t just burn our skin, it burns the fabric of our uniform too. Each drop makes a hole… several small holes join up and make a large one. […] I let the female guard see that my left breast is hanging out now… she has refused to let me have another shirt, refused a needle and thread, refused a pin, I’ll just have to work with my breast hanging out!] (1946, 217) Although the translation starts off by capturing Humbert’s glib tone in the statement that “I really do believe I am too old for this Folies-Bergère lark” (2008, 161), the remainder of the episode is conveyed in a more dispassionate manner which conceals the original flippancy: The acid burns holes not only in our skin, but also, naturally, in our uniforms. Every drop makes a hole, and the little holes join up to make big holes. […] I have shown the wardress how my left breast is now on view.  She has refused to let me have a new shirt, a needle and thread, or a pin, declaring that I’ll just have to work as I am. (2008, 161) The comparative reduction in irony stems first from the shift in register from the irreverent allusion to “le sein à l’air,” her breast hanging out, to the more factual statement that “my left breast is now on view.” Mellor’s translation also neglects to repeat the phrase at the end of the passage and to retain the exclamation mark, thereby eliding the dry humor and self- ridicule of the original interjection. Another significant alteration comes at the same point in the translation with the introduction of reported speech as signaled by the verb “declaring.” So, whereas the free indirect speech of the original echoes Humbert’s attempt to make light of her deplorable work conditions, the translation effectively takes the words from the survivor’s mouth and reattributes them to the female guard. This is a move that strips Humbert’s words of the power to resist her inhumane treatment at the hands of the one who now speaks in her place. Also suppressed in this passage is Humbert’s use of aposiopesis whereby the unfinished sentences silently, but deliberately, communicate the frustrating impossibility of her situation. The translation reader is thus no longer called on to sense the futility that lies in these discontinuities, which in turn detracts from Humbert’s ironic treatment of the scene. In point of fact, the use of irony is diminished elsewhere in the translation through the reduction in or omission of exclamation points and ellipsis; such is the case, for example, in Humbert’s account of an underwear inspection (1946, 180; 2008, 130) and the shared drinking bowl (1946, 184-5; 2008, 134). The examples above reveal that, in some instances at least, the irony of both Maurel and Humbert has been palpably conveyed to the translation reader. At the same time, however, where the tone of that irony is neutralized, misappropriated, or its typographic markers discarded, the reader will be left with less immediate and identifiable clues on which to base their interpretation. If the irony should cease to function as such, then the critical and unyielding voice of the survivor is also submerged by and in translation, marking thus a collapse of secondary witnessing. On narrative time Lawrence Langer draws a fundamental distinction between the linear movement of “chronological time” and the more oblique dynamics of “durational time” in Holocaust testimonies, where the latter “relentlessly stalks the memory of the witness, imprinting there moments immune to the ebb and flow of chronological time” (1995, 22). This durational past does make its haunting presence felt in the accounts of Maurel and Humbert, albeit in different ways, with both survivors slipping between and across temporal perspectives in their shifting use of tense. The translator as secondary witness is then called on to listen attentively to the subtleties and significances of how the past is retold in the present of the survivor. The passage in which Maurel recounts her arrival and processing at Ravensbrück is a revelatory example of how tense and aspect can serve to unsettle the narrative and point towards the abiding anguish of the survivor. It opens with alternating moves between narration in an imperfect tense that intimates the horrifyingly unending nature of the ordeal for the survivor and the use of the infinitive, an impersonal and timeless form that reverberates with the inhumanity and ubiquity of the guards’ orders. This sequence is followed by a sudden shift to the present tense, heavy with the weight of inescapable immediacy and dread, while the subsequent use of the perfect tense situates the survivor in the close aftermath of the event to convey a transitory moment of reprieve: Les choses se passaient vite derrière les portes. Déposer les valises, se déshabiller en vitesse; on vous arrachait les vêtements à mesure. Se coucher sur une table, où une femme vous maintenait pendant qu’une autre explorait du doigt tous vous orifices naturels. S’asseoir sur un tabouret pour être tondue. Une main fourrage dans mes cheveux. Je n’ai pas été tondue cette fois. [Things were happening quickly behind the doors. Put down the suitcases, quickly get undressed; your clothes were being snatched away as you went along. Lie on a table where a women was holding you down while another was exploring all your natural orifices with a finger. Sit on a stool to be shorn. A hand rummages through my hair. I have not been shorn this time.] (Maurel 1957: 18, emphasis mine)  The translated narrative undergoes an aspectual reframe- ing that obscures the inescapable, interminable and durational thrust of the time to which these temporal manoeuvres attest in the original. Maurel’s arrival at the camp has been wholly recast by the translator in a simple past that dissembles the difficult relationship between the survivor and the lived experience: Things happened fast behind those doors: a moment to set the bags down, to undress quickly, hastened on by hands that reached out to tear the clothing off; a moment to lie on a table, where one woman held us down while another passed an exploring finger into all our natural orifices; a moment to sit on a stool to have our hair cut off. A hand rumpled my hair, but on this occasion I was not shorn. (1958, 13, emphasis mine) The elision of the present tense marks, above all, a breach of attentiveness on the part of the translator as it fails to herald what Oren Stier has termed “the palpable presence of the past […] [that] disrupts the space-time of the survivor” (2003, 87). But the use of the imperfect tense has also been passed over in the translation, leaving little indication that Maurel found herself suspended in the dreadful moments she described, while the replacement of the infinitive imperatives with the temporal phrase “a moment to” further masks the threatening persistence of the guards’ orders. Although objective details about Maurel’s arrival at the camp remain, the translation reader can no longer discern the more subjective painful blurring of temporal boundaries enacted by the survivor, and the appropriation of the narrative flow into one of chronological time therefore blunts the act of secondary witnessing. The use of the present tense in Holocaust writing is widely held to be a narrative marker of trauma. As Anne Whitehead explains, “This method of narration emphasizes the traumatic nature of the memories described, which are not so much remembered as re-experienced or relived” (2004, 35). However, an altogether different dynamic emerges from the writing of Humbert; her account begins with the diary entries made in the months prior to her arrest, and her ensuing experiences of imprisonment and deportation are also recounted in this immediate narrative style of the diarist. In his afterword to Mellor’s translation, Julien Blanc writes that Humbert “was consistent in using the present tense throughout” (2008: 275), but this statement is only partly true. On the one hand, the use of the present tense is undeniably frequent, signalling less the steely grip of durational time on the survivor, and more her own lucid control over chronological time. On the other hand, though, Humbert’s work does bear the traces of tense switching, from this dominant use of the present tense that speaks of resistance and strength to a sparing, but nevertheless compelling, use of the past tense that speaks too, in its own way, of defiance and escape. The following example is telling in its understated shift from the immediacy of the present to the completedness of the perfect tense, transitioning through free indirect speech back to the present in an episode that details the survivor’s increased suffering due to acid burns and her descent into the confines of the cellar where prisoners supposedly had the opportunity to convalesce. Humbert writes: Mes mains me font autant souffrir que les yeux ; j’ai connu, car j’étais seule à la cave, la signification de cette locution, « se taper la tête contre le mur » ; oui, j’ai tapé ma tête contre le mur, et puis je me suis reprise. [. . .] Pour mes mains, il faudrait des pansements humides, oui, mais il n’y avait pas d’eau… Alors, essayons autre chose. J’urine sur mes malheureuses mains, les chiffons qui me servent de pansements sont imprégnés de pipi… [My hands are making me suffer as much as my eyes; because I was alone in the cellar I’ve known the meaning of this saying, ‘to bang your head against the wall’; yes, I’ve banged my head against the wall, and then I’ve pulled myself together again. […] For my hands, some damp bandages would be needed, yes, but there was no water… So, let’s try something else. I urinate on my pitiful hands, the rags that serve me as bandages are soaked in pee. . .] (1946, 252, emphasis mine) Here, the slippage into the use of the past perfect tense might be read as an attempt on the part of the survivor to contain her most unnerving memory of the event, marking it off as one concluded, isolated incident before she finds the determination once more to take charge of her situation. If durational time is indeed pursuing Humbert, she turns its trap on itself to restrict and defy its reach, distancing herself temporally and emotionally from this horrific moment. The return to the present tense indicates thus a return to resistance, a return that is further paralleled in Humbert’s flippant lexical choice and the dry humor of her ellipsis. These fleeting, yet important, variations in narrative time are indiscernible in the translation, where the episode is retold consistently in the present tense: My hands are as agonizing as my eyes; finding myself alone in the cellar, I understand the true significance of the phrase “banging your head against a brick wall.” Yes, I bang my head against the wall. Then I pull myself together. […] What I need for my hands is damp dressings, but there is no water. So let’s try something else. I urinate on my wretched hands, soaking the rags that serve as dressings. (2008, 190, emphasis mine). The translator does not appear to have heard the undertones of defiance in Humbert’s singular step into the past; or, this move may have been ignored in a misled endeavor to unify the temporal aspect of the narrative. The result stands as a warning against the potential dangers of inattention and appropriation in secondary witnessing; the lack of aspectual contrast mitigates the force of Humbert’s renewed refusal to give up, while the omission of the ellipsis and self-deprecating tone once again hides the survivor’s tenacity in the face of suffering. On language For many prisoners, experience of the Nazi camps was also marked by a confrontation with and assimilation of the language of their German oppressors, but also the Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, to name but the predominant tongues, of their fellow prisoners. The result of this linguistic conflation was the emergence of a “Lagersprache,” a vernacular particular to the camps that was necessary for communication between the prisoners themselves, as well as between the guards and the prisoners. In her testimony, Humbert remarks that, rather than speak fluent German, “Je ne parle que ce charabia international, cet espéranto étrange que vingt million de déportés ont dû apprendre [I speak only this international gobbledygook, this strange esperanto that twenty million deportess have had to learn]” (1946, 296). Her narrative is interspersed with individual German words that resounded throughout her internment and served to shape her experience. Mellor retains, in large part, the echo of these discordant and often terrifying lexical items; by way of illustration, the English language reader is introduced to the concept of the “kommando” (2008, 115), to the “little coshes, known here as ‘gummi Knüppel’” (2008, 128, italics in the original), to the “Spinnerei, or rayon mill” (2008, 147, italics in the original) and to the markings, “G=Gefangene: convict” (2008, 148, italics in the original) on the prisoners’ work uniforms. Nevertheless, there are a few occasions on which the lexical specificity of the camps is subsumed into standard modes of expression by Mellor. First, Humbert’s observation that the food in the Ziegenhain prison is “acceptable, mais knap [sic]” (1946, 286, italics in the original), is simply remediated as “tolerable but scarce” (2008, 219), without any attempt to retain the German term. Consequently, the translation silences the linguistic hybridity and alterity of Humbert’s “strange Esperanto,” while simultaneously obscuring the misspelling (German: knapp) which attests to the survivor’s adequate but imperfect use of a German idiom, undoubtedly acquired as a result of constant food privations. In addition, the prisoners would often create new turns of phrase, or rework existing ones, to convey the extreme conditions of their existence. Such is the case when Humbert and her fellow inmates adapt an idiom to capture the caustic effects of working in the rayon factory: “Selon notre expression « mes yeux coulaient dans ma bouche »” [According to our expression, “my eyes were running in my mouth”] (1946, 245). The translation omits reference to the singularity of the expression and also undoes its distinctiveness, reverting instead to the recognizable idiom of “eyes streaming” (2008, 184). The reader is at once disallowed access to the extent of the suffering and the process of linguistic inventiveness that characterized life in the camps. Language too plays a prominent role in the testimony of Maurel which bears the traces of the German, Polish and Russian with which she came into contact. Summers’ transla- tion, in turn, demonstrates a keen sensitivity to these markers of otherness, preserving a vast array of German orders (Raus!; Schnell!; Aufstehen!), insults (Schweinehund; Schmutzstück), and the nomenclature that designates the reality of the camps (Revier; Verfügbar; Strafstehen; Kretze). Snatches of Russian and Polish are also to be heard in the translation, while verses of French poetry and song are retained in their original form and then followed by their interpretation in English. The preservation strategy is an effective one, serving to provide a distant reverberation of the Babelian disquiet that prevailed in the camps. It is only on the rare occasion that the non-translation is discontinued, that the real force of appropriation comes to the fore. Notably, this occurs when the German command “Achtung!” (1957, 50, italics in the original) is articulated in the translation as “Atten-shun!” (1958, 40). Instead of a German imperative, an order now rings out that suggests the diction of a stereotypical British sergeant major in an act of appropriation that closes the reader off from a distinguishing verbal feature of the camps. Of further linguistic significance is the process whereby Maurel and her companions “Frenchify” some of the camp vocabulary: “Nous avons transformé Kopftuch en « coiffe- tout », Schüssel en « jusselle », Nachtschicht en « narchiste », Schmutzstück en « schmoustique ». Et les brutes en uniforme qui nous surveillaient, les Aufseherinnen était pour nous les « officerines »” [We transformed Kopftuch/headscarf into “coiffe-tout,” Schüssel/bowl into “jusselle,” Nachtschicht/ nightshift into “narchiste,” Schmutzstück/piece of dirt into “schmoustique.” And the brutes in uniform who guarded us, the Aufseherinnen/female overseers were for us the “officerines”] (1957, 15, italics in the original). This assimilation of German words into a French pronunciation resonates with Reiter’s reflection that “The highest priority for concentration camp prisoners was to lessen the alien character of their experience. They were helped in this if they could name new things with their existing vocabulary and thus include them in the horizon of the familiar” (2000, 99). However, the significance of this use of language as survival has been overlooked by Summers who, in her translator’s preface, begins by explaining the etymology and pronunciation of “coiffe-tout,” “schmoustique,” and “officerine,” but then goes on to undermine the prevalence and dismiss the importance of the remaining terms, claiming: “Certain other words, like Schüssel, a bowl or basin, pronounced jusselle by the French, Nachtschicht, nightshift, which became narchiste, occur only once or twice in the French text and have been omitted in this translation for simplicity’s sake, though they might have added local colour” (1958, 10). This approach to the survivor’s own appropriation of the German words attests to a further act of appropriation on the part of the translator, one that fails to heed the importance of the re-naming process. For these words lend more than a touch of “local colour” to the depiction of life in the camps; they represent a strategy of survival and of resistance. Evidently, Summers has made the decision to privilege simplicity over complexity in order to facilitate a more fluid reading experience in English. In so doing, though, Summers also closes the reader off from the entangled linguistic landscape of the camps and from Maurel’s coping mechanism amidst the unfamiliar. At this point, the translation strategy stands as a barrier to secondary witnessing. On accuracy Survivor testimonies are generally not held to be reliable sources of fact given the reconstructive fallibility of memory and the alleged representational failings of words. As Aleida Assman has noted, “The survivors as witness do not, as a rule, add to our knowledge of factual history; their testimonies have, in fact, often proved inaccurate” (2006, 263). But this does not preclude the possibility that, at any moment in the telling, survivors can fully and precisely convey the kind of empirical, objective information valued by historians.7 Although it may reasonably be presumed that this latter type of information is more readily discernible and less problematic for the translator as secondary witness, the following example from Summers’ translation of Maurel’s testimony would suggest otherwise. At the beginning of her account, Maurel records that: Le convoi dont je faisais partie […] a été immatriculé à Ravensbrück sous les numéros 22.000. J’étais le numéro 22.410. Au bout d’un mois de quarantaine, le convoi des 22.000 a été envoyé à Neubrandebourg [The convey I was part of […] had been registered in Ravensbrück in the 7 For a discussion of how historians have rejected personal testimony on the basis of its supposed inaccuracies, see Laub 1992, 59–63.  22,000s. I was number 22,410. After a month in quarantine, the convoy of the 22,000s was sent to Neubrandenburg]” (1957, 13). As prisoners entered the concentration and work camps, they were assigned a matriculation number; for Maurel’s particular French convoy, registration began at the number 22,000 and her own number was 22,410. However, it becomes clear that Summers has misinterpreted this numerical information as in the English version we read that the convoy was “registered and given numbers. I was number 22,410. At the end of a month of quarantine, the 22,000-odd were sent to Neubrandenburg” (1958, 8, emphasis mine). Here, the number that assigns identity to the group—that is, the “convoy of the 22,000s”—has been misattributed by Summers to the size of the group. Nor is this erroneous tally an isolated occurrence, for the translator then reworks Maurel’s observations in Chapter Four in line with her own reckonings. Consequently, where Maurel documents that “En automne 1943 le camp de Neubrandebourg contenait environ 2.000 femmes [In the autumn of 1943 the Neubrandenburg camp contained around 2,000 women]” (1957, 38), that “le convoi des 22.000 était pourtant bien mélangé [the convoy of the 20,000s was nevertheless well mixed]” in terms of political and religious beliefs (ibid., 41) and that “nous étions 2.000 sur le terrain [there were 2,000 of us on the parade ground]” (ibid., 46), Summers purports that “the camp at Neubrandenburg contained approximately 22,000 women” (1958, 30), the French “numbered 2,000” (ibid., 32) and the camp was “22,000 strong on the parade ground” (ibid., 37). Whether the reversal of the numbers stems from a misplaced attempt on the part of the translator to “correct” an inferred inaccuracy can itself only be surmised. But it does seem as though Summers was not fully aware of the dehumanizing Nazi practice of replacing prisoner names with numbers. Nor does Summers appear to have an understanding of the camp classification system of colored markings. Following liberation, Maurel has her friend remake “mon numéro et mon triangle rouge [my number and my red triangle]” (1957: 171) in order to avoid being mistaken for a German; these items are stripped of their specificity and their personal resonance for Maurel in the translation as “a triangle and some numerals” (1958: 143). The implications of such an inattentive treatment of the serial numbers and statistics are such that, not only does Summers obscure the imposed identity of the convoy, but the capacity of the labor camp is also inflated well beyond its actual dimensions. In line with Maurel, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos places the number of female prisoners in Neubrandenburg at “almost 2,000 at the end of February 1944” (Strebel 2009, 1215); the translation thus runs the risk of misinforming its readership, and of giving ammunition to the Holocaust deniers who “are quick to seize upon errors and inaccuracies in witness accounts” (Hutton 2005, 33). Regrettably, the errors and inaccuracies in this case are all those of the translator; worse, they have made their way into both reviews and scholarship, as a result of which the misinformation becomes more broadly disseminated. In 1959, the Catholic Herald printed a review of Ravensbrück in which it is noted that at Neubrandenburg “some 22,000 women, including 2,000 French, were engaged in munition works” (1959, 3). The Kirkus Review similarly goes on to record that “Neubrandenburg numbered some 22,000 women” (n.d.) on the basis of the translation, while the entry for Maurel in The Jewish Holocaust: An Annotated Guide to Books in English also states that “Over 22,000 women were sent to Neubrandenburg during the war” (1995, 192). Of even more significance is Rochelle G. Saidel’s (2004) work, The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Drawing explicitly on the English translation of Maurel’s account, Saidel challenges the statistics of another scholar as follows: “Morrison cites Maurel that there were two thousand women in the camp in late 1943, but she wrote there were twenty-two thousand women,” and she then refers the reader to An Ordinary Camp (the title under which the US edition was published) “regarding this discrepancy” (ibid., 250n. 12). Of course the unfortunate irony here is that the real discrepancy is to be found in the translation, not the original. In reference to Holocaust scholarship, Kuhiwczak notes that “large quantities of primary source material have been translated into English, and many conclusions have been drawn from texts read only in translation” (2007, 62). The above is a clear example of how translation can substantially (in both senses of the word) alter this interpretation of the camps that is presented to the translation receiver. And yet, in the face of such distortion, it is also important to bear in mind that translation has the potential to retransmit the accuracy and precision with which life in the camps has been reported in the original testimony. Such is the case in Mellor’s translation of Humbert’s account; although the survivor focuses less on the quantitative dimensions of the various camps to which she is sent, there is sustained evidence of a high degree of concordance between the details presented by the primary and secondary witnesses. Take for example the exactitude with which the classification system at Krefeld has been explained in the translation: “The Russian girls have a label sewn on their clothes, a little rectangle of blue material with the word ‘Ost’ in white” while the Polish women wear a “yellow lozenge with a dark-blue ‘P’” (2008, 132, italics in the original). Similarly, the complex mechanical process Humbert was forced to learn in the rayon factory has been recorded with careful adherence to the original telling, to reveal the torturous work of the spinner who, amongst other tasks, “grasps the filament in her left hand and, holding it between her index and middle fingers, takes it on to the glass wheel, follows it through and pulls it towards the funnel slightly” (2008, 153). There does appear to be one isolated instance in which Mellor has misheard the dynamics of life in the camps. The bartering (and theft) of commodities was widespread amongst prisoners, and Humbert recounts that “Mon amie Martha […] me promet, contre deux tartines, de me ravoir ma défroque [My friend Martha […] promises, in return for two slices of bread, to get my old rag back for me]” (1946, 204, italics mine). However, it would seem that Mellor has heard “entre” as opposed to “contre,” and thus reworks the situation into one where Martha “promises me between two slices of bread that she will get my old rag back” (2008, 150). Although evidence of the theft remains in the translation, one of the common and vital practices that shaped the (often and necessarily unscrupulous) relationship between prisoners has been obscured on the basis of a prepositional slip. Nevertheless, Mellor’s translation rigorously attends to the cruel physical realities of the labor camps as experienced by Humbert, thereby attesting to the re-presentational contingencies of interlingual secondary witnessing. Memory mediation in context It goes without saying that the translator is not the only figure involved in the transmission of the survivor’s account; when a translation appears, its packaging and intended audience are all shaped, to some degree, by context of production. By this token, the readership (the “other others”) that the translator as secondary witness reaches and their response to the testimony will be in large part be determined by the publisher, and not least by the ways in which the account is reframed by paratextual material. Although it is difficult to reconstruct a comprehensive account of all the editorial and contextual factors that have influenced the translations of Summers and Mellor, and therefore their reception, it is nevertheless possible to retrace some of the wider sociocultural and economic backdrop against which they appeared and offer some suggestions as to how the process of secondary witnessing is affected under such circumstances. Despite the parallels between the original testimonies of Humbert and Maurel in terms of referential content and style, the moment of publication and the paratextual presentation of the English translations differ widely. Whereas the translation of Maurel’s account is separated from its source text by just one year (i.e. 1957 to 1958), Humbert’s work does not appear in English until some sixty years after its publication in France (i.e. 1946 to 2008). This discrepancy may in part be explained by the dynamics of both the source and target cultures, and in particular by changes in the prevailing attitudes towards survivor accounts. To begin with Humbert’s Notre guerre, its appearance in France in 1946 came at a moment when the literary field was becoming (over-)saturated with testimonial writing from recently returned deportees. According to Damien Mannarion, the accounts which appear between 1944 and 1951 are not simply motivated by a desire to tell: “in this period when [the survivors] say “remember,” they are really addressing their contemporaries and not future generations, […] they want to denounce those responsible and see them condemned” (1998, 20, my translation). Given both the volume of published accounts and the contextual immediacy of their goals (acknowledgment of and justice for their sufferings), Humbert’s source text may well have been rendered invisible to British publishers or translators alike. Neither was there an expansive audience for any such translation in the target audience at that time. This is not to suggest that British readers were closed to accounts from the Nazi camps; on the contrary, the problem, as identified by David Cesarani, was one of a market flooded by very raw, disturbing writing, as a consequence of which readership began to dwindle: “Reading these memoirs and testimonies it is easy to understand why, by the end of the 1940s, the public turned away” (2012, 20). And so source and target conditions contrived to obscure Humbert’s work. But in France, a recovery of her writing was instigated by the publishing house Tallandier in 2004 when they issued a re- edition of Notre guerre, thereby introducing the survivor to a new, broader audience. The text’s journey was succinctly described by Daniel Rondeau, a journalist for L’Express, as follows: “out of sight for years, often quoted by historians, here is Notre guerre once again” (2004, n.p.). However, there seems to be no direct link between the appearance of the new French edition and the introduction of Humbert to English readers in translation, for this second recovery came about only when Mellor happened across the original 1946 edition on French ebay (Mellor, 2008, np.) and initiated the translation process herself. Likewise, the English version of Maurel’s Un camp très ordinaire appeared as a direct result of the translator. In this case, though, the link was of a more personal nature since Summers and Maurel shared a mutual acquaintance. According to a reviewer in The Vassar Chronicle: Mrs. Margaret Summers of the French Department has just completed a translation of AN ORDINARY CAMP by Micheline Maurel. […] Mrs. Summers became interested in this factual account of the author’s life in a German concentration camp through Mlle. Louisiene [Lucienne] Idoine, formerly of the Vassar French Department. Mlle. Idoine met Mlle. Maurel, the author of the original version at the German concentration camp of Ravenbruck [sic]. […] Mrs. Summers decided to undertake the translation  of Mlle. Maurel’s book, for she wanted people to know about these German camps. (1958, 3) The relatively quick appearance of the target text can thus be explained through the biographical circumstances of the translator, as well as her desire to raise awareness of Nazi atrocities. For even though the translation was published more than a ten years after the liberation of the camps, Anglo- American audiences would still not have been familiar then with the full scale and horror of the events we now know as the Holocaust.8 As Andy Pearce has argued, “We cannot speak of ‘Holocaust consciousness’ in the opening postwar decade or so no simply because the substantive concept of ‘the Holocaust’ did not yet exist, but because […] there remained considerable ignorance, ambiguity and variance” (2014, 12–13). Indeed, this rather patchy understanding is likely to have extended to Summers herself and may go some way to explaining some of her more problematic translation decisions, especially the treatment of the Lagersprache and matriculation numbers as discussed above. Events in the source culture may also have had a bearing on the appearance of Summers’ translation, for the prominence of Un camp très ordinaire was greatly enhanced by the involvement of François Mauriac who helped to secure its publication in 1957.9 Interest in survivor testimonies was on the wane in France at this time, and Mauriac felt a duty to remember “an abomination that the world has determined to forgot” (1957, 9, my translation). His presence as a preface writer inevitably lent weight and authority to the source text, and so, while Summers may have shared Mauriac’s ideological agenda, the additional symbolic and potential economic capital generated by his name would also have been appealing to Anglo-American publishers. Both Mellor and Summers then played integral roles in bringing the testimonies of Humbert and Maurel respectively to an English-speaking readership. But target culture publishers also made an undeniable contribution to this process of transmission, and a close examination of 8 The Eichmann trial is, at this point, still some years off. See Annette Wieviorka (2006) for a discussion of how the trial came to be a global watershed moment in Holocaust witnessing. 9 A year later, Mauriac would also help to bring about the publication of Elie Wiesel’s La nuit. editorial paratext can reveal some of their underlying motivations and agendas. What is instantly remarkable about Bloomsbury’s publication of Humbert’s account is the use of a modified title. Rather than adopt a literal translation of the original—that is, “Our War: Diary of Resistance 1940–1945,” the publisher has instead opted for Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France. On the one hand, this alteration can perhaps be explained by the reticence, first, to retain a possessive marker that would jar in a new cultural setting, and secondly, to present the work as a diary when only parts of the work can be claimed as such. But on the other hand, the revised title introduces some misconstruals of its own; for the account is not restricted in scope to Humbert’s time in an occupied France, but rather, the greatest proportion of the work deals with her experiences as a deportee. Indeed, this discrepancy has been noted by historian Simon Kitson who remarks in his review of the translation that “the English title is slightly misleading. Whilst the author’s spirit of resistance is present throughout, almost two-thirds of the book is set in Nazi Germany” (2008, n.p.). Furthermore, the cover graphics which show two lovers on the banks of the Seine, with a barbed-wire barricade in the foreground, also accentuates an occupied Paris that figures only in the beginning of the memoir. It may well be the case that cynical ploys of marketing lie behind this repositioning of focus; it is perhaps no coincidence that the cover image in many respects mirrors that of Suite Française, the highly successful novel written by Holocaust victim Irène Némirovsky and published in English translation by Chatto and Windus in 2006. Likewise, the revised subtitle, “Memoirs of Occupied France” also suggests a thematic correlation with the latter. Rather than present the work on its own terms, the publisher may have skewed its title in line with market forces. However, within the covers of the translation, the reader is afforded an abundance of supporting editorial and allographic paratextual material, including a preface by writer William Boyd, photographic illustrations, an afterword by French historian Julien Leblanc (who provided the introduction to the French 2004 re-edition of the work), historical documents on the Resistance movement, and a bibliography for further reading. In contrast to, or perhaps as compensation for, the title of the work, this material ensures that the interested reader has the opportunity to arrive at a more informed understanding of Humbert’s experiences, her character and her writing style. The first UK edition of Maurel’s Un camp très ordinaire was published in 1958 by Digit Books (an imprint of Brown Watson publishers) under the tile Ravensbrück, leaving the Catholic Herald reviewer unable to answer the “mystery why it should have been misleadingly re-christened” (1959, 3). One possible reason may be that Ravensbrück was becoming more recognizable to Anglo-American readers as part of the Nazi apparatus. For example, in 1954 Lord Russell published his book The Scourge of the Swastika which “enjoyed immense commercial success” (Pearce 2014, 16) and contained details of Ravensbrück and sketches of the camp drawn by former inmate Violette Lecoq, meaning that knowledge of its deadly function was expanding. The book cover also makes the prominent claim that the work is “As Real as THE DIARY of ANNE FRANK…” (1958, emphasis in the original), thereby suggesting that the publishers were tapping into an existing market demand for Holocaust writing, especially given the bestselling success of the latter’s translation in 1952. But other factors suggest that interest in the work was being generated not along the lines of understanding, but of sensationalism. At the top of the cover is the quote from a Sunday Times reviewer that this is “a coarse, savage book.” Below this appears the bold and fallacious depiction of a voluptuous, perfectly coiffed, red-lipped prisoner who bears more than a passing resemblance to Vivian Leigh, gripping a barbed-wire fence, and dressed in a well-tailored, low-cut khaki dress. For Maurel’s work has found its way on to the list of a publisher who caters for an audience that enjoys tales of derring-do such as Jungle Pilot, Against the Gestapo and Conscript. Interestingly, writer Ken Worpole recalls his own experiences of Ravensbrück in his work on popular literature in Britain, placing it on a list of nineteen WWII-related titles (mostly written by men) that “were sold in millions and read in even larger numbers” (1983, 50). The popularity of these books appears to have been enormous, with Worpole claiming that “they were the staple reading diet of myself and my school peers, and the sales figures also suggest that they were the staple reading diet of the adult male British reading public, and, possibly, of a significant portion of the female reading public” (1983, 50–51). But Worpole also sounds a strong note of concern about the way in which the Digit Books edition has been visually presented to its readers, defining it “as part of the pornography of sadism” (1983, 64). There can be no doubt the cover sets out to titillate, not educate; it sells a sexualized image of the survivor, rather than depict the arduous, unrelenting conditions of her captivity. Worse still is the US edition issued by Belmont in 1958 whose cover page depicts a distressed, yet appealing, blond behind whom stands a menacing SS figure, whip in hand. The original title has also been eschewed in favor of The Slave, while the cover carries an extract from Maurel’s text (but wrongly attributed to Mauriac) that asks “Were you raped? Were you beaten? Were you tortured?” and in so doing, overtly fetishizes the testimony. Unquestionably, these two publishers are extreme in their misappropriation; other editions released in the US by Simon and Schuster (1958) under the title An Ordinary Camp and in the UK by Anthony Blond (1958) as Ravensbrück are more muted in their cover design, opting instead for a plain barbed-wire motif. Nevertheless, both Digit Books and Belmont serve as an example of how publishers are positioned as initial gatekeepers to the survivor’s story, attracting a particular type of reader seeking action or cheap thrills. If Mauriac was troubled about forgetting in the source culture in the 1950s, there are parallel concerns to be raised in the target culture about the dubious ways in which the Holocaust was being remembered then. The last issue to be addressed in reference to the framing of the target texts is that of the translatorial paratext. 10 In Résistance, Mellor has provided a “Translator’s Acknowl- edgements” section in which she thanks those who helped in the process and alludes to her reasons for undertaking the translation of the original: “Surely it deserved to be more widely known? Surely it should be made available in an English 10I use this term as a means of supplementing Genette’s (1987) paradigm of authorial, editorial, and allographic paratext in order to carve out a more visible and definite space for the translator. See also Deane-Cox 2014, 27–29. translation?” (2008, vi). There are also extensive “Translator’s Notes” (2008, 325–357) at the back of the work which provide detailed explanations of references in the text to people, places and events. As discussed above, Summers also establishes her presence around the text by means of the “Translator’s Note” which focuses on the use of Lagersprache and Maurel’s Frenchification of certain words (1958, 10–11). So, although the translatorial paratext is a clear signal to the reader that they are reading a text in translation, neither translator provides any sustained or penetrating reflection on the challenges and possibilities they may have confronted during their engagement with the source text. I would like to argue that the paratext offers a space in which the translator can make explicit their role as secondary witness, in contrast to the text itself where “the task of the listener is to be unobtrusively present” (Laub 1992, 71). Accordingly, the position of the translator as secondary witness can be mapped once more on to that of the interviewer for the Fortunoff project. Hartman observes that throughout the recording process, “the interviewers are almost completely out of sight [and] seem not to intrude into the testimony, even as they continue to direct it” (Young 1988, 166). In the same way as the interviewers are visible on the margins of the screen, so too can the translator be visible on the margins of the text, whether in a preface, in footnotes or any other form of translatorial paratext. This peripheral material can thus function as a record of how the translator has interacted with the original witness, how they have elicited and facilitated the transmission of a testimony from one setting to another, what obstacles they might have encountered, and how they regard their own ethical responsibility. Trezise has noted that, in the video testimonies, “the audible and occasionally visible presence of the interviewer(s) lends to the dialogical relation of witnessing a concreteness far removed from what may seem, in written testimony, to be only a disembodied interaction of pronouns” (2013, 34). The translator as secondary witness can thus add a concrete dimension to the transmission process by acknowl- edging their own role as listener to and perpetuator of the original act of witness. In so doing, the community of receivers will be more informed, more alert to any potential barriers to communication and more conscious of the survivor behind the pronouns. Conclusion: Remembering Forwards Translation, as a mode of remembering forwards, is not an unshakable one. Despite resisting a more perfidious and total lapse of memory, the above inquiry has shown that translation equally has the potential to distort, amongst other aspects, the factual, linguistic and tonal qualities encoded in the original telling, while paratextual material can also function as a site of appropriation and transformation. The extent to which a translator listens closely to the original telling may be the result of numerous factors: over-identification with the survivor, the onset of secondary trauma that leads to a distancing or a numbing of the translator, or, more prosaically, the temporal and editorial constraints imposed by publishers. In turn, the listening realized by the translator has the capacity to shape the response of the reader to the events of the past. In other words, the manner in which the reader positions him or herself on an ethical and epistemological level in relation to the Holocaust, as well as to the specific struggles of the survivors, will hinge on the strength and integrity of the bond established between the original and secondary witness. It has also become evident that the ties of that bond hold more securely in some parts of a translation than in others; within the boundaries of a given text, translation can serve either as an empathic re-telling or as a trespass. Granted, this article has given more space to what, following Antoine Berman (2000), could be termed a “negative analytic” of translation, the emphasis here being on the forces that deform the survivor’s account. Peter Davies has warned against such a focus on the negative in reference to Holocaust translations, claiming that “What is missing from the discussion of translation is a sense of the far-reaching achievement [of translators]. If we move beyond melancholy reflections on loss, we are able to shed a much fuller light on the role that translation and translators have played” (2014, 166–167). However, the reasoning behind my negative approach is twofold. First, the wider empirical evidence that emerged from my comparative analyses had a discouraging tendency to point in this direction, particularly in the Summers translation; the examples discussed above are a small, but representative sample of this trend. Secondly, the study should in no way be understood as a personal attack against the translators, but rather, as a means of accentuating the very real transgressive potential of translation as a form of secondary witnessing. By flagging up the lapses in secondary witnessing in these texts and underlining the translation strategies from which they stemmed, it becomes possible to inform future Holocaust translation practice and to prevent such breaks in transmission from reoccurring elsewhere. It may well be the case that the all-hearing, non- appropriating figure of the secondary witness is an impossible ideal, but this does not mean that it is not one worth striving for. Speaking more broadly about the readers of Holocaust narratives, Colin Davis points out that “the best we can do may be to try to attend as honourably as possible to the traces of that which remains foreign to us” (2011, 40). Similarly, Francis Jones has proposed some basic guidelines for the translator working in sensitive circumstances, namely “a principle of maximum awareness of ethical implications together with one of least harm” (2004, 725). And so the translator as secondary witness is one who undertakes to be attentive and self-reflexive, and who weighs the better part of translation decisions in favor of the survivor. Although some of these endeavors will inevitably fall short of their mark, the crucial step is in the trying. It has often been noted in recent times that the need to document Holocaust testimonies is growing as the survivors themselves diminish in number. As these accounts continue to be committed to paper or audiovisual media, or are recovered from the past, so too does the potential increase for the communicative force of translation be brought consciously and effectively into the service of the original witness and the perpetuation of his or her memory. References “An Ordinary Camp.” Review of Ravensbrück, by Micheline Maurel, translated by Margaret M. Summers. Kirkus Reviews. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/micheline-maurel/an- ordinary-camp/. Assmann, Aleida. 2006. “History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony.” Poetics Today 27(2): 261–273. “Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. How Much We Must Learn!” 1959. Review of Ravensbrück, by Micheline Maurel, translated by Margaret M. Summers. Catholic Herald, April 3. 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Bloomington: Indiana University Press. joined the University of Strathclyde as a lecturer in translation and interpreting in 2016, having previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, where she also completed her PhD in 2011. Her research is anchored in the field of Translation Studies, but currently intersects with Memory Studies, Holocaust Studies, and Museum Studies. She is particularly interested in the translation of French individual and collective memories of occupation and deportation during World War II. She is author of the monograph Retranslation: Translation, Literature and Reinterpretation (2014) and a member of the IATIS Regional Workshops Committee. 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15533

Abstract: This article explores how memory—the central issue of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977)—has induced a specific type of writing that makes its translation a more challenging task in terms of stylistic, lexical, and syntactical choices. Tayo, the main character, is haunted by painful memories of his traumatic war experience, powerful nightmares and daytime visions blending seamlessly into the vacuity of his present life on the reservation. However, memory is also a healing force when it means going back to the traditional Indian way and adapting it to the broken present. Silko navigates between storytelling and storywriting, weaving a circular vision of time into the linear format of the novel and bridging the gap between her Indian ancestry and her white academic education. Translating Ceremony raises many interesting issues, three of which are discussed here: the treatment of intermingling narratives whose chronology the readers have to reconstruct for themselves, the network of echoes and repetitions that structure the novel, and the description of the Indian landscape. The article finally asserts that translation contributes to the circulation of memory and is a positive force ensuring the survival of texts written to resist acculturation. Introduction Ceremony is a landmark publication in the advent of Native American literature. Published in 1977 by Leslie Marion Silko, it received much critical acclaim and soon became a commercial success and was translated intoseveral foreign language (Norwegian, German, Japanese, Italian, French, Dutch). It is often part of the selection of Native American novels on university syllabi next to House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1968) and The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch (1979). Those are the titles readers remember as they have become the “memory” of Native American literary Renaissance. Whether they should be seen in terms of “ethnic minority fiction” or as part of mainstream American fiction is subject to debate. For instance, Joseph Bruchac states that the “‘mainstream’ in America is being turned back by a tide of multiculturalism” (Bruchac 1994, xviii). According to Robert N. Nelson, Native American novels have distinct features that set them apart: their authors are “Native American” (like the protagonists), the settings “include Indian reservations,” they allude to, or widely incorporate, “tribal traditions” 1 (Nelson 1993, 3). As a consequence some of their content is perceived as being difficult to grasp for the readers who are not “tribally literate” (to use Nelson’s word), those who do not share the memory of the tribal heritage. Memory is an essential dimension to Native American fiction and to Ceremony. According to Robert Dale Parker, Native American Literature was “invented” by “Indian writers,” drawing on both “Indian and literary traditions” (Parker 2003, 1). In trying to keep tribal culture alive, Native American writers have explored memory in different ways. Memory is what is left of all that has been destroyed and eradicated by colonization, industrialization, and forced assimilation. It is the main force enabling Native Americans to resist acculturation. Cultural memory was traditi- onally transmitted through storytelling, an endangered activity in a world ruled by the written word, where communities and families have been increasingly scattered across the whole 1 The choice of the most appropriate word to designate the people from Native American tribes is still highly controversial. The issue has not yet been settled, which explains what may seem like confusion in most essays and books about Native American art and fiction. Christina Berry writes in her article published on the All Things Cherokee website: “So what is it? Indian? American Indian? Native American? First Americans? First People? We all hear different terms but no one can seem to agree on what to call us” (Berry, 2013). Although the word “Native American” seems more neutral, many Native Americans object to it as it is seen as a creation by the Federal government aiming at erasing the sufferings of the Native tribes and making the colonial past more acceptable. The actor and political activist Russell Means declares: “I am an American Indian, not a Native American! I abhor the term Native American. It is a generic government term used to describe all the indigenous prisoners of the United States” (Means, 1996). Silko uses both the word “Indian” and “Native American.” In this article the word “Native American” has been kept to refer to the ethnic origin of the people involved but the word “Indian” has been preferred to indicate the cultural connotations as in “the Indian way” or “Indian memory” since it is closer to the ideas developed by Silko. country. Native American writers therefore invented a new type of storytelling that can survive and thrive in their new environment, translating traditional memory and storytelling into novels. Those novels are hybrid forms, close enough to the template of the Western novel to be recognized and understood by all while being innovative enough to cater for values and notions radically alien to Western culture. However, Indian memory is also a traumatic memory and offers many common points with other works and narratives problematizing memory such as writings by holocaust survivors and by victims of intense trauma (see Brodski 2007). Writing is not only a means of transmitting memory and struggling against oblivion, but it also transforms the unbearable memory of the trauma—which lies on the side of death and destruction—into a resilient force that makes life possible. The memory of the horror beyond the scope of human understanding is translated into words in order to help the victims make sense of the events and reappropriate their lives. Through the case study of Ceremony, I will demonstrate how memory can be a haunting force of destruction as well as a healing type of energy. Memory is both the theme and the material chosen by Silko for her novel. Her literary approach is characterized by a specific type of writing that makes interlingual translation particularly challenging in terms of stylistic, lexical, and syntactic choices. The novel was translated into French by Michel Valmary, who later translated two other books—Archie Fire Lame Deer’s Gift of Power (Le cercle sacré) and James Welch’s Killing Custer (C’est un beau jour pour mourir). The translation was published in 1992 by Albin Michel in the Terre Indienne collection, which specializes in Native American fiction (director: Francis Geffard), and its French title was Cérémonie. After studying how memory is at the core of the themes and textual identity of Ceremony, I will focus on three points: 1) writing/translating the fluctuating and unstable time of memory through a limited choice of possible grammatical tenses; 2) the construction/destruction of echoes, memories, and correspon- dences; 3) the translation of words and names referring to the landscape that is central to Indian memory. Finally, I will examine the close relationship between writing and translating in the case of Indian memory and discuss whether the trans- lation of Native American fiction is possible/advisable/neces- sary. Memory as the Main Theme and Material of Ceremony The theme of memory is crucial to Ceremony. The protagonist, Tayo, is a Laguna Pueblo of mixed ancestry, a “half-breed”2 living on the reservation near Albuquerque in New Mexico. When the story begins, he is back from the Second World War. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or “battle fatigue” according to the white psychiatrists who have discharged him from the hospital, he is unable to resume his old life. He is haunted by memories of the war and overwhelmed by guilt as he feels responsible for all the disruption that took place when he was away: the death of his cousin who went to war with him, the death of his uncle Josiah, and finally the drought that he sees as retribution for his swearing at the rain in the prisoner camp in the Philippines: “The old people used to say that droughts happen when people forget, when people misbehave”(Silko 1977, 46). These destructive memories disrupt his present life and make him mentally and physically ill as they invade his everyday life in the form of nightmares and daytime visions that leave him empty. His war memories are interspersed with his childhood memories as he is also trying to cope with his sense of alienation as a “half-breed” brought up by his aunt after his own mother left him. However the past, which is a source of suffering, is also the key to his recovery. Knowing that white medicine cannot save him, Grandma convinces him to visit a medicine man because “The only cure/I know/is a good ceremony” (Silko 1977, 3). Although the visits to Ku’oosh and then Old Betonie do not succeed immediately and the healing ceremony cannot be completed, Tayo gradually recovers his ancestral memory. He learns to understand the traditional signs and rites, becomes able to read the landscape around him again and to realign his life with a broader universal pattern of meaning. Thanks to his recovering the traditional cultural memory of his ancestors, Tayo can complete the ceremony by himself, adjust, and find his place back on the reservation. His 2Although “half-breed” may seem offensive, it is the word used by Silko to describe Tayo’s as well as her own ancestry (Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white). healing is symbolic of and preparatory to a more global change as rain returns to the region saving the crops and cattle. Tayo’s journey, out of his destructive memories, which are manifestations of evil and witchcraft and back to the healing memory of the Indian way, enables him to restore balance and harmony in the universe as thought can again circulate between the fifth world (the world inhabited by human beings) and the other worlds inhabited by spirits. Memory is at the core of Ceremony. The different encounters with the medicine men, the traditional one and Old Betonie, the modern one, with the women Tayo loves, all avatars of Tse’pina, the spirit of the mountain, are various memories of the same quest or the same healing ceremony. It is by remembering them and understanding their correspondences that Tayo progresses on his way to recovery and that the readers gradually understand the way the novel is structured and what it means. The novel functions like memory itself, giving birth to seemingly disconnected episodes that make sense when put together, reassembled and realigned. Moreover the conventional narrative structure of Tayo’s quest is framed by and intertwined with traditional stories and poems, memories of traditional Laguna storytelling, as if the real creator of the story was not Silko but Thought Woman. The book begins with the poem: Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears [. . .] I’m telling you the story she is thinking. Those traditional passages draw on Silko’s personal memories of the stories she was told when a child on the reservation or memories she has revived from the collection of stories published in Franz Boas’s Keresan Texts (a transcription of traditional tales published in 1928, see Nelson 2001). There are altogether 28 “storytelling memories” (whose length varies from a few lines to four pages). Silko blends traditional Indian forms—based on circular patterns, repetitions and circulation from memory and myth to reality—into a novel, a genre favoring a linear conception of time, a sequential and historical development of the story, and a clear-cut distinction between past and present, memory, and reality. She thus creates her own language, one that can express memory. Moreover, the novel is a way for Silko to come to terms with her own mixed ancestry and her sense of alienation. She started writing Ceremony after having been away in Alaska for two years where she felt she had been exiled. The novel is a personal remembrance ceremony enabling Silko to weave the loose threads of her attachment to her Native ancestry and of her white academic education back into significance: “Writing a novel was a ceremony for me to stay sane” (Arnold 2000, 24). Memory and the Blurred Frontiers between Past and Present The treatment of diegetic time is quite unconventional in Ceremony, as noted by most critics and reviewers. Although analepsis is a common device in most conventional novels, time shifts are so frequent in Ceremony that they blur the frontier between the main narrative and the secondary narratives that are Tayo’s various memories and visions. The story shifts to and fro between the time of Tayo’s return to the reservation after he is back from the war, and various memories—childhood scenes, war episodes, and other times before he left for the war. Those shifts back in time are not systematically signaled as such— there are few dates, few accurate references to places which would help the readers to chronologically reorganize the diverse fragments constituting Tayo’s story. The fragmented narratives are the representations on paper of the disruptive forces released by Tayo’s memories and the readers must agree to getting lost in the succession of embedded stories going back in circles rather than following a straight time line from beginning to end. Like Tayo, the readers will understand later and what they remember will then make sense, as Night Swan (one of the female characters Tayo meets during his quest) tells him: “You don’t have to understand what is happening. But remember this day. You will recognize it later” (Silko 1977, 100). Only when the tense of the first verb of the analepsis is a pluperfect is the shift clearly indicated. Even then, the following verbs are in the simple past (also the prevailing tense of the main narrative), which creates ambiguity as to the exact point where the main narrative is resumed, as in the following example:3 “You see,” Josiah had said, with the sound of the water trickling out of the hose into the empty wooden barrel [. . .]. He pointed his chin at the springs [. . .]. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead [. . .]. Tayo knelt on the edge of the pool and let the dampness soak into the knees of his jeans. (Silko 1977, 45–46) Although it is quite clear that the first paragraph is a memory because of the use of the pluperfect and the situation (Josiah is dead by the time Tayo returns from the war), the status of the following paragraph (“Tayo knelt…”) is ambiguous, and the similarity of the setting misleads the readers into believing initially that it is part of the same memory sequence whereas the main narrative has been resumed. The translation into French reads thus: “Tu vois, lui avait dit Josiah par-dessus le bruit de l’eau qui dégoulinait du tuyau dans les tonneau de bois vide [. . .]. Du menton, il avait montré les sources [. . .]. Il avait enlevé son chapeau et essuyé son front [. . .]. Tayo s’agenouilla au bord du bassin sans se soucier de l’eau qui trempait les genoux de ses jeans. (Silko 1992, 55) The translator has made a grammatically safe choice. The shift from pluperfect to past, which is quite frequent in English fiction, has been neutralized through a more consistent use of a plus que parfait in French. The passé simple, used for the main narrative, is deemed inadequate as soon as the diegetic chronology is upset—a stylistic rule many, but not all, French novelists adhere to. That “safe” choice is not consistently applied. For other time shifts the passé simple is used for anterior actions but only after a series of plus que parfait has clearly delineated the time frame: He stood outside the train depot in Los Angeles and felt the sunshine; he saw the palm trees [. . .] he realized why he was here and he remembered Rocky and he started to cry. [. . .] 3 Words discussed in the ensuing analysis are given in bold in the quotes.  The new doctor asked him if he had ever been visible and Tayo spoke to him softly and said that he was sorry but nobody was allowed to speak to an invisible one. (Silko 1977, 15) Devant la gare de Los Angeles, il avait senti la caresse du soleil; il avait vu les palmiers [. . .] il comprit pourquoi il était là, il se souvint de Rocky et il se mit à pleurer. [. . .] Quand le nouveau docteur lui avait demandé s’il avait jamais été visible, Tayo lui avait répondu d’une voix douce qu’il était désolé mais que personne n’avait le droit de parler à un être invisible. (Silko 1992, 23) Whereas the English original allows for more indeterminacy (the readers will not immediately understand that the first passage is the memory of a scene that took place just before Tayo’s return and that the second passage is another shift in time, neither the continuation of the preceding passage nor the resuming of the main narrative), the French readers are guided by the translator’s choice, which clarifies the order of the successive time sequences. Although choosing between imparfait, plus que parfait, passé simple, and passé composé to render a simple past is a controversial point, the passé simple—even if it is an obvious choice for a translator—may not be the most appropriate tense in the case of Ceremony. The use of the imparfait in some passages makes it possible to keep some referential indeterminacy as shown in that example where it is not clear if the second passage is still part of Tayo’s memory of the war or of the main narrative: Rocky had reasoned it out with him; […] Tayo nodded, slapped at the insects mechanically [. . .]. He had to keep busy; he had to keep moving so that the sinews connected behind his eyes did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull where the scenes waited for him. (Silko 1977, 8–9) Rocky s’était efforcé de le ramener à la raison ; [. . .] Tayo avait acquiescé; d’un geste machinal de la main, il avait écrasé quelques insectes [. . .]. Il fallait qu’il s’occupe ; il fallait qu’il reste actif pour que les muscles qui se rejoignent à l’arrière de ses yeux ne se relâchent pas, les faisant ainsi pivoter vers l’intérieur du crâne, là où toutes ces scènes l’attendaient. (Silko 1992, 16–17)  Even if it is not conventional to use the imparfait for single past actions, that tense might have the potential to accommodate Silko’s literary treatment of memory, as some French writers have done to give extra depth to their past narratives, J. M. G. Le Clézio, for instance (see Lepage 2008). Alternatively, using a passé composé instead of a passé simple as the prevailing tense for both the main narrative and the memories would have been a way to signal the shift from conventional fiction writing and would have insisted on the connection with oral tradition. Grammatical constraints and the translator’s wish to conform to the more conventional writing norms do not explain all the occurrences of plus que parfait in the French text. They illustrate the translator’s symptomatic wish to guide his readers, to help them through the maze of the original novel, as in the following example where a whole sentence has been added: They unloaded the cows one by one, looking them over carefully. (Silko 1977, 77) Quand Tayo eut ouvert le grand portail du couloir d’entrée du corral, Robert ouvrit la porte de la bétaillère. Ils firent sortir les vaches une par une, en les inspectant attentivement. (Silko 1992, 88) The time of the action as well as the identity of the characters have been made explicit in French. However, reducing ambiguity and reordering Tayo’s memories imposes a Eurocentric vision on a hybrid text. In fact, it brings more confusion to the readers as it prevents them from being aware of the blurred frontiers between past and present and between memory and reality, essential to the understanding of the novel. Indeed Ceremony reintroduces in the linear development of the novel the memory of a more ancient time, the Indian vision of time, which is circular, cyclical, always moving but not going directly from one point to another: The Pueblo people and the indigenous people of the Americas see time as round, not as a long linear string. If time is round, if time is an ocean, then something that happened 500 years ago may be quite immediate and real, whereas something inconsequential that happened an hour ago could be far away. Think of time as an ocean always moving. (Arnold 2000, 149) Memory as Repetitions, Echoes, and Resonances Repetitions and echoes are the backbone of the writing in Ceremony, and the coherent structure they create counter- balances the confusion brought about by Silko’s fluctuating treatment of diegetic time. Repetitions work at the level of sentences and paragraphs but also at the higher level of the whole novel. In sentences, repetitions give rhythm to the narrative and endow it with a typically oral dimension. The following passage illustrates how repetitions structure the sentences and help the readers/listeners keep track of the important notions: He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present, tangled up like colored threads from old Grandma’s wicker sewing basket when he was a child [. . .]. He could feel it inside his skull—the tension of little threads being pulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more. So Tayo had to sweat through those nights when thoughts became entangled; he had to sweat to think of something that wasn’t unraveled or tied in knots to the past (Silko 1977, 6–7) Il ne pourrait trouver le repos tant que les souvenirs et le présent s’enchevêtreraient comme les fils de couleur dans le panier à couture de Grand-mère : [. . .] Sous son crâne, c’est cela qu’il sentait, la tension des fils minces que l’on tirait, et les choses emmêlées, attachées ensemble, qui, lorsqu’il essayait de les démêler et de les rembobiner, chacune à sa place, s’accrochaient et s’emmêlaient encore davantage. C’est ainsi que Tayo devait passer de longues nuits en sueur quand ses pensées s’embrouillaient; il devait faire d’énormes efforts pour penser à quelque chose dont le fil ne soit pas défait ou attaché au passé par des nœuds inextricables (Silko 1992, 14–15) The translator has reduced the number of repetitions by erasing some occurrences (the two occurrences of tangled have been reduced to one in the first sentence) and by resorting to synonyms (s’enchevêtrer, emmêlées, s’emmêler, s’embrouiller for tangled; en sueur and faire d’énormes efforts for sweat). The destruction is not systematic, however. For instance, the translator manages to keep the repetition of comfort and comfortable (a word difficult to translate into French) by using bien and bien-être which work on both material and moral levels: We know these hills, and we are comfortable here.” There was something about the way the old man said the word “comfortable.” It had a different meaning—not the comfort of big houses or rich food or even clean streets, but the comfort of belonging with the land and the peace of being with these hills. (Silko 1977, 117) Nous connaissons ces collines, et nous y sommes bien. » Il y avait quelque chose de spécial dans la façon dont le vieil homme avait dit le mot « bien ». Il prenait un sens différent : ce n’était pas le bien-être que procuraient les grandes maisons, une nourriture riche ou même des rues propres, mais le bien-être né du fait d’être à l’unisson de la terre, la paix ressentie à se trouver dans ces collines. (Silko 1992, 129–130) At the macro level of the whole novel, repetitions give meaning to the various interconnected episodes. Repetitions of words create a textual memory that enables the readers to interpret the story correctly, exactly like Tayo who will gradually learn to recognize the pattern underlying what he goes through. For instance, when Tayo walks to the toilets in a bar (Silko 1977, 56), the dirty wet floor mentally takes him back to his ordeal in the jungle (Silko 1977, 11). The shift from a real situation to a memory is textually signified by the repetition of the same phrase—“It was soaking through his boots/it soaked into their boots”—in the two passages. In the translation, although the readers will understand the situation, there is no textual link between the two scenes but only a semantic link as two different phrases are used: “qui pénétrait dans ses bottes” (Silko 1992, 66)/“s’infiltrait dans les chaussures” (Silko 1992, 19). Many passages echo each other as if the various episodes and the various characters were diverse avatars of the same event, Tayo’s encounter with the spirit of the mountain and his becoming whole again. Repeated words form a network of key words whose occurrences weave a significant textual material connecting and reuniting what first seems disconnected. Through their reiteration the readers can recognize the resemblance and understand that time and storytelling are cyclical as Old Grandma concludes: “It seems like I already heard these stories before . . . only thing is, the names sound different” (Silko 1977, 260). The network of recurring words organizes the novel around key themes such as dampness and dryness, circles and whirls, weaving and scattering. In the translation, the structure is less obvious because of lexical variety. For instance, the word scatter which is central to Tayo’s broken psyche is translated by two different verbs, disséminer and disperser, as well as by a whole range of words according to the cotext: l’entouraient (Silko 1992, 117), franchirent le sommet (Silko 1992, 195), faire voler (Silko 1992, 231), laisser derrière (Silko 1992, 250), s’effriter (Silko 1992, 214), parmi (Silko 1992, 168), and s’égaillèrent (Silko 1992, 243). The important word scatter has virtually disappeared from the French translation, made invisible by the translator’s decision not to maintain its repetition. The destruction of repetitions is not systematic, how- ever, as the recurrences of some words are maintained. For instance whorls (of flesh, of skin), which appears in the morbid episodes dealing with witchcraft, is systematically translated by volute, making it possible for the French readers to link the various scenes together and to establish the connection with the poems relating the invasion of the evil spirit: “il se peignit le corps/les volutes de chair” (the poem about Pa’caya’nyi who tricks people into witchcraft, Silko 1992, 56), “D’autres défirent des paquets en peau/pleins d’objets répugnants:/des silex sombres, des cendres de hogans brûlés/où reposaient les morts,/Des volutes de peau” (the poem about a witchcraft competition during which white people are invented and turned loose to destroy the Indian world, Silko 1992, 147), “Pinkie lui maintint la jambe, et Leroy trancha la volute de chair sous le gros orteil de Harley” (the torture scene in which witchcraft attempts to engulf Tayo’s life and the world in general, Silko 1992, 271). By reducing the number of repetitions, the translator brings considerable changes to the material texture of Silko’s novel of textual memory. His motivations may be an adherence to French stylistic norms that still consider repetition to be inelegant despite its use by great writers. He thus imposes his own view, his own cultural memory on the original text and destroys its inner rhythm and its signifiance (to use Meschonnic’s (1999) word). Repetitions are essential to Silko’s endeavor to write a text which reads as a memory of the oral tradition of storytelling and deliberately blurs the frontier between genres (tales, songs, poems, and novels), between storytelling and story-writing, between Indian traditions and Western culture: “So I play with the page and things that you could do on the page, and repetitions. When you have an audience, when you’re telling a story and people are listening, there’s repetition of crucial points” (Arnold 2000, 71). Systematicity is essential to maintain the way lexical networks function. Each repetition is important. As Berman states when he studies how the deforming tendencies transform a text, each word must be chosen carefully and the use of synonyms is deceptive. Words have their own lives, their own textual bodies from which they derive their power: “The words of the story poured out of his mouth as if they had substance, pebbles and stone extending to hold the corporal up” (Silko 1977, 12). Silko’s writing is like weaving: the intricate patterns suffer no mistakes, no holes. Storytelling and story-writing is a sacred act, a ceremony in which each word has its part to play. Memory and the Landscape The landscape is the central character of Ceremony. As stated in Place and Vision, in which Nelson dedicates a whole chapter to the landscape of Ceremony, the geophysical landscapes “serve not only as the ‘settings’ of these [Native American] fictions but also as principal ‘characters’ in them” (Nelson 1993, 9). It is only after being reunited with the landscape that Tayo can recover his vital energy. The landscape is the place where Indian memory lies, the landscape is Indian memory: “We are the land. [. . .] More than remembered, the earth is the mind of the people as we are the mind of the earth” (Paula Gunn Allen in Nelson 1993, 1). Describing and naming the landscape is therefore a delicate part of the ceremony of writing. Locations and directions are given with accuracy. The words connected to the landscape are the names of the places, the words describing those places as well as the names of the plants, animals, and spirits inhabiting the land. All those names recreate the landscape of the American Southwest where the Laguna Pueblo reservation is located and they bear the memory of its history. The original Indian names have been largely replaced by English names or by Spanish names, the languages of the enemy, to use Gloria Bird’s phrase in Reinventing the Enemy’s Language (Harjo and Bird 1997), that is to say the languages of the settlers: “But the fifth world had become entangled with European names: the names of the rivers, the hills, the names of the animals and plants—all of creation suddenly had two names: an Indian name and a white name” (Silko 1977, 68). The Pueblo names are still there, though, in the names of the characters of the traditional stories and the names of the spirits inhabiting the land. They stand out in the English text as their morphology is quite different from that of the European names and display a characteristic apostrophe: Tse-pi’na orTs’eh, K’ou’ko, Ck’o’yo, A’moo’ooh, Ku’oosh. . . The Pueblo names have been used in the translation without any change as if they had resisted one more displacement. Most Spanish names are maintained too: mesa, arroyo, Casa Blanca . . . with the exception of burro (âne, bourricot). It is the English names that are problematic for the translation into French. When they are kept, which is the case of many place-names, they stand out as memories or traces of the original English text, whereas in the original they blend seamlessly into the main narrative in English. In Cérémonie, place-names such as Wake Island, Dixie Tavern, Purple Heart, or Prairie Dog Hill remind the readers of the European settlers’ imprint on the American landscape but also suggest that the “entanglement” with English names is only a passing stage in the history of the landscape. The names and languages may change, but the landscape and its ancient memory will remain unchanged. The English language, which dominates the text of Ceremony, is pushed back to the margin through translation. The names of plants and animals are translated into French and raise many difficulties. Most English names are both simple and precise. As they are based on a simple generic word (grass, tree, weed, hill. . . ), names such as wild rose bush, salt bushes, snakeweed, rabbit brush, foothills create a realistically complex environment (Silko has drawn on her accurate knowledge of the Southwest landscape). The geographically- literate readers will recognize it. However, those who are unfamiliar with such settings will not be lost and will manage to find their way among grass, trees, weeds, and hills. In French, the translator has to negotiate between two options. He can favor the exact translation which is very often a scientific term unknown to most readers: Salt bushes/atriplex, arroche; snakeweed/bistorte, gramma grass/ bouteloue. . . Alternatively, he may opt for a literal translation that will be understood but may not refer to an actual plant or animal. The few cases when literal translations correspond to the reality of the environment (rock sage/sauge de rocher, bee-wee plants/l’herbe-aux- abeilles, rabbit weed/herbe-aux-lapins. . . ) are not enough to compensate for the different vision of the world the numerous scientific names produce. Moreover, the scientific words in French do not allow the correspondence between geography and myth. The words of the landscape in Ceremony are meaningful and contribute to weave a consistent memory of the universe that reinforces the links between the human world and the spirits. When Tayo meets the mountain lion (puma in French), he also meets the hunter spirit, the companion of Tse’pina, the mountain spirit. When he meets Tse, she is sitting next to a moonflower plant (marguerite dorée) that indicates the feminine power she represents. Tse is a woman and a spirit and the earth, as this passage underlines: “He dreamed he made love with her. He felt the warm sand on his toes and knees; he felt her body, and it was as warm as the sand, and he couldn’t feel where her body ended and the sand began” (Silko 1977, 222). It echoes Josiah’s comment: “This is where we come from, see. This sand, this stone” (Silko 1977, 45). Once Tayo acknowledges he is sand and stone like the sandstone cliffs around him, he can be whole again. In the translation, the link connecting sand (sable), stone (pierre), and sandstone (grès) is severed. The landscape in Cérémonie is therefore more scientific and more obscure than in the original; it does not work as the main representation and memory of the harmony of the Indian way. It is not the “living text” mentioned by Nelson, which can be read by the readers. Memory and Translation as Transformation Beyond the linguistic and stylistic difficulties the translator has to face when translating a narrative of memory such as Ceremony, broader questions must be addressed. Is it possible or even legitimate to translate memory in the case of Native American fiction? Can Indian memory, which is so deeply rooted in the ancient languages and in the local environment, survive when uprooted and transferred into a culturally and linguistically alien environment? Silko has already provided part of the answer. Drawing on Indian memory to write her novel, she has opened up a new frontier and contributed to the invention and development of the Native American novel, essentially transgenre and multilingual. She is the one who has translated—that is to say, transformed and rewritten—the oral traditional stories: “I write them down because I like seeing how I can translate this sort of feeling or flavor or sense of a story that’s told and heard onto the page” (Arnold 2000, 71). Therefore, translating Ceremony into another language is doing a second-hand translation in which the main choices have already been made: the degree of multilingualism, of obscurity to which the readers—and more particularly the “tribally illiterate” ones—will be submitted. The inherent tension between the source and target languages, between what we understand and what we do not, between what the translator chooses to reveal and what he/she leaves unexplained is already present in the original. Even the reception of her work and the issue of the target reader has been addressed, as Silko is aware that her readership falls into two categories—Native Americans (who know a lot about Indian memory) and non-Natives (whom she does not want to alienate). For her, making Indian memory accessible to all through her translation is a political choice: “I’m political, but I’m political in my stories. That’s different. I think the work should be accessible and that’s always the challenge and task of the teller—to make accessible perceptions that the people need” (Arnold 2000, 26). Translators have always been suspected of betrayal and Silko is no exception. Being of mixed ancestry, born on the reservation but educated outside it, she is the perfect go-between and a highly suspicious one. Paula Gunn Allen criticized her for giving away tribal secrets which should only be known by Native people, as Nelson reminds us: “In fact, a few years ago another Laguna writer, Paula Gunn Allen, criticized Silko for using some of this oral traditional material, contending that by including a clan story in her novel Ceremony Silko has violated local conventions regarding proper dissemination of such stories” (Nelson 2001). For Silko, translating and rewriting Indian memory is not a betrayal but, on the contrary, a way to redeem Native traditions. Those must not be kept as museum artifacts which are the dead collectible pieces recorded and translated by ethnologists such as Boas, but they must be given the possibility to carry on as living entities. Memory pines for transmission as a way out of oblivion and eradication. Through her translation, Silko reminds the American readers of the Native American heritage of their country and promotes it as a living force in today’s world. Interlingual translation goes one step further in the same direction. Translating Indian memory strengthens it as it will be kept in the minds of more and more readers across the world, and in turn they will pass it on. It will then be safe from destruction, as when kept in the belly of the storyteller (Silko 1977, 2). Paradoxical though it may seem, translating Indian memory is a form of repatriation as it takes it back to its original purpose, helping the people understand and live in harmony. In a globalized world, the people may just mean people in general: “Something in writing Ceremony that I had to discover for myself was indeed that the old stories still have in their deepest level a content that can give the individual a possibility to understand” (Arnold 2000, 147). On a more practical level, the translation and transmission of memory may increase people’s awareness and support of the Native cause and give more visibility to the Indian alternative to the materialistic “American way of life” taking over the world. Silko is aware of the potential impact of Native memory across languages and nations: “In other words, we feel that we get cultural, intellectual, spiritual support from all the people outside the United States. [. . .] There are no isolated people, there is truly now a global village and it matters” (Arnold 2000, 151). The teller/writer is one link in the long chain of the circulation of memory, and the translator another one. The important point is to keep the transmission going even if it means changes on the way. Changes are not always for the worse. In the case of Indian memory, the displacement brought about by the interlingual translation opens up new possibilities. In the French translation, the stories may thrive better in a new medium, freed from the English language (the linguistic memory of the trauma of colonization). Memory itself is not a fixed form. It is based on repetitions and differences, like translation—two notions at the core of Deleuze’s early philosophical thought and analyzed at length in Différence et Répétition in link with the power of language: “La répétition est la puissance du langage” (“Repetition is the power of language”—translation mine—Deleuze 1968, 373). The memory of an event is a repetition of the event, both similar to and different from it. Each time the memory comes back it is slightly modified, too, as repetitions are never identical. The same relationship links the text and its translations, which are the memory of the text. They are not equivalents but repetitions of the original, different but not necessarily less valuable, less trustworthy, or less authentic. The transformation process at the core of memory and translation is a regenerative power that keeps life going. The old stories, like the old healing ceremonies, must be adapted to their new environment—be it linguistic or cultural—the way Betonie has managed to devise a new ceremony to cure Tayo of his modern disease. Translation and memory are two modes of survival (“‘survival’ as a cultural practice and symbolic action, and above all as a process that extends life” (Brodzki 2007, 5)) and revival, a way to share the gift of the healing force or the burden of the trauma. Conclusion Memory as the main theme and material of Ceremony has shaped the novel’s language. It is based on correspondences and resonances that can evoke the chaos of traumatic memory and of witchcraft but that also symbolize the redeeming force of the Indian way whose ceremonies can restore harmony. The specificity of Silko’s writing requires attentive translating strategies that enable the transmission of its textual and poetic density. The memory of the text is particularly threatened when the translator yields to some of the deforming tendencies defined by Berman in his chapter “L’analytique de la traduction et la systématique de la déformation” (Berman 1985, 65–82), and more particularly clarification (thus replacing cyclical time with linear time), the destruction of rhythm (the rhythm of oral tradition), and the loss of meaningful networks which equate writing with healing ceremonies. Like all poetical texts, Ceremony challenges easy solutions. Those texts need transformation rather than stereotyped equivalences. To translate them is to listen to the text and its resonances, to its signifiance rather than concentrate on its superficial narrative meaning. Translators will then be able to draw on that intimate memory of the text to rewrite it in an act of sharing and transformation, not a move of appropriation. Narratives of memory ask for translation more than anything else as transformation and circulation are their essence. Like the Indian stories they have “a life of their own” (Arnold 2000, 72) whose natural development is translation. Translators are similar to Betonie, the modern healer. “But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies [. . .] things which don’t shift and grow are dead things” (Silko 1977, 126). Translators, as life-givers of those narratives, have the responsibility of choosing carefully and creatively so that reading the translated text will be a renewed ceremony that revives the power of the original and transmits its memory. References Allen, Paula Gunn, ed. 1996. Song of the Turtle: American Indian literature, 1974–1994. New York: Ballantine Books. Arnold, Ellen L., ed. 2000. Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Berman, Antoine. 1985. Les Tours de Babel: Essais sur la traduction. Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress. Berry, Christina. 2013. “What’s in a Name? Indians and Political Correctness.” All Things Cherokee website. Accessed November 20, 2013: http://www.allthingscherokee.com/articles_culture_events_070101.html. Brodzki, Bella. 2007. Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bruchac, Joseph, ed. 1994. Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First North American Native Writers’ Festival. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1968. Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Harjo, Joy, and Gloria Bird, eds. 1997. Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America. New York: W. W. Norton. Lepage, Pierre. 2008. “Le Clézio et l’oubli de l’Afrique.” Le Monde des Livres, September 9. Accessed November 20, 2013. http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2008/10/09/le-clezio-et-l-oubli-de- l-afrique_1105152_3260.html. Means, Russell. 1996. “I am an Indian American, not a Native American!” Accessed November 20, 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20010208120908/http://www.peaknet.net/~ aardvark/means.html. Meschonnic, Henri. 1999. Poétique du traduire. Lagrasse: Verdier. Momaday, N. Scott. [1968] 2010. House Made of Dawn. New York: HarperCollins. Nelson, Robert M. 1993. Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction. New York: Peter Lang. ———. 2001. “Rewriting Ethnography: the Embedded Texts in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony.” In Telling the Stories: Essays on American Indian Literatures and Cultures, edited by Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson and Malcolm Nelson, 47–58. New York: Peter Lang. PDF available at https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~rnelson/ethnography.html Parker, Robert Dale. 2003. The Invention of Native American Fiction. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Silko, Leslie Marmon. 1977. Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books. ———. 1992. Cérémonie. Translated by Michel Valmary. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 1997. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. New York: Simon & Schuster. Welch, James. [1979] 2008. The Death of Jim Loney. London: Penguin Classics. Wright, Anne, ed. 1986. The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright. Saint Paul MN: Graywolf. is senior lecturer in Translation Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris 3. Her research concentrates on the interaction between form and meaning, on the translation of the voice, and the syntactic organization as well as normalizing effect at play in the translation process. She has either edited or coedited Palimpsestes 18 (Traduire l’intertextualité, 2006), Palimpsestes 24 (Le réel en traduction: greffage, traces, mémoire, 2011), and Translating the Voices of Theory (2015). She is also interested in intersemiotic forms of translation and Native American voices. 

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Abstract: Over the course of the last five years my research has led me to conclude that the literary representation of a trauma is not the immediate step after the historical event and that there are other, intervening layers in between. First is the occurrence of the historical event. What then follows is the translation of that event in the minds of the survivors—that is, in their memory and interpretation of the event. Then, memory becomes the subject of oral history. This oral history enters the minds of the writers of memoir and fiction, where it becomes a literary translation. Finally, the filmmaker, if such a story makes it to this step, translates the text in order to render her interpretation of it as film. If we acknowledge that translation involves interpretation, then what exists here are different layers of translation. The aim of the paper is to analyze the different effects that each medium (literature, translation, cinema) may have on the experience of its readers and audience—what that medium is trying to cultivate, the limitations of each, and how all of them in different ways bring greater attention to the historical phenomenon of the Armenian Genocide. Introduction Thinking about the contribution of literature to raising awareness about the Armenian Genocide, I have asked myself whether literature is the immediate step after the historical event. My research has led me to think that it is not. In this paper, I will propose the following schema to chart the development in Genocide awareness from the historical event to its interpretation within an act of artistic representation. First is the occurrence of the historical event. What then follows is the translation of that even in the minds of the survivors—that is, in their memory and  interpretation of the event. Memory then becomes the subject of oral history, and this oral history enters the minds of the writers of memoir and fiction, where it becomes a literary translation. Finally, the filmmaker, if such a story makes it to this step, translates the text in order to render his or her interpretation of it as film. In effect, we have here different layers of translation upon translation—to use memoirist Günter Grass’s term, with this theory we are “peeling the onion” (Grass 2008). With a focus on the renowned Italian–Armenian novelist Antonia Arslan’s Genocide narrative La masseria delle allodole (2004; English translation Skylark Farm, Arslan 2006), I’ll first discuss the literary genre as an instrument that brings greater attention to the historical memory of the Armenian Genocide. Then the power of translation related to the Genocide as an instrument of cultural, historical, and linguistic interaction will be both explored and problematized. For example, why has this particular book been chosen for translation into sixteen languages?1 In what ways have these translations contributed to the awareness of the Genocide in their given countries? Exploring the impacts these translations have had in their given countries, there will also be an examination of readers’ reactions following their respective publications in various languages by presenting interviews with some of the translators. Finally, I will focus on the theme of the Armenian Genocide in cinema and will deal with the dramatized version of the Genocide narrative La masseria delle allodole by the Italian directors the Taviani brothers (Taviani and Taviani 2007).2 The Armenian Genocide in Literature In every trauma, in every situation, there are always at least two sides, two prevalent stories, and the power dynamics are strong. On the one hand, the side that “successfully” commits Genocide usually determines the way its history is written (or not written), as is the case of the Armenian Genocide, which is varied and has been contested for many years. Then there is the side of the 1 So far, the book has been translated into Dutch, English (four editions), Eastern Armenian (two editions), Finnish, French, German (two editions), Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Persian, Romanian, Russian, Western Armenian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish. 2 The present study springs directly from my experience in translating Armenian Genocide narratives and from the outcomes of the course I taught at California State University, Fresno— Armenian Genocide and Translation while being the 10th Henry S. Khanzadian Kazan Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies at CSUF. people who have suffered the overwhelming trauma. This side, especially when silenced by the perpetrator, attempts to record any history of the event, albeit painful, and often, as we look over these testimonies, it is clear that any proper investigation or analysis of this traumatic event should be undertaken by someone with psychoanalytic and linguistic skills. One of the consequences of the Armenian Genocide was the dispersal of those who survived into a global Diaspora. Traumatized and impoverished, involuntary exiles and immigrants in a new land, they struggled to survive. Part of their survival strategy was to write what they had experienced and witnessed. Survivor stories emerged painfully and with great difficulty. The obstacles were many: a fragmented, traumatized community with far too few resources. The challenges they faced included the fact that they were either forced to write in a language that few in their new lands understood or that they had to struggle to describe the indescribable in a foreign tongue. Despite all the trauma and difficulties, the immigrants decided to put pen to paper to document that which the world needs to better know and comprehend. Even though the potential audience and publishers were greatly limited, these important survivor memoirs emerged, often in isolation, in small print runs and sometimes as unpublished manuscripts. They emerged in a variety of locales and conditions that characterized the global Diaspora. These Diaspora fragments disseminate Armenian culture and seeds across differing landscapes. In so doing, the Armenian identity has evolved and become more diverse and complex and has contributed to an emerging multiculturalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The survivor memoirs provided and continue to constitute an invaluable research tool not only for researchers but also for Genocide fiction writers, who take their insights from those stories and, in thousands of literary flavors, offer the reader the historical dimension of the Armenian Genocide. It is true that it is not possible to penetrate the world of the Armenian Genocide without reading the history. However, as Rubina Peroomian asserts (Peroomian 2012, 7), documents, statistics, and data do not provide the whole story. On the other hand, the extremely important memoirs and eye witness accounts alone often cannot express the unthinkable horror of the Genocide as the blockages and psychological borders can impede the author’s revealing the whole trauma. Hence the importance of historical fiction, which, by fusing historical fact and creative writing, can provide access to a larger readership in terms of global impact. An example of this phenomenon, with a particular symbolic and powerful radiation and with a priority function of meaning, is the Italian–Armenian novelist Antonia Arslan’s Genocide novel La masseria delle allodole (Arslan 2004). Antonia Arslan, who was born and grew up in Italy and was professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature at the University of Padua, has published on Italian popular fiction and Italian women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, her most recent publications have focused on her Armenian heritage. Her first approach to her Armenian heritage was, surprisingly, through translation. With the help of two Armenians (as she doesn’t know Armenian) she has translated/edited two volumes by Daniel Varujan, one of the most significant Armenian poets of the twentieth century, into Italian: Il canto del pane (Varujan 1992) and Mari di grano (Varujan 1995).3 Here is Antonia Arslan’s testimony about her translation: Poetry functions in an immediate and unexpected way. I discovered Daniel Varujan, his strength and his grace, when reading some of his poems in Italian and the entire The Song of Bread in French, translated by Vahé Godel. So it was that I concentrated on the text of his last work, which completely fascinated me. I already had a lot of experience translating poetry—from French, English and German—but my work with Varujan was a great adventure, also because of my collaboration with two young and enthusiastic scholars, C. H. Megighian and A. H. Siraky. The Italian edition of The Song of Bread (Varujan 1992) became the seventh one, and it enjoyed much success within the Italian secondary schools. I further translated other pieces of Varujan’s poetry; I published twenty of them in the volume Seas of Wheat (Varujan 1995) and the others in magazines. I also want to remind us that he was a great poet, one of the major ones since the beginning of the 1900s, equal to no one, but less known because he wrote in a minority language. (Haroutyunian 2012a) Translating Varujan’s poetry became part of the process of 3 In 1915 at the age of thirty-one, Daniel Varujan was on the verge of becoming an internationally renowned poet but he was brutally murdered by the government of the Young Turks, like other Armenian poets such as Siamanto, Grigor Zohrab, and so on. discovery of her own Armenian identity.4 It brought her to the unknown path of her lost ancestry and the birth of her first novel, the best-seller Skylark Farm, in which, drawing on the history of her own ancestors, she tells of the attempts of the members of an Armenian family caught up in the Armenian Genocide to escape to Italy and join a relative who had been living there for forty years. This book won many prestigious awards in Italy and worldwide.5 Skylark Farm belongs to a genre that mixes autobiography and biography, history and fiction, documentary and memory. First of all, Arslan introduces her fifty-three-year- old grandfather Yerwant, an important physician living in his adopted Italian hometown of Padua in the months leading up to the Second World War. [H]is mother, Iskuhi, the little princess, died at nineteen giving birth to him. My great-grandfather then remarried an “evil stepmother,” who bore him many other children; my grandfather couldn’t stand her, and so, at the age of thirteen, he requested and was granted permission to leave the little city and go to Venice, to study at Moorat-Raphael, the boarding school for Armenian children. (Arslan 2006, 17) Yerwant never again returned home. Now, after forty years, he hopes to reunite with his brother Sempad, a successful pharmacist, who continued living in his little city in Anatolia. In 1915, Yerwant enters his fiftieth year, and he is satisfied—and alone. . . “I am now a citizen of Italy; the Ottomans can’t touch me any more,” he thinks. (Arslan 2006, 45) But World War I begins, and the ruling Young Turk party closes the border and when Italy enters the war on May 24, 1915, Yerwant’s dream vanishes. He will never be able to return to his country of origin in his red Isotta Fraschini, the doors of which were encrusted with the silver coat of arms that featured an intertwined Y and A, standing for Yerwant Arslanian. He will 4 She then went on to edit different works on the Armenian Genocide, including Hushèr: la memoria. Voci italiane di sopravvissuti armeni (Arslan, Pisanello, and Ohanian 2001); she has worked with Boghos Levon Zekiyan on the Italian version of Gérard Dédéyan’s Histoire du peuple arménien (Dédéyan 2002) and Vahakn Dadrian’s Storia del genocidio armeno (Dadrian 2003); and translated Claude Mutafian’s brief history of the Armenian genocide from the French (Mutafian 2001). 5 Arslan’s more recent publications include Il libro di Mush (2012), which is an account of the largest extant Armenian manuscript that was preserved in two halves by two separate women, each of whom took one half when escaping the city of Mush during the Armenian Genocide; Il rumore delle perle di legno (2015); and Lettera a una ragazza in Turchia (2016). never see his family again as they will be exterminated almost entirely by the Young Turks. From that moment on for Yerwant the distant Fatherland remained forever remote, and when his children got older Yerwant even changed their names. Antonia Arslan talks about a contradiction in the behavior of her grandfather: at first he did not want to deny his ancestry, and gave his children four Armenian names each—Yetward, Erwand, Armenak, and Vardan; Khayel, Anton, Aram, and Maryam—but later tried to erase their origin: “And in 1924, he will petition the Italian government to allow him to legally remove from his surname that embarrassing three- letter suffix, -ian, that exposes so plainly his Armenian origin” (Arslan 2006, 160). During the deportation, the women performed a crucial role not only by bravely making sacrifices to protect the children, but by persistently working to preserve memories of their land. These are a few stories, objects, and photographs, “relics or icons from a terrible shipwreck” (Arslan 2006, 19), and a few other items shipped from Sempad as a gift to his relatives in Italy. Thanks to this “act of memorial transmission,” the author can now see and touch objects and images belonging to her Armenian family and therefore be reunited with its indefinite past (Alù 2009, 369). Here, as readers, we are made witness to familiar historical narratives—perhaps we share similar ones, perhaps we’ve read firsthand accounts in books. But what happens when a historical event penetrates literature? First of all, the literary genre is a powerful medium that is able to bring the historical phenomenon to the attention of the masses. By reconstructing her family history in the novel, Arslan is merging both historical research and imagination culled from collective memory; she also becomes the protector of her familial memory and historical archive. Taking an input from Bella Brodzki’s idea that “[c]ulture’s necessarily overarching orientation toward the future only obtains by sharing its past” (Brodzki 2007, 113), I conducted an experiment on collective memory and testimony in an assignment I gave to my students at Fresno State. I set an assignment in which they were called to write the story of their ancestor’s survival. Most of them said to me, “I know something about my great grandparents, but I’m missing a lot of details. What should I do?” This is exactly what I was hoping for, and advised them to fill in the gaps with their imaginations and to take advantage of their parents and grandparents and ask them questions. As evidenced by Brodzki, “[t]hinking both psychoanalytically and historically also means that while we harbor the dream of plentitude, we always begin with a gap” (Brodzki 2007, 113). For their assignment, some of my students contacted their relatives living in other countries to inquire about their grandparents and, as the students shared some amazing stories in class.6 This assignment contributed to raising their personal awareness of their ancestors’ voyages towards refuge. Antonia Arslan has done the same in filling in the gaps of an unknown past. In the meantime the geography, the places, and the itineraries that she describes in her novel reveal not only significant moments of family history but also its inclusion in a determinate social space and national history (Alù 2009, 364).7 This is important because it gives the historical part to “historical fiction.” For yet another class assignment, based on the concept of Rushdie’s “translated man,” students worked together to write the names of the native cities and villages of their ancestors, as well as the places through which they passed on their long journeys of migration before arriving in the United States.8 We also included in the map the languages they had learnt along the way. This initial exercise helped the students to visualize, re-realize, and appreciate both their ancestors’ geographical passages and the students’ indelible connection to them. Further, the act of writing it on the board—taking pen in hand—implicated them as the bearers and continuers of their ancestral memories. I have always been obsessively diligent throughout my academic career to erase whatever is on the board after any given lesson. However, what 6 Some of these stories have already been published in the Hye Sharzhoom newspaper (Fresno 2013, 35/1, 2). 7 In her article, Alù refers to Anne Muxel who in her Individu et mémoire familiale explains how rediscovering familiar places and spaces can help us to recover a biographical path as well as the origin, progress, and decline of a social, individual, and collective destiny (Muxel 1996, 47). 8 In his book of essays Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie asserts that “Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained” (Rushdie 1992, 17). was created on the board that day was an interwoven tapestry of names, places, times, and languages that neither my students nor myself even dared to erase. The memory seemed at once too fresh and validated yet again. So, we decided to leave it as it was. I took a picture before the next instructor could “erase our ancestors,” preserving this image at least through another medium—if not the word, the image. We were all excited and surprised to discover that among all our ancestors, they collectively spoke sixteen languages including Armenian, English, Arabic, French, Turkish, Spanish, Vai, Pele, Fula, Russian, German, Romanian, Bulgarian, Latin, Greek, and Kurdish. In the same way, Antonia Arslan’s undertaking the mission of retelling the story continues the voyage of her ancestors. In one of her numerous public lectures Antonia said: “The idea of my past was bothering me for years, so one morning I decided to write: ‘Zio Sempad è solo una leggenda, per noi: ma una leggenda su cui abbiamo tutti pianto.’”9 This is the very first sentence of the novel, and Antonia once told me that, while many passages of the book have undergone editing, that sentence remained unchanged. What is interesting is that Antonia never mentions the name of her grandfather’s birthplace, calling it “little city.” “No one, patient reader, ever went back to the little city,” finishes Antonia Arslan in her book (Arslan 2006, 268). She does this intentionally— firstly because this is a novel and not a memoir and secondly because she doesn’t want to personify but rather render the idea more globally and not to give the reader the impression that the Armenians were persecuted in that specific place. I’d like to share the last classroom example from my California State University experience, which dealt with the question of the story’s transmission. By using their part of the genealogical tapestry I spoke of before, each student illustrated the geographic and linguistic journeys of their ancestors. I asked the students, as an extension, to report their family history to one partner in the classroom. It was then the task of the partner to re- reflect the story and report it. After a series of retellings, the students eventually had to report these stories back to the class, 9 Uncle Sempad is only a legend, for us—but a legend that has made us all cry (Arslan 2006, 17). thus directly engaging in the process of transmission and translation. Our aim was to internalize the process of a story’s transmission and to show how feelings, details, chronology, and so forth are translated as they pass from one person to another. Thus, the story, especially the oral tale, is a shared substance between interlocutors, and simply does not exist without both the teller and the listener, the writer and the reader. So when we return to consider the gravity of Arslan’s work in the telling of the Armenian Genocide from a very personal perspective, we come to the realization that, by sharing her own family history, we also become a responsible player of that story as readers. In this case, we are both called upon to consider and remember the Genocide and are also invited to enter its discourse. To consider Arslan’s work on such a global scale, then, is of tantamount importance. Through the pen of the writer Antonia Arslan, the Armenian Genocide is thus carried beyond its historical limits, slipping from the desks of historians and entering the minds and imaginations of ordinary people. Of course, when a historical event becomes literature it is enriched with new shades and colors. New heroes are born who are given names and are assigned identities. Families are born belonging to one nationality or to another who are placed in this or that social class. This is where literary fiction comes into play. And she weaves the plot. Through a love story, a common conversation in the home, or between neighbors, and through a description of a relationship between two individuals of two different nationalities (such as the Armenian and Turkish) or minorities (Armenians and Greeks), Antonia Arslan introduces the historical dimension to the story. A sentence from the prologue that was also used for the blurb on the book cover reads: My aunt always used to say: When I’ve finally had it with you, when you get too mean, I’m leaving. I’ll go stay with Arussiag in Beirut, with Uncle Zareh in Aleppo, with Philip and Mildred in Boston, with my sister Nevart in Fresno, with Ani in NY, or even with Cousin Michel in Copacabana—him last, though, because he married an Assyrian. (Arslan 2006, 5) With this sentence, the author introduces the complex phenomenon of the Armenian Diaspora created by the Armenian Genocide. When a non-Armenian reader, completely ignorant of not only the essence but also the existence of the Armenian Genocide, buys the book for its literary value, while reading this sentence, asks herself: How can a single person, Antonia’s aunt, have so many relatives around the world? The answer will come on reading the book. Before writing her Genocide narrative, Antonia Arslan consulted many history books. But the plot also came to her through saved photographs. As Daniel Sherman has it: “Sight is the only sense powerful enough to bridge the gap between those who hold a memory rooted in bodily experience and those who, lacking such experience, nonetheless seek to share the memory” (Sherman 1999, 14). Thus the picture becomes a complicated form of self- portrait that reveals the ego of the writer that is necessarily relational and at the same time fragmentary. Similarly, descriptions of group photographs in Skylark Farm are used by Antonia Arslan to recover the bonds with her dispersed Armenian relatives (Alù 2009, 373): Arussiag, Henriette, and Nubar, two girls and a little boy dressed as a girl. Along with Nevart they are the numb survivors who will, after escaping Aleppo, come to the West. These children now look out at me from a snapshot taken in Aleppo in 1916, one year after their rescue, just before they embarked for Italy: their grave, childish eyes are turned mysteriously inward, opaque and glacial, having accepted—after too many unanswered questions—the blind selection that has allowed them to survive. They are wearing decent orphan clothes, but they seem dressed in uniforms of rags, and at a quick glance the eye sees prison stripes. Their dark Eastern eyes, with their thick brows tracing a single line across their foreheads, repeat four times, wordlessly, the fear of a future that will be inexorable and the hidden nucleus of a secret guilt. (Arslan 2006, 23) Transforming and translating the protagonists of the pictures into the characters of the book, Antonia is linking herself through a bridge towards her ancestors: But it will be Zareh the skeptic, the European, who will save the family legacy, the children, and the photographs: the four little malnourished bodies curled together like dying birds, their small skulls all eyes, and the precious packet of family portraits, sewn up along with Gregory of Narek’s  prayer book inside a velvet rag and passed from hand to hand from the dying to the survivors. Parched, dried skeletons—memorials of a life that had been cordial and boisterous, with plenty of water, plenty of hospitality and mirth. (Arslan 2006, 29) These images, along with a few objects protected by the women during the massacre and deportation, become relics of which the author becomes the possessor through the acts of postmemory. In addition, the images included or only described in Skylark Farm, along with the text, are the subject of memory and commemoration as well as collective pain, the lieux de mémoire that stop time, block forgetfulness, immortalize death and materialize the immaterial (Alù 2009; Nora 1989). In her 2007 book Can These Bones Live, Bella Brodzki directs her attention to processes of intergenerational transmission, conceived as acts of translation, to how the value of memory or remembrance as an instrument of historical consciousness is inscribed in a culture [. . .] What connects and divides two generations and their respective cultural narratives, where are the borderlines of a life and text, what are the ways in which processes of translation perform as well as disrupt the work of cultural memory? (Brodzki 2007, 111– 112). In the case of Antonia Arslan, the intergenerational transmission took place through her beloved grandfather who entrusted her with the task of retelling his trauma and memories for a country that no longer exists, for the columns of deportees, for a family dying beneath a poisonous sun, for the unmarked graves along the dusty roads and paths of Anatolia; and for everything that disappeared with them, everything alive and fragrant, exhausted and joyous, painful and consoling: the country’s soul. (Arslan 2006, 40) The Armenian Genocide in Translation When we talk about Genocide and translation in a global sense, we inevitably enter a discourse about memory. Let’s think for a moment of the psychological state of the trauma victim: they are pained, they block things out, sometimes repress the memories that are too painful. The Armenian Genocide survivors’ silence was also due to the fact that they were over-protective of their children considering them a representation of survival and treating them as substitutes for the relatives who perished and communities that had been wiped out. Thus with the aim to ensure their protection, the parents often refused to share the trauma with the second generation.10 Genocide trauma is translated by the very person who experienced it by the memory they retain of the event. What about when a trauma is translated into artistic literature? Are we obliged to then preoccupy ourselves with less important “factual” matters—was it really fifty days that the woman walked through the desert, or thirty? Historical fiction is a genre that fuses a historical fact with creative writing. Thus, as a fiction, we are ultimately obliged as readers to be less preoccupied with the precision of less important facts, but rather occupy ourselves with the rendering of feeling and narrative form within a historical space. And it is in this moment of not being preoccupied with the fact or fiction of memoir, biography, or a historical text that we are able to immerse ourselves in the heart of the matter. How do we feel about this situation? How can we relate to it? How do we interpret it ourselves? Certainly a lot of truth also comes out through creative writing and not only through memoir or biography or other forms of factual writing where the blockages and psychological borders stop the author from revealing the whole trauma. *** Every book has its birth story, and analogously every 10 While exploring the impact of World War II on the second-generation Armenian–American identity, Aftandilian (2009) noticed that the war brought the memory of the Armenian Genocide to the forefront within Armenian–American families, as survivors of the Genocide had to send their sons off to war. Aftandilian interviewed World War II Armenian–American veterans and found that the topic of returning home was more emotional than the topic of their combat experience. His research on the children of survivors found that many children were named after the murdered relatives. These children felt special, because an obligation was placed on them, directly or indirectly, to bear the hopes and aspirations of the survivors not only for the family, but also for the Armenian people as a whole. One of my students at California State University, A. Pilavian, wrote in her final paper: “I never really knew the details about how my family began or how much they sacrificed to live a better life. I used to get angry with my family when they wouldn’t tell me things that I wanted to know from their past experiences. What I came to realize is that when people don’t speak of something tragic that has happened in their life, it actually eats at them more. The reason they feel that it’s better to keep quiet is so that they don’t disrupt the peace in their life that they finally have now.” translation has its birth story. Most of the translations of Antonia Arslan’s Skylark Farm have been executed according to the standard ways when a publisher decides to commission a book’s translation. However, there is something immediately striking about the book’s Hungarian edition. The Hungarian translation was published in Romania, and not in Hungary (Arslan 2008). Here is the explanation given by the book dealer Kinga Kali: As you perhaps know Hungary still does not recognize the Armenian Genocide—and there is not much knowledge about it in the Hungarian book publishing. The publishers I contacted simply did not respond to my proposal—to publish the Hungarian translation of Skylark Farm. I had the idea to go to Mentor, a Hungarian publishing house in Transylvania, Romania. I also offered a complete plan for advertising the book in Hungary. They accepted the proposal. Mentor publishers in Romania took all the risks in dealing with a theme intentionally kept from public view in Hungary. This is why Antonia was able to go and give her book tour in both Hungary and Romania. The circulation of Antonia’s Genocide novel, thanks to its Hungarian translation, among common Hungarians is extremely important because Hungary has yet to recognize the Armenian Genocide.11 After the publication of Skylark Farm in Romania, the book dealer together with the publishing house managed to organize several book presentations in Budapest and in a few Transylvanian towns in Romania with a Hungarian majority. While I was in Budapest for a conference, I met the dealer and asked her about the impact of the translation and its contribution to raising awareness in Hungary. She replied that The majority of the people I gave the book [to] as a present and [who] 11 Hungary was the country where, in 2004, Ramil Safarov, a lieutenant of the Azerbaijani army, used an axe to hack the twenty-six-year-old Armenian lieutenant Gurgen Margaryan to death in his sleep. Both were participating in an English language training course within the framework of the NATO-sponsored Partnership for Peace initiative in Budapest. Ramil Safarov was imprisoned in Budapest for the murder until he was extradited to Azerbaijan in 2012. To the shock of many, Azerbaijan promoted him and made a hero of the murderer. In reaction, Armenia formally suspended ties with Hungary.  shared it with their friends said that by reading it for the first time, they were able to understand what the Armenian Genocide meant. They usually had knowledge about the Jewish Holocaust, but not about the Armenian one—at least, the younger generation did not know anything about it. The mother of a friend of mine was revolted, and cried, “why are people in Hungary not informed about all of this, and why is this not included in the history classes at the school?” Here we see a Hungarian girl dreaming of bringing knowledge to her people about the historical event of the Armenian Genocide, by translating the Genocide narrative Skylark Farm: When I met Antonia Arslan in 2004 during her book presentation, I decided to let my Hungarian nation learn about this book, and my dream came true within four years. In June 2008, the book was released and presented for the very first time at the Budapest Book Fest. Narrative and translation therefore once more prove themselves valid tools in the raising of awareness about the historical event. Later I had the chance to contact Kinga Júlia Király, the Hungarian translator of the novel. Antonia Arslan’s Skylark Farm was the most shocking translation I’ve ever made, she said. When I got the book from Italy and I started reading it for the first time, I couldn’t even imagine that such a horrible national destiny does exist. After reading one fourth of the novel I had to buy a new armchair, which I still call my “Skylarkfarmchair”: I needed a new position, a new posture for my body in order not to be absorbed by the novel, not to read as a whatsoever fiction, but keep my awareness till the end of it. As I have Armenian origins, too, since my family came to Transylvania in the seventeenth century, the novel had awakened in me, somewhere deep inside, a never felt receptivity toward suffering and misery. And I struggled for good amidst with my shamefacedness which [incapacitated] me in my translation. How should I translate those terrifying events, bring the best close to the reader, what Sempad’s family had endured? How should I repaint the “Armenian blood- flowers” on the walls (Arslan 2006, 118)? Am I allowed to do such things? Is this reasserting, recommitting a Genocide? It was much more than [a] matter of ethics or aesthetics. More than literature, as well. I still remember the deep impact which Nevart’s death in the thunderbolt made on me (Arslan 2006, 175). When I had to read a sequence from the  book for the first time in front of an audience, I [chose] Nevart’s death. But I could not do it. I felt such discomposure, such sorrow, such mourning, that I started to cry. That was too much for me as translating is an intimate act while sharing Genocide, in fact, [. . .] is a reaction. I owe this translation a brand new life, since I became wide open for suffering. Skylark farm – in a sacred sense – had made my life. Further, I also interviewed Hillary Creek, who translated into English a section of Antonia Arslan’s second novel A Road to Smyrna, which has now been entirely translated into Armenian (Arslan 2012): I am a historian (economic and social), she said, with a special interest in the Middle East from 1890 on, as my research has in some part been on petroleum politics in the area. As a social historian I am obviously interested in the life of ordinary people and find a rich source in the literature, drama, art, and music of the period. I researched [the] bare facts, chronological history of the time, movements, and main characters, before starting translating. But I was born into postwar London when the city was in large part rubble, rationing didn’t stop till I was six. The war was still very close, my mother (a teacher) had spent the Blitz finding and taking care of young kids who escaped from evacuations and returned to find nothing. So I had her memories. Then I have many friends who have had to flee from political persecutions and I have long been interested and involved in human rights questions. So if anything it was not one event, but rather a combination of first, second and third hand tales and memories that were my points of reference. Now, some of my personal thoughts about the Genocide novel as an Armenian experience and the Armenian translator of Antonia Arslan’s Genocide narratives. In 2004, when I read Skylark Farm all in one sitting, I could not imagine that three years later I would have the honor of being the Armenian translator of this best-seller. It all began in the fall of 2005, when a Festival of Friendship between Armenia and Italy was organized in Yerevan and there were many events held both on academic (conferences, round tables) and popular (Italian opera or cinema evenings) topics. At that time I was in Armenia participating in a conference at the Academy of Sciences with a paper on Dante’s Armenian translations (Haroutyunian 2006, 2012b). Of course, among the events, I could not miss the presentation of Skylark Farm, which had just been published in Italy and was already proving to be very successful. At the event, the author and the directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani were supposed to be there to present the book and forthcoming film. Antonia suggested that I translate the three most moving episodes of the book so they could be read at the presentation. It was after this that Antonia asked me about going forward with the translation. But the deadlines were very precise. The Armenian translation had to be ready for the release of the film by the Taviani Brothers. There was very little time, and the responsibility was huge. The heroes of the story were talking to me, just as Antonia says in her acknowledgments: I must first thank those who spoke to me: Sempad and Shushanig, Ismene and Isaac, Nazim the beggar, and Yerwant, with his neat Pirandello goatee. And then Azniv and Veron, the great aunts I never knew; funny, tiny Henriette, who spoiled me; Zareh and Rupen, my legendary great uncles. I thank my audacious, whimsical mother, who raised me unleniently; Khayel, my serious, sly father, who worried about everything; my uncle Yetwart, and my cousins Yerwant, Ermanno, and Teresa; my little brother Carlo . . . (Arslan 2006, 271) I was too emotionally involved in the story. I was feeling a kind of duty to make their story available to Armenians. I often skipped lunch. I was so immersed in the book and its characters that I was almost ashamed to take a break to eat while they were walking along the dusty roads of Anatolia, hungry and exhausted, destroyed by deportation. It seemed that they were beckoning me to tell their story because they desperately wanted to be heard. When I go to the episode that tells of the horrific massacre at the Farm, I was completely blocked as it was too hard to switch off emotionally and think about the word order of the sentence or make a choice of adjectives when the plot was describing the murder of the little boys in front of their mother: Garo lies placidly with his handsome smile, holding his little hands over his open belly. Leslie, scurrying on all fours, tries to hide beneath the sideboard sparkling with crystal, but he’s dragged out by his feet and flung against the wall, where his small round head smashes like a ripe coconut, spraying  blood and brain across the delicate floral design. Thus are flowers born from the blood of the Armenian Calvary. (Arslan 2006, 118) After a while, emotionally drained, I decided to skip those passages and return to them once I’d completed the book. I finally managed to keep my promise, finishing the book before the screening of the film, which took place July 10, 2007, at the opening of the Golden Apricot Film Festival in Yerevan (Arslan 2007). In the translation I have maintained the foreign expressions in Turkish, French, and English used by the author in the Italian text, because it was worth reviving those expressive nuances in Armenian, especially taking into account that these terms not only precisely characterized the cultural environment of that generation during the Genocide, but were also a part of the characters’ everyday lives. So I precisely preserved foreign words in transliteration, inserting notes to facilitate comprehension and reading. From Text to Reel: Cinematic Translation of Arslan’s Skylark Farm to the Taviani brothers’ film The Lark Farm There is always the matter of fidelity of the film to the novel, generally expressed as a function of adequacy and acceptability, whereby the former is more or less what we mean by equivalence, and the latter is more or less what we mean by audience believability. For example, many readers usually watch movies based on the books they’ve read and end up being disappointed. Why? Because so many parts of the story are cut out. So we as readers look for mistakes and sometimes disregard whether the movie was well directed, produced, and so on. I think we should never compare them, but rather consider them separately. When a book is translated into a movie, questions inevitably arise. One of the first is to ask about the film genre (documentary, drama, historical narrative, etc.) that the filmmaker has chosen since each film genre creates a different kind of viewing experience for the audience. The famous Italian film directors and screenwriters the Taviani brothers’ Lark Farm is based on a historical novel, so the goal is to awaken curiosity, interest, even engagement in a historical event; the limitations and strengths of a film translation are evident in the selection of passages from the novel, the filmic treatment of those passages, the omission of passages, and so on. The Taviani brothers announced right away that the film would be “liberally” based on Skylark Farm—that is, the plot would be relatively the same but the directors had the right to change things or make additions, and in fact they editorialized and accessorized the film and inserted fictional material in the movie such as love interests and so on. This is quite normal because, even if it originates in a novel, the filmmaker translates her or his perception/translation of the fiction into film. This reflection leads into the relationship of the source (novel) and the target (film) and opens up such questions as what other source modeling material is evident in the film. In fact, the Tavianis have not only cut episodes from the novel but they have also added some. There is an episode in the film that recalls a passage from another Genocide narrative by Alice Tachdjian, Pietre sul cuore (Stones on the heart), published in Italy in 2003. In the book there is a scene where two women are forced to dispose of the child by suffocating him between them as they sit back to back (Tachdjian 2003): We were terrorized by the Turks’ cruelty, writes Tachdjian in her memoir. We understood that they were trying to annihilate us all, but before they found joy in killing the children in front of their mothers, who were going mad throwing themselves from the cliffs. The Turks were opening the wombs of pregnant women with yatağan, they were stabbing children and then drowning [them] in the rivers. They even took [the] clothes from the dead, to resell them afterwards. [. . .] Our two-month-old baby was crying because he was hungry, there was no milk in Hripsimé’s breasts, the grass that she ate on the streets caused terrible stomachache for the child. However the poor creature [was] destined to die of hunger, diarrhea, or by the sword. To avoid being discovered by his cries, our mother and sister suffocated the baby in the middle of their backs, one against the other, without looking at him. He [was] extinguished like a candle . . .12 When the Taviani brothers asked Antonia Arslan to dramatize Skylark Farm, there was also much interest from 12 Tachdjian’s book hasn’t been translated into English yet. We translated this piece of a memoir as a class assignment during my Armenian Genocide course at Fresno State as I wanted my students to experience what Genocide translation meant. Since the memoir was in Italian, the process of translation took place with me providing the initial translation into English, and then working collectively with the students. Hollywood in acquiring the movie rights. But Arslan was aware that in the past the several attempts to produce a Hollywood film about the Armenian Genocide were blocked. She knew that prominent directors and actors throughout the decades had attempted to produce a film based on Franz Werfel’s novel Forty Days of Musa Dagh, but without success.13 Antonia Arslan therefore agreed to the Taviani brothers’ suggestion. The film is a Spanish coproduction and the Spanish actress Paz Vega is a central character in the movie. Even the Spanish translation of the movie Skylark Farm is entitled El Destino di Nunik as she interprets Nunik’s role.14 In fact when the film had just come out some Armenians were concerned by the fact that the filmmaker had inserted a double love story for Nunik with two Turkish officers played by two actors, the Italian actor Alessandro Preziosi and the German Moritz Bleibtreu. In her novel Antonia has only one love story. A change I dislike in the film is Nunik’s second romance with a Turkish soldier, one who is helping lead a caravan of Armenian women to their death in Syria, wrote one of my students at California State University Fresno in his final paper. I feel like Nunik must have a very deep case of Stockholm Syndrome, as she seems to only fall in love with Turkish soldiers. Besides catering to fans of romance movies I can’t understand why this change was made. It almost seems to pander to a Turkish audience by showing a sympathetic Turkish participant in the Genocide, who we’re meant to feel sorry for because he doesn’t really want to be there. Was he added to make any Turk watching feel less guilty? Obviously, the Turkish audience for this movie would be small if not nonexistent, so the addition of this character is puzzling. The two characters are both serving the same purpose as a sympathetic perpetrator and love interest, so it would make a lot more sense to merge them together, from a storytelling perspective. As it is the second Turkish soldier is redundant at best, and raises a lot of unfortunate implications.15 During the “film vs novel” discussion with cinema critic Dr. Artsvi Bakhchinyan from Armenia, he confessed: 13 According to Variety magazine, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh has become “the most on- again and off-again motion picture production in Hollywood history” (Torosyan 2012). 14 This character is Azniv in the book, and unlike the film is not a central character in the volume. 15 An excerpt from the final paper by Suren Oganessian.  Like from any artistic display of the Armenian Genocide, Armenians had great expectations from the Tavianis’ film, and as a general rule these expectations were unjustified. Of course, we should be grateful to the great masters of cinema for being able to bring the pain of our people to the public at large, which was not sufficiently informed of the history of this tragedy. However, in my humble opinion as a film critic, the extremely classical shape, style, and language in which the story was presented was at least half a century late. The same cannot be said about the book. The presented motivations for the film as a tragedy remain almost undiscovered. According to the film, one perceives the false notion that those motivations were purely economic. From historical and psychological points of view, the behavior of the main heroine of the film is not characteristic of an Armenian woman at the beginning of the twentieth century and gives the wrong idea that the Armenian women, like Nunik, were throwing themselves into the arms of the Turks. In fact, the opposite occurred. The fictional part of the film suffers due to the dialogues that are not characteristic of everyday home speech. Perhaps the film’s small budget caused some “artistisms” inappropriate to present-day cinematography (for example, in the deportation scene, the clothes the deportees are wearing are not convincing). From my perspective, the film works especially well for an audience with little or no knowledge about the Armenian Genocide. By contrast, Armenians, more aware of the Genocide, have more mixed sensations, either of gratitude towards the filmmakers or of disappointment due to the dubious accuracy of some aspects, as we saw above. A completely unaware person however would begin to learn about the historical phenomenon of the Armenian Genocide. The filmmakers managed to put together an excellent cast. They stated in one of their interviews that the actors were not only involved professionally but also emotionally. According to the directors, after watching the whole film for the first time the Turkish-born Greek–Jewish actor Tchéky Karyo burst into tears and when he calmed down he said that he had not only watched the tragedy that they had played, but he had also seen his Jewish uncle and grandfather. So in the imagination of the actor Karyo the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust all of a sudden were superimposed.16 16 Il genocidio dimenticato: intervista ai Fratelli Taviani [Parte 1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pnyzq4kROA.  When we ask about the effect of a film, we are dealing with the rhetorical and artistic purposes of the film—that is, we are probing into the film’s skopos or purpose with regard to the audience. A novel would have similar artistic and rhetorical purposes, but executed along different lines since the experience of reading a novel is stretched out over several hours if not days while the experience of viewing a film is usually contained in under two hours. And this is a very important point as movies usually reach an even larger audience, and sometimes viewing a massacre with your own eyes might prove more powerful than reading about it. The grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of film create meaning in their own right but also invite the viewers to make meaning out of the viewing experience. Film has the potential to be an excellent tool in raising awareness about a historical event in less than two hours to an audience of hundreds of thousands.17 When in 2006 the Taviani brothers were shooting the film, their intention was to raise awareness about the Armenian Genocide and show the world the need to stop such crimes against humanity from reoccurring. Their desire also was to see their movie circulating in the schools. Today their goal has been fulfilled as the film is shown in many Italian schools mainly to eighth-graders who are learning about World War I and students doing their last year of high school. This film has two major advantages: it stimulates reflection on a story known only by a few, in part because few film makers have brought this Genocide onto the screens before. Secondly, this film shows that good and evil are not at all on one side or the other. Conclusion In his Les Lieux de Mémoire, Nora asserts that In fact, memory has never known more than two forms of legitimacy: historical and literary. These have run parallel to each other but until now always separately. At present, the boundary between the two is blurring; following closely upon the successive deaths of memory–history and memory–fiction, a new kind of history has been born, which owes its 17For audiovisual translation, among others see Zatlin 2005; Díaz-Cintas 2009; Cronin 2009; and the collection of essays by Agost, Orero, and di Giovanni 2012.  prestige and legitimacy to the new relation it maintains to the past [. . .] History has become the deep reference of a period that has been wrenched from its depths, a realistic novel in a period in which there are no real novels. Memory has been promoted to the center of history: such is the spectacular bereavement of literature. (Nora 1989, 24) In the novel, by reconstructing her family history Arslan is merging both historical research and the imagination from a collective memory. Historical research and imagination that have both been brought together by a collective memory are very important even independently, and the merging of them all is quite fascinating, especially with regards to the collective. And the consequence of the novel is a sort of catharsis for Arslan and her family as she becomes both receptacle and protector. Here we can also call into question the very genre of art and literature, depending on the author’s intention. For example, “art for art’s sake” or art for a social cause, or testimony for catharsis. Literature and testimony are different, and then there is the literature of testimony, which is another genre altogether. Why is the “literature of testimony” an actual genre? And, further, even if it is not exactly Arslan’s testimony but a retelling of a retelling, Arslan’s text is a literature of testimony. Collecting personal and public memories affords coherence and integrity to interrupted stories that have been fragmented or compromised by loss, dislocation, and division. In our case, the journey into Arslan’s family’s past transcends the silence and fills the gaps in a personal history. Family history, personal history, and national history are, in fact, interrelated and at times one. Finally, in Skylark Farm, through the research of original documents and acts of postmemory, the author unites her present to the lost world of her family, and in this way strengthens her roots and anchors her identity. With the memory what is past returns to be actual. The memory is not only an act of remembering, but it can become a living entity, can become a vibrant emotion. Antonia Arslan’s Genocide narrative with its thirty-six reprints in Italy alone, where the Armenian community only has 2,000 members, has sold over 500,000 copies to an Italian readership for the most part previously unaware of the Armenian Genocide. However, it is through the power of translation into fifteen languages that Skylark Farm has surpassed the borders of Italy, taking the knowledge of the Armenian Genocide throughout the globe and thereby contributing to its “afterlife”—to use the word of Walter Benjamin (Benjamin 1999)—as well as its cinematic rendering to a global audience. References Aftandilian, Gregory (2009), “World War II as an Enhancer of Armenian- American Second Generation Identity,” JSAS 18:2, 33–54. Agost, Rosa, Pilar Orero, and Elena di Giovanni. 2012. Multidisciplinarity in Audiovisual Translation. Alicante: University of Alicante Press. Alù, Giorgia. 2009. “Sulle tracce del passato: memoria e frammentazione familiare in Vita di Melania Mazzucco e La masseria delle allodole di Antonia Arslan.” In Tempo e memoria nella lingua e nella letteratura italiana. Vol. III: Narrativa del Novecento e degli anni Duemila, edited by Bastiaensen et al., 363–374. Brussels: Associazione Internazionale Professori d’Italiano. Arslan, Antonia. 2004. La masseria delle allodole. Milan: Rizzoli. ———. 2006. Skylark Farm. Translated by Geoffrey Brock. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 2007. Artuytneri agarake (Skylark Farm). Second edition 2012. Edited by Sahak Partev. Translated by Sona Haroutyunian. Yerevan: Sahak Partev. ———. 2008. Pacsirtavár. Translated by Kinga Júlia Király. Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureș: Mentor Kiadó. ———. 2009. La strada di Smirne. Milan: Rizzoli. ———. 2012. Il libro di Mush. Milan: Skira. ———. (2015). Il rumore delle perle di legno. Milan: Rizzoli. ———. (2016). Lettera a una ragazza in Turchia. Milan: Rizzoli. Arslan, Antonia, Laura Pisanello, and Avedis Ohanian. 2001. Hushèr: la memoria. Voci italiane di sopravvissuti armeni. Milan: Guerini e Associati. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. “The Task of Translator: An introduction to the translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens.” Translated by Harry Zohn. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge. Brodzki, Bella. 2007. Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cronin, Michael. 2009. Translation goes to the Movies. Abingdon: Routledge. Dadrian, Vahakn N. 2003. Storia del genocidio armeno. Conflitti nazionali dai Balcani al Caucaso. Edited by Antonia Arsland and Boghos Levon Zekiyan and translated by Alessandra Flores d’Arcais. Milan: Guerini e Associati. Dédéyan, Gérard, ed. 2002. Soria degli armeni. Edited by Antonia Arslan and Boghos Levon Zekiyan. Milan: Guerini e Associati. Original French edition Histoire du peuple arménien. Edited by Gérard Dédéyan. Toulouse: Éditions Privat, 1982. Díaz-Cintas, Jorge. (2009). New Trends in Audiovisual Translation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Grass, Günter. 2008. Peeling the Onion. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Haroutyunian, Sona. 2006. “La Commedia dantesca in armeno.” In IX Rassegna armenisti italiani, 20–26. Venice: Padus-Araxes. Accessed February 16, 2017. PDF available at http://www.24grammata.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/04/Armenisti-Italiani-24grammata.com_.pdf. ———. 2012a. “Interview with world famous novelist Antonia Arslan.” PDF available at book platform: your gateway to book culture in Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine. Accessed February 16, 2017. http://www.bookplatform.org/images/activities/417/docs/interviewantoniaar slanen.pdf. ———. 2012b. “‘The Homer of Modern Times’: The Reception and Translation of Dante in the Armenian World.” In Like doves summoned by desire: Dante’s New Life in 20th Century Literature and Cinema. Essays in memory of Amilcare Iannucci, edited by Massimo Ciavolella and Gianluca Rizzo, 89–109. New York: Agincourt Press. Accessed February 16, 2017. https://www.academia.edu/18710985/_The_Homer_of_Modern_Times_the _Reception_and_Translation_of_Dante_in_the_Armenian_World. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations (26), special issue Memory and Counter-Memory, 7–24. doi:10.2307/2928520. Muxel, Anne. 1996. Individu et mémoire familiale. Paris: Nathan. Mutafian, Claude. 2001. Metz Yeghérn: Breve storia del genocidio degli armeni. Translated and edited by Antonia Arslan. Milan: Guerini e Associati. Peroomian, Rubina. 2012. The Armenian Genocide in Literature: Perceptions of Those Who Lived through the Years of Calamity. Yerevan: The Armenian Genocide Museum–Institute. Rushdie, Salman. 1992. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Vintage Books. Sherman, Daniel J. 1999. The Construction of Memory in Interwar France. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Tachdjian, Alice. 2003. Pietre sul cuore. Milan: Sperling & Kupfer Editori. Taviani, Paolo, and Vittorio Taviani, directors. 2007. La masseria delle allodole. Released in English as The Lark Farm (2007). Ager 3, France 2 cinéma, Flach Film et al. Torosyan, Lilly. 2012. “New Documentary on ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’ and Hollywood.” The Armenian Weekly, October 5. Accessed February 16, 2017. www.armenianweekly.com/2012/10/05/new-documentary-on-the- forty-days-of-musa-dagh-and-hollywood/. Varujan, Daniel. 1992. Il canto del pane. Translated by Antonia Arslan. Milan: Guerrini e Associati. ———. 1995. Mari di grano e altre poesie armene. Translated by Antonia Arslan. Paoline. Zatlin, Phyllis. 2005. Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation. Buffalo: Multilingual Matters. teaches Armenian language and literature at the Università degli Studi di Venezia—Ca’ Foscari (Venice, Italy). She received her first PhD in philology and translation (Yerevan State University) and her second in linguistics (Università degli Studi di Venezia—Ca’ Foscari). She has been visiting professor at the Nida School of Translation Studies, Yerevan State University, California State University Fresno, and City University of New York. She has authored many scholarly papers and translated books, including Antonia Arslan’s bestsellers. In her recent monograph The Theme of the Armenian Genocide in the Italian Literature she metaphorically analyses Genocide literature as “translation of trauma.” 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15536

Siri Nergaard: Marianne, I would like to start by asking you to introduce yourself, to tell us how you started to work on memory, and how you developed the idea of postmemory. Marianne Hirsch: I was very late coming to questions of memory. I really started to think about it in the late 1980s which was, I guess, the beginning of Memory Studies and Holocaust Studies, when it became a field of inquiry. But actually, thinking back, my Master’s thesis in 1970 was already on memory. It was a thesis in Comparative Literature and it was on Nabokov’s Lolita and Musil’s novella Tonka, and it was, in each case, about the protagonist’s memory of a lost love. So it is in some ways an old topic, and also a much newer and different one, though it did not concern me for a very long time, because I was actually interested in the new. The new novel, the new wave, postmodernism and the beginnings of second-wave feminism, and the issue about how to remake the world: the past was very far from my consciousness for over a decade. If someone had told me in the ’70s that I would be working on memory, and particularly my family history and the history of my parents during the Second World War, I would have said, “who’s interested in that?” and “why would I be interested in that?” When I did come to the study of memory, I think that it was actually through my work in feminism which was very much about analyzing, contesting, critiquing the ethos of family, of traditional family structures. I wrote a book on mothers and daughters in literature that then led me to genealogies: the story of genealogies that of course also leads to memory. This trajectory is not just about my own formation, it’s really about my generation where actually, strangely, a number of people working in feminism and women’s literature and feminist theory ended up working on issues of memory. I see a lot of threads of continuity between these fields and how we all suddenly, it seemed, moved from one interest to another. Not that we left behind the questions of gender. On the contrary, they’re still infused in the work. It’s a work that has a similar commitment to tell untold stories, to ensure that stories of suffering and catastrophe aren’t forgotten—those kinds of commitments. So, this is how I see the relationship. Cristina Demaria: I have a very similar itinerary. This is also how I started moving toward memory. Marianne Hirsch: . . . How do you explain the continuities? Cristina Demaria: . . . In a very similar way to the one you said: to give voice to untold stories, or narratives that can be told differently. And as you said before, in the 1970s the tendency of critical theory was oriented towards the new and the future. Nowadays memory is often seen in connection to the future; memory of course is written in the present to rewrite the past, but also for a future. So, the very role of memory has changed very much, but to me its connection to gender studies is still very important. I remember that the first essay I read of yours is the one on Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah and the women. Marianne Hirsch: . . . that’s really the beginning of my getting involved in that field, that was the very beginning. . . Cristina Demaria: Do you agree with those who say that the concept of memory became important as a category in order to bring history and materiality back into theory? Marianne Hirsch: Yes, I agree though it may not be the only explanation. In fact, materiality and bodies didn’t really disappear: to say that deconstruction was completely antimaterial is not really true. But I think people saw it as the linguistic turn and, so, saw that not only materiality was missing but also history, in a sense. So, then we had the new historicism that was also about material objects, and memory studies kind of grew up around the same time. I think that there are many other reasons for the appeal of memory, one of them, the attractiveness of the interdisciplinarity of this field, that anthropologists, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and psychoanalysts, literary and visual culture theorists could actually work together. That didn’t really happen for me in any other context as vibrantly as around questions about memory. Siri Nergaard: And also translation studies, later on, can be, in many ways, connected to memory. Bella Brodzki, with her book has demonstrated how strongly connected these two themes are. In regards to this interdisciplinary connection I would like you to develop what you just told us about your starting your research on memory through Shoah, a film in which you noticed the absence of women, but where the women were translators. Marianne Hirsch: Exactly, Shoah shows a particular relation to the Holocaust, which was a very central site of the development of memory studies. Shoah really shows how central translation is to the whole, I mean, first of all to the experience of the Holocaust and its aftermath, and then to the representation and the study of it. Many films wouldn’t do it that way, but because Lanzmann decided to take time to show the process of translation and to foreground it, I think he points to something that’s actually very much a part of the field, which is that, a lot of people who lived through that historical moment, may not have had a primary language but lived their daily lives, at home, in the ghettos and camps, and in the aftermath, in and through translation. You asked me earlier, “what's your first language?” and I said “German,” but neither my parents nor I lived in a German- speaking country, except for one year in Vienna, so we were always minority speakers of a language that we claimed as ours, but that was actually denied us as Jews. So, it’s a very complicated relationship to a first language, but many survivors of the Holocaust, may not have had a first language at all. Many people were young and they might have grown up speaking Yiddish in school and then Polish on the street, they were deported to a camp where they learned German, and later they ended up in a DP camp in Italy, and in the end they went to Israel or the United States. When you listen to or watch their testimonies, they are most often speaking a “foreign” language. What is the status of those testimonies? In the study of memory, testimony, and witness in the first person is really important, but the witness’s relation to the language she speaks is very often mediated by the multilingualism in which she lived and lives. Siri Nergaard: Yes, and when you then have the person to whom the memory is transmitted, the generation of postmemory, further languages are involved. As you told us, you spoke German with your mother, but the language you are writing in is English, so you are really translating these memories again, for I don’t know, the third, fourth, or fifth time. Marianne Hirsch: Well, you know, it’s very complicated and, I’m always wondering, what am I doing to these stories, to their authenticity. The book that Leo Spitzer and I wrote on the community that my family grew up in, Czernowitz, Ghosts of Home, was based on a lot of interviews, a lot of readings and documents and literature as well, but a lot of interviews. We interviewed people in German, we interviewed them in English, we interviewed them in Romanian, you know, whatever they wanted to speak. But the book is in English, so most of the quotes we used had not only to be edited but also translated. We also used my father’s memoir quite extensively. He wanted to write it in English because he wanted to write it for his grandsons. His English was a language acquired very late in life, and the experiences he wrote about were in German and Romanian. So, his words are already a process of translation, of multiple translations. I think these language issues are at the core of memory studies. Siri Nergaard: There is also the time of translation in the metaphorical and literal way. Marianne Hirsch: It is time, but it’s also the mediation of the translator, especially significant if the translator is the child of the person and wants to hear certain things, then it’s more than just a professional translation, right? There’s a kind of investment that’s part of what I talk about as postmemory; the personal investments and the desires, and the curiosities of the second generation. Then, you get the parents’ words but you have to translate them; how do you trust that your investments aren’t somehow also structuring the translation? Siri Nergaard: As I see it from a translation point of view again, what you are telling here about the transmission and mediation of a memory, through language, the personal involvement by the translator, her investments, are assuming in a way what I see as the core aspects of what translation is about. In the translation of the other’s memory you can find a kind of archetype of what translation really is. Translation always implies change because of personal and cultural investments giving memory a new nature, a new identity of that memory since you have put it into another context and another language. Marianne Hirsch: Yes, I think that’s true. And then, of course, a lot of these stories are diaspora stories with memories of migration and refugeehood that are inherent as well. There, of course, you have multiple translations, cultural translations, and linguistic [translations] as well. Siri Nergaard: Could you tell us how you define and how you developed this concept that has been so helpful and fruitful for us—the concept of postmemory? Cristina Demaria: And together with that, let us include the question Bella Brodzki wanted to ask you: Have there been applications or appropriations—translations into new and different contexts—of your very generative term “postmemory” that have surprised or perhaps even enlightened you in ways you hadn’t anticipated or envisioned? Marianne Hirsch: Well, it started as a very personal need for a term, not just for me but also for a number of colleagues who met at feminist conferences in the 1980s. Informally, at lunch or breakfast we started talking about our family history and then it turned out that we had similar family histories, and similar symptoms and syndromes that came from them. It was the moment when important texts like Art Spielgeman’s Maus and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, monuments about memory were starting to come out. We realized that we are the inheritors of these histories but we hadn’t really thought about what that meant. For me it was really reading Maus and thinking about it and talking to people like Bella, who had actually gone through similar family experiences. We all felt like our parents’ memories of their youth were overshadowing our own memories of our childhoods. It was a really powerful sensation that demanded a term that was like memory but it wasn’t actually memory. So, that’s where the idea actually came from, so it was quite personal and it was rooted in this history of inherited histories. But of course this is part of a much larger story. Just yesterday, we had a discussion with the filmmaker Laurent Bécue- Renard who made the film Of Men and War, based on interviews with traumatized veterans of the Iraq War in a treatment program in California. He said that the reason he made this film, and his previous film about Bosnian widows called Tired of War, is because he felt like he needed to understand his own grandparents. His two grandfathers fought in the First World War; he never met them, but he wanted to understand how these very young men went into trench warfare, came back, started a family of which he is the product. The widows, wives, grandmothers whom he met lived with an unspoken history. As he said, “aren’t we all the inheritors of the wars of the twentieth century?” If this is postmemory, it is so in the sense not even of stories, it’s really about the affects and the behaviors and the kinds of. . . Cristina Demaria: As you said, “products.” Marianne Hirsch: . . . Yes, the products, it’s really in the DNA that we have inherited, we are all the products of that. We all live with those legacies. Laurent Bécue-Renard is trying to understand how that shapes masculinity and femininity and the culture, and how these histories are transmitted even if they’re not really told. And that really kind of subsumed what I wanted to do with that term. It was fascinating that he’s third generation and he didn’t talk about his parents in France during the Second World War, but about his grandfathers. When he was interviewing the veterans of Iraq who were, probably, twenty years younger than he is, it was as their grandson, in a sense. This is something I didn’t quite understand in the beginning—that the temporal implications [. . .] are so complex that history stops being linear and is somehow simultaneous rather than genealogical. So, something else I learned is that although I never saw postmemory as a strictly biological, biographical, or familial structure, for some the literal connections are supremely important. I saw it more as a generational structure and I think that memory is always mediated through stories, through narratives, through images, through media. Even when it’s within the family, it’s still mediated. So, I was always very insistent on that, but then people who are children or grandchildren of survivors or actors within certain histories, wanted to preserve a special place for that literal relationship. In my book on postmemory, I tried to make space for them by distinguishing between familial and affiliative postmemory. At first it surprised me that people felt very protective of that space which is a position I’m not always that sympathetic to, because it feels like identity politics to me, or some sort of authenticity that I’ve always been suspicious of. The other thing that happened in the time that I’ve been working on postmemory is that a lot of interesting work in queer theory that complicates linearity, linear histories emerged. A critique that complicates the idea of genealogy and that looks at alternative kinds of family structures. And so I felt like my work was, in some ways, already doing that, even though it looked like it was about family, it wasn’t really, it was about a contestation about a kind of traditional family structure. Those are things that surprised me because I felt like there were some conversations that I didn’t quite realize I would be in but, I ended up in. Cristina Demaria: I was thinking of this very idea of affiliation and the ways in which different forms of commemoration of post dictatorship have developed in Latin America, very much linked memory is preserved, as in the movements of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo: the bearer of a certain memory is legitimized as such through a family connection. But there is a tendency now in Argentinean Memory Studies to go towards a more affiliative idea of memory and postmemory, since the very idea of family in a Latin culture can be also very much of a problem; it can be very traditional and has been used to support the dictatorship: God, the traditional family, and the country. . . Marianne Hirsch: Well it’s fascinating in Argentina because of course, that’s where family have DNA tests actually, so that a very literal, biological definition of identity has a political impact unlike many other places. Each context has its own politics and I think that’s what’s so interesting about working transnationally as you do and as I have. It is actually, if I can say it in more metaphorical terms, the untranslatabilities between these contexts: in any other context, if you wanted to do a DNA test to find out if you’re really the daughter of this person who’s already handed down to you all of these histories, you might think that that was a kind of identity politics, but, in Argentina it’s actually really important, because the people raising you could be the perpetrators of the crimes against your biological parents. Cristina Demaria: In the same context there are different layers. This idea of limiting the “property” of memory to the biological family, and to the associations of direct victims had stopped the more affiliative and cultural ways of elaborating the past. But now it is changing. I would like to move to your work within Women Creating Change, where there are scholars but also artists and performers. How do you work together, do you translate? And what happens when you go to a place like Istanbul, as you recently did, where you confront, different cultures, a very particular past and a troubled present. . . Marianne Hirsch: The larger project is called Women Creating Change but the working group within that that some of us have started, is called Women Mobilizing Memory and it really has to do with what you said before: how can memory be mobilized for to the idea of family transmission. Think of Argentina and how change in the future? Rather than being weighted down by a past that you can never get over. The trauma paradigm that came out of this wonderfully rich theoretical work of the 1990s is very much about keeping the wounds open and understanding the unspeakability of certain crimes, the kind of crushing of the human and of language through acts of persecution and genocide and the destruction of a culture. That’s been a very powerful paradigm in the study of memory. Our thought in working more comparatively and transnationally was to look at whether the practices of memory look the same in different places. One of the key questions is how can memory become activist and how can it become more future-oriented? How can the past be transmitted, how can we make sure that certain histories aren’t forgotten… Cristina Demaria: Not just to be “preserved,” but as living memories… Marianne Hirsch: Right, and not for monumentalization in some kind of a museum, but for change. That’s where the feminist angle is coming in. To do that work, we really thought it would be interesting not just to have an interdisciplinary academic group but to work together with practictioners—artists, activists, curators, museologists. . . and to see what kind of collaboration would emerge from that. We are working together with the Hemispheric Institute on Performance and Politics: Performance Studies is already the field that takes the kind of embodied nature of memory very much into account. In those conferences, in the Encuentros of the Hemispheric Institute, we’ve had working groups in which we talked about mobilizing memory, but we also always talked about embodiment. It’s really interesting to have academic conversations in a room with artists, dancers, theater practitioners, visual artists, and scholars. Now, I think that question about embodiment and how memory functions in the body is a very different question for a dancer than it is for an academic like me who’s going to write about it. That’s also a process of translation when you think about it, it’s really understanding the multidimensionality of knowledge. When we have visual artists in the group, they’re translating our ideas into a visual work and I feel that we could use that work to think with. As literary critics we do that anyway with the texts that we read, but the multiple texts are very interesting. And, then, you have the embodied practices of memory, like the walk of the mothers on Thursdays in Buenos Aires, or the walk of the Saturday Mothers in Istanbul; similar strategies, very different kind of impact, politically different moments in the histories of these mothers–activists. These practices are a kind of performance, and its cultural impact then becomes a way through which ideas about memory and memory practices can be developed. I find these multidimensional conversations really helpful. So far, we’ve worked in a triangular structure with Chile, Turkey, and the US but people in the group may be working on other sites as well, so it’s more about the conceptual connections than just about the sites. Often we think we understand something and we really don’t. So I think, in terms of translation, one of the things we decided from the very beginning is that we should just assume that we don’t understand. We shouldn’t just assume that things can be easily translated. For example, when the group was in Chile, we went to the Museo de la Memoria, which is a museum commemorating the coup against Allende and the crimes of the dictatorship of Pinochet. The narrative of the museum starts on September 11, 1973—that is, the day of the Golpe. Where’s the background? How are people supposed to understand how this happened? Isn’t there a prehistory? To us from the US, it seemed flawed as a museological choice. But our Chilean partners responded, “here in Chile, when you talk about the background, that's the right-wing thing to do,” because the right said the reason Allende was toppled was because he was failing, and there were strikes because of his bad government. . . The progressive history starts on the day and its aftermath. This is the kind of untranslatability that I think is at the core of this kind of work which I don’t even want to call comparative work anymore, because it implies that you can compare things, so I’m trying to talk about “connective” histories; we provide the connections but often, they’re not easily connectable. We have to start with, “maybe we don't understand,” rather than walking into a situation assuming you know how it should be done, because it’s different in different contexts. Siri Nergaard: It’s very interesting what you are saying about untranslatability and that you don’t want to use the comparative concept. . . Marianne: I mean, I was in comparative literature so you can imagine it’s not so easy for me to say that. . . Siri Nergaard: I understand. I am saying this also because recently there has been a sort of shift in translation studies towards a stronger attention towards untranslatability, an aspect that has been somehow neglected. We have been so focused on translatability, and recognizing it everywhere, that we have almost forgotten that untranslatability exists. Untranslatables exist: as you said, sometimes universes are uncomparable because they are untranslatable, but we can create the connections. Marianne Hirsch: In the conference that we had in Turkey, which was about mobilizing memory for change, there was a really interesting talk by the anthropologist Leyla Nezi who interviewed Kurdish youth and Turkish young people, about the relationship between the two cultures. She said, “in these interviews, nobody meets anybody else,” because for the Turkish young people, the important moments of their lives are ahead of them, but for the Kurdish young people, the important things have already happened for them in the losses that preceded their birth. They live in the same country, but they’re not in the same time zone. I think that’s a really interesting idea of the nonmeeting. How might their lost past be turned toward the future as well? What will make these histories translatable to each other? What kinds of solidarity might be forged between them? And what can we learn from each other’s experiences of memory and activism? These are some of the questions that I’ve been thinking about and translation is at their core. Thank you for giving me a chance to think with you about this. Cristina Demaria and Siri Nergaard: Thank you very much. writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in a global perspective. Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012); Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010), coauthored with Leo Spitzer; and Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (2011), coedited with Nancy K. Miller. Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She is one of the founders of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. She is a former President of the Modern Language Association of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15747

Introduction Sherry Simon This special issue explores eight spaces of translation—geographical sites, urban spaces, and architectural structures—whose cultural meanings are shaped through language interactions and transfer. Each study confirms the idea that places are created through itineraries and narratives, wanderings and stories, which evolve over time. Situated in the complex cityscapes of Itae- won, Lagos, Lviv, Montreal, Talinn, Renaissance Florence, Marseille, and the historically rich interzone of Gibraltar, these places illustrate the formative powers of translation in defining sensory experience and memory. The idea of space and place receives diverse interpretations in these essays—contributing to a field of inquiry which is rapidly evolving. Space is not understood as a simple container where translation takes place, but rather as a site where production and interpretation are intermingled, where translations occur and where identity is reinterpreted. Spaces are indicators of regimes of translation, of the forces that converge to allow or impede the transfer of languages and memories. From the architectural structure of a san- itary station to the dialogue between Gibraltar and Tangier, from the pages of novels to bronze statues, from multilingual markets to the studies where scholars are bent over treatises on Kabbalistic thought—these diverse spaces explode the notion of the “where” of translation. *** In her reading of the Sanitary Station of Marseille, Simona Bonelli uses the lens of translation and memory to evoke a place of multiple pasts— linked to the history of Marseille in its function as a place of migration and passage. Originally designed as a medical checkpoint, a place for screening mi- grants, then long abandoned, it has now become a museum which neverthe- less maintains traces of its previous functions. Citing Barthes, Bonelli shows that architectural spaces can be read as chapters of a complex text, continually retranslated. Following the Station in its transformations over the years, she defines it as a palimpsest representing “a place of exile, of displacement, a metaphorical place that contains a plurality of meanings, errant trajectories, isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 11  and that lends itself to multiple interpretations.” Initially born as a “boundary area” because of its function of containment and delimitation, the Sanitary Station has eventually “swollen,” through a series of metamorphoses, into a threshold—a place caught up in a tension of the present. This passage from boundary to threshold is enabled by a history of translation. *** Hunam Yun’s textured analysis of the district of Itaewon, in Seoul, South Korea, emphasizes the rich history of twists and turns that has marked this zone. This is a history which is not, however, apparent in the capsule “translations” found in tourist guides. As an area which has seen a strong mil- itary presence across the centuries, most recently for stationing the Japanese army during the colonial period and subsequently the American army, as a place now attracting many migrants, and also as a place strongly associated with sexuality and sex workers, Itaewon has been the site of cultural amalga- mation and conflict. As Yun shows, the various translations of the name of Itaewon itself—foreigners’ village, village for being pregnant with a foreign- er’s child, village for pear trees—show that the city as a “a culture-generator” (Lotman) cannot be translated into one fixed image. Itaewon has been a place for travelers and trading, a space of trauma caused by the conflictual history of Korea, a foreigners’ village, a foreign land within the country, a colonized space, a space of freedom and resistance, a window onto Western culture, a space for cultural translation . . . Yun contrasts the selective translations and commodifications of the city with the richness of its reality and history. As a culture-generator, a city deserves a more adequate translation. *** Elena Murphy draws a portrait of the multilingual city of Lagos through readings of Nigerian authors who portray the different sounds and accents of one of Nigeria’s most diverse and vibrant cities. The multilingual texts of Sefi Atta, a leading voice in what has come to be known as “The Third Generation of Nigerian Writers,” replicate the language negotiations of the city. Languages such as Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, as well as Nigerian English and Nigerian Pidgin, flow through Atta’s novels, just as they flow through the city. Particularly interesting is the diversity of cultural forms and spaces which express this plurality—types of music such as afrobeat or highlife music, dance, film, as well as the spaces of Lagos’s streets and markets. Translation is present in varied forms, aiding in the creation of new hybrid linguistic forms and new semantic associations, typical features of interaction in urban areas. 12 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  The Straits of Gibraltar, with its twin cities of Gibraltar and Tang- ier, stand as emblematic spaces of translation—but also as spaces whose hy- bridities force a rethinking of translation itself. To negotiate across hybrid spaces is to concentrate on the border experience as generating a powerful political vision, working against binaries, against inside and outside. In such zones, translation is a foundational activity, an activity of cultural creation. África Vidal and Juan Jesús Zaro provide a portrait of the Strait of Gibraltar as a natural border between two continents (Africa and Europe), between two countries (Morocco and Spain), and between two cities (Gibraltar, an overseas territory of the United Kingdom, and Ceuta, a Spanish city with its own statute of autonomous government), and offer nuanced descriptions of the cultural histories of those spaces as they have been in interaction with one another. Governed as one territory by the Romans and also during the eight centuries of Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, the Straits then be- come an indication of division across empires. The waters of the Strait carry “a layered text of narratives of belonging and exclusion.” Anastasiya Lyubas reads the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv as a space comprised of buildings, communities, maps, memories, and languages spo- ken, written, and read—a tactile, textile, and textual fabric. The “real” city, she argues, cannot be experienced without linguistic mediation. Inviting the read- er to stroll the city, stopping at monuments and buildings, consulting a map drawn by authors Igor Klekh, Yuri Andrukhovych, and Natalka Sniadanko, she gives the widest meaning to translation as a key to the multifaceted ele- ments which define city life. The city, thus, becomes a construct of individual and collective readings. The essay includes references to the events of 2013– 2014 in Ukraine that have problematized even further unresolved issues of identity, politics of memory, and belonging. With an eye attentive to shifts in the role of language in the city, Lyubas shows how the aural dimensions of the spoken languages of yesterday have become visual places, traces. Yesterday’s commerce has become trade in cultural meanings and in competing claims to the city. The city’s architecture, its history, literary scene, and projections of the future are read as a “text” offering insights into urban experience and the ways it is mediated and interpreted. *** Ceri Morgan’s reading of Montreal focuses on two novels from the 1960s which challenge orthodox versions of the language situation in the city. In Yvette Naubert’s La Dormeuse éveillée (1965) and Claire Mondat’s Poupée (1963), active and passive linguistic translations become signposts for a par- ticular kind of modernity, dramatizing embodied everyday translation prac- isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 13  tices occurring in places of work, leisure, and consumption, like the café and department store. The texts are striking for their choice of settings and their sometimes seemingly relaxed mediation of French and English interactions at a time when many examples of le roman montréalais are highlighting clash- es between these. They prefigure, in fact, many of the everyday interactions between French and English in contemporary Montreal. As such, they offer important pointers as to the possibilities of negotiating differences. Gender is highlighted in the analysis, the body of the protagonist navigating between past and present gender conventions and mappings of Montreal’s majority languages, as well as across the very different histories of the protagonists (the French-Canadian maid, the family of Holocaust survivors). Translation be- comes a way of being in the world, of overcoming trauma. In many respects, Naubert’s and Mondat’s protagonists can be seen as “languagers”—that is, “people [. . .] who engage with the world-in-action, who move in the world in a way that allows the risk of stepping out of one’s habitual ways of speak- ing and attempt to develop different, more relational ways of interacting with the people and phenomena that one encounters in everyday life” (Phipps 2011, 365). Translation facilitates a mobility associated with feminine asser- tion; translation allows escapes from, or challenges to, the social constraints of the past. Naubert’s and Mondat’s heroines inhabit a kind of messy middle in their employing of the “tactics” as “always [. . .] partial, provisional and broken” (Phipps 2011, 375). Moving inside and outside the city, they embody a translation practice beyond representation and vital to a “relational” being in the world. *** Federico Bellentani considers the case of the relocation of the Bronze Soldier of Talinn as a practice of cultural reinvention. Here translation takes on its medieval spatial meaning as the physical transfer of a sacred body. This paper proposed an analysis of the marginalization, the removal, and the relo- cation of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn. Employing the vocabulary of semi- otics, looking at monument as text, Bellentani argues that the removal cannot be interpreted through the clashing interpretations of Ethnic-Estonians and Russian speakers. Rather, the Bronze Soldier embodied an array of multifacet- ed interpretations and the process of its relocation elicited different emotional reactions. Its relocation two kilometers outside the center of the city had both spatial and ideological implications: it was an official attempt to displace its meanings toward a peripheral area of both Tallinn and Estonian culture as such—that is, to translate them into the context of contemporary European Estonia. 14 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  The final essay by Laurent Lamy tells the fascinating story of a transla- tional movement whose center was Renaissance Florence. The paradigm shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe, he argues, was in part possible be- cause of the combination of mystical and rational thought which emerged in the early Renaissance—largely through the translations of one Flavius Mithri- dates, born Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada (ca. 1445–1489), a colorful figure who was a Jewish convert to Christianity. From 1485 to 1487, he labored by the side of Pico della Mirandola, translating Kabbalistic literature. The col- laboration between the two scholars was one of the most fertile translation ventures in the history of ideas in the West; it provided the European intellec- tual elite with a reservoir of ideas and symbolic patterns that found resonance in provinces of thought “located many leagues from their country of origin.” The introduction of Persian and Chaldean solar theologies, and the concept of a plurality of worlds presented through the various perspectives offered by cosmological speculations of the Jewish Kabbalah, had a large impact on the evolving ideas of the intellectual elite of the Quattrocento. The translation of a critical mass of Kabbalistic and Arabian astronomical treatises—the begin- nings of which far exceeded the translations produced under the enlightened caliphate of Bagdad between the ninth and twelfth centuries—established, in a very short time span, a fertile interplay between sapiential traditions of an- cient times and embryonic ideas of modern science. Florence was, for several decades, the epicenter of this heightened activity around translation, which opened up a fault line that shook the geocentric status quo. isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 15 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15748

Marseilles’ Sanitary Station: morphologies of displacement between memory and desire Simona Elena Bonelli [email protected] <Abstract> The former “Sanitary Station” of Marseille was built in 1948 by the architect Fernand Pouillon, its history closely linked to the history of the Phocaean city. The main entry and departure point for travelers and immigrants arriving by the sea, it was aban- doned for forty years and was almost destroyed in 2009. In 2013, it was transformed into the museum Regards de Provence, but still keeps the memory of its past: the “steam room” (part of this quarantine internment system) is a permanent installation and is part of a section called “Memories of the Sanitary Station.” Migrants from all over the world arriving in Marseille were “displaced” here to go through disinfection, screening, and a vaccination process in a bid to fight the city’s ever-present threat of epidemics. This was therefore a multilingual context, but also a place in which bodies were forced to undergo a transformation. Somehow, these people, like a text under the eyes of a translator, were carefully examined before being allowed access to a new space, a new context. The building itself is a palimpsest, made of different phases of transforma- tion: from Sanitary station to a place occupied by squatters to a museum. What makes the Sanitary Station an emblematic city space is the fact that the different “layers” of its transformations are all present—none has been cancelled. An urban structure that is at the same time—as Derrida puts it—translatable and untranslatable: “Un texte ne vit que s’il survit, et il ne sur-vit que s’il est à la fois traductible et intraduisible.” “La città non dice il suo passato, lo contiene come le linee d’una mano, scritto negli spigoli delle vie, nelle griglie delle finestre, negli scorrimano delle scale, nelle antenne dei para- fulmini, nelle aste delle bandiere, ogni segmento rigato a sua volta di graffi, seghettature, intagli, svirgole.” (Calvino, 1979, 18)1 In Invisible Cities, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan talk about the impossibility of defining what a city is and what it is not. Cities are the product of multiple and unpredictable interactions rather than the result of a rational plan. Urban space is read and interpreted by Italo Calvino as a place constantly crossed by fluctuations and rhythms. In one of the sections called “Cities and memory,” Marco Polo describes the city of Zaira that, he tells the Emperor, consists of 1 “The city [...] does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls” (Calvino 1997, 9). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 17  “relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past” (Calvino 1994, 9). The urban landscape is made of time and space, and, like texts, cities are made of signs that we can read and interpret. In this article I would like to read the past of an emblematic building, the Sanitary Station, “like the lines of a hand” of Marseille, trying to decipher its patterns, its trans- formations, its symbolic function inside the city. The former “Sanitary Station” of Marseille (figure 1) was built in 1948 by the architect Fernand Pouillon, and the history of this place is closely linked to that of the Phocaean city. Main entry and departure point for trav- ellers and immigrants arriving by the sea, it was abandoned for forty years and was almost destroyed in 2009. In 2013 it was completely transformed into the museum Regards de Provence, but it still keeps the memory of its past: the “salle des étuves” (the steam room, part of the quarantine internment system) (figure 1) is a permanent installation and is part of a section called “Memories of the Sanitary Station.” If the concept of memory recalls something that is buried in the past, what makes this building an exemplary space is the fact that all the different phases of its transformations are still there—they have not been canceled.2 The city of Marseille is not new to epidemics. The Mediterranean sea has always been a source of life and prosperity, but also of death: through the centuries, the population of Marseille has been devastated by plague and pes- tilence, and in the sixteenth century the first sanitation board was established, whose members inspected all incoming ships, cargoes, crew, and passengers. The worst plague outbreak in the history of Marseille occurred in 1720, when the merchant ship Grand Saint-Antoine brought pestilence-carrying rats and fleas into the Vieux Port. It was the “Great Plague of Marseille,” the epidemics that Antonin Artaud evokes in his Le Théâtre et son double (1964) to develop an analogy between theater and pestilence; the plague is a transforming force that purges the world of its violence and ugliness.3 Although this epidemic was considered the last outbreak of plague in France, at the beginning of the twentieth century small epidemics and sporadic cases were recorded in Mar- seille and Paris. 2 The book that retraces the several transformations from the Sanitary Station to the Museum Regards de Provence has the emblematic title of Métamorphoses (Muntaner and Durousseau 2013). 3 The streets of a plague-ridden city are blocked by mounds of unidentifiable corpses; at this point, Artaud writes, “[l]e théâtre comme la peste est une crise qui se dénoue par la mort ou par la guérison. Et la peste est un mal supérieur parce qu’elle est une crise complète après laquelle il ne reste rien que la mort ou qu’une extrême purification. De même le théâtre est un mal parce qu’il est l’équilibre suprême, qui ne s’acquiert pas sans destruction” (Artaud 1964, 25). 18 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  1. The former Sanitary Station of Marseille 2. The Salle des étuves After World War ii, there were fifteen million refugees, or “displaced people,” in Europe. Marseille organized the reception of thousands of immi- grants by creating a strategy of sanitary prophylaxis against plague, cholera, yellow fever, typhus fever, and smallpox. In 1948, the French architects An- dré Champollion, Fernand Pouillon, and René Egger were charged with the project of designing the Sanitary Station of Marseille. The main aim of their project was to create a place of disease prevention and control but, at the same time, to defy rigid spatial segregations and the exposure of individuals to a controlling centralized observation. For this reason they created a structure with several one-way corridors through which individuals could move in or- der to be washed and disinfected and undergo a medical examination (figure isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 19  3. Area for ablutions and disinfection 3). Everything was done to avoid any sense of humiliation to the passengers: wide, luminous spaces and above all a horizontal linearity that invested win- dows, objects, and at the same time the building’s structure created a place that evoked the atmosphere of a ship. These similarities between a ship and a place receiving potentially ill people suggests the Renaissance allegory of the “ship of fools” that, as Foucault explains, symbolizes an intermediate moment between the medieval exclusion of lepers outside the gates of the city and the exclusion of the mad within the social body (Foucault 1988). Every boat that arrived in Marseille found its uncanny “double” located on the threshold of the city, in a place that lies between the sea and the urban space, a liminal area that must be crossed if the individual wants to be considered healthy and, above all, inoffensive to the rest of the population. The threshold is an in-between state that separates two spaces of dif- ferent nature. As Walter Benjamin observed in his reflections on architecture: 20 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  The threshold is a zone. And in fact a zone of passage (Übergang). Transformation, passage, flux—all are contained in the word threshold. [. . .] We have become quite poor as far as threshold experiences go. Falling asleep is perhaps the only such ex- perience that has remained to us. (quoted in Sieburth, 19) But the notion of threshold has also fascinated Gérard Genette who, in the opening pages of Seuils, explains that “plus que d’une limite ou d’une frontière étanche, il s’agit ici d’un seuil ou—mot de Borges à propos d’une préface—d’un ‘vestibule’ qui offre à tout un chacun la possibilité d’entrer, ou de rebrousser chemin” (Genette 1987, 8).4 Philosophers like Wittgenstein and Benjamin have created several parallels between the forms of the city and the diverse forms of language, and semiotic studies invite us to read the city through its signifying forms. In his “Sémiologie et urbanisme,” Roland Barthes sees the city as a discourse, and this discourse, he writes, is truly a language: “Et nous retrouvons la vieille intuition de Victor Hugo: la ville est une écriture; celui qui se déplace dans la ville, c’est-à-dire l’usager de la ville (ce que nous sommes tous), est une sorte de lecteur qui, selon ses obligations et ses déplacements, prélève des fragments de l’énoncé pour les actualiser en secret” (Barthes 1985, 268).5 Architectural spaces can be read as chapters of a complex text—the city—made of streets, traffic, buildings, and so on that interact in a complex game of intertextuality. From this standpoint, the Sanitary Station is a multilingual context, a sort of Babel, but also a place in which the bodies of the immigrants had to undergo a transformation. Somehow these people, like a text in the eyes of a translator, were carefully examined before being allowed into a new space, a new context. A translation implies a movement, the concept of carrying something across. The English word derives from the Latin translatio, which itself comes from trans “across” and la-tio- “carrying”; the Italian language adds a cultural element to this image of movement with the use of the noun tradotta, which is a special train used for the transportation of military troops or deportees. By extension, in Italian it is possible to say that “l’assassino è stato tradotto in carcere” (“the murderer was taken, ‘translated’ to prison”). In his book The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes asks the question “Does the text have a human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body?” (Barthes 1986, 16). We could ask ourselves whether the human body has 4 “More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold or—a word Borg- es used apropos of a preface—a ‘vestibule’ that offers the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back” (Genette 1997, 1–2). 5 “And here we rediscover Victor Hugo’s old intuition: the city is writing. He who moves about the city, e.g., the user of the city (what we all are), is a kind of reader who, following his obliga- tions and his movements, appropriates fragments of the utterance in order to actualize them in secret” (Barthes 1986, 199). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 21  a textual status, that of a “readable” object of translation, whose position can be changed and relocated in a new context. The “transformation” of the refugees that arrived in Marseille took place in a building organized as a series of passageways that somehow evoke Benjamin’s arcades, although with some remarkable differ- ences. Sherry Simon writes that Benjamin uses the arcades as a cultural historian to represent an ambiguous urban space, neither inside nor outside, a passageway which is also a space of consumption, a new materialization of urban space. In the essay on translation, he uses the arcade to for- mulate a contrast between interpretive translation (which uses as its unit the “sentence” or the “proposition”) and literal translation (which proceeds word by word). The first, he says, produces a translation akin to a wall, the second a text which functions more like an arcade: ‘For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.’ The glass roof allows light to flow through matter, just as the literally translat- ed text is a transparent surface which allows the light of the original to fall onto the new version, creating an interplay of surfaces. (Simon 2000, 75) I find this passage extremely interesting because it gives me the op- portunity to explore the relationship between the process of translation and the spaces of translation. Both in the Parisian arcade and in the Sanitary Sta- tion of Marseille, the presence of a glass construction is essential, but while in the arcade the glass roof has the aim of accentuating the transition zone between the outdoor world of the street and the interior space,6 in the Sanitary Station the lateral glass walls contribute to the brightness of the space but at the same time the concrete structure creates a screen to guarantee the privacy of those passing by. Benjamin sees the arcades as the entry point of the Parisian labyrinth, a place where the flâneur could dwell; the Sanitary Station is a one- way passage in which there is no time for dwelling: the “translation” of those who are already “dis-placed” people should be done quickly in order to obtain a transformed, clean version of their bodies. Like Genette, I would like to insist on the term “vestibule,” because, in addition to the concept of “thresh- old,” this word also conveys the idea of clothing if we accept the etymology from the Latin vestibulum, from vestis “garment” and -bulum, probably from the sense of “a place to dress.”7 When the immigrants arrived in the Sanitary Station, they were first of all asked to undress so that their clothes could be 6 Benjamin was attracted by the ambiguity of glass, by the transformative power of this building material through its architectural application: “It is not a coincidence that glass is so hard and smooth a material to which nothing can be fastened. It is also cold and sober. Things that are made of glass have no ‘aura.’ Glass is the enemy par excellence of secrecy. It is also the enemy of property” (quoted in Heynen 1999, 155). 7 Ovid, in his Fasti, links the term vestibulum to the Roman goddess of hearth and home Vesta. In any case, if the vestibule is now the place where outer clothing is put on or removed in leaving or entering a house, for the Romans it was the area in which they used to depose their clothes. 22 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  washed and disinfected; they then had to go through the communal showers that, thanks to a system of mobile partition walls, became individual show- ers. The city that has made “Savon de Marseille” its emblem distributed bars of soap and towels to the immigrants who, eventually, got back their clean clothes and could go upstairs for a medical examination. The Sanitary Station only remained active for a couple of years, un- til the World Health Organization coordinated a global vaccination program that made entities such as the station redundant. Before entering a country, people were supposed to show their vaccination cards; this was the beginning of preventive medicine. After having served as offices for the administrative clerks of the Direction du Contrôle Sanitaire aux Frontières, the Sanitary Sta- tion of Marseille was closed in 1971. A new chapter in this building’s life then began—that of refuge of squatters. The edifice that was used as an institution for disease prevention and control became a place of meetings and creativity for squatters and graffiti art- ists. The white aseptic walls of the Sanitary Station were filled with colorful po- ems, tags, and murals. Round images replaced the square tiles covering the walls, showers, and steam rooms. An ephemeral form of art violated the visual and ar- chitectural order and setting, breaking the rules of the space–time relationship. The body, the skin of the sanitary station was “scratched,”8 in the same way as the skin of the migrants was scratched to be immunized against smallpox. The squatters imposed a transformation on this building by “inoculating” the germs of a revolutionary art. In 2009, in order to protest against the permanent closing of the place, the squatters burned a car inside the building (figure 4), which was 4. Burned car in Sanitary Station 8 The term “graffiti” derives from the Italian word graffio, a “scratch” or “scribble”. isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 23  nearly destroyed—fire as a sort of extreme catharsis that paved the way to the next transformation. The burned car is a trace, its cinders a rem(a)inder of something that is at the same time present and absent. In Feu la cendre, Derrida describes how one particular phrase, “il y a là cendre” (“cinders there are”), continually returned to him and insists on the importance of the trace: Si vous ne vous rappelez plus, c’est que l’incinération suit son cours et la consumation va de soi, la cendre même. Trace destinée, comme toute, à disparaître d’elle-même pour égarer la voie autant que pour rallumer une mémoire. La cendre est juste : parce que sans trace, justement elle trace plus qu’une autre, et comme l’autre trace. (Derrida 1984, 30)9 What remains from the destruction returns to the surface, to the skin; when the smoke dissipates, the incinerated place resurfaces. The evocation of haunting memories that reemerge from a fire is at the center of the artistic production of Claudio Parmiggiani, who in his work Delocazione (De-loca- tion) builds installations and sets them on fire, revealing the traces of the disappeared objects. This is what Didi-Huberman calls “une matière de l’ab- sence”—things disappear, but the memory of their presence still remains.10 The Regards de Provence foundation, in need of a permanent structure for its exhibitions in the city of Marseille, decided to rehabilitate this building and create a museum that collected artworks created in and about Provence. But before its permanent recuperation and conversion, before the ancient Sanitary Station was transformed into a Museum, a French photographer and installation artist was asked to fix an image in which the traces of the past could interact with the poetic metamorphoses that this place has experienced. Georges Rousse is an artist attracted by neglected and forgotten sites, by their solitude and emptiness; he takes his inspiration from the “wounds” suffered by an edifice to create an ephemeral “mise-en-scène” that he then immortalizes with photographs.11 One of the main characteristics of a photograph is its link with the referent, a sort 9 “If you no longer recall it, it is because the incineration follows its course and the consummation proceeds from itself, the cinder itself. Trace destined, like everything, to disappear from itself, as much in order to lose the way as to rekindle a memory. The cinder is exact: because without a trace it precisely traces more than an other, and as the other trace(s)” (Derrida 1991, 57). 10 In his book Génie du non-lieu, Georges Didi-Huberman explores the works of Parmiggiani. The Italian artist shows that fire does not cause the complete disappearance of an object, but, rather, it delocates it. The question of memory and survival therefore becomes essential: “Il se- rait donc abusive d’identifier l’œuvre de Parmiggiani à une simple nostalgie du passé (Delocazi- one est d’ailleurs plus proche d’Hiroshima que d’une reconstitution pompéienne). Cette œuvre vise plutôt un travail de la mémoire—une prise en considération de la survivance—qui a fait dire à l’artiste que ‘les veritables Antiques, c’est nous’” (Didi-Huberman 2001, 43). 11 His artistic intervention is multifaceted: “I call upon various methods of art: I am the designer of the project, the painter on-site, the architect by my interpretation of a given space and by the construction I organise there within, and finally the photographer who coordinates all these actions” (http://www.georgesrousse.com/english/news/rousse-speech.html). 24 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  of “reality effect” that makes the past reality of the object indubitable. In La Chambre claire, Barthes argues that the photographic referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation: whereas in painting the presence of the model is optional and in language the referents can be chimerical, in a photograph we cannot deny that the thing “has been there.”12 This significant aspect of referentiality seems to compensate for an inexplicable lack of images in relation to the activity of these spaces. In fact, neither the book Metamorphoses published by the Musée Regards de Provence (Muntaner and Durousseau 2013) nor the 45-minute documentary that, in the same Museum, explores the history of the plague in Marseille, immigration, and the building contain a single picture concerning the people who passed through the Sanitary Station, and there are only a few pictures of the areas and rooms from when it was active. Somehow, the artistic view of Georges Rousse is asked to capture, in single images, the sig- nificant past of these spaces, and he does so by insisting on the double liminality of the Sanitary Station: the instant captured by the photos of the French artist is not only that of a place that has represented for years the liminal area between the port and the city, but also that of a phase of an urban space that has gone through several transformations.13 The technique used by Rousse is that of anamorphosis; whereas trompe l’œil gives the illusion that a flat surface is three dimensional, his anamorphic images create the illusion that a three-dimensional area is flat (figures 5 and 6). Although it looks as if the geometric form has been digitally created, the illusion generated by these photographs is optical, and represents the outcome of several weeks of work so that the colorful geometric is only visible from a specific point of view. The anamorphic figure invites those who are watching it to move, to change their point of view, in order to bring into perfect focus the object of interpretation. Nevertheless, the installations created by Georges Rousse, once they are immortalized by the camera, do not ask the viewer to move, to change their perspective: his artwork is intended only for the lens, and not for an ob- server in the actual space. Rousse creates a “before” and “after” effect—first, the “deconstructed” red circle and then the perfectly round red circle reassembled by the camera. In doing so, he wanders in the rooms of the Sanitary Station with the eye of the photographer who is trying to find the right standpoint.14 12 Its essence is recorded in the formula “ça a été,” “that has been.” 13 In an interview about his installations at the future Musée Regards de Provence, Georges Rousse said that “[l]e port c’était la station sanitaire qui accueillait les immigrants mais c’est aussi le point de départ vers l’ailleurs. [. . .] Je voulais rendre compte de ce nouvel espace qui a perdu toute fonctionnalité et qui va disparaitre, cet entre-deux” (Muntaner and Durousseau 2013, 109) 14 “Je déambule dans les lieux avec l’œil du photographe pour repérer le bon point de vue jusqu’à l’image finale qui a besoin de l’appareil photographique comme outil de reproduction” (Muntaner and Durousseau 2013, 111). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 25 26 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  In these ephemeral installations that are immortalized only by the lens of a camera, the gaze of the artist leaves its place to another “gaze”: that of the Museum Regards de Provence, a museum that has slowly become a sort of palimpsest, made of its different phases of transformation. The permanent installation shows the old steam room and a documentary that retraces the history of this building, while the temporary exhibitions are housed in galler- ies on the ground and first floors. The several windows along both the front and the back walls of this long, horizontal building invite the observer to gaze outside, towards the port and the city. In the course of all its transformations, 5–6. the Sanitary Station has been “living on”; its trans-lation, its trans-positions Rousse, anamorphic have not destroyed it. Like a text, this building has survived only because, installation to paraphrase Derrida, it was at once translatable and untranslatable.15 This building outlives itself, is at the outskirts of its own living. Like Georges Rousse, Walter Benjamin was attracted by the decayed or abandoned spaces of the city; likewise, he was fascinated by “thresholds” and borders. He first visited Marseille in 1926, and then several times in 1928 and 1931. His last visit to the Phocaean city took place in 1940, shortly before his death. Marseille was for him like a book to be interpreted: In the early morning I drove through Marseilles to the station, and as I passed familiar places on my way, and then new, unfamiliar ones or others that I remembered only vaguely, the city became a book in my hands, into which I hurriedly glanced a few last times before it passed from my sight for who knows how long into a warehouse crate. (Benjamin 1999b, 447) Whereas Paris represents for Benjamin the ideal place to discover the traces of social meaning and the collective dreams of modernity, he finds Mar- seille hard to decipher, to the point where he once commented that no city so stubbornly resisted his efforts to depict it as did Marseille (Eiland 2014, 310). Benjamin sees each street as a vertiginous experience; for him the city-dweller should be “on the threshold of the metropolis as of the middle class” (Benja- min 2006, 40). Nevertheless, in his writings on hashish, and in particular in the text “Hashish in Marseilles,” he does not stay on the borders. Rather, he lets himself sink inside the “ventre of Marseilles”: 15 “Un texte ne vit que s’il sur-vit, et il ne sur-vit que s’il est à la fois traductible et intraduisible. [. . .] Totalement traductible, il disparaît comme texte, comme écriture, comme corps de langue. Totalement intraduisible, même à l’intérieur de ce qu’on croit être une langue, il meurt aussitôt. La traduction triomphante n’est donc ni la vie ni la mort du texte, seulement ou déjà sa survie. On en dira de même de ce que j’appelle écriture, marque, trace, etc. Ça ne vit ni ne meurt, ça survit. Et ça ne ‘commence’ que par la survie (testament, itérabilité, restance, crypte, détache- ment déstructurant par rapport à la rection ou direction ‘vivante’ d’un ‘auteur’ qui ne se noierait pas dans les parages de son texte)” (Derrida 1986, 147–149). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 27  I lay upon the bed, read and smoked. All the while opposite to me this glimpse of the ventre of Marseilles. (Now the images begin to take hold of me). The street that I’d so often seen is like an incision cut by a knife. (Benjamin 1978, 138) When, under the effect of hashish, Benjamin describes the streets of Marseille, he enters a surrealist dream world, made of strange sounds, images, and scents. His perception of what he sees in the streets—where he strolls to find a restaurant for dinner—is distorted, the dimensions of time and space are abolished.16 Unexpectedly, the words of a conversation in a little port bar sound to him like dialect: The people of Marseilles suddenly did not speak good enough French to me. They were stuck at the level of dialect. The phenomenon of alienation that may be involved in this, which Kraus has formulated in the fine dictum “The more closely you look at a word the more distantly it looks back” appears to extend to the optical. (Benjamin 1978, 144) Michel de Certeau writes that the city is a text, and that walking in a city has its own rhetoric: “Il y a une rhétorique de la marche. L’art de ‘tourn- er’ des phrases a pour équivalent un art de tourner des parcours. Comme le langage ordinaire, cet art implique et combine des styles et des usages” (De Certeau 2005, 15).17 Nevertheless, the legibility of a city changes; it is the per- spective of the viewer that defines the object of observation. When Benjamin quotes Kraus’s aphorism (“The closer one looks at a word, the further away it looks back”), he too evokes the importance of perspective. How should we read a city, its translation zones, its palimpsests? I would like to close this paper with another quote from Calvino’s Invisible Cities: In due modi si raggiunge Despina: per nave o per cammello. La città si presenta differente a chi viene da terra e a chi dal mare. [. . .] Ogni città riceve la sua forma dal deserto a cui si oppone; e così il cammelliere e il marinaio vedono Despina, città di confine tra due deserti. (Calvino 1994, 370)18 16 “Versailles, for one who has taken hashish, is not too large, nor eternity too long” (Benjamin 1978,138). 17 “There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of ‘turning’ phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path. Like ordinary language, this art implies and combines styles and uses” (De Certeau 1984, 100). 18 “Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea. [. . .] Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts” (Calvino 1997, 17). 28 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Whereas the city of Zaira is part of a section devoted to memory, De- spina is a city of desire that opens paths and opportunities for visitors. There are multiple ways of seeing the same city, depending on which face of the city they see. Those who arrive at Despina have to shift their perspective, as if they were in front of an anamorphic image. By building the Sanitary Station, Mar- seille has tried to give itself a “face” from which the immigrants could see it, but France’s oldest city has not resisted the univocal direction imposed by this passage point: the Station operated for a few years, quickly transformed by artists who made this structure a place of exile, of displacement, a metaphori- cal place that contains a plurality of meanings and errant trajectories, and that lends itself to multiple interpretations. The story of those anonymous people who arrived in Marseille and whose body/corpus underwent a transformation in order to be admitted to a new context intertwines with the story of another migrant who, some years before, in 1940, had been trying to escape France for the United States: Walter Benjamin. He went from Paris to Marseille, which at that time was full of refu- gees, especially those from countries occupied by the German army. The philos- opher who used to be an extraordinary city dweller and who loved to get lost in the meanders of a city, found himself obliged to follow the route taken by many refugees. In Marseille he obtained a passport issued by the American Foreign Service, but when he discovered that the port was virtually closed he tried to cross the Spanish border by walking up into the mountains. He never managed to traverse the most important boundary of his life, however, and in Portbou he was refused entry into Spain. He was held in Portbou overnight and sent back to occupied France the next morning. The morphine Benjamin had brought with him from Marseille was strong enough to kill him. Hannah Arendt wrote about her dear friend and the Kafkian situation in which he found his death: A few weeks later the embargo on visas was lifted again. One day earlier Benjamin would have got through without any trouble; one day later the people in Marseille would have known that for the time being it was impossible to pass through Spain. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible. (Arendt 1990, 24) Benjamin died in a liminal space, in a liminal time; a bitter twist of fate for the philosopher who has taught us the important difference between “boundary” and “threshold”: “The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwell <threshold> is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell, and etymology ought not to over- look these senses” (Benjamin 1999, 494). Following Benjamin’s fundamental distinction, we might suggest that the Sanitary Station was initially born as a “boundary area” because of its isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 29  function of containment and delimitation, and that it has eventually “swol- len,” with an extraordinary series of metamorphoses, into a threshold, a place caught up in a tension, an innovative space. The Regards de Provence muse- um is now a site of rewriting, a place that combines memory of its past and a gaze towards the future. It has not lost its “in-between position,” though, caught as it is between the ancient Cathedral and the new buildings (Mucem, Villa Mediterranée) designed by internationally renowned architects. A poten- tial space for hybridization. <References> Arendt, Hannah. 1999. “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940.” In Walter Benjamin, Illumina- tions, edited by Hannah Arendt; translated by Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico. 7–60. Artaud, Antonin. 1964. “Le Théâtre et la peste.” In Le Théâtre et son double. Paris: Gallimard. 25–26. Barthes, Roland. 1973. Le Plaisir du texte. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. . 1973. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. . 1980. La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie. Paris: Gallimard. . 1985. “Sémiologie et urbanisme.” In L’Aventure sémiologique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. . 1986. “Semiology and the Urban.” In The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics. Edited by Mark Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopou- los. New York: Columbia University Press. 87–98. Benjamin, Walter. 1978. “Hashish in Marseilles.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter Demetz. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt Brace. 137–145. . 1999a. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin Mc- Laughlin. Cambridge (Mass.) and London (England): The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. . 1999b. Selected Writings. Edited by Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. . 2006. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Edited by Mi- chael W. Jennings. Cambridge (Mass.) and London (England): The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Calvino, Italo. 1979. Le città invisibili. Turin, Einaudi. . 1997. Invisible cities. Translated by William Weaver. London: Vintage Books. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Ren- dall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. . 2005. “Rhétoriques combinatoires.” In L’invention du quotidien. Tome 1—Arts de faire [1980–1990]. Folio Essais. Paris: Gallimard. Derrida, Jacques. 1984. Feu la Cendre/Ciò che resta del fuoco. Translated by Stefa- no Agosti. Firenze: Sansoni. . 1986. “Survivre.” In Parages. Paris: Galilée. 109-203. . 1991. Cinders. Translated by Ned Lukacher. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 30 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2001. Génie du non-lieu. Air, poussière, empreinte, han- tise. Paris: Minuit. Eiland, Howard, and M. W. Jennings. 2014. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books. Genette, Gerard. 1987. Seuils. Paris: Seuil. . 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge (Mass.): Cambridge University Press. Translated by Jane E.Lewin. Heynen, Hilde. 1999. Architecture and Modernity. A Critique. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press. Muntaner, Bernard, and Thierry Durousseau. 2013. Métamorphoses. Station Sani- taire en Musée Regards de Provence. Marseille: Fondations Regards de Provence. Sieburth , Richard. “Benjamin the Scrivener.” in Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aes- thetics. Ed. Gary Smith. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. 13-37. Simon, Sherry. 2000. “The Paris Arcades, the Ponte Vecchio, and the Comma of Translation.” Translators’ Journal, vol. 45 (1): 73–79. <Simona Elena Bonelli> She is a translator and lives in Marseille. She studied English and French Literature (University of Siena, Italy) and received her MA and PhD in Critical and Cultural Theory from Car- diff University, UK. She has taught English Language and Literature at the Universities of Siena and Perugia (Italy). Bonelli has published Tito Andronico. Il testo come simulacro del corpo, and has edited Seg- ni particolari: l’immagine del viso, l’immaginario del nome proprio, both with Quattroventi, Urbino. Her books and essays cover topics relating to Elizabethan literature, philosophy, aesthetics, gender studies, and trans- lation theory. isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 31 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15749

Translation and Fragmented Cities: Focus on Itaewon, Seoul Hunam Yun [email protected] <Abstract> Cities are open texts. They are perpetually transformed by their dynamic relationship with history and with the people who live in them. They are “rearticulated, transformed from a singular structure into a multilateral palimpsest that can be ‘written’ up and over, again and again,” with time. Therefore, the boundaries of cities’ identities continuously expand with this dynamic movement. There can be no single, fixed, or com- plete description of a city, which is why cities require continuous translation. However, cities are commonly represented as a single, fixed, and complete image in the process of translation through selective appropriation, and people consume that image. This paper attempts to reveal the process and ideological bias in such selective appropriation with a focus on Itaewon, South Korea. Historically, Itaewon has always been a site of different cultural encounters reflecting the historical twists and turns of Korea. After the Japanese invasion of the country in 1592 and the Manchu war of 1636, Japanese and Chinese soldiers stayed in the area. Then, during the colonial period, the Japanese army was stationed there, and after liberation, the American army was quartered there. Now, Mus- lims are flocking to the area, and it is becoming a city of immigrants. Because of these dynamic historical moments, Itaewon has been the site of cultural amalgamation and conflict, always retaining traces of the past. However, the images of Itaewon created by tourist books are ahistorical and fixed; the city has been fragmented as a commodity to be consumed through selective appropriation, and its dynamic history has been erased. The most common of these images are those of shopping centers and the red light dis- trict, images that have been reinforced by reproduction throughout decades. This paper investigates the process of this fragmentation of Itaewon and its underlying ideology. introduction I was motivated to consider the aspects of a city’s translation (in terms of in- tersemiotic translation in which nonverbal text is transferred into verbal text) when I found the translation of Itaewon, an area located in the northern part of Seoul, South Korea. Shockingly, the words that caught my eye were “Red Light District.” Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, in its entry on Itaewon, highlighted only the Red Light District as a local attraction, as follows:1 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itaewon (last accessed December, 2014). 32 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Contents 1. Local attractions 1.1 Red Light District 2. See also 3. Notes 4. External links With a brief explanation of the geographical location of Itaewon, Wikipedia introduces local attractions, focusing on the international dishes, hotels, shops, and clubs that tourists can enjoy: Many restaurants serving international dishes are found in this area […]. Major ho- tels such as The Grand Hyatt and local landmark The Hamilton Hotel can be found here as well as dozens of shops and services aimed at tourists. High quality leather products in Korea can be found […] as well as various types of traditional Korean souvenirs. […] Itaewon is one of the popular club congested area in Korea, […] Most of foreign people go to the clubs for clubbing and hooking up while they are staying in Korea.2 Then separate space was allocated to the introduction of the Red Light District under the same title: There is a portion of Itaewon known as “Hooker Hill” among GI’s of different allied nations stationed in South Korea. Although the stereotype of only American ser- vicemen frequenting this area is well-known, men from all other countries, including Middle-Eastern and African, are known to frequent this area as well. Furthermore, because South Korea is not widely socially accepting of homosexuals, there is an underground gay area within this district as well. The prominent image of Itaewon represented by Wikipedia is of a “retail” city—selling goods and bodies. An explanation of this followed: “This article is written like a travel guide rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject. [. . .]” (July 2013). This explanation is very significant in that it suggests that a travel guide does not present full, complete, and thorough information, but rather is se- lective regarding the information it includes. This is quite appropriate since a travel guide should be light enough for travelers to carry. However, the problem with selective information—in other words selective translation—is the image the translation produces. This paper is concerned with this point. Translation has been frequently presented as an activity to create an image of others or of selves, in the case of Itaewon, for example, this includes “a nostalgic image of a lost past” about Japanese people (Fowler 1992), images of the East by the West in colonial contexts (Niranjana 1992), or a self-image 2 The article has since been altered, but there is no significant difference in its content. isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 33  by a colonized people (Tymoczko 1999). The process involves “a deliberate and conscious act of selection, assemblage, structuration, and fabrication— and even, in some cases, of falsification, refusal of information, counterfeiting, and the creation of secret codes” (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002, xxi). However, little notice has been taken of translation as an activity to cre- ate images of cities and of the process this involves. French theologian Jacques Ellul states that the evolution of cities represents man’s fall from natural grace and the subsequent attempt to create a new, workable order (Kotkin 2005, xv). This may mean that cities are constructed and shaped through the dynamic rela- tionship with human beings, and they are formed, and transformed, by such re- peated attempts throughout the city’s history, keeping traces of every historical moment. That is, they are “rearticulated, transformed from a singular structure into a multilateral palimpsest that can be ‘written’ up and over, again and again” (Chambers 2012, 104) with time. Therefore, the boundaries of cities’ identities continuously expand with this dynamic movement. However, cities are commonly represented as a single and fixed image in the process of translation through selective appropriation, and people ac- cept and consume that image. In the history of translation studies, little atten- tion has been paid to these aspects of cities, that is, cities as a translated text. Cities are translated through special forms of communication, such as the environmental landscape, symbolic artifacts, local events, or other landmarks, and through verbal communication, such as cities’ names, slogans or statements. This paper attempts to reveal how verbal translation, especially for tourists, constructs an image of a city, with a focus on Itaewon. Itaewon has been a very particular and special space in Korean history. Unlike other areas of Seoul, which have a single ethic identity, Itaewon has been the space of expatriates. It has been a foreign and exotic land within Korea, a zone of con- tact where native and foreign cultures encounter each other, and a mediating channel though which foreign cultures are introduced. This paper first inves- tigates Itaewon as a site of cultural encounters and cultural translation against the background of Korean history, then it examines its translation in tourist books and the subsequent effects. itaewon as a site of cultural encounters and cultural translation When French historian Fernand Braudel stated, “A town is always a town, wherever it is located, in time as well as space” (Rybczynski 1995, 49), he must have been referring to the universality of the urban experience. As Kot- kin notes, the urban experience is universal “despite vast differences in race, 34 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  climate, and location” because “there is the visceral ‘feel’ of the city almost everywhere—the same quickening of pace on a busy street, an informal mar- ketplace, or a freeway interchange, the need to create notable places, the shar- ing of a unique civic identity” (2005, xv–vxi). The omnipresent visceral feel he refers to is created by the so called “non-places” found in almost every city. Non-places, a term coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé, refers to an- thropological spaces of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as “places.” As Augé points out, supermodernity produces nonplaces, “meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike in Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places” (1995, 63). Nonplaces are temporary, ephemeral, fleeting spaces for passage, commu- nication, and consumption. Augé puts it thus: If place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. [. . .] the same things apply to the non-place as to the place. It never exists in pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it; relations are restored and resumed in it; the ‘millennial ruses’ of ‘the invention of the everyday’ and ‘the arts of doing,’ so subtly analysed by Michel de Certeau, can clear a path there and deploy their strategies. Places and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed. (Augé 1995, 63–64) Examples of nonplaces are air, rail, and motorway routes, aircraft, trains and road vehicles, airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and the complex skein of cable and wireless net- works that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication (Augé 1995). These nonplaces make urban scenes familiar and uniform, creating an illusion of universality in urban experiences. In extreme cases, those nonplaces may make urban experiences homogeneous so that they give the impression that “only the name of the airport changes” as described in the novel Invisible Cities by Italian writer Italo Calvino: If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, […] The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had not changed at all. […] You can resume your flight whenever you like, but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by the sole Trude, which does not begin, nor end. Only the name of the airport changes. (Calvino 1972/1974, 128) However, despite “the universality of the urban experience,” each city has a unique and special “feel,” which gives city tourists a different experience. One of the factors that make each city unique and special is its ascent and decline throughout history, the process of which is “both rooted in history isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 35  and changed by it” (Kotkin 2005, 147), in other words, the characteristics of “places” in Augé’s term. Cities are not stagnant; they are reconfigured, re- shaped, and rearranged with political, economic, social, and cultural changes throughout history. Just as Lotman points out in his discussion on the symbolism of St. Petersburg, “The city is a mechanism, forever recreating its past” (Lotman 1990, 194–195): architectural ensembles, city rituals and ceremonies, the very plan of the city, the street names and thousands of other left-overs from past ages act as code programs constantly renewing the texts of the past. Lotman also says that “in this sense, the city, like culture, is a mechanism which with- stands time” (Lotman 1990, 195). So, as Simon’s Cities in Translation (2012) suggests, cities are “intersec- tions of memory,” and the streets of the cities keep those memories. Itaewon is such a city. Compared to other areas in Seoul, it is an area with a rapid pace of change, and it has various images: diversity, ambiguity, disorder, chaos, exoticism, foreign land within the country, and so on. Such dynamicity and images throughout the history of the place stem mainly from its geographical location, specifically, its location near Han River. As Lotman puts it, there are two ways in which a city as a demarcated space may relate to the earth which surrounds it—concentric and eccentric: Concentric structures tend towards enclosure, separation from their surroundings which are classed as hostile while eccentric structures tend towards openness and contacts with other cultures. [. . .] The concentric situation of the city in semiotic space is as a rule associated with the image of the city on the hill. [. . .] The eccentric city is situated “at the edge” of the cultural space: on the seashore, at the mouth of a river. (Lotman 1990, 191–192) The peculiar situation of Itaewon, due to its location near the Han River, imbued it with openness. Indeed, various meanings and different sto- ries about the origin of the name show such characteristics. Itaewon has three different names and meanings, using different Chinese characters—梨 泰 院, 李 泰 院, and 異 胎 院—which are embedded in its geographical position and Korean history. Firstly, Itaewon was initially a place for travelers and trading. During the Joseon Dynasty, one of four Hanyang (present Seoul) won (院)—a won was a kind of inn established for government officials and travelers by the govern- ment—was located there. So the place was named Itaewon. The won (院) in the name “Itaewon” meant “inn offering lodgings to travelers” (smg 1998, 83). As more people frequented the area, inns for foreign envoys and markets were formed (Jang 2000, 59). Another story claims that Itaewon (梨 泰 院), meaning “area for pear trees,” was so named because pear trees were grown there. 36 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Itaewon was also a space of trauma. It was the area for alienated wom- en, women who had to choose isolation from the society because, with the scar of foreign invasion on their body, they could not be accepted in Korean society. During the Seven-Year War (1592–1598) against the Korean dynasty of Joseon, a Japanese military supply base was established in the Unjongsa Buddhist nun temple near present-day Itaewon. It is said that the Japanese commander Katō Kiyomasa and his soldiers seized the temple, raped the nuns, and then stayed for some time. They subsequently burned the temple before they left. The Buddhist nuns, who had lost their home, moved to nearby Yunggyeong Mountain and lived there. Thus, the area was called Itaewon (異 胎 院), which means “village for being pregnant with a foreigner’s child” (No- mi Lee 2011, 242–243; Hoefer et al. 1981; Jun-gi Kim 2012). Itaewon was also the place where Korean women, who had been tak- en to China during the second Manchu invasion of Korea in 1636, returned and settled down (Chosun Daily 2011).3 In Joseon society, which had a tradi- tion of monogamy, those women were despised as hwanhyangnyeo (“women who returned”) and so they could not return to their home. Therefore, they went to live with the nuns (Heu-suk Han 2001, 59). According to another story, the name originated from Itain (異 他 人), which means foreigners, in reference to Japanese soldiers, who surren- dered and were naturalized during the Seven-Year War, forming a community there (Jun-gi Kim 2012). This link between Itaewon with marginalized people might have facilitated the formation of neighboring Haebangchon (literally, “liberation village”). Haebangchon was the area for displaced people after liberation from Japanese colonial rule, for north Korean refugees after the Korean War of 1950–1953, and then for farmers who had left their rural hometowns for cities during the process of industrialization. Geographically situated near Han River, Itaewon was considered strategically important in terms of transportation and military withdrawal. Thus, Itaewon has frequently been an area for foreign troops, having been a logistics base for the Mongolian Army during the late Goryeo Dynasty and a supply base for the Japanese Army during the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592 (Choi 2003, 23); it was also used by Chinese forces during the Im-O mili- 3 서울 속 외국 이태원 백서. 美軍거리서 다국적 거리로 (Itaewon White Paper: From the Street of the US Military Army to Multinational Street). Chosun Daily, Feb 21, 2011. http://boomup.chosun. com (accessed December, 2014). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 37  tary revolt of 1882–1884, was the location of the Japanese military headquarters during the colonial period of 1910–1945, and was used by the US forces after the liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule (No-mi Lee 2011, 242–243; Shin 2008, 193; Seoul Development Institute 2001). The deployment of foreign troops transformed and rearranged the topography of Itaewon. During the 1920s, for instance, the public cemetery, which was located near the present-day Central Mosque, was transformed into the Japanese military headquarters. The cemetery was moved to the Miari district, and the body of Yu Gwan-sun, a patriotic martyr for independence from Japanese colonial rule, was lost in the process. However, the biggest changes to and deepest influence on Itaewon came with the deployment of the US forces. On September 9, 1945, the US forces came to be stationed in Itaewon when the US Army commanding of- ficer John Hodge received the surrender of all the Japanese forces in Korea south of the 38th parallel and took over the Japanese barracks and military facilities. The US Army Military Government was established and lasted from 1945 to 1948. However, with the Korean War in 1950, the US forces came back to be stationed in Itaewon, and the history of the US forces in Itaewon began. The English and Korean languages came to be used together; shops and bars emerged; and prostitutes, orphans, widows, and people from the provinces crowded around the US Army base hoping to scrape together a living from working on the base, selling goods to the soldiers, and so on. Military camp town clubs for American soldiers were opened, and Itaewon became a space where “American soldiers consumed Korean women sexually” (Hyeon-mee Kim 2005, 26). Thus, the so called “Hooker Hill” was formed. However, most of the women who worked at Hooker Hill were vic- tims of the Korean War. As the war had produced many orphans and widows, girls and women had to take responsibility for earning a living. They had to support not only themselves, but also their families. Some of them had to send money to their families in their hometown.4 Under the circumstances, given that they could not find proper jobs, they had to choose prostitution, becoming yang-gongju5 (a foreigner’s whore), as described in Yeong-su Oh’s novel of Anna’s Will (1963): 4 A girl risked her life to avoid the government’s control over prostitution and died because she could not make a living if she was caught. Hearing this news, sixty yang-gongju held a demon- stration against the control (Dong-A Ilbo Daily, October 27 1960, 3). 5 Yang in yang-gongju means Western, and gongju means a princess. Women who sold their bodies to Western men, especially American soldiers, were called yang-gongju. 38 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  She had no clothes to cover her body A brick looked like a chunk of meat to her. How could you expect a girl, who is starving, To be a lady, to be faithful? I was starved. A mature girl had no place to lay down her body. Is this sin? So I became a whore called Anna. (translation mine) (Oh 1963, 330) As foreign official residences were established in the 1960s, military accommodation was built in 1963, and when the 121st Evacuation Hospital of the US Army was moved to Itaewon from Bupyeong district, more than 10,000 people relocated there. During the 1970s, the area became a shopping district for cheap branded goods; there was a prosperous textile industry, and the area enjoyed the reputation of one of the most popular tourist attractions in Korea among foreign tourists in the 1980s when international events were held in Seoul. Thus, it was while the US forces were stationed there that Itaewon came to be known for its shopping area and for Hooker Hill. However, Itae- won cannot be reduced to only a shopping area and Hooker Hill. Itaewon was both a colonized space and a space of freedom and resistance. Politically, it was an Americanized colonial space (Lee and Jung 2010, 191), a colonized space (Choi 2003), or a deterritorialized space in that the authority of the nation–state was applied differently from how it was applied in other areas of the country (Eun-sil Kim 2004). Culturally, it was the space of freedom and resistance where Korean people could escape oppression under the Yushin regime in the 1970s and experience American culture (Eun-sil Kim 2004, 27; No-mi Lee 2011, 243). Indeed, Itaewon was the only route to American culture in Korean society: It was a place to experience Americanism as an object of desire for a generation familiar with afkn radio programs, with singers trained on the musical stages at US military bases, and with Hollywood movies (Choi 2003,102) because foreign travel remained restricted in Korea until 1989. These characteristics made the area a dynamic space where heteroge- neous cultural codes and different subjectivities (including colonized “others,” fragmented “youths,” and a decolonized “new generation”) were encountered, (re)constructed, (re)signified, and transformed at a specific historical stage (Lee and Jung 2010, 191). It was a place where subcultures, such as the culture of the US army in the 1950s–1960s, the Go-Go culture in the 1970s, disco cul- ture in the 1980s, and hip-hop culture around the 1990s, were circulated, and it took on a leading role in Korea’s popular music and subculture. The “clubs” which actively interacted with subcultures of different generations formed a site that led Korean popular music and subculture (see Lee and Jung 2010). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 39  Itaewon, where American soldiers were previously the most numer- ous of the foreign residents, has become more multinational since 1993, when the Korean government introduced an industrial trainee system for foreign- ers. Foreign workers from India, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Uzbekistan, and so on settled in Itaewon because the area was more open to foreigners and foreign cultures. Thus, foreigners could feel more comfortable and secure there. Many expatriates found solace in its accommodating nature and chose to set up their homes there. As various cultures, languages, and lifestyles mix together and various cultural activities commingle, the exterior landscape of the area is changing, and the space of the area is being rearranged, creating a unique and distinctive atmosphere. Through these dynamics, the area is becoming the cultural frontier zone where various cultures have become multinational and multilingual (Hy- eon-mee Kim 2005, 26). Itaewon is also a site of both conflict and solidarity as shown in the Muslim community in the area: “Though Arab Muslim traders have been known to make infrequent trading expeditions to Korea since the Silla dy- nasty, the teachings of Muhammad never made a real impact until 1950 when Turkish troops arrived to fight for UN forces” (Hoefer 1981). In 1960, the Korean Muslim Federation was founded with a Korean, Haji Sabri Suh, as its leader. However, the Islamic community was established due to the need to understand the Islamic world after the oil crisis of 1973 and 1974 (Lee and Jung 2011, 242). In February 1975, an Islamic Center was established in Itae- won, Seoul, and an adjoining Central Mosque—the largest such onion-domed structure in northeast Asia—was opened in 1976 (Hoefer 1981). The Seoul Central Mosque had been built with both Korean and Middle Eastern funds to serve the 3,000 followers of the Prophet in the nation (Hoefer 1981). The Central Mosque is therefore not only a place for religious belief but also a symbolic site which shows Koreans’ effort to understand the Islamic world (Lee and Jung 2011, 242–243). A larger Muslim community was formed in Itaewon in 2005 when an- ti-American sentiment spread after two Korean middle school girls were acciden- tally run over and killed by an American armored personnel carrier, and American soldiers assaulted some citizens. As American soldiers were subsequently banned from bars and clubs, the economic base of the area declined and workers in the entertainment business left the area for cheaper accommodation elsewhere. Thus, the Muslim community was formed around the Central Mosque. The Muslim community is bringing about changes to Itaewon. One of the most noticeable changes is the increased number of Halal food restau- rants and the reduced number of local butcher’s shops (Heu-su Yi et al. 2008, 40 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  1. Itaewon, street view 2. Itaewon, Muslim settlement area 68). Furthermore, because of the strong solidarity among Muslims, the com- munity is often regarded as a closed community by other Koreans (Lee and Jung 2011, 250). The Muslim settlement in Itaewon is a segmentation of urban space formed by the pluralism of race and Islamic culture. However, the space is isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 41  never homogeneous to the citizens and Muslims living in the Muslim settle- ment, and the place of residence is perceived according to different meanings. That is, the citizens living in Itaewon view the Muslims as those who threaten their lives and view foreigners as the cause of economic conflicts as well. How- ever, for those Muslims in the settlement, the citizens’ hostility toward them has given rise to a view of them as a strange and potential threat. The place of conflict and alienation is an inevitable part of the process of initiating a new cultural solidarity (see Lee and Jung 2011). Another feature of Itaewon is the coexistence of mutually exclusive activities in the same place: the Muslim community adjoins Gay Hill, which was formed in the late 1990s when gay bars moved there from Euljiro-Jongro (Jung-eun Kim et al. 2010). The position of Itaewon as a place of expatriates makes negotiation across different cultures with no shared history the very condition of civic coexistence. Now, Itaewon is producing a varied atmo- sphere and landscapes as multinational cultures are dynamically mixed to- gether. translation and representation of itaewon as a nonplace Tourist books have an important role to play in presenting an image of a city to the outside world because most tourists depend on the books for informa- tion about the city they will visit. They obtain information about the history, culture, shopping centers, or entertainment facilities in the city and they con- sume the city based on this information. Tourist books provide guidelines to give tourists information and instructions to help them know or understand the city. Itaewon has been one of the most popular tourist areas in Seoul among foreign tourists to the extent that it has been said that “[y]ou may not know Seoul, but you should know Itaewon” (Saccone 1994, 79). Indeed, for most foreigners the area has become synonymous with Seoul. This section investigates how Itaewon has been presented in tourist books during the past thirty years. For this purpose, tourist books in English from 1981 until 2010 were examined; however, as not many tourist books are available that discuss Itaewon, the sample was limited to seventeen books. Insight Guides: Korea (Hoefer et al.), which was published in Hong Kong in 1981, offers comparatively detailed information, focusing on the or- igin of the name and Muhammadanism in Korea. Regarding the name, it quotes Allen and Donard Clark, a father-and-son team of Seoul historians as saying, “Following the Japanese invasion of 1592–1598, the area now called 42 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Itaewon came to be called ‘Itaein’ or ‘Itaein dong’ meaning ‘Foreigners’ Vil- lage,’ because of the Japanese soldiers who were quartered on this site,” and “When the war was over, some of the soldiers settled down, married Korean girls, and spent the rest of their lives here.” Then “the tradition carries on, though most American soldiers take their Korean brides home, to ‘the world.’ as they call the U.S. of A.” (Hoefer et al. 1981). Regarding Muhammadanism, the book says the teachings of Mu- hammad never made a real impact until the arrival of Turkish troops in 1950, as mentioned previously, and it goes on to explain the foundation of the Ko- rean Muslim Federation in 1960 and the establishment of an Islamic Center in 1975 and, later, the adjoining Central Mosque (Hoefer et al. 1981). Visitors Guide: Seoul Korea, which was published by Seoul Metro- politan Government (smg) in 1998, introduces some of Itaewon’s histor- ical traces: [the] “won” of the name has meant an inn offering lodgings to travelers of the Cho- son Dynasty. In the middle of the 17th century, there was a concentrated village of naturalized Japanese. From 1906, a Japanese Military Post was stationed in the area until liberation from Japanese colonial rule, and now US Military Post including headquarters is located there. (SMG 1998, 83) However, Insight Guides: South Korea (Le Bas), which was published in London in 2007, introduces the history of Itaewon using a more poetic tone: but foreigners, not all of them Western, now occupy multi-story apartment buildings. [. . .] Imagine the astonished reactions of the Buddhist monks who, for some 500 years, kept a free hostel for travelers near here. What exists now, albeit breathtaking, may prove to be too developed for their tastes: the Grand Hyatt Hotel’s mirrored façade; and the twin minarets of the onion-domed mosque below, from which re- sounds the muezzin’s call to afternoon prayer. (Le Bas 2007, 135-139) The book then adds that centuries ago, Itaewon was used as a stop- over point for visitors to the capital, that Japanese troops were housed there during the Japanese Occupation, and that, after the Korean War, they were then replaced by American soldiers. Although the descriptions in the above three tourist books are not enough to show the dynamicity of Itaewon, they at least reveal the historicity of the area. However, other tourist books introduce Itaewon, focusing on it as place for con- sumerism and as a shopping area and entertainment district as follows: known as a part of the city that never sleeps. [. . .] a one-stop hub for foreign visitors, including shopping, tours, lodging and information services. It also offers many ven- ues in which to enjoy Korean and foreign cultures and cuisines. (kotra 2006, 249) now a growing mecca for bargain hunters. [. . .] It is lined on both sides with hundreds isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 43  of shops and arcades selling ready-made sports clothes [. . .] It is also an entertain- ment spot that boasts well over 200 restaurants, bars and clubs. (Suzanne Crowder Han 1989, 74) crowded with shops of all kinds from custom tailors to jewelers, from antiques deal- ers to clothiers. [. . .] In the evening Itaewon becomes a dynamic entertainment dis- trict packed with discos, nightclubs, bars, and karaokes of all sizes. (Saccone 1994, 79–80) the shopping paradise of diverse visitors from all parts of the world. (kowoc 2002, 63) Itaewon offers tailor-made and ready-made clothes [. . .] There is a spirited night life, too. (Chunsung Kim 2004, 90) it was one of the only places in the country in which you could buy “Western” items [. . .] While it remains a great place to shop for cheap tailored suits and shoes, Itae- won’s popularity also made it a byword for transactions of a more sexual nature – hostess bars sprung up all over the place. (Paxton 2008, 109) It’s a bastardized district that’s neither Korean nor Western, but a skewed yet intrigu- ing combination of both. Clothing, gifts . . . (Nilsen 2009, 44 and 92) a lively expat entertainment zone with bars and clubs aplenty, both gay and straight. Market stalls line the main street and the district comes to life in the evening. (Rob- inson and Zahorchak 2009, 55) Once a shady red-light district, it’s been cleaned up [. . .] You can still find ladies of the night walking down certain streets at night, but during the day, it’s a shopper’s paradise. (Cecilia Hai-Jin Lee 2010, 63) Translation of Itaewon in the above tourist books is no different from that in Wikipedia, as was pointed out in the introduction. Rather than being presented as a dynamic space where memories are imprinted, heterogeneous cultures mix together, and new cultures emerge, Itaewon is represented in these books as a large retail outlet for the selling and buying of goods, just like nonplaces, to use Augé’s term (1995, 63), which have no urban relations, history, or identity. The way Itaewon is translated is similar to the process of reification in that it presents fragmented information about the city in the process of com- modification for tourism, and thereby stops us understanding the totality of the city. According to Lukács (1971), under capitalism everything is reified as the result of a unified structure of consciousness—that is, seeing everything in a completely discrete way, where everything is separated and fragmented and taken out of the process to which it belongs. Lukács claims this is caused by the fact that everything is turned into a commodity under capitalism, which thus prevents us from seeing the totality of the place and the deeper processes that are going on. In a capitalist society, a city is presented as a commodity for the tour- ist industry, and its images are created, manipulated, or distorted in the pro- 44 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  cess of translation in order to create a profit. A city’s function as a place for entertainment and shopping is frequently emphasized in presenting the city because “the criteria of the successful tourist industry mainly puts priority on spending on entertainment and shopping” (Yi and Oh 1994, 21). Itaewon’s image is presented as a place for selling and entertaining; removed from its historicity, the image is fragmented. fragmented image, fragmented experience What does this fragmented image have to do with the city? The most direct influence may be the way the city is consumed by tourists. For example, the following recent reviews of the city by tourists6 show that the way they con- sume the city is closely related to the image presented in tourist books: Itaewon: Lots of Shopping. There are shops and a district for almost every imaginable type of product and some are open until very late at night […]. (October 20, 2002) Itaewon: Capital of Kitsch. [. . .] filling up with good restaurants and chain stores. You can find Nike outlets selling all manner of shoes and sports gear, Body Shops filled with makeup and luxurious bath products, and dozens of clothing stores and tailors specializing in Chinese silk dresses. (October 19, 2003) Itaewon: Cheap shops and street fashion. You can find bargains of any kind and a lot of the big clothing chains [. . .]. (January 28, 2004) Itaewon: Near military base. Itaewon does have some shops [. . .] Itaewon is located near a US military base, so don’t mind the soldiers in camouflage wandering around town. At night time, Itaewon transforms itself [. . .] One of the native Koreans told me that most Korean girls do not hang around in that area, afraid to be mistaken as a prostitute. (February 22, 2005) Itaewon is perhaps the most famous shopping area for foreigners in Korea. (January 13, 2006) Itaewon: Buying a Custom-Made Suit in Itaewon. (May 6, 2007) Itaewon: Very Touristy and Expensive, not a Sample of Korea. The Itaewon shopping area covers a 1.4 km in length [. . .] The area has a vibrant night life scene with many bars and nightclubs. (July 24, 2008) Itaewon: Special Tourism Shopping Zone of Seoul (April 4, 2011) 6 All citations are taken from http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Asia/South_Korea/Soul_ tukpyolsi/Seoul-1058426/Shopping-Seoul-Itaewon-BR-1.html (accessed December, 2014), which is an interactive site aimed at sharing travel knowledge, which includes chat, forums, travelogues, photos, and maps. isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 45  Although one reviewer describes Itaewon as an unexpected treasure trove, most of the reviews show that tourists’ experience of Itaewon is superfi- cial and fragmented, alienated from its memories and ongoing history just like the images of the city in the tourist books. They just experience Itaewon as a non-place where things are sold and bought. Considering the general purpose of tourist books, it can be said that the translation of Itaewon that is circulated and reproduced has directed tourists’ pattern of consuming the city. The city is, of course, a place where things are traded, but it is not only a place where things are traded. As Calvino’s Invisible Cities suggests, a city is an assemblage of memory, desire, signs, names, and other features. So what is traded is not only things but also memories, desires, signs, names, and other things, as shown by Invisible Cities’ Euphemia: You do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell, but also because at night, by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels or stretched out on pile of car- pets, at each word that one man says—such as “wolf,” “sister,” “hidden treasure,” “battle,” “scabies,” “lovers”—the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, sca- bies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel’s swaying or the junk’s rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox. (Calvino 1972/1974, 36–37) Itaewon is also a place that has its memories, desires, signs, and names, and is the place where those memories, desires, signs, and names are traded; thus it deserves to be known for various reasons, not just as a selling place. So the experience of the city could be more complex than simply trading things. The fragmented experience together with the reproduced image has produced a negative image about Itaewon, so that it loses its attraction as a tourist site. Furthermore, as neighboring commercial areas are created, Itae- won has also lost its merits as a shopping area. Realizing the risk, the gov- ernment designated the area a special tourism district in 1997 and decided to hold the Itaewon Global Village Festival twice a year in an attempt to revive Itaewon as a site of dynamic cultural exchanges. conclusion In the tourism industry, cities are rearranged according to the economic principles of commercialism in a capitalist society. Cities can be classified as a sacred city, a fashion city, a commercial city, and so on, and this clas- sification is translated spatially or verbally, creating a representative image of the city. 46 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  3. Different views of Itaewon Tourist books are one of the media where cities are verbally trans- lated. Itaewon has been verbally translated as a shopping and entertainment area in tourist books, and such a translated image has been consumed among tourists. However, this image has been fragmented, and so has been the expe- rience of tourists. The experience of cities may be more multiple and more multilateral than the one the tourist books can produce as shown in the description of the city of Irene in Invisible Cities: If you saw it, standing in its midst, it would be a different city; Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes. For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene. (Calvino 1972/1974, 125) isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 47  4. Itaewon, historical view Therefore, cities cannot be fixed to a single image or translation. The various translations of the name of Itaewon itself—foreigners’ village, village for being pregnant with a foreigner’s child, village for pear trees—show that the area cannot be translated into one fixed image. The inherent and unique properties of Itaewon have been formed by the totality of geographical and historical moments. Itaewon has been a place for travelers and trading, a space of trauma caused by the conflictive history of Korea, a foreigners’ village, a foreign land within the country, a colonized space, a space of freedom and resistance, a deterritorialized zone, a window onto Western culture, a space of conflicts and solidarity, a space for cultural translation, and so on. The area has accumulated its memories throughout history while being repeatedly rewrit- ten, functioning as “a culture-generator.” Indeed, regarding cities as “culture-generators,” Lotman says: The city is a complex semiotic mechanism, a culture-generator, but it carries out this function only because it is a melting-pot of texts and codes, belonging to all kinds of languages and levels. The essential semiotic polyglottism of every city is what makes it so productive of semiotic encounters. The city, being the place where different national, social, and stylistic codes and texts confront each other, is the place of hybridization, recodings, semiotic translations, all of which makes it into a powerful generator of new information. (Lotman 1990, 194) Itaewon has been, to use Lotman’s words “the place of hybridization, recodings, semiotic translations” (Lotman 1990, 194). However, a selective translation of such a city in the tourist books has focused on the fragmented image in the process of the commodification of the city as a tourist site. This fragmented image has been reproduced during past decades, fixing the image to Itaewon and obstructing cognition of the totality or the whole nature of the 48 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  city. This way, translation may be damaging to cities especially when a dis- torted image obtains authority through reproduction. As a culture-generator, a city deserves its proper translation. <References> Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermoder- nity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bewes, Timothy. 2002. Reification or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Calvino, Italo. 1972. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver (1974). Florida: Har- court Brace & Company. Chambers, Iain. 2012. “The Translated City.” Translation 1: 101–106. Choi, Jong-il. 2003. 이태원에 나타난 아메리카나이제이션에 관한 연구 (A Study on “Amer- icanization” expressed in Itaewon space). Unpublished thesis. Seoul Nation- al University. Fowler, Edward. 1992. “Rendering Words, Traversing Cultures: On the Art and Politics of Translating Modern Japanese Fiction.” Journal of Japanese Studies 18: 1–44. Han, Heu-suk. 2001. 용산 속의 전쟁사와 군사문화 (War history and military culture within Yongsan). Seoul: Yongsan Cultural Council. Han, Suzanne Crowder. 1989. Seoul: a Pictorial Guidebook. Host of the ’86 Asian Games and ’88 Olympics. Seoul: Hollym. Hoefer, Hans, and et al. 1981. Insight Guides: Korea. Hong Kong: Apa Productions. Im, Myung Soo. 1981. Tour in Seoul. Seoul: Saenggaksa. Jang, Hak-jin. 2000. 이태원 상업가로 매력요소 분석에 관한 연구 (Analysis of merits of Itae- won as a commercial district). Unpublished thesis. Seoul National University. Kim, Chunsung. 2004. A Guide for Foreign Tourists about Korea. Seoul: HyunHakSa. Kim, Eun-sil. 2004. “지구화 시대 근대의 탈영토화된 공간으로서 이태원에 대한 민족지적 연구.” (Eth- nographic study on Itaewon as a modern deterritorialized space in the glo- balized age. In 변화하는 여성문화 움직이는 지구촌 (Changing women culture, moving global village), 13–60. Seoul: Pureun Sasangsa. Kim,Hyeon-mee.2005.글로벌 시대의 문화번역: 젠더, 인종, 계층의 경계를 넘어(Culturaltrans- lation in the global age: beyond gender, race, and class). Seoul: Another Culture. Kim, Jung-eun, et al. 2010. “이태원 경관 읽기 (Reading Itaewon Landscape).” Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture Journal 2010 (0): 141–145. Kim, Jun-gi. 2012. 이태원’, 한국민속문학사전 (The encyclopedia of Korean folk litera- ture). National Folk Museum of Korea. http://folkency.nfm.go.kr/munhak/ index.jsp (accessed December, 2014). Kotkin, Joel. 2005. The City. New York: Modern Library. kotra. 2006. Guide to Living in Korea. Seoul: KOTRA. kowoc (Korean Organizing Committee for the 2002 FIFA World Cup). 2002. Spec- tator Guide10—Venue Cities in Korea. Seoul: KOWOC. Le Bas, Tom. 2007. Insight Guides: South Korea. 8th edition. London: Insight Guides. Lee, Cecilia Hae-Jin. 2010. Frommer’s South Korea. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley. Lee, Na-young, and Min-yoo Jung. 2010. “탈/식민성의 공간, 이태원과 한국의 대중음 악 – 이태원 ‘클럽’들의 형성과 변화과정을 중심으로 (1950–1991)” (History of popular music and (re)formation of ‘clubs’ at Post/Colonial Space, Itaewon in South Korea, 1950–1991).” Society and History 87: 191–229. Lee, No-mi. 2011. “국내 외국인 소수집단 거주지의 갈등과 연대 – 이태원 무슬림 거주지를 중 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 49  심으로” (A study on conflict and solidarity in foreign settlement—focused on Itaewon Muslim Settlement). Korean Culture Study 21(0): 237–263. Lotman, Yuri M. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Translated by Ann Shukman. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nilsen, Robert. 2009. South Korea. Berkeley, CA: Avalon Travel. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. Oh, Yeong-su. 1963. “Anna’s Will.” The Complete Works of Oh Yeong-su. Seoul: Hyundaeseogwan. 263–330. Paxton, Norbert. 2008. The Rough Guide to Korea. London: Rough Guides. Robinson, Martin, and Jason Zahorchak. 2009. Seoul. City Guide. London: Lonely Planet. Rybczynski, Witold. 1995. City Life: Urban Expectations in the New World. New York: Scribner’s. Saccone, Richard .1994. Travel Korea Your Way. New Jersey: Hollym. Seoul Development Institute. 2001. 이태원 장소 마케팅 전략연구 (Study on marketing strategies for Itaewon). Seoul: Seoul Development Institute. Shin, Ju-baek. 2007. “용산과 일본군 용산기지의 변화 (Changes of Yongsan and Japa- nese Military Base in Yongsan) (1884–1945).” Seoul Studies 29: 189–218. Simon, Sherry. 2012. Cities in Translation. London: Routledge. SMG (Seoul Metropolitan Government). 1998. Visitors Guide. Seoul Korea. Seoul: SMG. Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Translation in a Postcolonial Context. Manchester: St. Je- rome. Tymoczko, Maria, and Edwin Gentzler, eds. 2002. Translation and Power. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Yi. Heu-su, et al. 2008. “서울 이태원동 일대의 이슬람 타운화 과정에 관한 연구 (Study on the Process of Islamic Town Formation in Itaewon).” Korean Association of Islamic Studies Journal 18(2): 47-86. Yi, Hyeok-jin, and Ho-tak Oh. 1994. “관광산업으로서의 쇼핑상품에 관한 이론적 고찰 (Theoretical Approaches to Shopping Items as Tourism Industry).” Regional Development Journal 19: 21-52. <Hunam Yun> She is a translation scholar and translator. She first obtained her BA in English literature at Korea University, Seoul. After studying translation studies at Warwick University, UK, she obtained her MA and PhD in Translation Studies in 2000 and 2011 respectively. She has taught translation theory and practice for over fifteen years at Hongik University in Seoul and translated Walter Scott, Andersen, George MacDonald, and Beatrix Potter into Korean. Her main topics in- clude globalization and translation, literary translation, drama translation, translational norms, and screen translation and she authored Introduc- tion to Translation Theory and Practice. She now focuses on writing and translating while living in New York. 50 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15750

Of Translational Spaces and Multilingual Cities: Reading the Sounds of Lagos in Sefi Atta’s Swallows and Everything Good Will Come* Elena Rodríguez Murphy University of Salamanca, Spain [email protected] <Abstract> Over the last few years, there has been an increasing number of Nigerian au- thors who in their writing have centered on portraying the different sounds and accents of one of Nigeria’s most diverse and vibrant cities, Lagos. This article aims to analyze the way in which Sefi Atta, a leading voice in what has come to be known as “the third generation of Nigerian writers,” describes in her novels Swallow (2005) and Everything Good Will Come (2010) the manner in which some of Nigeria’s vernacular languages, such as Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, as well as Nigerian English and Nigerian Pidgin, permeate this incredibly plu- ral and multilingual city where varying ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups have been made to live together in the same translational space as a result of the colonial era. As Achille Mbembe (2010) has underlined, one of the main bequests of colonialism has been the unequal development of the different countries and regions of Africa. This situa- tion has led to an uneven distribution of people within multiple spaces. In this way, cities such as Lagos, Dakar, Accra, or Abidjan have actually become major metropolitan centers where interaction and negotiations among diverse peoples are commonplace and transcul- tural forms of different elements such as modes of dress, music, or language are constantly emerging. Without a doubt, translation is a main feature of coexistence in Lagos given its multilingual environment and the way in which various ethnic and linguistic communities share everyday life. “Language is part of the audible surface of the city.” (Cronin and Simon 2014, 120) in translation: reading the sounds of the city Over the last few years, there has been an increasing number of Nigerian au- thors who in their writing have centered on portraying the different sounds and accents of one of Nigeria’s most diverse and vibrant cities, Lagos. In this * This article is part of the research project entitled “Violencia simbólica y traducción: retos en la representación de identidades fragmentadas en la sociedad global” [Symbolic Violence and Translation: Challenges in the Representation of Fragmented Identities within the Global Soci- ety] (FFI2015-66516-P; MINECO/FEDER, UE), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 51  regard, as Toni Kan Onwordi has underlined in a brief description included on the cover of Sefi Atta’s second novel Swallow, “no contemporary Nigerian writer is better than Sefi Atta at evoking the smells, sounds and the sheer madness of this sprawling cosmopolitan city of Lagos.” Along with Chris Aba- ni, Helon Habila, Maik Nwosu, Jude Dibia, and Akin Adesokan, and other members of what has come to be known as “the third generation of Nigerian writers,” in her narrative Sefi Atta ably describes the way in which diverse peoples negotiate everyday life on the city’s populated streets. Although there are many ways in which one may try to understand the workings of urban reality, analyzing “the practice of everyday life” (see De Certeau 1984) in a postcolonial city such as Lagos through language and translation can offer new and interesting perspectives in various fields of study. Indeed, Atta’s novels Everything Good Will Come (2005) and Swallow (2010) provide the reader with a valuable linguistic experience of Lagos through the inclusion in her texts of the multilingual transactions that permeate the city. As Simon interestingly points out in her book Cities in Translation, Much of the abundant literature in recent decades has emphasized the visual aspects of urban life. And yet the audible surface of languages, each city’s signature blend of dialects and accents, is an equally crucial element of urban reality [. . .] “hearing” introduces the observer into layers of social, economic and cultural complexity. (Si- mon 2012, 1) Thus, reading in Atta’s fiction the sounds and diverse range of accents that characterize the city brings the reader closer to the complexity of its lin- guistic reality, in which translation appears as an indispensable tool which has gradually allowed for the emergence of what McLaughlin has termed “new urban language varieties”: The burgeoning growth of Africa’s cities that began during the latter part of the colo- nial period and continues with increasing momentum into the twenty-first century has given rise to a multiplicity of innovative and often transformative cultural practices that are associated primarily with urban life, not least of which is the emergence of new urban language varieties. (McLaughlin 2009, 1) Lagos is, without a doubt, a multilingual and multiethnic city that can actually be defined as “a translation space [where] the focus is not on mul- tiplicity but on interaction” (Simon 2012, 7). Therefore, given its multilingual environment and the way in which various ethnic and linguistic communities have come to share its everyday life, translation can clearly be considered one of the main features of activity in Lagos. In this way, beyond dichotomist un- derstandings, translation becomes an indispensable medium through which a common coexistence may, although not always successfully, be negotiated: 52 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Multilingual contexts put pressure on the traditional vocabulary of transfer and its concepts of source and destination. Communities which have had a longstanding re- lationship inhabit the same landscape and follow similar rhythms of daily life. Facing one another across the space of the city, they are not “foreign” and so translation can no longer be configured only as a link between a familiar and a foreign culture, be- tween a local original and a distant destination, between one monolingual community and another. [. . .] The Other remains within constant earshot. The shared understand- ings of this coexistence change the meaning of translation from a gesture of benev- olence to a process through which a common civility is negotiated. (Simon 2012, 7) lagos: a multilingual and multiethnic megacity In his book Sortir de la grande nuit (2010), Achille Mbembe recently under- lined the fact that one of the main bequests of colonialism has been the un- equal development of the different countries and regions of Africa. In fact, “[n]o major coastal cities existed in Western Africa before the colonial period. However, as a result of the mostly maritime-based logistics of colonialism, countries in the sub-region began an urbanization path strongly associated with the coast” (United Nations Human Settlements Programme [UN-Hab- itat] 2014, 99). This situation has gradually led to an uneven distribution of people within multiple spaces, hence cities like Lagos, Dakar, Accra, and Ab- idjan have actually become major metropolitan centers where interaction and negotiations are commonplace and transcultural forms of different elements such as modes of dress, music, or language are constantly emerging. It be- comes apparent, therefore, that in many African cities such as Lagos attaining even the minimum often requires complex styles of staying attuned to the shifting intersections of gestures, excitements, languages, anxieties, determinations and comportments enacted across markets, streets and other venues. The city is a field of affect where specific dispositions and attainments are contingent upon the ways actors’ bodies, histories and capacities are mobilized and enacted. (Simone 2007, 237) As Ato Quayson explains in regard to Oxford St., in the Ghanaian capital of Accra the streets in many African cities may be seen as archives, rather than just geographical locations, where it is possible to find “a rich and intricate relationship between tradition and modernity, religion and secularity as well as local and transnational circuits of images and ideas” (Quayson 2010, 72). Lagos is a burgeoning city, the largest in Nigeria (Falola and Genova 2009, 202), and, according to the figures published by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) in its 2014 report The State of African Cities 2014. Re-imagining Sustainable Urban Transitions, it “has recent- ly joined the ranks of the world’s megacities” (2014, 17). Lagos has undoubt- edly been shaped by its history, not only as one of the most important ports isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 53  in West Africa from the eighteenth century onwards, but also as the federal capital of Nigeria (1914–1991). In this respect, although Abuja has been the federal capital of the country since 1991, Lagos, whose population is expected to rise to over eighteen million by 2025 (United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 23–25), is now the center of one of the largest urban areas in Western Africa and continues to be a main hub in the southwestern region of Nigeria for the circulation of peoples as well as goods. Growing urbaniza- tion and rural–urban migration are responsible for the cultural heterogeneity of this major Western African city, which was at one point described “as an ancient city inhabited by the Awori and Ijebu people, both subgroups of the Yoruba” (Falola and Genova 2009, 202). Nevertheless, as a result of Nigeria’s national history, Lagos is currently populated by varying and distinct ethnic groups. Although there is still a Yoruba majority, it can be said that “Nigeria’s myriad ethnic and religious identities are found throughout the city’s neigh- borhoods, usually managing to coexist, though periodically sparking tensions” (Lewis 2009, 115). The artificial boundaries which were drawn when Nigeria was created by British administrators in 1914,1 have given rise to an incredibly heteroge- neous space both in ethnical and linguistic terms. As can be seen in the map below, there is an extremely wide range of ethnic groups which, as a conse- quence of colonialism, have come to inhabit the same nation; this has often provoked ethnic and religious tensions, the Biafran War (1967–1970) being a case in point: The Nigeria of today [...] is a relatively new creation, dating back to the early 20th century. Boundaries prior to that time included numerous chieftaincies and empires that expanded and contracted geographically without regard to modern Nigeria’s boundaries. For the early peoples of Nigeria, only geographic boundaries, such as the Sahara Desert or Atlantic Ocean, might have kept them in place. Western European powers competing for territory and political control in Africa during the late-19th cen- tury determined Nigeria’s boundaries to suit their needs. Much of Nigeria’s western, eastern, and northern borders are the results of rivalry and compromise by Euro- pean powers. As a result, ethnic groups and former kingdoms straddle boundaries. [...] Modern-day Nigeria is a conglomeration of hundreds of ethnic groups, spanning across different geographical zones. [...] To identify a single Nigerian culture is diffi- cult. (Falola and Genova 2009, xxx-xxxi) 1 The name ‘Nigeria’ is credited to the colonial editor of the Times of London, Flora Shaw, who later married the new entity’s governor, Lord Frederick Lugard. The name stuck. But the new name was not accompanied by any sense of national unity. [. . .] The British yoking together of so many different peoples into a huge state [. . .] shaped the future of about a fifth of Africa’s sub-Saharan population” (Campbell 2013, 2). 54 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  From a demographic point of view, within Nigeria the Hausa-Fulani, the Igbo, and the Yoruba can be considered to be the largest of the ethnic groups. According to Iyoha (2010, 169), around 29% of the population is Hausa-Fulani who live mainly in the northern regions in cities such as Kano, Sokoto, and Kaduna. The Yoruba, more or less 21%, are based primarily in the southwest of the country, in cities such as Ife-Ife, Lagos, and Ibadan. On the other hand, the Igbo, approximately 18% of the population, inhabit the areas situated in the southeast of Nigeria, for example in Port Harcourt, Owerri, and Enugu. These aforementioned groups can, however, be said to live all around the country. Other, numerically smaller ethnic groups include the Tiv, the Nupe, the Igala, and the Jukun in the Middle Belt region and the Ijaw, the Itsekiri, the Urhobo, the Ogoni, and the Ibibio in the Niger Delta. They have long been demanding greater political and economic representation within the national space, as Saro-Wiwa has pointed out on many occasions in regard to the Ogoni people: Colonialism is not a matter only of British, French, or European dominance over Af- ricans. In African society, there is and has always been colonial oppression. In my case, the Ogoni had never been conquered by their Igbo neighbors. But the fact of British colonialism brought both peoples together under a single administration for the first time. And when the British colonialists left, the numerically inferior Ogoni were consigned to the rule of the more numerous Igbos, who always won elections in the Region since ethnic loyalties and cultural habits were and continue to be strong throughout Nigeria. (Saro-Wiwa 1992, 155) Not only is Nigeria diverse in terms of its ethnicity, but it also boasts an enormous variety of languages and dialects—more than four hundred ac- cording to Garuba (2001, 11) and more than five hundred according to the isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 55  Ethnologue database (Simons and Fennig 2017). As Adekunle (1997) and Adeg- bija (2000, 2004) highlight, multilingualism is a common feature of many West African regions, and Nigeria can be said to be the country where the largest number of different languages is spoken. Together with English, which is used as an official language and is employed in diverse forms, Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba have become the three major national languages.2 Moreover, a wide range of languages and dialects spoken by the different Nigerian ethnic groups is to be found: Apart from the indigenous languages, which are the mother tongues of Nigerians, there also exist non-indigenous languages. They include English, which has become a second language; Nigerian Pidgin (the language in Nigeria with probably the larg- est number of speakers), which derives from the contact between English and the indigenous languages; Classical Arabic, which is learnt by Muslims; and other for- eign languages such as French, German, and Russian, which are taken as academic subjects at the secondary and tertiary levels of education. (Igboanusi 2002, 13–14) Faced with this highly complex web of languages, many Nigerians have resorted to both English and Nigerian Pidgin (NP)3 as a way of favoring communication with each other: Originally mainly restricted to trade, Pidgin has spread to become the language of market places, sports, the army and police force, taxi drivers, playgrounds, university campuses, and generally of interethnic discourse in lower-class and informal con- texts. In recent decades it has therefore been utilized for mass communication—in advertising, political campaigning, government propaganda, announcements, and mass media, e.g. news broadcasts on the radio [. . .] It is labeled “the most widely spoken language in Nigeria” [. . .] Though the language still carries a strong stigma in the eyes of many educated Nigerians, many others have come to use it in informal conversations, also in banks, offices, and businesses, utilizing its ethnographic role as a code of friendliness and proximity. (Schneider 2007, 205–206) Nonetheless, it is interesting to take into consideration that whilst NP and the vernacular languages are normally used in informal and familiar conversations, administrative and educational matters are mainly dealt with in English: “For a great many speakers from different groups, English is [...] valued as a language of prestige, a sign of education, and a mark of modernity” 2 “The dominance of English in the Nigerian Constitution continued until 1979, when the Con- stitution that emerged under a military regime specifically provided for the use of the three major languages (Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba) in addition to English for proceedings in the Na- tional Assembly: ‘The business of the National Assembly shall be conducted in English, and in Hausa, Ibo, and Yoruba when adequate arrangements have been made therefore (Section 51)’” (Bamgbose 1996, 358). 3 It is important to bear in mind that, as Igboanusi points out, “Nigerian English” (NE) and “Ni- gerian Pidgin” (NP) are considered to be different languages: “Nigerian Pidgin is different from Nigerian English (the variety of English used in Nigeria). However, the line between them is sometimes difficult to draw, particularly at the lexical level” (Igboanusi 2008, 78). 56 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  (Simpson 2008,194). According to different critics (Bamgbose 1971; Bamgbose 1996, 366; Igboanusi 2002; Gut 2004, 813), only a small percentage of the Ni- gerian population may understand or speak English, but, despite the fact that in recent years there have been repeated attempts to increase the importance of the vernacular languages, it continues to be used on a regular basis, espe- cially by the local elites: As ex-colonial people, Nigerians hold English in great awe. They so overrate English that literacy in English is considered the only mark of being an educated person. For example, for them science and technology are not within the reach of any person who cannot master the English language. Not surprisingly, therefore, the language, unlike any of the Nigerian mother tongues, is regarded as being politically neutral for adoption by the people. [. . .] Consequently, political expediency makes the English lan- guage the ready language for adoption for national literacy today. (Afolayan 2001, 83) Just as in other African countries, the increasing use of new technologies such as the Internet and cable TV among specific sectors of Nigerian society has resulted in a growing interest on the part of the younger generation in learning the English language. This situation has been skillfully described by the widely acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who, on many occasions, has stated that English is no longer considered by some as a “foreign” language, but rather as a Nigerian language adapted to the Nigerian cultural context: I’d like to say something about English [...] which is simply that English is mine. Some- times we talk about English in Africa as if Africans have no agency, as if there is not a distinct form of English spoken in Anglophone African countries. I was educated in it; I spoke it at the same time as I spoke Igbo. My English-speaking is rooted in a Nigerian experience and not in a British or American or Australian one. I have taken ownership of English. (Adichie, quoted in Uzoamaka 2008, 2) The general trend encountered in multilingual communities consists in usage gradually determining the role each language has in particular domains, and Nigeria is no exception. Although English remains the most important language in education and matters pertaining to government and administration, the vernacu- lar languages—such as Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo as well as NP—are used primarily in informal contexts. Taking these matters into consideration, it is important to underline the “diglossic,” or rather “poliglossic,” relations that, as Zabus (2007) and Bandia (2008) point out, have been established between the different languages that are employed in many of the countries in West Africa, including Nigeria:4 4 It is interesting to mention here that, according to Warren-Rothlin, in Nigeria digraphia is also a social reality which can result in social divisions (Warren-Rothlin 2012, 6–7). There also exist multiple orthographies and writing scripts within the country (ibid. 7). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 57  For our purposes, the sociolinguistic concept of diglossia needs to be expanded to include not only Ferguson’s genetically linked “high” and “low” varieties (to which he erroneously attributed scripturality and orality, respectively) but unrelated languages as well. Indeed, in a country like Ghana, Ewe is not a dialect of English and has a written literature of its own but, functionally, Ewe is to English what a dominated or subordinate language is to a dominant or superordinate language. [. . .] Also, the West African auxiliary languages resulting from languages in contact such as pidgins have a diglossic relation to the dominant European language that is similar to the more conventional relation between a prestige or power language and its regional dialect. Conversely, a statistically dominant language like Wolof in Senegal can be consid- ered as being hegemonic like French and would thus be in diglossia with a minor language like Ndût. (Zabus 2007, 14) In the case of the Nigerian linguistic landscape, English has gradually come to be accepted as the dominant language in some domains while specific forms of some of the vernacular languages such as Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba have been gaining ground in others. In many instances, however, these vernac- ular languages are in a diglossic situation in relation to the English language. Likewise, although it is now defined as “the most widely spoken language in Nigeria,” NP appears to be in a diglossic situation with respect to English. It is also important to bear in mind that the three major vernacular languages can be categorized as hegemonic vis-à-vis those considered as minor. Thus, faced with the linguistic variation characteristic of a territory like Nigeria, it may be said that, in Zabus’s own words, “[w]e can therefore advance the notions of ‘triglossia’ or even ‘polyglossia,’ and ‘intertwined diglossias’” (Zabus 2007, 14). The Nigerian cultural and linguistic situation that we have been describing, although very succinctly, is reflected in the city of Lagos where, as illustrated by the different examples that follow, diverse languages, and therefore translation, are used on a daily basis, not only in the ever-chang- ing “discourse ecologies” (Quayson 2010) that exist on its streets, but also in the conversational exchanges that take place in its crowded markets, “motor parks,” taxis or buses. In this regard, in their work both Adedun and Shodipe have underlined the fact that, although most people in Lagos use Yoruba and Nigerian Pidgin in their daily interactions, Hausa, Igbo, and other vernacular languages together with English are also a common feature in this cosmopol- itan African city: The nature of Lagos, which accommodates various ethnic, and religious groups, ac- counts for the present state of its language repertoire. [. . .] Without any doubt, Lagos is a potpourri of different peoples and tribes and these have had a noticeable impact on the linguistic repertoire, language choice, and language shift in the area. (Adedun and Shodipe 2011, 131) 58 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  the sounds of lagos in swallow and everything good will come One of the main characteristics of Atta’s work, as mentioned previously, is the accuracy with which she manages to portray the city of Lagos and the wide range of sounds that fill its streets and buildings. Both in her first novel, Every- thing Good Will Come (EG in the citations, below), and in her second novel, Swallow (SW in the citations, below), in addition to other works, Atta de- scribes different parts of the city along with its diverse languages and accents: Our continent was a tower of Babel, Africans speaking colonial languages: French, English, Portuguese, and their own indigenous languages. Most house help in Lagos came from outside Lagos; from the provinces and from neighboring African coun- tries. If we didn’t share a language, we communicated in Pidgin English. (EG, 212) Sheri’s younger siblings greeted me as I walked across the cement square. “Hello, Sister Enitan.” “Long time no see.” “Barka de Sallah, Sister Enitan.” (EG, 247) Street hawkers sat behind wooden stalls in a small market . . . They were Fulani peo- ple from the North. The men wore white skull caps and the women wrapped chiffon scarves around their heads. [. . .] They talked loud in their language, and together they sounded like mourners ululating. (EG, 198) Baba came to collect his monthly salary [. . .] “Compliments of the season,” I said. “How are you?” I spoke to him in Yoruba, addressing him by the formal you, because he was an elder. He responded with the same formality because I was his employer. Yoruba is a lan- guage that doesn’t recognize gender—he the same as she, him the same as her—but respect is always important. (EG, 312). In her fiction, Atta includes many instances in which translation ap- pears as an indispensable tool and a necessary medium through which ev- eryday life may be negotiated in Lagos, a place where diverse peoples and languages have come to share a common space. For instance, when Enitan, the main character in Everything Good Will Come, is sent to Royal College in La- gos and encounters girls from varying ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, cul- tural and linguistic translation becomes indispensable on a day-to-day basis: I met Moslem girls [. . .] Catholic girls [. . .] Anglican girls, Methodist girls. One girl, San- gita, was Hindu [. . .] I learned also about women in my country, from Zaria, Katsina, Kaduna who decorated their skin with henna dye and lived in purdah [. . .] Uncle Alex had always said our country was not meant to be one. The British had drawn a circle on the map of West Africa and called it a country. Now I understood what he meant. The girls I met at Royal College [in Lagos] were so different. I could tell a girl’s ethnic- ity even before she opened her mouth. Hausa girls had softer hair because of their Arab heritage. Yoruba girls like me usually had heart-shaped faces and many Igbo girls were fair-skinned; we called them Igbo Yellow. We spoke English, but our native tongues were as different as French and Chinese. So, we mispronounced names and spoke English with different accents. Some Hausa girls could not “fronounce” the isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 59  letter P. Some Yoruba girls might call these girls “Ausas,” and eggs might be “heggs.” Then there was that business with the middle-belters who mixed up their L’s and R’s. (EG, 44–45) Moreover, when Enitan meets one of her neighbors, a Muslim girl named Sheri, they are each faced with both cultural and linguistic translation. Since they come from different ethnic communities and religious backgrounds, Enitan, who is Yoruba, and Sheri, a “half-caste” with Hausa roots, need to understand one another’s cultural and linguistic circumstances before they can become friends: [Sheri] was funny, and she was also rude, but that was probably because she had no home training. She yelled from our gates. “I’ll call you aburo, little sister, from now on. And I’ll beat you at ten-ten, wait and see.” (EG, 16) The woman in the photograph by [Sheri’s] bedside table was her grandmother. “Alha- ja,” Sheri said. “She’s beautiful.” [...] There were many Alhajas in Lagos. This one wasn’t the first woman to go on hajj to Mec- ca, but for women like her, who were powerful within their families and communities, the title became their name. [...] She pressed the picture to her chest and told me of her life in downtown Lagos. She lived in a house opposite her Alhaja’s fabric store. She went to a school where children didn’t care to speak English. After school, she helped Alhaja in her store and knew how to measure cloth. I listened, mindful that my life didn’t extend beyond Ikoyi Park. What would it be like to know downtown as Sheri did, haggle with customers, buy fried yams and roasted plantains from street hawkers, curse Area Boys and taxi cabs who drove too close to the curb. [...] Sheri was a Moslem and she didn’t know much about Christianity. [...] I asked why Moslems didn’t eat pork. “It’s a filthy beast,” she said, scratch- ing her hair. I told her about my own life. (EG, 33–34) As Enitan mentions in several parts of the novel, although Hausa resonates in the streets and markets of Lagos, without translation into other languages it is not always understood by the Yoruba majority or by people from other ethnic communities. That is why, in many cases, people from di- verse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds who live in the city translate their vernacular languages into Pidgin English or English: Our gate man unlocked the gates. His prayer beads hung from his wrist. I realized I must have disturbed his prayer. Soon it would be the Moslem fasting period, Rama- dan. “Sanu, madam,” he said. “Sanu, mallam,” I replied in the only Hausa I knew. (EG, 201) In my first year of marriage, there was a hawker who sat by the vigilante gates of our state. She was one of those Fulani people from the north. We never said a word to each other: I could understand her language no more than she could mine. (EG, 243) This situation is also underlined by another Nigerian writer, Buchi Emecheta, in her well-known novel The Joys of Motherhood: The early market sellers were making their way to the stalls in single file. [Nnu Ego] 60 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  in her haste almost knocked the poor man down [. . .] There followed a loud curse, and an unintelligible outpouring from the mouth of the beggar in his native Hausa language, which few people in Lagos understood. (Emecheta 1994, 9) In the colorful markets of Lagos and other African cities, peoples from varied ethnic and linguistic environments constantly mingle and in- teract. Markets, as Simone puts it, are “the site for incessant performance, for feigned connections and insider deals, for dissimulation of all kinds, for launching impressions and information, rumors and advice” (Simone 2008, 81). Hence, given the mélange of languages and cultures, “[t]he resulting con- fusion about what is really going on breeds its own makeshift interpreters, who pretend to have real skills of discernment and can steer customers to the best price, quality, or hidden deal” (Simone 2008, 81). In the extract below, taken from Everything Good Will Come, Enitan, who was brought up in Ikoyi, one of Lagos’s affluent neighborhoods,5 high- lights the fact that class differences are extremely important in the city and can greatly influence the way in which people talk to one another: Pierre, my present house boy, began to wash the vegetables [. . .] I needed Pierre to place the okras on the chopping board. “Ici,” I said pointing. “Over there, please.” Pierre raised a brow. “Là bas, madame?” “My friend,” I said. “You know exactly what I mean.” It was my fault for attempting to speak French to him. [. . .] “I beg, put am for there,” I said [in Nigerian Pidgin]. [. . .] The general help we called house boys or house girls. [. . .] They helped with daily chores in exchange for food, lodgings, and a stipend. Most were of working age, barely educated. [. . .] (EG, 212) In this particular situation, because Pierre, the house boy, comes from the neighboring Republic of Benin, Enitan tries to translate her orders into French. Nevertheless, in the end, she resorts to a translation into Pidgin En- glish, which, as stated earlier in the article, is the language normally used as the medium of communication among peoples who belong to different ethnic and linguistic groups in Lagos. On other occasions, however, depending on the educational level of the speakers and the specific context in which interaction takes place, when 5 According to Fourchard (2012a, 68), this comes as a direct result of the colonial era, when the city of Lagos was divided into a residential area reserved for Europeans (Ikoyi) and a commer- cial area in which Europeans lived, worked, traded, and interacted with Africans (Lagos Island). In this regard, Lagos, like other contemporary African cities, may be described as what Triulzi (2002, 81) refers to as “the ‘site of memory’ of colonisation, with its divisions (the colonial city was conceived and grew opposite to and separate from the native town), its visible remains (buildings, town plans, statues) and its obligatory ‘synthesis’ of tradition and modernity.” isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 61  people whose ethnicities differ speak with one another, they translate their vernacular languages into English, instead of Pidgin English: We [Rose and Tolani] always spoke in English because she couldn’t speak Yoruba and I couldn’t understand her own language, Ijaw. (SW, 8) Enitan and Tolani, the main protagonists of Everything Good and Swallow respectively, recount their stories in English yet, as Atta herself has pointed out (quoted in Rodríguez Murphy 2012, 107–108), it actually consists of a transcultural form of English (Rodríguez Murphy 2015b, 72), which is inscribed with Nigerian vernacular languages and expressions as well as with Nigerian cultural markers: “[Nigerian readers] tell me they enjoy seeing those kinds of Englishes in my work. They come up to me and say: ‘Oh, you really do know Nigeria, you really do know Lagos very well.’ They enjoy it” (Atta quoted in Rodríguez Murphy 2012, 108). In her work, Atta manages to reflect the different varieties of English used in Lagos. These varieties have come to be defined as NE, and now form part of the wide range of “World Englishes” (see Kachru 1992 and Kachru, Kachru, and Nelson 2006) or “New Englishes” (see Crystal 2003), in reference to local adaptations of the English language which suit specific cultural contexts. This can be seen in the following examples: Yellow Sheri’s afro was so fluffy, it moved as she talked [. . .] She had a spray of rashes and was so fair-skinned. People her color got called “Yellow Pawpaw” or “Yellow Banana” in school. (EG, 18) Peter Mukoro tapped my arm. “I was calling that lady, that yellow lady in the kitchen, but she ignored me. Tell her we need more rice. Please.” (EG, 125–126) I’d heard men say that women like Sheri didn’t age well: they wrinkled early like white women. It was the end of a narration that began when they first called her yellow banana, and not more sensible, I thought. (EG, 206) In diverse passages of Atta’s novels, we may observe that the word “yellow” has come to acquire a specific meaning in NE: “a NE way of describ- ing a fellow Black who is fairly light-skinned” (Igboanusi 2002, 303). Area boys “You won’t believe. We were having a peaceful protest, calling on the government to reconsider our demands, when we noticed a group in the crowd who did not belong to our union. [. . .] They were shouting insults and acting rowdy [. . .]” The people she was talking about had to be area boys. They waited for any protest so they could misbehave. (SW, 133) In this extract taken from Swallow, Atta uses the term “area boy,” a phrase now commonly heard in urban settings, which, in NE, makes reference to a job- 62 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  less young man who participates in criminal acts and is often involved in criminal activities. Such a term is one of many linguistic reflections of what, according to some critics (Fourchard 2012b, Lewis 2009), is now happening in the streets of the city where, for several decades, criminal activity has been on the increase. High-life music As he spoke, I fell asleep dreaming of him, an eleven-year-old boy with khaki shorts holding a rifle made of sticks, dancing to high-life music with his mother and learning how to drink palm-wine from his father’s calabash. (EG, 116-117) “High-life music,” sometimes referred to just as “highlife,” is a very well-known musical genre in the Western regions of Africa,6 “a brand of music style combining jazz and West African elements, popular in Nigeria and other West African countries. In BE, ‘high life’ denotes a style of life that involves spending a lot of money on entertainment, good food, expensive clothes, etc.” (Igboanusi 2002, 138). As Igboanusi remarks, it is important to take into con- sideration that there is a difference between the way the term is used in British English and the meaning it has come to acquire in Nigerian English. Not only “Highlife,” but also other types of transcultural Nigerian mu- sic such as apala or juju music are often mentioned in Atta’s novels. Along with language, another element that permeates daily life in Lagos and many Nigerian cities is music that, as in other countries on the African continent, has been adapted and translated to suit diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds: Through the fence we heard Akanni’s juju music. Sheri stuck her bottom out and began to wriggle. She dived lower and wormed up. (EG, 15) The street was narrow and juju music blared from a battered cassette player perched on a wooden stool. Street hawkers sat around selling boxes of sugar, bathing spong- es, tinned sardines, chewing sticks, cigarettes, and Bazooka Joe gum. (EG, 89) Lagos. The street on which we lived was named after a military governor. Our neigh- borhood smelled of burned beans and rotten egusi leaves. Juju and apala music, disco and reggae music jumped from the windows, and fluorescent blue cylinders lit up the entire place past midnight. (SW, 21) In her writing, Atta includes both NE and NP, and also the vernacu- lar languages with which she was brought up, Yoruba and Hausa. This helps situate the reader in Lagos’s translational spaces, where the sounds of different accents and languages share a common linguistic environment: 6 Although “highlife music” is a popular genre in West Africa, it is necessary to emphasize that each region has managed to maintain its own specificity: “Generally, as the music and its ac- companying highlife dance spread across West Africa, each region maintained its ethnic spec- ificity by composing songs in the local language, and some bands, especially the multinational ones, created compositions in English or pidgin English” (Ajayi-Soyinka 2008, 526). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 63  He pronounced his visions between chants that sounded like the Yoruba words for butterfly, dung beetle, and turkey: labalaba, yimiyimi, tolotolo. (EG, 10) Yoruba people believed in reincarnation. The Yoruba religion had a world for the living and another for spirits. There was a circle of life and other complex concepts regarding deity, royalty, and fate that I couldn’t fully understand. For anyone to understand the Yoruba cosmos was a challenge without the wisdom and guidance of a babalawo [. . .] (SW, 88) On the day of the Moslem festival, Id-el-fitr, I left home for the first time that month to break fast with the Bakares. [. . .] As I drove through their gates, I heard a ram bleat- ing in the back yard of the Bakare’s house. It had been tied to a mango tree for two weeks and would be slain for the Sallah feast. (EG, 245) “How’s your husband?” Mama Gani asked. Her gold tooth flashed. “He’s fine,” I said [. . .] “Still nothing about your father?” “Still nothing,” I said. She clapped her hands. “Insha Allah, nothing will happen to him, after the kindness he’s shown us.” (EG, 245) The multilingualism which is typical in Lagos makes communication based on translation and transculturation inevitable. The following dialogues from Everything Good Will Come and Swallow clearly illustrate this point: We heard a cry from the road. “Pupa! Yellow!” A taxi driver was leaning out of his window. [. . .] “Yes, you with the big yansh,” he shouted. Sheri spread her fingers at him. “Nothing good will come to you!” [. . .] “And you, Dudu,” the taxi driver said. Startled, I looked up. “Yes you with the black face. Where is your own yansh hiding?” I glared at him. “Nothing good will come to you.” He laughed with his tongue hanging out. “What, you’re turning up your nose at me? You’re not that pretty, either of you. Sharrap. Oh, sharrap both of you. You should feel happy that a man noticed you. If you’re not careful, I’ll sex you both.” Sheri and I turned our backs on him. (EG, 135-136) There was a strong smell of simmering palm oil in the flat. Rose was in the kitchen. [. . .] She laughed at my expression. “My sister,” she said. “You think say I no know how to cook or what?” “I’ve just seen Mrs. Durojaiye,” I said, shutting the door. “I saw her too.” “She says you visited her?” She clucked. “The woman done craze [. . .]” (SW, 135) On my way to the bus stop, I passed a group of women selling roasted corn under a breadfruit tree. [. . .] I heard two men discussing women. “Statuesque,” one of them said. “The first one is black and skinny, the second is yellow and fat. I can’t decide. I love them both. You think say I fit marry both of them?” (SW, 236) At the bus stop, an army officer with his stomach protruding over his belt parted the crowd to board a bus. “Single-file line,” he repeated and lifted his horsewhip to warn those who protested. [. . .] “Those who give orders,” I said in a voice loud enough for the others to hear. “Question them. You can’t just obey without thinking.” [. . .] “Oh, I hate people like this,” [a] woman said. “What is wrong with her? Move your 64 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  skinny self, sister.” [. . .] “Sister [. . .]. Move before I move you to one side, oh!” “Abi she’s deaf?” “Maybe she done craze.” “Sister, ‘dress oh!” “Yes, address yourself to the corner and continue to tanda for dat side with your body like bonga fish.” “Tss, keep shut. Don’t start another fight.” (SW, 188–189) Enitan’s and Tolani’s stories take place in a particular context which Atta succeeds in describing in great detail through a specific use of language that evokes, in the mind of the reader, the smells, images and languages which define the city of Lagos, where it is possible to come across interesting con- trasts and a wide range of lifestyles as well as “cultural inscriptions [. . .] seen in mottos and slogans on lorries, cars, pushcarts and other mobile surfaces that may be encountered on the street” (Quayson 2010, 73): Millions lived in Lagos [. . .] Most days it felt like a billion people walking down the labyrinth of petty and main streets: beggar men, secretaries, government contractors (thieves, some would say), Area Boys, street children [. . .] There was a constant din of cars, popping exhaust pipes, and engines, commuters scrambling for canary-yellow buses and private transport vans we called kabukabu and danfo. They bore bible epi- taphs: Lion of Judah, God Saves [. . .] There were countless billboards: Pepsi, Benson and Hedges, Daewoo, Indomie Instant Noodles, Drive Carefully, Fight Child Abuse [. . .] a taxi driver making lurid remarks; people cursing themselves well and good; All right-Sirs, our urban praise singers or borderline beggars, who hailed any person for money. Chief! Professor! Excellency! [. . .] My favourite time was early morning, before people encroached, when the air was cool and all I could hear was the call from Cen- tral Mosque: Allahu Akhbar, Allahu Akhbar. (EG, 98–99) In the different examples cited above, one can appreciate to what extent Atta accomplishes a very creative and engaging use of language in her novels. She skillfully manages to transmit the specific characteristics of the cultures that have come to constitute her identity;7 similarly she also succeeds in representing the diverse range of accents that define the city of Lagos as a translational space, where “[a]ccents, code-switching and translation are to be valued for the ways in which they draw attention to the complexities of difference, for the ways in which they interrupt the self-sufficiencies of ‘mono’ cultures” (Simon 2012, 1). 7 “I had an unusual upbringing [. . .] and was surrounded by people from other ethnic groups and religions. Many Nigerian writers I meet feel that they are Yoruba, Igbo or something else, but I actually feel Nigerian and it comes out in my writing. I write about people who don’t have any strong ethnic allegiance or people who are in mixed marriages. [. . .] What I have picked up is language from different parts of the world and it comes out in my writing. I have to be very careful when I am writing in the voices of people who have not had my experiences. My second novel, Swallow, is written in the voice of a Yoruba woman, for instance. I couldn’t use language I had picked up here or in England” (Atta as cited in Collins 2007, 7). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 65  conclusion As several critics (Bandia 2008, Bandia as cited in Rodríguez Murphy 2015a, Gyasi 1999, Mehrez 1992, Inggs and Meintjes 2009) have rightly emphasized, the high rate of multilingualism or “polilingualism” (Bandia 2008, 136–137, Bandia as cited in Rodríguez Murphy 2015a, 149) which characterizes many of the African postcolonies,8 including Nigeria, is of great importance for translation studies in this day and age. Without a doubt, taking into account the ever-growing transculturation and transnationalization of cultures in our present-day global world, multilingualism can be considered an increasingly relevant feature both in literature and society: As a corollary of colonization, the displacement and migration of peoples brought about changes that would challenge the notion of a national language and a homo- geneous culture paving the way for understanding language and culture from the point of view of a transnational experience. According to Bhabha, hybridity, a main characteristic of the postcolonial condition, disrupts the relation between national language and culture, and points to a culture of difference, of displacement of signifi- cation, of translation. (Bandia 2008, 139). In this regard, in many African cities new transcultural and hybrid forms of diverse elements are being created every day. Ranging from trans- cultural types of music (Osumare 2012), such as afrobeat or highlife music, to other transcultural phenomena, including the Azonto dance in Ghana (Jaka- na, 2012) and the Nollywood film industry, which is now a major influence in Lagos’s streets and markets (Haynes 2007, Fuentes-Luque 2017). In the specific case of language, and as we have seen in the examples quoted from Atta’s novels, the prominence of the multilingualism that permeates African cities in general, and the continuous emergence of new hybrid linguistic forms and new semantic associations, which are typical features of the discourse em- ployed in situations involving interaction in urban areas, are, and will contin- ue to be, compelling topics when analyzing issues related to translation and translatability in the twenty-first century. 8 Here “postcolony” (Mbembe 2010) refers to the postcolonial context which, according to Bandia, is part of the colonial space: “Colonial space is ‘the postcolony’ itself, but it is also that space where people with postcolonial experiences, people with postcolonial backgrounds, exist” (Bandia as cited in Rodríguez Murphy 2015a, 149). This “colonial space” should not be understood as a static entity, but rather as characterized by ongoing translation, translocation and transculturation. 66 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  <References> Adedun, Emmanuel and Mojisola Shodipe. 2011. “Yoruba-English bilingualism in cen- tral Lagos—Nigeria.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 23 (2): 121–132. Adegbija, Efurosibina E. 2000. “Language Attitudes in West Africa.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 141 (1): 75–100. . 2004. Multilingualism: A Nigerian Case Study. Trenton/Asmara: Africa World Press. Adekunle, Mobolaji. 1997. “English in Nigeria: Attitudes, Policy and Communicative Realities.” In New Englishes: A West African Perspective, edited by Ayo Bamgbose, Ayo Banjo, and Andrew Thomas, 57–86. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press. 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Saro-Wiwa, Ken. 1992. “The Language of African Literature: A Writer’s Testimony.” Research in African Literatures 23 (1): 153–157. Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English. Varieties around the World. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press. 68 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Simon, Sherry. 2012. Cities in Translation. Intersections of Language and Memory. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2007. “Deep into the Night the City Calls as the Blacks Come Home to Roost.” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (7–8): 224–237. . 2008. “Some Reflections on Making Popular Culture in Urban Africa.” African Studies Review 51 (3): 75-89. Simons, Gary F. and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2017. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Twentieth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com. Simpson, Andrew, ed. 2008. Language and National Identity in Africa. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Triulzi, Alessandro. 2002 “African Cities, Historical Memory and Street Buzz.” In The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, edited by Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, 78–91. London and New York: Routledge. United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). 2014. The State of African Cities 2014. Re-imagining sustainable urban transitions. Nairobi: UN-Habitat. Uzoamaka, Ada. 2008. “Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Creative Writing and Literary Activism.” http://www.iun.edu/~minaua/interviews/interview_ chimamanda_ngozi_adichie.pdf Warren-Rothlin, Andy. 2012. “Arabic script in modern Nigeria.” In Advances in Minority Language Research in Nigeria (vol. I), edited by Roger M. Blench and Stuart McGill, 105–121. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. Zabus, Chantal. 2001. “Oil Boom, Oil Doom. Interview by Chantal Zabus.” Interview with Ken Saro-Wiwa, in No Condition is Permanent: Nigerian Writing and the Struggle for Democracy, edited by Holger G. Ehling and Claus-Peter Holste-von Mutius, 1–12. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. First pub- lished 1993 by Rodopi (Amsterdam and New York). . 2007. The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. <Elena Rodríguez Murphy> holds a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Salamanca (Spain), where she works in the Depart- ment of Translation and Interpreting. Her research interests include Af- rican literatures, translation studies, and linguistics. She has published several articles and book chapters on these areas of study, including “An Interview with Sefi Atta” (published Research in African Literatures, 2012) and “An Interview with Professor Paul Bandia” (Perspectives, 2015). She is the author of Traducción y literatura africana: multilingüis- mo y transculturación en la narrativa nigeriana de expresión inglesa (Granada, 2015). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 69 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15751

Translation and Asymmetrical Spaces, the Strait of Gibraltar as a Case in Point África Vidal and Juan Jesús Zaro University of Salamanca, Spain [email protected] University of Malaga, Spain [email protected] <Abstract> As a geographical location, defined by Paul Bowles as “the center of the uni- verse,” which separates continents—Europe in the North and Africa in the South—but also world views, cultures, religions, and languages, the Strait of Gibraltar was and remains an authentic translation space. At present, the metaphor of the separation that the Strait evokes incessantly continues to be valid every day, taking into account, for example, events such as the succesive waves of African immigrants who have been arriving on the European coasts for several years “illegally.” In addition to these tensions, there are cities located in the Strait, such as Tangier and Gibraltar, that are by themselves multilingual and multicul- tural places and therefore spaces of translation and conflict that deserve specific sections in this paper. While Tangier, during the second half of the twentieth century was a unique “interzone” characterized by cosmopolitanism and the coexistence of spaces and multiple and confronted texts, Gibraltar is now a territory reinvented as a result of its past, in which hybridity would be a fundamental part of its complex and young identity. introduction Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary practice. (hooks 1991, 152) Human beings access reality by means of translations, of provisional, rele- vant, interesting or interested versions of realities which are continually being contextualized, rectified, and translated. With the hermeneutic and ethical journeys of each individual, we come to realize that translating is an inevitable means of encountering the other. Not only of encountering the other, but also of coming face to face with immigration and national identities, the global and the local, the problem of marginal groups, difference, or encountering what we sometimes agree with and sometimes detest. And we come across all of these things because when we translate we invade spaces, we occupy alien, far-away spaces which overlap and clash. When we translate, we shape these spaces and walk over the tracks we find on the way; but, on occasion, when we move around in others’ spaces, our aim is also to rewrite them and translate them. Translating is shifting smells, flavors, or passions from places that are 70 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  not ours. Translation is movement, flow, and passage between spaces that are not, and should never be, unidirectional or closed. Our starting-point in this paper is that all cultural experience arises at the crossroads between language, topos, and identity, and that precisely the ex- perience of what is different is produced by the destabilization of these cross- roads (Robinson 1998, 24). Our point of departure, therefore, is that translat- ing, and more specifically translating spaces, is a very political activity which is certainly not neutral—it is the locus where the coexistence of heterogeneity becomes possible, and as a result space must always be under construction (Massey 2011, 9). As an example of this way of understanding translation, we aim to focus on the Strait of Gibraltar, with the cities of Tangier and Gibraltar at opposite sides of its coast. It is a fascinating area because it is the space that joins Africa and Europe, a space of cultural encounter that espouses the concept of hybridity, a hybridity distinct from syncretism, creolization, and métissage, which would suggest that the dynamics of cultural encounters give rise to new, long-lasting identities. On the contrary, these are spaces in which the hybrid is that space in construction just mentioned that problematizes binary oppositions since each is part of the construction of the other. Within this context, translating in these spaces means offering a culturally constructed version away from dualisms. The analysis of this space, which includes the Strait, Tangier, and Gi- braltar, will lead us to reflect on the fact that translating is today the condition of living of many cities with a double or triple history behind them. The study of these spaces will make clear that translation, far from being a benevolent act of hospitality toward a guest from another space, is a relentless transaction (Si- mon 2003, 77), a hybrid act which does not mean a new synthesis but a zone of negotiation, dissent, and exchange, a locus that short-circuits patterns of alterity in order to express the drift of contemporary identities (Simon 1999, 39–40). The Strait of Gibraltar, which is in turn a clash space between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, is the starting point of this essay; it is here that all stories—those that go to the North and those that remain in the South—begin and it is also the narrative constructions on the Strait that make this space such a complicated, multicultural space, because “places without stories are unthinkable” (Price 2004, xxi). In fact, the Strait of Gibraltar and the stories shaping it throughout the centuries make it a space of conflicts, silences, discontinuities, and exclu- sions that turn it into a place which is unstable and multilayered, never fin- ished, never determined, processual, porous (Price 2004, 5). Because although the Strait of Gibraltar is currently a natural border between two continents (Africa and Europe) and two countries (Morocco and Spain), and it is unique isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 71  in that it also has Gibraltar (an overseas territory of the United Kingdom), and Ceuta (a Spanish city with its own statute of autonomous government) on opposite sides of its shores, the truth is that, throughout history, both sides have been united longer than they have been separated. They were governed as one territory by the Romans and also during the eight centuries of Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. In 1492, after the fall of the Kingdom of Granada, the two shores separated forever, a separation that was only occa- sionally interrupted during the time of the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco (1913–1956). Since 1956, when the kingdom of Morocco became independent, the two shores have once again become administratively, politically, and cul- turally independent. The waters of the Strait are, therefore, a palimpsest accumulating well-known stories and also, unfortunately, other stories we will never hear about because they were lost forever with the bodies that have sunk to the depths. The waters of the Strait are “a layered text of narratives of belonging and exclusion, always negotiated, always struggled over, never finished” (Price 2004, 7); they are the intermediate, imaginary zone between Africa and the West that every culture needs: “Somewhere every culture has an imaginary zone for what it excludes, and it is that zone we must try to remember today” (Cixous and Clément 1986, 6). And that imaginary zone is the line that joins the two “dual cities” (Simon 2012, 3 and following pages) we shall go on to examine in detail, Tangier and Gibraltar. Currently, communication between both sides of the Strait is in the form of fast or traditional ferries between Tarifa, Algeciras, and Gibraltar on the European side and Ceuta and Tangier in Africa. Crossings take between thirty and ninety minutes. Sometimes crossings cannot be made due to storms or strong winds, especially in winter. One of these ferries is called “the whale,” a carrier of unknown treasures which, with a curious symbolism reminding us of Captain Ahab’s quest to hunt down Moby Dick, is pursued by an old fish- erman from Tangier in the film Moroccan Chronicles (1999) by the Moroccan director Moumen Smihi. The journey between the two shores is made legally by almost three million people a year and illegally by more than ten thousand, who use their own means to get across in “pateras.” The Strait of Gibraltar is the only gateway into and out of the Mediterranean for all marine traffic. It is estimated that more than 82,000 ships cross it every year. As Alfred Chester points out in his short story “Glory Hole”: “The hills of Spain are there like civilized laughter across the narrow water; two ferries a day, or six, or ten— who can remember anymore? Spain is on the other, the inaccessible side of Styx” (Chester 1990, 221). The possibility of building a bridge or a tunnel between both shores 72 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  has often been discussed. From the technical viewpoint, the tunnel option would appear to be the most feasible, even though the depth of the water of the Strait would make it the deepest (and most expensive) tunnel in Europe. However, the existence of a tunnel or bridge across the Strait would be a huge improvement in traffic and mobility between both sides, something which, from a symbolic and political point of view, would not seem to be totally acceptable at this moment in time: the idea of a tunnel or bridge, ultimately a metaphor of union and communication between the two shores, clashes with other well-known metaphorical narratives about the Strait which focus more on the idea of battle and separation. One is the familiar mythological tale of the “columns,” identified fairly vaguely as the Rock of Gibraltar and Mount Hacho in Ceuta, which Hercules separated to open up a passage for the Atlantic Ocean. Another is the myth surrounding Julian, Count of Ceu- ta, a Visigoth governor of the city who is alleged to have facilitated entry of Muslim troops into the Spanish mainland in 711, enabling them to put an end to the Visigothic rule established after the fall of the Roman Empire. This act changed the history of Spain forever. It is said that Julian did this out of revenge after his daughter was raped in Toledo by Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king of Spain who would finally be defeated and killed by the invading army in the Battle of Guadalete. In this sense, the fact that it was a question of honor that caused the Muslim invasion of Spain has led to numerous interpre- tations. In his novel Reivindicación del conde don Julián (1970), Juan Goytisolo identifies with the main character more than one thousand years later in his desire to put an end to the essential, homogeneous, and nationalist–Catholic Spain of the Franco regime, in the same way that the Visigothic count had indirectly helped to put an end to Christian Spain and, ultimately, promote miscegenation and the fusion of races. We must not forget that the last sig- nificant act of war in the Strait took place in August 1936, when around eight thousand troops from the rebel Spanish army in Morocco were transported by sea to the Spanish mainland to join the rebel troops once the Civil War started. The history of the Strait, therefore, has been, and continues to be, a history of conflict involving the clash of two different civilizations, established on the two continents located on either side of this stretch of water, which also economically represent two very different zones—Europe on the north side and Africa on the south, which are profoundly asymmetrical in economic terms. It is, in this sense, perhaps the most unequal border in the whole world, and crossing the Strait was, and perhaps still is, travelling to another reality. This is how it was described by the Spanish traveller and spy Ali Bey when he said in 1814, on crossing from Tarifa to Tangier, that whoever crosses the isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 73  Strait goes “en tan breve espacio de tiempo a un mundo absolutamente nuevo, y sin la más remota semejanza con el que se acaba de dejar, se halla realmente como transportado a otro planeta” (Bey 2009, 147). Nowadays, the most vis- ible aspect of this conflict is that of illegal migrants, who, as we have pointed out above, use the Strait to enter Europe, and who in recent years consist mainly of people from sub-Saharan countries. This is why this intermediate space that is the sea is the space in movement that, although in the middle, is the space of the beginning and the end, the space of the in-between which necessarily has to be crossed by these fragmented lives. It is the only space in which, unfortunately, they will be full citizens. However, there are other conflicts in the area, including claims from other countries for territories they consider to have been illegally occupied for centuries. This is the case, above all, of Spain and Gibraltar, but also of Morocco and Ceuta. Exile, or immigration for political or ideological reasons, is also linked to the history of the Strait of Gibraltar. Many historical diasporas have traversed it, including, for example, the Jews (around 80,000) or the Moriscos (around 300,000) when they were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively, who abandoned Spain and crossed over to Africa. Some Spanish Jews settled in towns in the north of Morocco, where they lived for centuries with a largely Muslim population. Many migrated to Israel shortly after the new state was founded and now form part of the Sephardic community, one of the most visible and well-known communities of that country. The Spanish Moriscos who took refuge in Morocco, on the other hand, contributed their andalusí character to Moroccan culture and it is now one of its signs of identity. And not only that, but the space we will examine below is, as well as being a multicultural space, or perhaps precisely for that reason, a multilingual space. Four languages live side by side on both shores: Spanish on the Spanish side in Ceuta, in Gibraltar, and to a much lesser degree throughout North Morocco; English in Gibraltar; and French and Arabic in Morocco. The two most used languages, Spanish and Arabic, correspond to diatopical dialect forms, Andalusian Spanish in Spain and colloquial Moroccan Arabic or dāriŷa on the Moroccan coast of the Strait. The Andalusian variant is also used by the citizens of Gibraltar, which immediately makes them Andalusians for the rest of Spain when they speak Spanish, although they do in fact speak a hybrid variety called “llanito,” a kind of small-scale European Spanglish. Moroccan Arabic, on the other hand, has a strong Berber substrate and influences from French and Spanish and is an identitarian dialect, far removed from modern standard Arabic and unintelligible to many Moroccans. Due to their own particular history, a number of coastal towns on the Strait, such as Tangier 74 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  for example, can be considered to be multilingual spaces where it is possible to be understood in three or four languages. Others, like Gibraltar, are clearly bilingual. Ceuta is similarly an interesting example, as it is also becoming a bilingual city due to the increasing Muslim population, to which we must likewise add a significant Hindu community which is completely bilingual in Spanish and Hindi. These multicultural and multilingual spaces will allow us to better understand the Strait’s coastal “dual cities”—to use Sherry Simon’s terminol- ogy—which we will examine below. tangier, a dual city The place [Tangier] was counterfeit, a waiting room between connections, a transition from one way of being to another… (Bowles 2006, 382). Tangier is not part of Morocco. It’s international. Paul Bowles interviewed by Abdelhak Elghandor (Elghandor 1994, 16) From the end of the 1940s until Moroccan independence in 1956, the city of Tangier, located to the extreme west of the African coast of the Strait of Gi- braltar, had a unique political status, that of being an “international zone.” But it was, at the same time, a multilayered space where many languages existed, and still do exist, at the same time, a space where translation was never a mere language transfer but a practice of writing that took place at the crossroads (Simon 2012, 8). Perched on the northern tip of Morocco with its eyes trained across the Strait of Gibraltar toward Spain, “Tangier certainly has long been at the crossroads, a point of intersection of various civilizations, notably African/ Islamic and European Christian” (Hibbard 2009, 1). This is why Tangier is a space that has always generated multiple discourses; it is a city that has always “spoken,” because it is a site of representation. However, the discourses it has generated have been different translations of reality, rewritings of a space that some, Westerners, exoticized, and others, Moroccans, understood differently, as a way of “writing back to the West” (Elkouche 2008, 1). Tangier was, on the one hand, a space of rich British expatriates and, on the other, the receiving space of many expatriates from Paris during the years between the World wars, artists and writers who sought in the “interna- tionalized” Tangier what the Lost Generation had searched for in the French capital a few years earlier, a space open to less conventional ways of life. The era during which both artists and writers lived in Tangier was especially rele- isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 75  1. View of Tangier vant with regard to political and social change, because during these years the Maghreb moved on from being an area under European colonial control to one of postcolonial independence Halfway between nations, cultures, and languages, Tangier became an “interzone,” to use Burroughs’s word—that is, “a place of intermediacy and ambiguity, a place that remains outside standard narratives of nationhood and identity. It proved to be an expedient location for [writers] to sort out the multiple crises of identity, desire, and loss that motivated their writing” (Mul- lins 2002, 3). In this sense, we must not forget that, as Tangier’s legal situation allowed moral permissiveness with regard, for example, to sexuality and drugs 76 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain and was considered to be a mental illness in the United States, it was logical that this unorthodox space should attract many gay artists of the time, from Jean Genet to Robert Rauschenberg, William Burroughs and Paul Bowles (who lived in Tangier for over fifty years, from 1947 until his death in 1999). To these names we could add a long list of intellectuals who spent time in Tangier, such as Gertrude Stein, Francis Bacon, Djuna Barnes, Brion Gysin, Samuel Beckett, Alfred Chester, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Aaron Copeland, Juan Goytisolo, Ian Fleming, and many others. Because Tangier was the promised land of the bohemian Diaspora and refuge of many rich, eccentric Westerners (see Pulsifer 1992 and Walonen 2011) who sought ways of life that constituted an alternative to the orthodoxy of their countries of origin. This is something that, in spite of everything, the city is still proud of and still attracts a lot of tourists. A recent tourist brochure, Tangier in Morocco, published by the Mo- roccan National Tourist Office, states: “The streets of Tangier are teeming with artistic and literary memories. Countless painters, novelists, playwrights, poets, photographers, actors, filmmakers and couturiers from every nation under the sun have stayed here a while or made their home here, inspired and bewitched by the city’s magic” (Moroccan National Tourist Office n.d., 12). Truman Capote, in a 1950 article entitled “Tangier” (Capote 2013), reminds us of the radical heterogeneity and idiosyncrasies arising from this huge amount of freedom. Tangier was the space on the border between Eu- rope and Africa, between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity; a place where nationalities, cultures, and languages mixed to the point of promiscuity. In fact, in Morocco translation is still a means of survival today. Although the official language is Arabic, the economic and cultural life of the country has always been carried out in several languages. The educated classes speak and write standard Arabic and French, while the majority of people use varieties of Moroccan Arabic or Berber variants. In the north many people speak Span- ish and also English, particularly those involved in tourism and commerce. Therefore, “no single Moroccan language can universally speak to and for all Moroccans; rather, Moroccans must daily translate among themselves, or in the formation of literary narratives, both written and oral” (Sabil 2005, 176). It is no surprise, then, that this open locus, especially that of Tangier when it was an International Zone, should have been so attractive a place for writers whose lives and works were considered unorthodox in Western circles. Tangier was a space where for many years national structures and rigid codes of ethics were deconstructed and where confusion of all binary logic was favored. However, the spaces inhabited by Westerners in Tangier were gen- isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 77  erally separate from those inhabited by Moroccans. We see this in the case of Bowles, whose descriptions of the spaces his characters are situated in speak of class, race, or cultural differences. Moreover, Bowles describes in many of his translations the horror of not having a place in space, in For Bread Alone by Choukri (2010), for example. The above-mentioned rich British expats created a series of separate places that reflected English ways of life, places of worship like St. Andrew’s Church, tea parties and lavish parties with film stars (Finlayson 1992, 271 and following pages), although it is also true that the density of the population and the physical and social distribution of the city led to inevitable contact between the communities. The center of Tangier had been designed initially for around 12,000 people and it remained un- changed when population numbers increased. So, the streets were always full of people, cultures, and religions as reflected in the pages of Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch or Bowles’s Let it Come Down. The narrow streets in the center showed multiplicity and the two main axes of the town, the Boulevard Pas- teur running from east to west, and the Rue du Statut running from north to south, crossed at Place de France, “a bustling roundabout ringed by popular cafés frequented by the diplomatic community and Moroccan nationalists” (Edwards 2005, 130). In Tangier, the European powers were initially the producers of spac- es, the power groups who designed, distributed, named, and built spaces and who also established the rules for the use of these spaces. This divided spatial- ity is typical, as Fanon reminds us in The Wretched of the Earth, of colonizing processes: “The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits” (Fanon 1968, 52). The space of colonial order is always one of luxury, cleanliness, and entertainment; the other formed of wretched places, as we see, for example, in Choukri’s For Bread Alone. Without a doubt, for Bowles and many other writers and artists, Tang- ier was a “third space,” in Edward Soja’s sense of the term—that is, “the space where all places are capable of being seen from every angle, each standing clear; but also a secret and conjectured object, filled with illusions and allu- sions, a space that is common to all of us yet never able to be completely seen and understood” (Soja 1996, 56). Perhaps this is why Bowles never considered himself to be Tangierian but, rather, a vocational stateless person. In March 1992 he said in an interview, “I am not American and I am not Moroccan. I’m a visitor on earth. You have to be Muslim to really be accepted in Morocco, to be a part of it” (Choukri 2008, 304). Bowles was also against the Westernization of Moroccan spaces after independence—for him geography was a way of reading identity. Spaces were texts and the scenery was the reflection of his characters’ inner self, some- 78 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  thing the critics have discussed in detail (Pounds 1985; Olson 1986; Hassan 1995; Caponi 1998; Patteson 2003; Walonen 2011) and that he himself recognized in some of his travel writings such as Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue (1963), and in his novels and several interviews. Characters like Thami in Let it Come Down identify with the place and the space, but when they are taken somewhere else like New York many of his characters feel out of place. It was in his translations of oral texts by Moroccan narrators (Ahmed Yacoubi, Layachi Larbi, Abdeslam Boulaich, and Mohammed Mrabet, among others), howev- er, that he rewrites in that contact zone that is no good to imperialism, like many other postcolonial translations, but comes from within the Other(‘s) space, “involves a much looser notion of the text, interacts intensely with local forms of narrative and is a revigorating and positive global influence [. . .] a con- tinuous life-giving and creative process” (Simon and St-Pierre 2000, 10). After October 1956, when Tangier was no longer an International Zone (in 1961 it became part of Morocco), people came to suspect that “the good times, the high-living years for foreign residents with substantial assets in Tangi- er, might be ending” (Finlayson 1992, 75). In 1957 the British Post Office closed its offices; the Spanish Post Office did the same in 1958. In addition, many banks and companies closed and transferred their branches to other countries. The lux- ury goods shops on Boulevard Pascal were replaced by shops selling local crafts and clothing. But one of the most revealing details of the change was “a new edict banning the sale of liquor within a certain distance from a mosque” and another determining the places that stayed and those that did not: “There were a great many mosques, and a great many Spanish, Jewish and other foreign-owned bars. The mosques stayed open, the bars closed” (Finlayson 1992, 75). That is, the places that Lefebvre calls “representations of space” (1991, 33) closed, that experience of space referring to hegemonic ideological representations, to space constructed by professionals and technocrats (engineers, architects, urban plan- ners, geographers, etc.), a space where ideology, power, and knowledge are in- variably linked to representation. Besides, when it was no longer an International Zone, many Moroccans living in the country moved to Tangier, which changed the city space. The clean, luxurious Tangier of today is Muslim, the best areas be- long to citizens of countries in the Persian Gulf and to Moroccans who have made their fortune from drug-trafficking between Africa and Europe, traffick- ing in which the city is a crucial point (Walonen 2011, 127). The city and its population have evolved and so has their interaction with the first world, to such an extent that the essentialist vision of the Muslim population, which to- day reproaches the former foreign residents of the Tangier of the International Zone, might have changed. The foreign residents and tourists currently in isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 79  Tangier (many attracted by the literary past of the city) still mix with the local people, but probably in a different way to that of the foreign community of the Tangier of the 1940s and ‘50s. Despite this, it is curious that in the tourist brochure mentioned above, Tangier in Morocco, Tangier’s special character, compared to that of other Moroccan cities, is highlighted in the following words: “Today, the city still has its cosmopolitan side, with a wide variety of outside influences contributing to its cultural diversity and unique personali- ty” (Moroccan National Tourist Office n.d., 7). Or with these other puzzling words: “There is something altogether unique about the town, something impalpable, indefinable –a sense of freedom that hangs in the air like the scent of orange blossom” (Moroccan National Tourist Office n.d., 5). Tangier, with its linguistic and cultural contrasts and the social and classist inequalities reflected in its spaces, is therefore the living example that spaces are socially created entities, political constructions that reveal prejudices, asymmetries, and inequalities. But, in addition, the places are “practiced” spaces (De Certeau 1988, 117). De Certeau compares spatiality, place and narrative, and, for him, the narrative ends up “transforming places into spaces or spaces into places” (De Certeau 1988, 130). The writer and the translator take the reader by the hand when they describe an apartment, a street, a country, or a border. gibraltar, a translational city [...] dual cities have their origins in conquest, when a stronger language group comes to occupy or impinge upon a pre-existent language which may itself have displaced another before it. (Simon 2012, 3) The city of Gibraltar (Jebel-al-Tariq, or “the mountain of Tarik,” an Arab leader who led the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 ce), resting on its Rock, has been, as we all know, a British colony since the beginning of the eighteenth century. In 1704 Gibraltar was occupied by an English fleet involved in the War of the Spanish Succession and included in the Spanish territories ruled by the Archduke Charles of Austria, one of the pretenders to the throne (the other was Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis xvi of France and legitimate heir according to the last will and testament of the last king of Spain, Charles II, who had died in 1700). However, the detachment that expelled the citizens from the city—they founded the town of San Roque, whence an irate stone lion stills looks threateningly over at the Rock—never left, not even when the war ended and Philip V was proclaimed King. One of the conditions of the famous Treaty of Utrecht (1713) was that Spain should recognize British sovereignty over the Rock of Gibraltar, the city, and the 80 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  port. The Treaty, which has never been revoked and is, therefore, still in force today, continues to be invoked by Spain today on the grounds that, among other things, the land occupied by Gibraltar Airport is in a neutral area that had never been signed over to the British and, therefore, was occupied illegally during the First World War. More than three hundred years of British sovereignty have made Gi- braltar a unique enclave. It is located on the southern tip of Andalusia and its only land border is with Spain. This Lilliputian territory is 5.8 square kilo- meters in size and has a population of almost 30,000 inhabitants, making it one of the most densely populated places in the world (4,290 inhabitants per square kilometer). As the original Spanish population of the city abandoned the Rock after the British occupation, it soon filled with immigrants from several places—Genoa, Portugal, India, Malta, Morocco, and Spain, among others—and also had a significant Jewish community, who had migrated to Gibraltar to “serve” the British troops and their families. As we have men- tioned above, the city is also practically bilingual, English is spoken, as well as “llanito” or a kind of Spanglish spoken on the Rock which the locals call “suichito” or “switch,” a hybrid language where code switching is constantly used. Many Gibraltarians also speak fluent Spanish with a marked Andalusian accent. Relations with Spain have never been easy. In Spain, whatever the ideology of the ruling party, Gibraltar is always considered to be a colonized territory which should be returned to Spain as it was taken by force in an act of war. Today most Gibraltarians think that the Treaty of Utrecht is obsolete, that history has shown that Gibraltar is a territory demographically, linguis- tically, and culturally different from Spain, and that the current autonomous status of the territory, approved by all its inhabitants, is proof of its democrat- ic nature. Although the United Nations declared in 1964 that Gibraltar should be “decolonized,” under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht it could never be an independent country—it could only be British or, should the latter abandon the territory, Spanish. At that time, the United Kingdom refused to enter into any kind of negotiation with Franco’s Spain, and the Spanish gov- ernment, in retaliation, closed the land border between Gibraltar and Spain, leaving Gibraltar isolated via land from 1969 to 1985. Recent attempts to set up negotiations to try to reach an agreement of British and Spanish cosovereignty of the territory have met the refusal of almost all the Gibraltarians. In any case, there is still a problem between Gibraltar and Spain which is visible, especially at the moment, in the “queues” of cars and people that have been forming at the Spanish border crossing every summer since 2013, when the Spanish government decided to periodically tighten the con- isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 81  trol of vehicles and persons, which only adds to the active conflicts in the area of the Strait. In this case, however, it is a political conflict more than a social or cultural one, but it affects the daily life of people who live in the area and have become hostages, in a way, of decisions taken very far away for reasons they often do not understand. This “distance” from the centers of power can be seen in the references to the population of Gibraltar in the media. Therefore, while the Spanish government said these queues were “necessary” to stop smuggling, Gibraltar’s Chief Minister, Fabián Picardo, denounced the “passivity” of the British government in this affair for fear of worsening relations with Spain (Ayllón 2014), and the Spanish workers on the Rock expressed their disagreement with the measures put into place by their own government (Romaguera 2013). This is, therefore, a deep-rooted problem with no easy solution. Gi- braltar is a prosperous place with a high standard of living—it is, in fact, the second most prosperous territory in the European Union, which is in stark contrast with the Spanish region surrounding it. The Campo de Gibraltar is a depressed area with a high level of unemployment and is still far behind other areas of Spain. But, this prosperity is due, above all, to the fact that it is a tax haven where companies and financial institutions pay hardly any taxes, which would explain the huge amount of investment and increasing number of com- panies registered on the Rock. From Spain it is argued that this prosperity is largely due to fiscal rules and regulations, which are very different to those in Spain and prevent investment, for example, reaching Campo de Gibraltar, the area around the Rock. The Gibraltarian stereotype as seen from Spain is that of a smuggler on a motorbike who takes advantage of his situation as an islander with respect to Spain to obtain economic benefits, but who, deep down, is just an Andalusian in denial. From the Gibraltarian point of view, Spaniards are considered to be provincial individuals anchored in the past who have never been able to understand that Gibraltar is not a part of Spain, that its population is more heterogeneous in comparison to that of Spain, and that it is so prosperous. Whatever the case, we cannot forget that currently more than seven thousand Spaniards work in Gibraltar and that many Gibral- tarians have invested large amounts of money in properties in Spain. This “insularity” or impermeability of Gibraltar, even though it is not an island as such, has led to it being a place of stability and freedom in contrast with the turbulent history of its neighbor. During the nineteenth century, the Rock was a refuge for Spanish exiles who had to abandon their country for political reasons and were making their way to the United Kingdom or other European countries. During the twentieth century the Rock, as a British terri- tory, maintained standards of religious freedom and tolerance which were un- 82 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  2. Views of Gibraltar known in Spain, especially during the Franco regime, and this would make it a more advanced society in all aspects. We cannot forget the famous wedding of John Lennon and Yoko Ono which took place in Gibraltar in 1969, a media event highlighting the “modernity” of the Rock, which was much closer to the “swinging London” of the 1960s than backward, conservative Spain. In any case, the closure of the border crossing in 1969 made communication between Gibraltar and Spain almost nonexistent. Today, Gibraltar (or “Gib” as it is known in Britain) could be any town on the southern coast of England, or perhaps the Channel Islands. There are typical references found in British territories, red telephone box- es, “bobbies” and the Union Jack, which continues to fly in many places. The supermarkets and shops belong to British groups—Marks and Spencer, BHS, Boots, Morrisons, and so on—and the pubs are authentic. However, this translation of a southern space to a northern one does not include all the codes or elements: in Gibraltar people drive on the right, as they do in Spain; the Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, the most “British” space in the whole area, is built in an oriental style with horseshoe arches over doors and windows; at the entrance to the city the Muslim fort, which could never be seen in an English town, is still standing strong; and the Andalusian accent of the inhabitants when they speak Spanish or “llanito” assimilates them to their neighbors in Campo de Gibraltar. There are two theories regarding the origin of the term “llanito,” both related to the clash between languages. Ac- cording to one theory, “llanito” was coined in Gibraltar in the early twentieth century by Andalusian workers who would hear Gibraltar mothers call their “yanitos” (the Spanish diminutive for Johnny—Johnnito) and began to call all Gibraltarians “yanis” (Johnnys), which led in turn to the current “llanitos” isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 83  or “yanitos.” The other theory is that the word derives from the large num- ber of “Giovannis,” or “Giannis” as they are familiarly called, in the large Genoese colony which settled on the Rock. The simultaneous use of Spanish and English can often be very amusing. Main Street, the commercial artery of the city, is also called the “Calle Reá,” and Gibraltar is “Gibrartá,” both in “llanito” and Andalusian Spanish. Manuel Leguineche (2002, 2) mentions his surprise when a Gibraltarian bobby replied “Zí, zeñó” to the question “Do you speak English?” This way of speaking is only the reflection of the coexistence of asym- metrical spaces where at least two cultures live side by side or occasionally clash. It is a way of speaking that, as Susan Bassnett states (in Simon 2012, n.p.), shows the fundamental importance of languages shaping cultural, geo- graphical, and historical space. In effect, the particular language used in Gi- braltar demonstrates the power of language to mark the urban landscape, to understand it, and how important it is to listen to cities (Simon 2012, xix and 1), especially these types of cities which are contact zones (see Pratt 1992), noisy streets of polyglot neighborhoods. These are very clear examples that language is an area of negotiation, a space where connections are created through rewritings and where ideas circulate, converge, and clash in the translational city, which imposes its own patterns of interaction and these emerge out of their spaces and their own narrative pasts (Simon 2012, 2). But in Gibraltar, as in Tangier or the Strait, languages share the same terrain but rarely participate in a peaceful and egali- tarian conversation. And there is some, albeit not a great deal of, Gibraltarian literature, written mostly in Spanish by authors like Héctor Licudi, Alberto Pizzarello, or Elio Cruz (see Yborra Aznar 2005). More recent writers, how- ever, write in both languages (Mario Arroyo, for example) or only in English. One of the most interesting current Gibraltarian authors is Trino Cruz, a poet who writes in Spanish, translates Moroccan poetry from Arabic, and defends the multiethnic and multilinguistic character of the territory. These and many other authors allow us to see that translation (or self-translation, depending on your point of view) “can no longer be configured only as a link between a familiar and a foreign culture, between a local original and a distant destination, between one monolingual community and another. [. . .] The Other remains within a constant earshot. The shared understandings of this coexistence change the meaning of translation from a gesture of benevolence to a process through which a common civility is negotiated” (Simon 2012, 7). As we have seen, given its history and the composition of its popu- lation, Gibraltar is now also a hybrid or “dual” city whose complex, young identity is based, above all, on the wishes of its population to maintain their 84 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  status as a British overseas territory and not be absorbed in any way by Spain in the long term. It is clear that the friendly relations between the two parties at the beginning of the twentieth century collapsed, probably permanently, when the border crossing was closed from 1969 until 1985, isolating the two peoples and provoking in Gibraltar both anti-Spanish feelings and a lack of proficiency in the Spanish language. Even so, certain data (Grocott and Stock- ey 2012, 125) show that the inhabitants of the Rock consider themselves to be more and more Gibraltarian and less British, although it is not clear what this feeling, whose signs of identity are still fairly vague yet real, consists of, the city now celebrates a “National Day” on September 10 to commemorate the date of the first referendum, held in 1967, to reject annexation to Spain; the red and white flag of Gibraltar can be seen more and more often flying over the territory, “llanito” is sometimes used in the local press instead of English, and the project to publish the first local paper Calpe Press is already under way. This nationalist feeling would only assimilate Gibraltar to tiny European nations such as Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and San Marino, which are historically much older. If this “national” sentiment were to become consol- idated, which does not appear to have happened yet, Gibraltar would be an example of a relatively new “heterogeneous,” hybrid, multilingual communi- ty, seeking to define its own identity, composed in turn of hybrid elements from different cultures. concluding remarks Living in different places means growing separate selves, learning other languages and ways of being, and looking at the world from different vantage points, without ever quite belonging to any of them. The state of being of a foreigner wherever I am has become second nature to me. It is a condition that sharpens the eye and the ear, that keeps awareness on its toes, and that takes nothing for granted. It means also that whatever I am, the ghosts of other places and other lives are hovering close. (Reid 1994, 3) The linguistic forms used in a space like Gibraltar cause us to reflect on how diffi- cult it can become to find or create equivalent idioms for local, nonstandard lan- guages, but in general everything mentioned above in relation to other spaces such as Tangier and the waters of the Strait of Gibraltar confirms that “the translator’s dilemmas are not to be found in dictionaries, but rather in an understanding of the way language is tied to local realities [. . .] and to changing identities” (Simon 1995, 10). This is why nowadays, in a global and transcultural society, translation is a transversal and interdisciplinary activity that has much to do with geography, while only a few years ago they were both considered to be fields of research far removed from each other (Bassnett 2011; Vidal 2012). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 85  By examining in this essay spaces such as Tangier and Gibraltar, cit- ies of ethnicities with shifting centers and peripheries, sites of transitory events, movements, memories, open spirals of heterogeneous collaborations and con- taminations, heterotopic, multiform and diasporic realities, spaces which un- dermine the presumed purity of thought (Chambers 1994, 93 and 95), we hope to have shown the need to access both space and translation in a different way, to have questioned what we understand today by space and why translation has forced us to very seriously analyze how ideology and power interfere in the creation of a space and a translation, what cultural contact points we have seen between peoples whose spaces become joined or clash in translations of those texts that define them in this way; what role is played by cartography of the plac- es understood as texts; and how this concept of knowledge is instrumentalized in asymmetrical and multidirectional contexts. From this point of view, translating in the hybrid spaces studied here, spaces like the Strait, Tangier, or Gibraltar that are sites of displacement, in- terference, and constructed and disputed historicities (Clifford 1997, 25), has shown itself to be a border experience able to produce powerful political vi- sion, the subversion of binarism which makes us wonder how translatable these places/metaphors of crossing are, how like and unlike diasporas. What does it take to define and defend a homeland? What are the political stakes in claiming a “home” in hooks’s (1991) sense? How are ethnic communities’ “insides” and “outsides” sustained, policed, subverted, crossed by historical subjects with different degrees of power (Clifford 1997, 36)? Considered from this state of things, translation is a foundational activity, an activity of cultural creation that takes into account the unstable and liminal identities it trans- forms and that partakes of the incompleteness of cultural belonging in spaces informed by estrangement, diversity, plurality, and already saturated with a logic of translation (Simon 1996, 152, 165, and 166) and dual cities may not serve only to impose an alien and oppressive presence but also to be part of a process of exchange which involves “an active chain of response, a vivifying interaction” (Simon and St-Pierre 2000, 10). This article is part of the research projects entitled “Violencia simbólica y traducción: retos en la representación de identidades fragmentadas en la sociedad global” (Symbolic violence and translation: challenges in the representation of fragmented identities within the global society) and “La traducción de clásicos en su aspecto editorial: una visión transatlántica” (Publishing strategies in the translation of classics: a transatlantic approach) (respectively FFI2015-66516-P and FFI2013-41743-P; MINECO/FEDER, UE) financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. 86 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  <References> Ayllón, Luis. 2014. “Picardo enfurece contra Cameron.” http://abcblogs.abc. es/luis-ayllon/public/post/picardo-enfurece-contra-cameron-16073. asp/ Bassnett, Susan. 2011. “From Cultural Turn to Transnational Turn, A Transnational Journey.” In Literature, Geography, Translation. Studies in World Writing, edited by Cecilia Alvstad, Stefan Helgesson, and David Watson, 67–80. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bey, Ali. 2009. Viajes por Marruecos. Edited by Salvador Barberá Fraguas. Barcelona: Zeta. First published 1814. First English translation, revised and completed by Mrs. Helen Maria Williams, published 1816 under the title Travels of Ali Bey in Morocco, Tripoli, Cyprus, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Turkey between the Years 1803 and 1807 in Two Volumes for Longman, Rees, Orme, and Brown (Paternoster-Row, London). Bowles, Paul. 2006. Let It Come Down. New York: Harper. First published 1952 by Random House (New York). Caponi, Gena Dagel. 1998. Paul Bowles. New York: Twayne Publishers. Capote, Truman. 2013. “Tangier.” In Portraits and Observations, 63–72. New York: Random House. Chambers, Ian. 1994. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Chester, Alfred. 1990. “Glory Hole: Nickel Views of the Infidel in Tangiers.” In Head of a Sad Angel. Stories 1953–1966, edited by Edward Field, 217–231. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press. Choukri, Mohamed. 2008. Paul Bowles, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams in Tangier. London: Telegram. . 2010. For Bread Alone. Translated and introduced by Paul Bowles. London: Telegram. First published 1973 by Peter Owen (London). Clifford, James. 1997. Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. 1986. The Newly Born Woman. Trans- lated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1975 under title La Jeune née by Union Générale d’Éditions (Paris). De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edwards, Brian T. 2005. Morocco Bound. Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Durham and London: Duke Univer- sity Press. Elghandor, Abdelhak. 1994. “Atavism and Civilization, An Interview with Paul Bowles.” Ariel. A Review of International English Literature 25 (2): 7–30. Elkouche, Mohamed. 2008. “Space and Place, Tangier Speaks.” http://interac- tive-worlds.blogspot.com.es/2008/03/tangier-speaks.html. Fanon, Frantz. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press. Finlayson, Iain. 1992. Tangier. City of Dream. London: Harper Collins. Goytisolo, Juan. 1970. Reivindicación del conde don Julián. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Grocott, Chris, and Gareth Stockey. 2012. Gibraltar. A Modern Story. Cardiff: Univer- sity of Wales Press. Hassan, Ihab. 1995. “Paul Bowles, The Pilgrim as Prey.” In Rumors of Change, Essays of Five Decades, 3–16. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Hibbard, Allen. 2009. “Tangier at the Crossroads, Cross-cultural Encounters and Lit- isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 87  erary Production.” In Writing Tangier, edited by Ralph M. Coury and R. Kevin Lacey, 1–12. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. hooks, bell. 1991. Yearning. Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nichol- son-Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. First published 1974 under the title of La Production de l’espace by Éditions Anthropos (Paris). Leguineche, Manuel. 2002. Gibraltar. La roca en el zapato de España. Barcelona: Planeta. Massey, Doreen. 2011. For Space. London: Sage. First published 2005 by Sage (Lon- don). Moroccan National Tourist Office. N.d. Tangier in Morocco. Tourist brochure. N.p. Mullins, Greg A. 2002. Colonial Affairs, Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester Write Tangier. Madison: Wisconsin University Press. Olson, Steven E. 1986. “Alien Terrain, Paul Bowles Filial Landscapes.” Twentieth Cen- tury Literature 32 (3/4): 334–349. Patteson, Richard F. 2003. A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pounds, Wayne. 1985. Paul Bowles: The Inner Geography. New York: Peter Lang. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. Price, Patricia L. 2004. Dry Place. Landscapes of Belonging and Exclusion. Minneap- olis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Pulsifer, Gary ed. 1992. Paul Bowles by His Friends. London: Peter Owen. Reid, Alastair. 1994. An Alastair Reid Reader. Selected Prose and Poetry. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Robinson, Douglas. 1998. Translation and Empire. Postcolonial Theories Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome. Romaguera, Cándido. 2013. “Los trabajadores españoles en Gibraltar, en contra del dictamen sobre los controles.” http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2013/11/15/ andalucia/1384519777_182467.html. Sabil, Abdelkader. 2005. Translating/Rewriting the Other. A Study of Paul Bowles’ Translation of Moroccan Texts by Choukri, Mrabet and Charhadi. Saarbrück- en: Lambert Academic Publishing. Simon, Sherry ed. 1995. Culture in Transit. Translating the Literature of Quebec. Mon- tréal: Véhicule Press. . 1996. Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge. . 2003. “Crossing Town, Montreal in Translation.” In Bilingual Games. Some Lit- erary Investigations, edited by Doris Sommer, 77–86. New York: Palgrave. . 2012. Cities in Translation. Intersections of Language and Memory. London and New York: Routledge. Simon, Sherry, and Paul St-Pierre, eds. 2000. Changing the Terms. Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Smihi, Moumen, dir. 1999. Moroccan Chronicles/Chroniques Marocaines/Waqa’i maghribia. 35mm, 70 minutes. Distributed by POM films (Montreuil). Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Vidal, M. Carmen África. 2012. La traducción y los espacios: viajes, mapas, fronteras. Granada: Comares. Walonen, Michael K. 2011. Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition. Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature. Surrey: Ashgate. 88 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Yborra Aznar, José Juan. 2005. “La frontera estéril. La literatura en español en Gi- braltar.” In El español en el mundo. Anuario del Instituto Cervantes. Madrid: Instituto Cervantes. <M. Carmen África Claramonte> is Professor of Translation at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her research interests include trans- lation theory, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, contemporary art, and gender studies. She has published a number of books, anthologies, and essays on these issues, including Traducción, manipulación, des- construcción (Salamanca, 1995), El futuro de la traducción (Valencia, 1998), Translation/Power/Subversion (coedited with Román Álvarez, Clevedon, 1996), En los límites de la traducción (Granada, 2006), Tra- ducir entre culturas: diferencias, poderes, identidades (Frankfurt, 2007), Traducción y asimetría (Frankfurt, 2010), La traducción y los espacios: viajes, mapas, fronteras (Granada, 2013), ”Dile que le he escrito un blues.” Del texto como partitura a la partitura como traducción (Frank- furt, 2017), and La traducción y la(s) historia(s) (Comares, 2017). She is a practicing translator specializing in the fields of philosophy, literature, and contemporary art. <Juan Jesús Zaro> has been professor of translation studies at the University of Málaga since 2008. His research interests include trans- lation theory, history of translation, and literary translation. He obtained an MA from New York University, as a Fulbright student, and a PhD in English Literature from the University de Granada (1983). He has pub- lished a number of books, anthologies, and articles, including Manual de Traducción/A Manual of Translation (Madrid, 1998), Shakespeare y sus traductores (Bern, 2008), Traductores y traductores de literatura y ensayo (Granada, 2007), and Diez estudios sobre la traducción en la España del siglo xix (Granada, 2009). He is also a practicing translator and has translated, among other books, Charles Dickens’ Historia de dos ciudades (Cátedra, 2000); Samuel Butler’s El destino de la carne (Alba Editorial, 2001), Edith Wharton’s El arrecife (Alba Editorial, 2003), and Jane Austen’s Persuasión (Cátedra, 2004). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 89 

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Introduction Sherry Simon This special issue explores eight spaces of translation—geographical sites, urban spaces, and architectural structures—whose cultural meanings are shaped through language interactions and transfer. Each study confirms the idea that places are created through itineraries and narratives, wanderings and stories, which evolve over time. Situated in the complex cityscapes of Itae- won, Lagos, Lviv, Montreal, Talinn, Renaissance Florence, Marseille, and the historically rich interzone of Gibraltar, these places illustrate the formative powers of translation in defining sensory experience and memory. The idea of space and place receives diverse interpretations in these essays—contributing to a field of inquiry which is rapidly evolving. Space is not understood as a simple container where translation takes place, but rather as a site where production and interpretation are intermingled, where translations occur and where identity is reinterpreted. Spaces are indicators of regimes of translation, of the forces that converge to allow or impede the transfer of languages and memories. From the architectural structure of a san- itary station to the dialogue between Gibraltar and Tangier, from the pages of novels to bronze statues, from multilingual markets to the studies where scholars are bent over treatises on Kabbalistic thought—these diverse spaces explode the notion of the “where” of translation. *** In her reading of the Sanitary Station of Marseille, Simona Bonelli uses the lens of translation and memory to evoke a place of multiple pasts— linked to the history of Marseille in its function as a place of migration and passage. Originally designed as a medical checkpoint, a place for screening mi- grants, then long abandoned, it has now become a museum which neverthe- less maintains traces of its previous functions. Citing Barthes, Bonelli shows that architectural spaces can be read as chapters of a complex text, continually retranslated. Following the Station in its transformations over the years, she defines it as a palimpsest representing “a place of exile, of displacement, a metaphorical place that contains a plurality of meanings, errant trajectories, isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 11  and that lends itself to multiple interpretations.” Initially born as a “boundary area” because of its function of containment and delimitation, the Sanitary Station has eventually “swollen,” through a series of metamorphoses, into a threshold—a place caught up in a tension of the present. This passage from boundary to threshold is enabled by a history of translation. *** Hunam Yun’s textured analysis of the district of Itaewon, in Seoul, South Korea, emphasizes the rich history of twists and turns that has marked this zone. This is a history which is not, however, apparent in the capsule “translations” found in tourist guides. As an area which has seen a strong mil- itary presence across the centuries, most recently for stationing the Japanese army during the colonial period and subsequently the American army, as a place now attracting many migrants, and also as a place strongly associated with sexuality and sex workers, Itaewon has been the site of cultural amalga- mation and conflict. As Yun shows, the various translations of the name of Itaewon itself—foreigners’ village, village for being pregnant with a foreign- er’s child, village for pear trees—show that the city as a “a culture-generator” (Lotman) cannot be translated into one fixed image. Itaewon has been a place for travelers and trading, a space of trauma caused by the conflictual history of Korea, a foreigners’ village, a foreign land within the country, a colonized space, a space of freedom and resistance, a window onto Western culture, a space for cultural translation . . . Yun contrasts the selective translations and commodifications of the city with the richness of its reality and history. As a culture-generator, a city deserves a more adequate translation. *** Elena Murphy draws a portrait of the multilingual city of Lagos through readings of Nigerian authors who portray the different sounds and accents of one of Nigeria’s most diverse and vibrant cities. The multilingual texts of Sefi Atta, a leading voice in what has come to be known as “The Third Generation of Nigerian Writers,” replicate the language negotiations of the city. Languages such as Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, as well as Nigerian English and Nigerian Pidgin, flow through Atta’s novels, just as they flow through the city. Particularly interesting is the diversity of cultural forms and spaces which express this plurality—types of music such as afrobeat or highlife music, dance, film, as well as the spaces of Lagos’s streets and markets. Translation is present in varied forms, aiding in the creation of new hybrid linguistic forms and new semantic associations, typical features of interaction in urban areas. 12 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  The Straits of Gibraltar, with its twin cities of Gibraltar and Tang- ier, stand as emblematic spaces of translation—but also as spaces whose hy- bridities force a rethinking of translation itself. To negotiate across hybrid spaces is to concentrate on the border experience as generating a powerful political vision, working against binaries, against inside and outside. In such zones, translation is a foundational activity, an activity of cultural creation. África Vidal and Juan Jesús Zaro provide a portrait of the Strait of Gibraltar as a natural border between two continents (Africa and Europe), between two countries (Morocco and Spain), and between two cities (Gibraltar, an overseas territory of the United Kingdom, and Ceuta, a Spanish city with its own statute of autonomous government), and offer nuanced descriptions of the cultural histories of those spaces as they have been in interaction with one another. Governed as one territory by the Romans and also during the eight centuries of Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, the Straits then be- come an indication of division across empires. The waters of the Strait carry “a layered text of narratives of belonging and exclusion.” Anastasiya Lyubas reads the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv as a space comprised of buildings, communities, maps, memories, and languages spo- ken, written, and read—a tactile, textile, and textual fabric. The “real” city, she argues, cannot be experienced without linguistic mediation. Inviting the read- er to stroll the city, stopping at monuments and buildings, consulting a map drawn by authors Igor Klekh, Yuri Andrukhovych, and Natalka Sniadanko, she gives the widest meaning to translation as a key to the multifaceted ele- ments which define city life. The city, thus, becomes a construct of individual and collective readings. The essay includes references to the events of 2013– 2014 in Ukraine that have problematized even further unresolved issues of identity, politics of memory, and belonging. With an eye attentive to shifts in the role of language in the city, Lyubas shows how the aural dimensions of the spoken languages of yesterday have become visual places, traces. Yesterday’s commerce has become trade in cultural meanings and in competing claims to the city. The city’s architecture, its history, literary scene, and projections of the future are read as a “text” offering insights into urban experience and the ways it is mediated and interpreted. *** Ceri Morgan’s reading of Montreal focuses on two novels from the 1960s which challenge orthodox versions of the language situation in the city. In Yvette Naubert’s La Dormeuse éveillée (1965) and Claire Mondat’s Poupée (1963), active and passive linguistic translations become signposts for a par- ticular kind of modernity, dramatizing embodied everyday translation prac- isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 13  tices occurring in places of work, leisure, and consumption, like the café and department store. The texts are striking for their choice of settings and their sometimes seemingly relaxed mediation of French and English interactions at a time when many examples of le roman montréalais are highlighting clash- es between these. They prefigure, in fact, many of the everyday interactions between French and English in contemporary Montreal. As such, they offer important pointers as to the possibilities of negotiating differences. Gender is highlighted in the analysis, the body of the protagonist navigating between past and present gender conventions and mappings of Montreal’s majority languages, as well as across the very different histories of the protagonists (the French-Canadian maid, the family of Holocaust survivors). Translation be- comes a way of being in the world, of overcoming trauma. In many respects, Naubert’s and Mondat’s protagonists can be seen as “languagers”—that is, “people [. . .] who engage with the world-in-action, who move in the world in a way that allows the risk of stepping out of one’s habitual ways of speak- ing and attempt to develop different, more relational ways of interacting with the people and phenomena that one encounters in everyday life” (Phipps 2011, 365). Translation facilitates a mobility associated with feminine asser- tion; translation allows escapes from, or challenges to, the social constraints of the past. Naubert’s and Mondat’s heroines inhabit a kind of messy middle in their employing of the “tactics” as “always [. . .] partial, provisional and broken” (Phipps 2011, 375). Moving inside and outside the city, they embody a translation practice beyond representation and vital to a “relational” being in the world. *** Federico Bellentani considers the case of the relocation of the Bronze Soldier of Talinn as a practice of cultural reinvention. Here translation takes on its medieval spatial meaning as the physical transfer of a sacred body. This paper proposed an analysis of the marginalization, the removal, and the relo- cation of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn. Employing the vocabulary of semi- otics, looking at monument as text, Bellentani argues that the removal cannot be interpreted through the clashing interpretations of Ethnic-Estonians and Russian speakers. Rather, the Bronze Soldier embodied an array of multifacet- ed interpretations and the process of its relocation elicited different emotional reactions. Its relocation two kilometers outside the center of the city had both spatial and ideological implications: it was an official attempt to displace its meanings toward a peripheral area of both Tallinn and Estonian culture as such—that is, to translate them into the context of contemporary European Estonia. 14 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  The final essay by Laurent Lamy tells the fascinating story of a transla- tional movement whose center was Renaissance Florence. The paradigm shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe, he argues, was in part possible be- cause of the combination of mystical and rational thought which emerged in the early Renaissance—largely through the translations of one Flavius Mithri- dates, born Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada (ca. 1445–1489), a colorful figure who was a Jewish convert to Christianity. From 1485 to 1487, he labored by the side of Pico della Mirandola, translating Kabbalistic literature. The col- laboration between the two scholars was one of the most fertile translation ventures in the history of ideas in the West; it provided the European intellec- tual elite with a reservoir of ideas and symbolic patterns that found resonance in provinces of thought “located many leagues from their country of origin.” The introduction of Persian and Chaldean solar theologies, and the concept of a plurality of worlds presented through the various perspectives offered by cosmological speculations of the Jewish Kabbalah, had a large impact on the evolving ideas of the intellectual elite of the Quattrocento. The translation of a critical mass of Kabbalistic and Arabian astronomical treatises—the begin- nings of which far exceeded the translations produced under the enlightened caliphate of Bagdad between the ninth and twelfth centuries—established, in a very short time span, a fertile interplay between sapiential traditions of an- cient times and embryonic ideas of modern science. Florence was, for several decades, the epicenter of this heightened activity around translation, which opened up a fault line that shook the geocentric status quo. isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 15 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15748

Marseilles’ Sanitary Station: morphologies of displacement between memory and desire Simona Elena Bonelli [email protected] <Abstract> The former “Sanitary Station” of Marseille was built in 1948 by the architect Fernand Pouillon, its history closely linked to the history of the Phocaean city. The main entry and departure point for travelers and immigrants arriving by the sea, it was aban- doned for forty years and was almost destroyed in 2009. In 2013, it was transformed into the museum Regards de Provence, but still keeps the memory of its past: the “steam room” (part of this quarantine internment system) is a permanent installation and is part of a section called “Memories of the Sanitary Station.” Migrants from all over the world arriving in Marseille were “displaced” here to go through disinfection, screening, and a vaccination process in a bid to fight the city’s ever-present threat of epidemics. This was therefore a multilingual context, but also a place in which bodies were forced to undergo a transformation. Somehow, these people, like a text under the eyes of a translator, were carefully examined before being allowed access to a new space, a new context. The building itself is a palimpsest, made of different phases of transforma- tion: from Sanitary station to a place occupied by squatters to a museum. What makes the Sanitary Station an emblematic city space is the fact that the different “layers” of its transformations are all present—none has been cancelled. An urban structure that is at the same time—as Derrida puts it—translatable and untranslatable: “Un texte ne vit que s’il survit, et il ne sur-vit que s’il est à la fois traductible et intraduisible.” “La città non dice il suo passato, lo contiene come le linee d’una mano, scritto negli spigoli delle vie, nelle griglie delle finestre, negli scorrimano delle scale, nelle antenne dei para- fulmini, nelle aste delle bandiere, ogni segmento rigato a sua volta di graffi, seghettature, intagli, svirgole.” (Calvino, 1979, 18)1 In Invisible Cities, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan talk about the impossibility of defining what a city is and what it is not. Cities are the product of multiple and unpredictable interactions rather than the result of a rational plan. Urban space is read and interpreted by Italo Calvino as a place constantly crossed by fluctuations and rhythms. In one of the sections called “Cities and memory,” Marco Polo describes the city of Zaira that, he tells the Emperor, consists of 1 “The city [...] does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls” (Calvino 1997, 9). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 17  “relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past” (Calvino 1994, 9). The urban landscape is made of time and space, and, like texts, cities are made of signs that we can read and interpret. In this article I would like to read the past of an emblematic building, the Sanitary Station, “like the lines of a hand” of Marseille, trying to decipher its patterns, its trans- formations, its symbolic function inside the city. The former “Sanitary Station” of Marseille (figure 1) was built in 1948 by the architect Fernand Pouillon, and the history of this place is closely linked to that of the Phocaean city. Main entry and departure point for trav- ellers and immigrants arriving by the sea, it was abandoned for forty years and was almost destroyed in 2009. In 2013 it was completely transformed into the museum Regards de Provence, but it still keeps the memory of its past: the “salle des étuves” (the steam room, part of the quarantine internment system) (figure 1) is a permanent installation and is part of a section called “Memories of the Sanitary Station.” If the concept of memory recalls something that is buried in the past, what makes this building an exemplary space is the fact that all the different phases of its transformations are still there—they have not been canceled.2 The city of Marseille is not new to epidemics. The Mediterranean sea has always been a source of life and prosperity, but also of death: through the centuries, the population of Marseille has been devastated by plague and pes- tilence, and in the sixteenth century the first sanitation board was established, whose members inspected all incoming ships, cargoes, crew, and passengers. The worst plague outbreak in the history of Marseille occurred in 1720, when the merchant ship Grand Saint-Antoine brought pestilence-carrying rats and fleas into the Vieux Port. It was the “Great Plague of Marseille,” the epidemics that Antonin Artaud evokes in his Le Théâtre et son double (1964) to develop an analogy between theater and pestilence; the plague is a transforming force that purges the world of its violence and ugliness.3 Although this epidemic was considered the last outbreak of plague in France, at the beginning of the twentieth century small epidemics and sporadic cases were recorded in Mar- seille and Paris. 2 The book that retraces the several transformations from the Sanitary Station to the Museum Regards de Provence has the emblematic title of Métamorphoses (Muntaner and Durousseau 2013). 3 The streets of a plague-ridden city are blocked by mounds of unidentifiable corpses; at this point, Artaud writes, “[l]e théâtre comme la peste est une crise qui se dénoue par la mort ou par la guérison. Et la peste est un mal supérieur parce qu’elle est une crise complète après laquelle il ne reste rien que la mort ou qu’une extrême purification. De même le théâtre est un mal parce qu’il est l’équilibre suprême, qui ne s’acquiert pas sans destruction” (Artaud 1964, 25). 18 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  1. The former Sanitary Station of Marseille 2. The Salle des étuves After World War ii, there were fifteen million refugees, or “displaced people,” in Europe. Marseille organized the reception of thousands of immi- grants by creating a strategy of sanitary prophylaxis against plague, cholera, yellow fever, typhus fever, and smallpox. In 1948, the French architects An- dré Champollion, Fernand Pouillon, and René Egger were charged with the project of designing the Sanitary Station of Marseille. The main aim of their project was to create a place of disease prevention and control but, at the same time, to defy rigid spatial segregations and the exposure of individuals to a controlling centralized observation. For this reason they created a structure with several one-way corridors through which individuals could move in or- der to be washed and disinfected and undergo a medical examination (figure isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 19  3. Area for ablutions and disinfection 3). Everything was done to avoid any sense of humiliation to the passengers: wide, luminous spaces and above all a horizontal linearity that invested win- dows, objects, and at the same time the building’s structure created a place that evoked the atmosphere of a ship. These similarities between a ship and a place receiving potentially ill people suggests the Renaissance allegory of the “ship of fools” that, as Foucault explains, symbolizes an intermediate moment between the medieval exclusion of lepers outside the gates of the city and the exclusion of the mad within the social body (Foucault 1988). Every boat that arrived in Marseille found its uncanny “double” located on the threshold of the city, in a place that lies between the sea and the urban space, a liminal area that must be crossed if the individual wants to be considered healthy and, above all, inoffensive to the rest of the population. The threshold is an in-between state that separates two spaces of dif- ferent nature. As Walter Benjamin observed in his reflections on architecture: 20 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  The threshold is a zone. And in fact a zone of passage (Übergang). Transformation, passage, flux—all are contained in the word threshold. [. . .] We have become quite poor as far as threshold experiences go. Falling asleep is perhaps the only such ex- perience that has remained to us. (quoted in Sieburth, 19) But the notion of threshold has also fascinated Gérard Genette who, in the opening pages of Seuils, explains that “plus que d’une limite ou d’une frontière étanche, il s’agit ici d’un seuil ou—mot de Borges à propos d’une préface—d’un ‘vestibule’ qui offre à tout un chacun la possibilité d’entrer, ou de rebrousser chemin” (Genette 1987, 8).4 Philosophers like Wittgenstein and Benjamin have created several parallels between the forms of the city and the diverse forms of language, and semiotic studies invite us to read the city through its signifying forms. In his “Sémiologie et urbanisme,” Roland Barthes sees the city as a discourse, and this discourse, he writes, is truly a language: “Et nous retrouvons la vieille intuition de Victor Hugo: la ville est une écriture; celui qui se déplace dans la ville, c’est-à-dire l’usager de la ville (ce que nous sommes tous), est une sorte de lecteur qui, selon ses obligations et ses déplacements, prélève des fragments de l’énoncé pour les actualiser en secret” (Barthes 1985, 268).5 Architectural spaces can be read as chapters of a complex text—the city—made of streets, traffic, buildings, and so on that interact in a complex game of intertextuality. From this standpoint, the Sanitary Station is a multilingual context, a sort of Babel, but also a place in which the bodies of the immigrants had to undergo a transformation. Somehow these people, like a text in the eyes of a translator, were carefully examined before being allowed into a new space, a new context. A translation implies a movement, the concept of carrying something across. The English word derives from the Latin translatio, which itself comes from trans “across” and la-tio- “carrying”; the Italian language adds a cultural element to this image of movement with the use of the noun tradotta, which is a special train used for the transportation of military troops or deportees. By extension, in Italian it is possible to say that “l’assassino è stato tradotto in carcere” (“the murderer was taken, ‘translated’ to prison”). In his book The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes asks the question “Does the text have a human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body?” (Barthes 1986, 16). We could ask ourselves whether the human body has 4 “More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold or—a word Borg- es used apropos of a preface—a ‘vestibule’ that offers the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back” (Genette 1997, 1–2). 5 “And here we rediscover Victor Hugo’s old intuition: the city is writing. He who moves about the city, e.g., the user of the city (what we all are), is a kind of reader who, following his obliga- tions and his movements, appropriates fragments of the utterance in order to actualize them in secret” (Barthes 1986, 199). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 21  a textual status, that of a “readable” object of translation, whose position can be changed and relocated in a new context. The “transformation” of the refugees that arrived in Marseille took place in a building organized as a series of passageways that somehow evoke Benjamin’s arcades, although with some remarkable differ- ences. Sherry Simon writes that Benjamin uses the arcades as a cultural historian to represent an ambiguous urban space, neither inside nor outside, a passageway which is also a space of consumption, a new materialization of urban space. In the essay on translation, he uses the arcade to for- mulate a contrast between interpretive translation (which uses as its unit the “sentence” or the “proposition”) and literal translation (which proceeds word by word). The first, he says, produces a translation akin to a wall, the second a text which functions more like an arcade: ‘For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.’ The glass roof allows light to flow through matter, just as the literally translat- ed text is a transparent surface which allows the light of the original to fall onto the new version, creating an interplay of surfaces. (Simon 2000, 75) I find this passage extremely interesting because it gives me the op- portunity to explore the relationship between the process of translation and the spaces of translation. Both in the Parisian arcade and in the Sanitary Sta- tion of Marseille, the presence of a glass construction is essential, but while in the arcade the glass roof has the aim of accentuating the transition zone between the outdoor world of the street and the interior space,6 in the Sanitary Station the lateral glass walls contribute to the brightness of the space but at the same time the concrete structure creates a screen to guarantee the privacy of those passing by. Benjamin sees the arcades as the entry point of the Parisian labyrinth, a place where the flâneur could dwell; the Sanitary Station is a one- way passage in which there is no time for dwelling: the “translation” of those who are already “dis-placed” people should be done quickly in order to obtain a transformed, clean version of their bodies. Like Genette, I would like to insist on the term “vestibule,” because, in addition to the concept of “thresh- old,” this word also conveys the idea of clothing if we accept the etymology from the Latin vestibulum, from vestis “garment” and -bulum, probably from the sense of “a place to dress.”7 When the immigrants arrived in the Sanitary Station, they were first of all asked to undress so that their clothes could be 6 Benjamin was attracted by the ambiguity of glass, by the transformative power of this building material through its architectural application: “It is not a coincidence that glass is so hard and smooth a material to which nothing can be fastened. It is also cold and sober. Things that are made of glass have no ‘aura.’ Glass is the enemy par excellence of secrecy. It is also the enemy of property” (quoted in Heynen 1999, 155). 7 Ovid, in his Fasti, links the term vestibulum to the Roman goddess of hearth and home Vesta. In any case, if the vestibule is now the place where outer clothing is put on or removed in leaving or entering a house, for the Romans it was the area in which they used to depose their clothes. 22 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  washed and disinfected; they then had to go through the communal showers that, thanks to a system of mobile partition walls, became individual show- ers. The city that has made “Savon de Marseille” its emblem distributed bars of soap and towels to the immigrants who, eventually, got back their clean clothes and could go upstairs for a medical examination. The Sanitary Station only remained active for a couple of years, un- til the World Health Organization coordinated a global vaccination program that made entities such as the station redundant. Before entering a country, people were supposed to show their vaccination cards; this was the beginning of preventive medicine. After having served as offices for the administrative clerks of the Direction du Contrôle Sanitaire aux Frontières, the Sanitary Sta- tion of Marseille was closed in 1971. A new chapter in this building’s life then began—that of refuge of squatters. The edifice that was used as an institution for disease prevention and control became a place of meetings and creativity for squatters and graffiti art- ists. The white aseptic walls of the Sanitary Station were filled with colorful po- ems, tags, and murals. Round images replaced the square tiles covering the walls, showers, and steam rooms. An ephemeral form of art violated the visual and ar- chitectural order and setting, breaking the rules of the space–time relationship. The body, the skin of the sanitary station was “scratched,”8 in the same way as the skin of the migrants was scratched to be immunized against smallpox. The squatters imposed a transformation on this building by “inoculating” the germs of a revolutionary art. In 2009, in order to protest against the permanent closing of the place, the squatters burned a car inside the building (figure 4), which was 4. Burned car in Sanitary Station 8 The term “graffiti” derives from the Italian word graffio, a “scratch” or “scribble”. isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 23  nearly destroyed—fire as a sort of extreme catharsis that paved the way to the next transformation. The burned car is a trace, its cinders a rem(a)inder of something that is at the same time present and absent. In Feu la cendre, Derrida describes how one particular phrase, “il y a là cendre” (“cinders there are”), continually returned to him and insists on the importance of the trace: Si vous ne vous rappelez plus, c’est que l’incinération suit son cours et la consumation va de soi, la cendre même. Trace destinée, comme toute, à disparaître d’elle-même pour égarer la voie autant que pour rallumer une mémoire. La cendre est juste : parce que sans trace, justement elle trace plus qu’une autre, et comme l’autre trace. (Derrida 1984, 30)9 What remains from the destruction returns to the surface, to the skin; when the smoke dissipates, the incinerated place resurfaces. The evocation of haunting memories that reemerge from a fire is at the center of the artistic production of Claudio Parmiggiani, who in his work Delocazione (De-loca- tion) builds installations and sets them on fire, revealing the traces of the disappeared objects. This is what Didi-Huberman calls “une matière de l’ab- sence”—things disappear, but the memory of their presence still remains.10 The Regards de Provence foundation, in need of a permanent structure for its exhibitions in the city of Marseille, decided to rehabilitate this building and create a museum that collected artworks created in and about Provence. But before its permanent recuperation and conversion, before the ancient Sanitary Station was transformed into a Museum, a French photographer and installation artist was asked to fix an image in which the traces of the past could interact with the poetic metamorphoses that this place has experienced. Georges Rousse is an artist attracted by neglected and forgotten sites, by their solitude and emptiness; he takes his inspiration from the “wounds” suffered by an edifice to create an ephemeral “mise-en-scène” that he then immortalizes with photographs.11 One of the main characteristics of a photograph is its link with the referent, a sort 9 “If you no longer recall it, it is because the incineration follows its course and the consummation proceeds from itself, the cinder itself. Trace destined, like everything, to disappear from itself, as much in order to lose the way as to rekindle a memory. The cinder is exact: because without a trace it precisely traces more than an other, and as the other trace(s)” (Derrida 1991, 57). 10 In his book Génie du non-lieu, Georges Didi-Huberman explores the works of Parmiggiani. The Italian artist shows that fire does not cause the complete disappearance of an object, but, rather, it delocates it. The question of memory and survival therefore becomes essential: “Il se- rait donc abusive d’identifier l’œuvre de Parmiggiani à une simple nostalgie du passé (Delocazi- one est d’ailleurs plus proche d’Hiroshima que d’une reconstitution pompéienne). Cette œuvre vise plutôt un travail de la mémoire—une prise en considération de la survivance—qui a fait dire à l’artiste que ‘les veritables Antiques, c’est nous’” (Didi-Huberman 2001, 43). 11 His artistic intervention is multifaceted: “I call upon various methods of art: I am the designer of the project, the painter on-site, the architect by my interpretation of a given space and by the construction I organise there within, and finally the photographer who coordinates all these actions” (http://www.georgesrousse.com/english/news/rousse-speech.html). 24 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  of “reality effect” that makes the past reality of the object indubitable. In La Chambre claire, Barthes argues that the photographic referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation: whereas in painting the presence of the model is optional and in language the referents can be chimerical, in a photograph we cannot deny that the thing “has been there.”12 This significant aspect of referentiality seems to compensate for an inexplicable lack of images in relation to the activity of these spaces. In fact, neither the book Metamorphoses published by the Musée Regards de Provence (Muntaner and Durousseau 2013) nor the 45-minute documentary that, in the same Museum, explores the history of the plague in Marseille, immigration, and the building contain a single picture concerning the people who passed through the Sanitary Station, and there are only a few pictures of the areas and rooms from when it was active. Somehow, the artistic view of Georges Rousse is asked to capture, in single images, the sig- nificant past of these spaces, and he does so by insisting on the double liminality of the Sanitary Station: the instant captured by the photos of the French artist is not only that of a place that has represented for years the liminal area between the port and the city, but also that of a phase of an urban space that has gone through several transformations.13 The technique used by Rousse is that of anamorphosis; whereas trompe l’œil gives the illusion that a flat surface is three dimensional, his anamorphic images create the illusion that a three-dimensional area is flat (figures 5 and 6). Although it looks as if the geometric form has been digitally created, the illusion generated by these photographs is optical, and represents the outcome of several weeks of work so that the colorful geometric is only visible from a specific point of view. The anamorphic figure invites those who are watching it to move, to change their point of view, in order to bring into perfect focus the object of interpretation. Nevertheless, the installations created by Georges Rousse, once they are immortalized by the camera, do not ask the viewer to move, to change their perspective: his artwork is intended only for the lens, and not for an ob- server in the actual space. Rousse creates a “before” and “after” effect—first, the “deconstructed” red circle and then the perfectly round red circle reassembled by the camera. In doing so, he wanders in the rooms of the Sanitary Station with the eye of the photographer who is trying to find the right standpoint.14 12 Its essence is recorded in the formula “ça a été,” “that has been.” 13 In an interview about his installations at the future Musée Regards de Provence, Georges Rousse said that “[l]e port c’était la station sanitaire qui accueillait les immigrants mais c’est aussi le point de départ vers l’ailleurs. [. . .] Je voulais rendre compte de ce nouvel espace qui a perdu toute fonctionnalité et qui va disparaitre, cet entre-deux” (Muntaner and Durousseau 2013, 109) 14 “Je déambule dans les lieux avec l’œil du photographe pour repérer le bon point de vue jusqu’à l’image finale qui a besoin de l’appareil photographique comme outil de reproduction” (Muntaner and Durousseau 2013, 111). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 25 26 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  In these ephemeral installations that are immortalized only by the lens of a camera, the gaze of the artist leaves its place to another “gaze”: that of the Museum Regards de Provence, a museum that has slowly become a sort of palimpsest, made of its different phases of transformation. The permanent installation shows the old steam room and a documentary that retraces the history of this building, while the temporary exhibitions are housed in galler- ies on the ground and first floors. The several windows along both the front and the back walls of this long, horizontal building invite the observer to gaze outside, towards the port and the city. In the course of all its transformations, 5–6. the Sanitary Station has been “living on”; its trans-lation, its trans-positions Rousse, anamorphic have not destroyed it. Like a text, this building has survived only because, installation to paraphrase Derrida, it was at once translatable and untranslatable.15 This building outlives itself, is at the outskirts of its own living. Like Georges Rousse, Walter Benjamin was attracted by the decayed or abandoned spaces of the city; likewise, he was fascinated by “thresholds” and borders. He first visited Marseille in 1926, and then several times in 1928 and 1931. His last visit to the Phocaean city took place in 1940, shortly before his death. Marseille was for him like a book to be interpreted: In the early morning I drove through Marseilles to the station, and as I passed familiar places on my way, and then new, unfamiliar ones or others that I remembered only vaguely, the city became a book in my hands, into which I hurriedly glanced a few last times before it passed from my sight for who knows how long into a warehouse crate. (Benjamin 1999b, 447) Whereas Paris represents for Benjamin the ideal place to discover the traces of social meaning and the collective dreams of modernity, he finds Mar- seille hard to decipher, to the point where he once commented that no city so stubbornly resisted his efforts to depict it as did Marseille (Eiland 2014, 310). Benjamin sees each street as a vertiginous experience; for him the city-dweller should be “on the threshold of the metropolis as of the middle class” (Benja- min 2006, 40). Nevertheless, in his writings on hashish, and in particular in the text “Hashish in Marseilles,” he does not stay on the borders. Rather, he lets himself sink inside the “ventre of Marseilles”: 15 “Un texte ne vit que s’il sur-vit, et il ne sur-vit que s’il est à la fois traductible et intraduisible. [. . .] Totalement traductible, il disparaît comme texte, comme écriture, comme corps de langue. Totalement intraduisible, même à l’intérieur de ce qu’on croit être une langue, il meurt aussitôt. La traduction triomphante n’est donc ni la vie ni la mort du texte, seulement ou déjà sa survie. On en dira de même de ce que j’appelle écriture, marque, trace, etc. Ça ne vit ni ne meurt, ça survit. Et ça ne ‘commence’ que par la survie (testament, itérabilité, restance, crypte, détache- ment déstructurant par rapport à la rection ou direction ‘vivante’ d’un ‘auteur’ qui ne se noierait pas dans les parages de son texte)” (Derrida 1986, 147–149). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 27  I lay upon the bed, read and smoked. All the while opposite to me this glimpse of the ventre of Marseilles. (Now the images begin to take hold of me). The street that I’d so often seen is like an incision cut by a knife. (Benjamin 1978, 138) When, under the effect of hashish, Benjamin describes the streets of Marseille, he enters a surrealist dream world, made of strange sounds, images, and scents. His perception of what he sees in the streets—where he strolls to find a restaurant for dinner—is distorted, the dimensions of time and space are abolished.16 Unexpectedly, the words of a conversation in a little port bar sound to him like dialect: The people of Marseilles suddenly did not speak good enough French to me. They were stuck at the level of dialect. The phenomenon of alienation that may be involved in this, which Kraus has formulated in the fine dictum “The more closely you look at a word the more distantly it looks back” appears to extend to the optical. (Benjamin 1978, 144) Michel de Certeau writes that the city is a text, and that walking in a city has its own rhetoric: “Il y a une rhétorique de la marche. L’art de ‘tourn- er’ des phrases a pour équivalent un art de tourner des parcours. Comme le langage ordinaire, cet art implique et combine des styles et des usages” (De Certeau 2005, 15).17 Nevertheless, the legibility of a city changes; it is the per- spective of the viewer that defines the object of observation. When Benjamin quotes Kraus’s aphorism (“The closer one looks at a word, the further away it looks back”), he too evokes the importance of perspective. How should we read a city, its translation zones, its palimpsests? I would like to close this paper with another quote from Calvino’s Invisible Cities: In due modi si raggiunge Despina: per nave o per cammello. La città si presenta differente a chi viene da terra e a chi dal mare. [. . .] Ogni città riceve la sua forma dal deserto a cui si oppone; e così il cammelliere e il marinaio vedono Despina, città di confine tra due deserti. (Calvino 1994, 370)18 16 “Versailles, for one who has taken hashish, is not too large, nor eternity too long” (Benjamin 1978,138). 17 “There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of ‘turning’ phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path. Like ordinary language, this art implies and combines styles and uses” (De Certeau 1984, 100). 18 “Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea. [. . .] Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts” (Calvino 1997, 17). 28 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Whereas the city of Zaira is part of a section devoted to memory, De- spina is a city of desire that opens paths and opportunities for visitors. There are multiple ways of seeing the same city, depending on which face of the city they see. Those who arrive at Despina have to shift their perspective, as if they were in front of an anamorphic image. By building the Sanitary Station, Mar- seille has tried to give itself a “face” from which the immigrants could see it, but France’s oldest city has not resisted the univocal direction imposed by this passage point: the Station operated for a few years, quickly transformed by artists who made this structure a place of exile, of displacement, a metaphori- cal place that contains a plurality of meanings and errant trajectories, and that lends itself to multiple interpretations. The story of those anonymous people who arrived in Marseille and whose body/corpus underwent a transformation in order to be admitted to a new context intertwines with the story of another migrant who, some years before, in 1940, had been trying to escape France for the United States: Walter Benjamin. He went from Paris to Marseille, which at that time was full of refu- gees, especially those from countries occupied by the German army. The philos- opher who used to be an extraordinary city dweller and who loved to get lost in the meanders of a city, found himself obliged to follow the route taken by many refugees. In Marseille he obtained a passport issued by the American Foreign Service, but when he discovered that the port was virtually closed he tried to cross the Spanish border by walking up into the mountains. He never managed to traverse the most important boundary of his life, however, and in Portbou he was refused entry into Spain. He was held in Portbou overnight and sent back to occupied France the next morning. The morphine Benjamin had brought with him from Marseille was strong enough to kill him. Hannah Arendt wrote about her dear friend and the Kafkian situation in which he found his death: A few weeks later the embargo on visas was lifted again. One day earlier Benjamin would have got through without any trouble; one day later the people in Marseille would have known that for the time being it was impossible to pass through Spain. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible. (Arendt 1990, 24) Benjamin died in a liminal space, in a liminal time; a bitter twist of fate for the philosopher who has taught us the important difference between “boundary” and “threshold”: “The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwell <threshold> is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell, and etymology ought not to over- look these senses” (Benjamin 1999, 494). Following Benjamin’s fundamental distinction, we might suggest that the Sanitary Station was initially born as a “boundary area” because of its isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 29  function of containment and delimitation, and that it has eventually “swol- len,” with an extraordinary series of metamorphoses, into a threshold, a place caught up in a tension, an innovative space. The Regards de Provence muse- um is now a site of rewriting, a place that combines memory of its past and a gaze towards the future. It has not lost its “in-between position,” though, caught as it is between the ancient Cathedral and the new buildings (Mucem, Villa Mediterranée) designed by internationally renowned architects. A poten- tial space for hybridization. <References> Arendt, Hannah. 1999. “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940.” In Walter Benjamin, Illumina- tions, edited by Hannah Arendt; translated by Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico. 7–60. Artaud, Antonin. 1964. “Le Théâtre et la peste.” In Le Théâtre et son double. Paris: Gallimard. 25–26. Barthes, Roland. 1973. Le Plaisir du texte. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. . 1973. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. . 1980. La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie. Paris: Gallimard. . 1985. “Sémiologie et urbanisme.” In L’Aventure sémiologique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. . 1986. “Semiology and the Urban.” In The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics. Edited by Mark Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopou- los. New York: Columbia University Press. 87–98. Benjamin, Walter. 1978. “Hashish in Marseilles.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter Demetz. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt Brace. 137–145. . 1999a. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin Mc- Laughlin. Cambridge (Mass.) and London (England): The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. . 1999b. Selected Writings. Edited by Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. . 2006. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Edited by Mi- chael W. Jennings. Cambridge (Mass.) and London (England): The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Calvino, Italo. 1979. Le città invisibili. Turin, Einaudi. . 1997. Invisible cities. Translated by William Weaver. London: Vintage Books. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Ren- dall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. . 2005. “Rhétoriques combinatoires.” In L’invention du quotidien. Tome 1—Arts de faire [1980–1990]. Folio Essais. Paris: Gallimard. Derrida, Jacques. 1984. Feu la Cendre/Ciò che resta del fuoco. Translated by Stefa- no Agosti. Firenze: Sansoni. . 1986. “Survivre.” In Parages. Paris: Galilée. 109-203. . 1991. Cinders. Translated by Ned Lukacher. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 30 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2001. Génie du non-lieu. Air, poussière, empreinte, han- tise. Paris: Minuit. Eiland, Howard, and M. W. Jennings. 2014. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books. Genette, Gerard. 1987. Seuils. Paris: Seuil. . 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge (Mass.): Cambridge University Press. Translated by Jane E.Lewin. Heynen, Hilde. 1999. Architecture and Modernity. A Critique. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press. Muntaner, Bernard, and Thierry Durousseau. 2013. Métamorphoses. Station Sani- taire en Musée Regards de Provence. Marseille: Fondations Regards de Provence. Sieburth , Richard. “Benjamin the Scrivener.” in Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aes- thetics. Ed. Gary Smith. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. 13-37. Simon, Sherry. 2000. “The Paris Arcades, the Ponte Vecchio, and the Comma of Translation.” Translators’ Journal, vol. 45 (1): 73–79. <Simona Elena Bonelli> She is a translator and lives in Marseille. She studied English and French Literature (University of Siena, Italy) and received her MA and PhD in Critical and Cultural Theory from Car- diff University, UK. She has taught English Language and Literature at the Universities of Siena and Perugia (Italy). Bonelli has published Tito Andronico. Il testo come simulacro del corpo, and has edited Seg- ni particolari: l’immagine del viso, l’immaginario del nome proprio, both with Quattroventi, Urbino. Her books and essays cover topics relating to Elizabethan literature, philosophy, aesthetics, gender studies, and trans- lation theory. isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 31 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15749

Translation and Fragmented Cities: Focus on Itaewon, Seoul Hunam Yun [email protected] <Abstract> Cities are open texts. They are perpetually transformed by their dynamic relationship with history and with the people who live in them. They are “rearticulated, transformed from a singular structure into a multilateral palimpsest that can be ‘written’ up and over, again and again,” with time. Therefore, the boundaries of cities’ identities continuously expand with this dynamic movement. There can be no single, fixed, or com- plete description of a city, which is why cities require continuous translation. However, cities are commonly represented as a single, fixed, and complete image in the process of translation through selective appropriation, and people consume that image. This paper attempts to reveal the process and ideological bias in such selective appropriation with a focus on Itaewon, South Korea. Historically, Itaewon has always been a site of different cultural encounters reflecting the historical twists and turns of Korea. After the Japanese invasion of the country in 1592 and the Manchu war of 1636, Japanese and Chinese soldiers stayed in the area. Then, during the colonial period, the Japanese army was stationed there, and after liberation, the American army was quartered there. Now, Mus- lims are flocking to the area, and it is becoming a city of immigrants. Because of these dynamic historical moments, Itaewon has been the site of cultural amalgamation and conflict, always retaining traces of the past. However, the images of Itaewon created by tourist books are ahistorical and fixed; the city has been fragmented as a commodity to be consumed through selective appropriation, and its dynamic history has been erased. The most common of these images are those of shopping centers and the red light dis- trict, images that have been reinforced by reproduction throughout decades. This paper investigates the process of this fragmentation of Itaewon and its underlying ideology. introduction I was motivated to consider the aspects of a city’s translation (in terms of in- tersemiotic translation in which nonverbal text is transferred into verbal text) when I found the translation of Itaewon, an area located in the northern part of Seoul, South Korea. Shockingly, the words that caught my eye were “Red Light District.” Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, in its entry on Itaewon, highlighted only the Red Light District as a local attraction, as follows:1 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itaewon (last accessed December, 2014). 32 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Contents 1. Local attractions 1.1 Red Light District 2. See also 3. Notes 4. External links With a brief explanation of the geographical location of Itaewon, Wikipedia introduces local attractions, focusing on the international dishes, hotels, shops, and clubs that tourists can enjoy: Many restaurants serving international dishes are found in this area […]. Major ho- tels such as The Grand Hyatt and local landmark The Hamilton Hotel can be found here as well as dozens of shops and services aimed at tourists. High quality leather products in Korea can be found […] as well as various types of traditional Korean souvenirs. […] Itaewon is one of the popular club congested area in Korea, […] Most of foreign people go to the clubs for clubbing and hooking up while they are staying in Korea.2 Then separate space was allocated to the introduction of the Red Light District under the same title: There is a portion of Itaewon known as “Hooker Hill” among GI’s of different allied nations stationed in South Korea. Although the stereotype of only American ser- vicemen frequenting this area is well-known, men from all other countries, including Middle-Eastern and African, are known to frequent this area as well. Furthermore, because South Korea is not widely socially accepting of homosexuals, there is an underground gay area within this district as well. The prominent image of Itaewon represented by Wikipedia is of a “retail” city—selling goods and bodies. An explanation of this followed: “This article is written like a travel guide rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject. [. . .]” (July 2013). This explanation is very significant in that it suggests that a travel guide does not present full, complete, and thorough information, but rather is se- lective regarding the information it includes. This is quite appropriate since a travel guide should be light enough for travelers to carry. However, the problem with selective information—in other words selective translation—is the image the translation produces. This paper is concerned with this point. Translation has been frequently presented as an activity to create an image of others or of selves, in the case of Itaewon, for example, this includes “a nostalgic image of a lost past” about Japanese people (Fowler 1992), images of the East by the West in colonial contexts (Niranjana 1992), or a self-image 2 The article has since been altered, but there is no significant difference in its content. isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 33  by a colonized people (Tymoczko 1999). The process involves “a deliberate and conscious act of selection, assemblage, structuration, and fabrication— and even, in some cases, of falsification, refusal of information, counterfeiting, and the creation of secret codes” (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002, xxi). However, little notice has been taken of translation as an activity to cre- ate images of cities and of the process this involves. French theologian Jacques Ellul states that the evolution of cities represents man’s fall from natural grace and the subsequent attempt to create a new, workable order (Kotkin 2005, xv). This may mean that cities are constructed and shaped through the dynamic rela- tionship with human beings, and they are formed, and transformed, by such re- peated attempts throughout the city’s history, keeping traces of every historical moment. That is, they are “rearticulated, transformed from a singular structure into a multilateral palimpsest that can be ‘written’ up and over, again and again” (Chambers 2012, 104) with time. Therefore, the boundaries of cities’ identities continuously expand with this dynamic movement. However, cities are commonly represented as a single and fixed image in the process of translation through selective appropriation, and people ac- cept and consume that image. In the history of translation studies, little atten- tion has been paid to these aspects of cities, that is, cities as a translated text. Cities are translated through special forms of communication, such as the environmental landscape, symbolic artifacts, local events, or other landmarks, and through verbal communication, such as cities’ names, slogans or statements. This paper attempts to reveal how verbal translation, especially for tourists, constructs an image of a city, with a focus on Itaewon. Itaewon has been a very particular and special space in Korean history. Unlike other areas of Seoul, which have a single ethic identity, Itaewon has been the space of expatriates. It has been a foreign and exotic land within Korea, a zone of con- tact where native and foreign cultures encounter each other, and a mediating channel though which foreign cultures are introduced. This paper first inves- tigates Itaewon as a site of cultural encounters and cultural translation against the background of Korean history, then it examines its translation in tourist books and the subsequent effects. itaewon as a site of cultural encounters and cultural translation When French historian Fernand Braudel stated, “A town is always a town, wherever it is located, in time as well as space” (Rybczynski 1995, 49), he must have been referring to the universality of the urban experience. As Kot- kin notes, the urban experience is universal “despite vast differences in race, 34 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  climate, and location” because “there is the visceral ‘feel’ of the city almost everywhere—the same quickening of pace on a busy street, an informal mar- ketplace, or a freeway interchange, the need to create notable places, the shar- ing of a unique civic identity” (2005, xv–vxi). The omnipresent visceral feel he refers to is created by the so called “non-places” found in almost every city. Non-places, a term coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé, refers to an- thropological spaces of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as “places.” As Augé points out, supermodernity produces nonplaces, “meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike in Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places” (1995, 63). Nonplaces are temporary, ephemeral, fleeting spaces for passage, commu- nication, and consumption. Augé puts it thus: If place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. [. . .] the same things apply to the non-place as to the place. It never exists in pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it; relations are restored and resumed in it; the ‘millennial ruses’ of ‘the invention of the everyday’ and ‘the arts of doing,’ so subtly analysed by Michel de Certeau, can clear a path there and deploy their strategies. Places and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed. (Augé 1995, 63–64) Examples of nonplaces are air, rail, and motorway routes, aircraft, trains and road vehicles, airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and the complex skein of cable and wireless net- works that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication (Augé 1995). These nonplaces make urban scenes familiar and uniform, creating an illusion of universality in urban experiences. In extreme cases, those nonplaces may make urban experiences homogeneous so that they give the impression that “only the name of the airport changes” as described in the novel Invisible Cities by Italian writer Italo Calvino: If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, […] The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had not changed at all. […] You can resume your flight whenever you like, but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by the sole Trude, which does not begin, nor end. Only the name of the airport changes. (Calvino 1972/1974, 128) However, despite “the universality of the urban experience,” each city has a unique and special “feel,” which gives city tourists a different experience. One of the factors that make each city unique and special is its ascent and decline throughout history, the process of which is “both rooted in history isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 35  and changed by it” (Kotkin 2005, 147), in other words, the characteristics of “places” in Augé’s term. Cities are not stagnant; they are reconfigured, re- shaped, and rearranged with political, economic, social, and cultural changes throughout history. Just as Lotman points out in his discussion on the symbolism of St. Petersburg, “The city is a mechanism, forever recreating its past” (Lotman 1990, 194–195): architectural ensembles, city rituals and ceremonies, the very plan of the city, the street names and thousands of other left-overs from past ages act as code programs constantly renewing the texts of the past. Lotman also says that “in this sense, the city, like culture, is a mechanism which with- stands time” (Lotman 1990, 195). So, as Simon’s Cities in Translation (2012) suggests, cities are “intersec- tions of memory,” and the streets of the cities keep those memories. Itaewon is such a city. Compared to other areas in Seoul, it is an area with a rapid pace of change, and it has various images: diversity, ambiguity, disorder, chaos, exoticism, foreign land within the country, and so on. Such dynamicity and images throughout the history of the place stem mainly from its geographical location, specifically, its location near Han River. As Lotman puts it, there are two ways in which a city as a demarcated space may relate to the earth which surrounds it—concentric and eccentric: Concentric structures tend towards enclosure, separation from their surroundings which are classed as hostile while eccentric structures tend towards openness and contacts with other cultures. [. . .] The concentric situation of the city in semiotic space is as a rule associated with the image of the city on the hill. [. . .] The eccentric city is situated “at the edge” of the cultural space: on the seashore, at the mouth of a river. (Lotman 1990, 191–192) The peculiar situation of Itaewon, due to its location near the Han River, imbued it with openness. Indeed, various meanings and different sto- ries about the origin of the name show such characteristics. Itaewon has three different names and meanings, using different Chinese characters—梨 泰 院, 李 泰 院, and 異 胎 院—which are embedded in its geographical position and Korean history. Firstly, Itaewon was initially a place for travelers and trading. During the Joseon Dynasty, one of four Hanyang (present Seoul) won (院)—a won was a kind of inn established for government officials and travelers by the govern- ment—was located there. So the place was named Itaewon. The won (院) in the name “Itaewon” meant “inn offering lodgings to travelers” (smg 1998, 83). As more people frequented the area, inns for foreign envoys and markets were formed (Jang 2000, 59). Another story claims that Itaewon (梨 泰 院), meaning “area for pear trees,” was so named because pear trees were grown there. 36 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Itaewon was also a space of trauma. It was the area for alienated wom- en, women who had to choose isolation from the society because, with the scar of foreign invasion on their body, they could not be accepted in Korean society. During the Seven-Year War (1592–1598) against the Korean dynasty of Joseon, a Japanese military supply base was established in the Unjongsa Buddhist nun temple near present-day Itaewon. It is said that the Japanese commander Katō Kiyomasa and his soldiers seized the temple, raped the nuns, and then stayed for some time. They subsequently burned the temple before they left. The Buddhist nuns, who had lost their home, moved to nearby Yunggyeong Mountain and lived there. Thus, the area was called Itaewon (異 胎 院), which means “village for being pregnant with a foreigner’s child” (No- mi Lee 2011, 242–243; Hoefer et al. 1981; Jun-gi Kim 2012). Itaewon was also the place where Korean women, who had been tak- en to China during the second Manchu invasion of Korea in 1636, returned and settled down (Chosun Daily 2011).3 In Joseon society, which had a tradi- tion of monogamy, those women were despised as hwanhyangnyeo (“women who returned”) and so they could not return to their home. Therefore, they went to live with the nuns (Heu-suk Han 2001, 59). According to another story, the name originated from Itain (異 他 人), which means foreigners, in reference to Japanese soldiers, who surren- dered and were naturalized during the Seven-Year War, forming a community there (Jun-gi Kim 2012). This link between Itaewon with marginalized people might have facilitated the formation of neighboring Haebangchon (literally, “liberation village”). Haebangchon was the area for displaced people after liberation from Japanese colonial rule, for north Korean refugees after the Korean War of 1950–1953, and then for farmers who had left their rural hometowns for cities during the process of industrialization. Geographically situated near Han River, Itaewon was considered strategically important in terms of transportation and military withdrawal. Thus, Itaewon has frequently been an area for foreign troops, having been a logistics base for the Mongolian Army during the late Goryeo Dynasty and a supply base for the Japanese Army during the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592 (Choi 2003, 23); it was also used by Chinese forces during the Im-O mili- 3 서울 속 외국 이태원 백서. 美軍거리서 다국적 거리로 (Itaewon White Paper: From the Street of the US Military Army to Multinational Street). Chosun Daily, Feb 21, 2011. http://boomup.chosun. com (accessed December, 2014). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 37  tary revolt of 1882–1884, was the location of the Japanese military headquarters during the colonial period of 1910–1945, and was used by the US forces after the liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule (No-mi Lee 2011, 242–243; Shin 2008, 193; Seoul Development Institute 2001). The deployment of foreign troops transformed and rearranged the topography of Itaewon. During the 1920s, for instance, the public cemetery, which was located near the present-day Central Mosque, was transformed into the Japanese military headquarters. The cemetery was moved to the Miari district, and the body of Yu Gwan-sun, a patriotic martyr for independence from Japanese colonial rule, was lost in the process. However, the biggest changes to and deepest influence on Itaewon came with the deployment of the US forces. On September 9, 1945, the US forces came to be stationed in Itaewon when the US Army commanding of- ficer John Hodge received the surrender of all the Japanese forces in Korea south of the 38th parallel and took over the Japanese barracks and military facilities. The US Army Military Government was established and lasted from 1945 to 1948. However, with the Korean War in 1950, the US forces came back to be stationed in Itaewon, and the history of the US forces in Itaewon began. The English and Korean languages came to be used together; shops and bars emerged; and prostitutes, orphans, widows, and people from the provinces crowded around the US Army base hoping to scrape together a living from working on the base, selling goods to the soldiers, and so on. Military camp town clubs for American soldiers were opened, and Itaewon became a space where “American soldiers consumed Korean women sexually” (Hyeon-mee Kim 2005, 26). Thus, the so called “Hooker Hill” was formed. However, most of the women who worked at Hooker Hill were vic- tims of the Korean War. As the war had produced many orphans and widows, girls and women had to take responsibility for earning a living. They had to support not only themselves, but also their families. Some of them had to send money to their families in their hometown.4 Under the circumstances, given that they could not find proper jobs, they had to choose prostitution, becoming yang-gongju5 (a foreigner’s whore), as described in Yeong-su Oh’s novel of Anna’s Will (1963): 4 A girl risked her life to avoid the government’s control over prostitution and died because she could not make a living if she was caught. Hearing this news, sixty yang-gongju held a demon- stration against the control (Dong-A Ilbo Daily, October 27 1960, 3). 5 Yang in yang-gongju means Western, and gongju means a princess. Women who sold their bodies to Western men, especially American soldiers, were called yang-gongju. 38 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  She had no clothes to cover her body A brick looked like a chunk of meat to her. How could you expect a girl, who is starving, To be a lady, to be faithful? I was starved. A mature girl had no place to lay down her body. Is this sin? So I became a whore called Anna. (translation mine) (Oh 1963, 330) As foreign official residences were established in the 1960s, military accommodation was built in 1963, and when the 121st Evacuation Hospital of the US Army was moved to Itaewon from Bupyeong district, more than 10,000 people relocated there. During the 1970s, the area became a shopping district for cheap branded goods; there was a prosperous textile industry, and the area enjoyed the reputation of one of the most popular tourist attractions in Korea among foreign tourists in the 1980s when international events were held in Seoul. Thus, it was while the US forces were stationed there that Itaewon came to be known for its shopping area and for Hooker Hill. However, Itae- won cannot be reduced to only a shopping area and Hooker Hill. Itaewon was both a colonized space and a space of freedom and resistance. Politically, it was an Americanized colonial space (Lee and Jung 2010, 191), a colonized space (Choi 2003), or a deterritorialized space in that the authority of the nation–state was applied differently from how it was applied in other areas of the country (Eun-sil Kim 2004). Culturally, it was the space of freedom and resistance where Korean people could escape oppression under the Yushin regime in the 1970s and experience American culture (Eun-sil Kim 2004, 27; No-mi Lee 2011, 243). Indeed, Itaewon was the only route to American culture in Korean society: It was a place to experience Americanism as an object of desire for a generation familiar with afkn radio programs, with singers trained on the musical stages at US military bases, and with Hollywood movies (Choi 2003,102) because foreign travel remained restricted in Korea until 1989. These characteristics made the area a dynamic space where heteroge- neous cultural codes and different subjectivities (including colonized “others,” fragmented “youths,” and a decolonized “new generation”) were encountered, (re)constructed, (re)signified, and transformed at a specific historical stage (Lee and Jung 2010, 191). It was a place where subcultures, such as the culture of the US army in the 1950s–1960s, the Go-Go culture in the 1970s, disco cul- ture in the 1980s, and hip-hop culture around the 1990s, were circulated, and it took on a leading role in Korea’s popular music and subculture. The “clubs” which actively interacted with subcultures of different generations formed a site that led Korean popular music and subculture (see Lee and Jung 2010). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 39  Itaewon, where American soldiers were previously the most numer- ous of the foreign residents, has become more multinational since 1993, when the Korean government introduced an industrial trainee system for foreign- ers. Foreign workers from India, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Uzbekistan, and so on settled in Itaewon because the area was more open to foreigners and foreign cultures. Thus, foreigners could feel more comfortable and secure there. Many expatriates found solace in its accommodating nature and chose to set up their homes there. As various cultures, languages, and lifestyles mix together and various cultural activities commingle, the exterior landscape of the area is changing, and the space of the area is being rearranged, creating a unique and distinctive atmosphere. Through these dynamics, the area is becoming the cultural frontier zone where various cultures have become multinational and multilingual (Hy- eon-mee Kim 2005, 26). Itaewon is also a site of both conflict and solidarity as shown in the Muslim community in the area: “Though Arab Muslim traders have been known to make infrequent trading expeditions to Korea since the Silla dy- nasty, the teachings of Muhammad never made a real impact until 1950 when Turkish troops arrived to fight for UN forces” (Hoefer 1981). In 1960, the Korean Muslim Federation was founded with a Korean, Haji Sabri Suh, as its leader. However, the Islamic community was established due to the need to understand the Islamic world after the oil crisis of 1973 and 1974 (Lee and Jung 2011, 242). In February 1975, an Islamic Center was established in Itae- won, Seoul, and an adjoining Central Mosque—the largest such onion-domed structure in northeast Asia—was opened in 1976 (Hoefer 1981). The Seoul Central Mosque had been built with both Korean and Middle Eastern funds to serve the 3,000 followers of the Prophet in the nation (Hoefer 1981). The Central Mosque is therefore not only a place for religious belief but also a symbolic site which shows Koreans’ effort to understand the Islamic world (Lee and Jung 2011, 242–243). A larger Muslim community was formed in Itaewon in 2005 when an- ti-American sentiment spread after two Korean middle school girls were acciden- tally run over and killed by an American armored personnel carrier, and American soldiers assaulted some citizens. As American soldiers were subsequently banned from bars and clubs, the economic base of the area declined and workers in the entertainment business left the area for cheaper accommodation elsewhere. Thus, the Muslim community was formed around the Central Mosque. The Muslim community is bringing about changes to Itaewon. One of the most noticeable changes is the increased number of Halal food restau- rants and the reduced number of local butcher’s shops (Heu-su Yi et al. 2008, 40 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  1. Itaewon, street view 2. Itaewon, Muslim settlement area 68). Furthermore, because of the strong solidarity among Muslims, the com- munity is often regarded as a closed community by other Koreans (Lee and Jung 2011, 250). The Muslim settlement in Itaewon is a segmentation of urban space formed by the pluralism of race and Islamic culture. However, the space is isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 41  never homogeneous to the citizens and Muslims living in the Muslim settle- ment, and the place of residence is perceived according to different meanings. That is, the citizens living in Itaewon view the Muslims as those who threaten their lives and view foreigners as the cause of economic conflicts as well. How- ever, for those Muslims in the settlement, the citizens’ hostility toward them has given rise to a view of them as a strange and potential threat. The place of conflict and alienation is an inevitable part of the process of initiating a new cultural solidarity (see Lee and Jung 2011). Another feature of Itaewon is the coexistence of mutually exclusive activities in the same place: the Muslim community adjoins Gay Hill, which was formed in the late 1990s when gay bars moved there from Euljiro-Jongro (Jung-eun Kim et al. 2010). The position of Itaewon as a place of expatriates makes negotiation across different cultures with no shared history the very condition of civic coexistence. Now, Itaewon is producing a varied atmo- sphere and landscapes as multinational cultures are dynamically mixed to- gether. translation and representation of itaewon as a nonplace Tourist books have an important role to play in presenting an image of a city to the outside world because most tourists depend on the books for informa- tion about the city they will visit. They obtain information about the history, culture, shopping centers, or entertainment facilities in the city and they con- sume the city based on this information. Tourist books provide guidelines to give tourists information and instructions to help them know or understand the city. Itaewon has been one of the most popular tourist areas in Seoul among foreign tourists to the extent that it has been said that “[y]ou may not know Seoul, but you should know Itaewon” (Saccone 1994, 79). Indeed, for most foreigners the area has become synonymous with Seoul. This section investigates how Itaewon has been presented in tourist books during the past thirty years. For this purpose, tourist books in English from 1981 until 2010 were examined; however, as not many tourist books are available that discuss Itaewon, the sample was limited to seventeen books. Insight Guides: Korea (Hoefer et al.), which was published in Hong Kong in 1981, offers comparatively detailed information, focusing on the or- igin of the name and Muhammadanism in Korea. Regarding the name, it quotes Allen and Donard Clark, a father-and-son team of Seoul historians as saying, “Following the Japanese invasion of 1592–1598, the area now called 42 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Itaewon came to be called ‘Itaein’ or ‘Itaein dong’ meaning ‘Foreigners’ Vil- lage,’ because of the Japanese soldiers who were quartered on this site,” and “When the war was over, some of the soldiers settled down, married Korean girls, and spent the rest of their lives here.” Then “the tradition carries on, though most American soldiers take their Korean brides home, to ‘the world.’ as they call the U.S. of A.” (Hoefer et al. 1981). Regarding Muhammadanism, the book says the teachings of Mu- hammad never made a real impact until the arrival of Turkish troops in 1950, as mentioned previously, and it goes on to explain the foundation of the Ko- rean Muslim Federation in 1960 and the establishment of an Islamic Center in 1975 and, later, the adjoining Central Mosque (Hoefer et al. 1981). Visitors Guide: Seoul Korea, which was published by Seoul Metro- politan Government (smg) in 1998, introduces some of Itaewon’s histor- ical traces: [the] “won” of the name has meant an inn offering lodgings to travelers of the Cho- son Dynasty. In the middle of the 17th century, there was a concentrated village of naturalized Japanese. From 1906, a Japanese Military Post was stationed in the area until liberation from Japanese colonial rule, and now US Military Post including headquarters is located there. (SMG 1998, 83) However, Insight Guides: South Korea (Le Bas), which was published in London in 2007, introduces the history of Itaewon using a more poetic tone: but foreigners, not all of them Western, now occupy multi-story apartment buildings. [. . .] Imagine the astonished reactions of the Buddhist monks who, for some 500 years, kept a free hostel for travelers near here. What exists now, albeit breathtaking, may prove to be too developed for their tastes: the Grand Hyatt Hotel’s mirrored façade; and the twin minarets of the onion-domed mosque below, from which re- sounds the muezzin’s call to afternoon prayer. (Le Bas 2007, 135-139) The book then adds that centuries ago, Itaewon was used as a stop- over point for visitors to the capital, that Japanese troops were housed there during the Japanese Occupation, and that, after the Korean War, they were then replaced by American soldiers. Although the descriptions in the above three tourist books are not enough to show the dynamicity of Itaewon, they at least reveal the historicity of the area. However, other tourist books introduce Itaewon, focusing on it as place for con- sumerism and as a shopping area and entertainment district as follows: known as a part of the city that never sleeps. [. . .] a one-stop hub for foreign visitors, including shopping, tours, lodging and information services. It also offers many ven- ues in which to enjoy Korean and foreign cultures and cuisines. (kotra 2006, 249) now a growing mecca for bargain hunters. [. . .] It is lined on both sides with hundreds isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 43  of shops and arcades selling ready-made sports clothes [. . .] It is also an entertain- ment spot that boasts well over 200 restaurants, bars and clubs. (Suzanne Crowder Han 1989, 74) crowded with shops of all kinds from custom tailors to jewelers, from antiques deal- ers to clothiers. [. . .] In the evening Itaewon becomes a dynamic entertainment dis- trict packed with discos, nightclubs, bars, and karaokes of all sizes. (Saccone 1994, 79–80) the shopping paradise of diverse visitors from all parts of the world. (kowoc 2002, 63) Itaewon offers tailor-made and ready-made clothes [. . .] There is a spirited night life, too. (Chunsung Kim 2004, 90) it was one of the only places in the country in which you could buy “Western” items [. . .] While it remains a great place to shop for cheap tailored suits and shoes, Itae- won’s popularity also made it a byword for transactions of a more sexual nature – hostess bars sprung up all over the place. (Paxton 2008, 109) It’s a bastardized district that’s neither Korean nor Western, but a skewed yet intrigu- ing combination of both. Clothing, gifts . . . (Nilsen 2009, 44 and 92) a lively expat entertainment zone with bars and clubs aplenty, both gay and straight. Market stalls line the main street and the district comes to life in the evening. (Rob- inson and Zahorchak 2009, 55) Once a shady red-light district, it’s been cleaned up [. . .] You can still find ladies of the night walking down certain streets at night, but during the day, it’s a shopper’s paradise. (Cecilia Hai-Jin Lee 2010, 63) Translation of Itaewon in the above tourist books is no different from that in Wikipedia, as was pointed out in the introduction. Rather than being presented as a dynamic space where memories are imprinted, heterogeneous cultures mix together, and new cultures emerge, Itaewon is represented in these books as a large retail outlet for the selling and buying of goods, just like nonplaces, to use Augé’s term (1995, 63), which have no urban relations, history, or identity. The way Itaewon is translated is similar to the process of reification in that it presents fragmented information about the city in the process of com- modification for tourism, and thereby stops us understanding the totality of the city. According to Lukács (1971), under capitalism everything is reified as the result of a unified structure of consciousness—that is, seeing everything in a completely discrete way, where everything is separated and fragmented and taken out of the process to which it belongs. Lukács claims this is caused by the fact that everything is turned into a commodity under capitalism, which thus prevents us from seeing the totality of the place and the deeper processes that are going on. In a capitalist society, a city is presented as a commodity for the tour- ist industry, and its images are created, manipulated, or distorted in the pro- 44 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  cess of translation in order to create a profit. A city’s function as a place for entertainment and shopping is frequently emphasized in presenting the city because “the criteria of the successful tourist industry mainly puts priority on spending on entertainment and shopping” (Yi and Oh 1994, 21). Itaewon’s image is presented as a place for selling and entertaining; removed from its historicity, the image is fragmented. fragmented image, fragmented experience What does this fragmented image have to do with the city? The most direct influence may be the way the city is consumed by tourists. For example, the following recent reviews of the city by tourists6 show that the way they con- sume the city is closely related to the image presented in tourist books: Itaewon: Lots of Shopping. There are shops and a district for almost every imaginable type of product and some are open until very late at night […]. (October 20, 2002) Itaewon: Capital of Kitsch. [. . .] filling up with good restaurants and chain stores. You can find Nike outlets selling all manner of shoes and sports gear, Body Shops filled with makeup and luxurious bath products, and dozens of clothing stores and tailors specializing in Chinese silk dresses. (October 19, 2003) Itaewon: Cheap shops and street fashion. You can find bargains of any kind and a lot of the big clothing chains [. . .]. (January 28, 2004) Itaewon: Near military base. Itaewon does have some shops [. . .] Itaewon is located near a US military base, so don’t mind the soldiers in camouflage wandering around town. At night time, Itaewon transforms itself [. . .] One of the native Koreans told me that most Korean girls do not hang around in that area, afraid to be mistaken as a prostitute. (February 22, 2005) Itaewon is perhaps the most famous shopping area for foreigners in Korea. (January 13, 2006) Itaewon: Buying a Custom-Made Suit in Itaewon. (May 6, 2007) Itaewon: Very Touristy and Expensive, not a Sample of Korea. The Itaewon shopping area covers a 1.4 km in length [. . .] The area has a vibrant night life scene with many bars and nightclubs. (July 24, 2008) Itaewon: Special Tourism Shopping Zone of Seoul (April 4, 2011) 6 All citations are taken from http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Asia/South_Korea/Soul_ tukpyolsi/Seoul-1058426/Shopping-Seoul-Itaewon-BR-1.html (accessed December, 2014), which is an interactive site aimed at sharing travel knowledge, which includes chat, forums, travelogues, photos, and maps. isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 45  Although one reviewer describes Itaewon as an unexpected treasure trove, most of the reviews show that tourists’ experience of Itaewon is superfi- cial and fragmented, alienated from its memories and ongoing history just like the images of the city in the tourist books. They just experience Itaewon as a non-place where things are sold and bought. Considering the general purpose of tourist books, it can be said that the translation of Itaewon that is circulated and reproduced has directed tourists’ pattern of consuming the city. The city is, of course, a place where things are traded, but it is not only a place where things are traded. As Calvino’s Invisible Cities suggests, a city is an assemblage of memory, desire, signs, names, and other features. So what is traded is not only things but also memories, desires, signs, names, and other things, as shown by Invisible Cities’ Euphemia: You do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell, but also because at night, by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels or stretched out on pile of car- pets, at each word that one man says—such as “wolf,” “sister,” “hidden treasure,” “battle,” “scabies,” “lovers”—the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, sca- bies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel’s swaying or the junk’s rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox. (Calvino 1972/1974, 36–37) Itaewon is also a place that has its memories, desires, signs, and names, and is the place where those memories, desires, signs, and names are traded; thus it deserves to be known for various reasons, not just as a selling place. So the experience of the city could be more complex than simply trading things. The fragmented experience together with the reproduced image has produced a negative image about Itaewon, so that it loses its attraction as a tourist site. Furthermore, as neighboring commercial areas are created, Itae- won has also lost its merits as a shopping area. Realizing the risk, the gov- ernment designated the area a special tourism district in 1997 and decided to hold the Itaewon Global Village Festival twice a year in an attempt to revive Itaewon as a site of dynamic cultural exchanges. conclusion In the tourism industry, cities are rearranged according to the economic principles of commercialism in a capitalist society. Cities can be classified as a sacred city, a fashion city, a commercial city, and so on, and this clas- sification is translated spatially or verbally, creating a representative image of the city. 46 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  3. Different views of Itaewon Tourist books are one of the media where cities are verbally trans- lated. Itaewon has been verbally translated as a shopping and entertainment area in tourist books, and such a translated image has been consumed among tourists. However, this image has been fragmented, and so has been the expe- rience of tourists. The experience of cities may be more multiple and more multilateral than the one the tourist books can produce as shown in the description of the city of Irene in Invisible Cities: If you saw it, standing in its midst, it would be a different city; Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes. For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene. (Calvino 1972/1974, 125) isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 47  4. Itaewon, historical view Therefore, cities cannot be fixed to a single image or translation. The various translations of the name of Itaewon itself—foreigners’ village, village for being pregnant with a foreigner’s child, village for pear trees—show that the area cannot be translated into one fixed image. The inherent and unique properties of Itaewon have been formed by the totality of geographical and historical moments. Itaewon has been a place for travelers and trading, a space of trauma caused by the conflictive history of Korea, a foreigners’ village, a foreign land within the country, a colonized space, a space of freedom and resistance, a deterritorialized zone, a window onto Western culture, a space of conflicts and solidarity, a space for cultural translation, and so on. The area has accumulated its memories throughout history while being repeatedly rewrit- ten, functioning as “a culture-generator.” Indeed, regarding cities as “culture-generators,” Lotman says: The city is a complex semiotic mechanism, a culture-generator, but it carries out this function only because it is a melting-pot of texts and codes, belonging to all kinds of languages and levels. The essential semiotic polyglottism of every city is what makes it so productive of semiotic encounters. The city, being the place where different national, social, and stylistic codes and texts confront each other, is the place of hybridization, recodings, semiotic translations, all of which makes it into a powerful generator of new information. (Lotman 1990, 194) Itaewon has been, to use Lotman’s words “the place of hybridization, recodings, semiotic translations” (Lotman 1990, 194). However, a selective translation of such a city in the tourist books has focused on the fragmented image in the process of the commodification of the city as a tourist site. This fragmented image has been reproduced during past decades, fixing the image to Itaewon and obstructing cognition of the totality or the whole nature of the 48 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  city. This way, translation may be damaging to cities especially when a dis- torted image obtains authority through reproduction. As a culture-generator, a city deserves its proper translation. <References> Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermoder- nity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bewes, Timothy. 2002. Reification or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Calvino, Italo. 1972. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver (1974). 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Spec- tator Guide10—Venue Cities in Korea. Seoul: KOWOC. Le Bas, Tom. 2007. Insight Guides: South Korea. 8th edition. London: Insight Guides. Lee, Cecilia Hae-Jin. 2010. Frommer’s South Korea. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley. Lee, Na-young, and Min-yoo Jung. 2010. “탈/식민성의 공간, 이태원과 한국의 대중음 악 – 이태원 ‘클럽’들의 형성과 변화과정을 중심으로 (1950–1991)” (History of popular music and (re)formation of ‘clubs’ at Post/Colonial Space, Itaewon in South Korea, 1950–1991).” Society and History 87: 191–229. Lee, No-mi. 2011. “국내 외국인 소수집단 거주지의 갈등과 연대 – 이태원 무슬림 거주지를 중 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 49  심으로” (A study on conflict and solidarity in foreign settlement—focused on Itaewon Muslim Settlement). Korean Culture Study 21(0): 237–263. Lotman, Yuri M. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Translated by Ann Shukman. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics. 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Cities in Translation. London: Routledge. SMG (Seoul Metropolitan Government). 1998. Visitors Guide. Seoul Korea. Seoul: SMG. Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Translation in a Postcolonial Context. Manchester: St. Je- rome. Tymoczko, Maria, and Edwin Gentzler, eds. 2002. Translation and Power. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Yi. Heu-su, et al. 2008. “서울 이태원동 일대의 이슬람 타운화 과정에 관한 연구 (Study on the Process of Islamic Town Formation in Itaewon).” Korean Association of Islamic Studies Journal 18(2): 47-86. Yi, Hyeok-jin, and Ho-tak Oh. 1994. “관광산업으로서의 쇼핑상품에 관한 이론적 고찰 (Theoretical Approaches to Shopping Items as Tourism Industry).” Regional Development Journal 19: 21-52. <Hunam Yun> She is a translation scholar and translator. She first obtained her BA in English literature at Korea University, Seoul. After studying translation studies at Warwick University, UK, she obtained her MA and PhD in Translation Studies in 2000 and 2011 respectively. She has taught translation theory and practice for over fifteen years at Hongik University in Seoul and translated Walter Scott, Andersen, George MacDonald, and Beatrix Potter into Korean. Her main topics in- clude globalization and translation, literary translation, drama translation, translational norms, and screen translation and she authored Introduc- tion to Translation Theory and Practice. She now focuses on writing and translating while living in New York. 50 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15750

Of Translational Spaces and Multilingual Cities: Reading the Sounds of Lagos in Sefi Atta’s Swallows and Everything Good Will Come* Elena Rodríguez Murphy University of Salamanca, Spain [email protected] <Abstract> Over the last few years, there has been an increasing number of Nigerian au- thors who in their writing have centered on portraying the different sounds and accents of one of Nigeria’s most diverse and vibrant cities, Lagos. This article aims to analyze the way in which Sefi Atta, a leading voice in what has come to be known as “the third generation of Nigerian writers,” describes in her novels Swallow (2005) and Everything Good Will Come (2010) the manner in which some of Nigeria’s vernacular languages, such as Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, as well as Nigerian English and Nigerian Pidgin, permeate this incredibly plu- ral and multilingual city where varying ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups have been made to live together in the same translational space as a result of the colonial era. As Achille Mbembe (2010) has underlined, one of the main bequests of colonialism has been the unequal development of the different countries and regions of Africa. This situa- tion has led to an uneven distribution of people within multiple spaces. In this way, cities such as Lagos, Dakar, Accra, or Abidjan have actually become major metropolitan centers where interaction and negotiations among diverse peoples are commonplace and transcul- tural forms of different elements such as modes of dress, music, or language are constantly emerging. Without a doubt, translation is a main feature of coexistence in Lagos given its multilingual environment and the way in which various ethnic and linguistic communities share everyday life. “Language is part of the audible surface of the city.” (Cronin and Simon 2014, 120) in translation: reading the sounds of the city Over the last few years, there has been an increasing number of Nigerian au- thors who in their writing have centered on portraying the different sounds and accents of one of Nigeria’s most diverse and vibrant cities, Lagos. In this * This article is part of the research project entitled “Violencia simbólica y traducción: retos en la representación de identidades fragmentadas en la sociedad global” [Symbolic Violence and Translation: Challenges in the Representation of Fragmented Identities within the Global Soci- ety] (FFI2015-66516-P; MINECO/FEDER, UE), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 51  regard, as Toni Kan Onwordi has underlined in a brief description included on the cover of Sefi Atta’s second novel Swallow, “no contemporary Nigerian writer is better than Sefi Atta at evoking the smells, sounds and the sheer madness of this sprawling cosmopolitan city of Lagos.” Along with Chris Aba- ni, Helon Habila, Maik Nwosu, Jude Dibia, and Akin Adesokan, and other members of what has come to be known as “the third generation of Nigerian writers,” in her narrative Sefi Atta ably describes the way in which diverse peoples negotiate everyday life on the city’s populated streets. Although there are many ways in which one may try to understand the workings of urban reality, analyzing “the practice of everyday life” (see De Certeau 1984) in a postcolonial city such as Lagos through language and translation can offer new and interesting perspectives in various fields of study. Indeed, Atta’s novels Everything Good Will Come (2005) and Swallow (2010) provide the reader with a valuable linguistic experience of Lagos through the inclusion in her texts of the multilingual transactions that permeate the city. As Simon interestingly points out in her book Cities in Translation, Much of the abundant literature in recent decades has emphasized the visual aspects of urban life. And yet the audible surface of languages, each city’s signature blend of dialects and accents, is an equally crucial element of urban reality [. . .] “hearing” introduces the observer into layers of social, economic and cultural complexity. (Si- mon 2012, 1) Thus, reading in Atta’s fiction the sounds and diverse range of accents that characterize the city brings the reader closer to the complexity of its lin- guistic reality, in which translation appears as an indispensable tool which has gradually allowed for the emergence of what McLaughlin has termed “new urban language varieties”: The burgeoning growth of Africa’s cities that began during the latter part of the colo- nial period and continues with increasing momentum into the twenty-first century has given rise to a multiplicity of innovative and often transformative cultural practices that are associated primarily with urban life, not least of which is the emergence of new urban language varieties. (McLaughlin 2009, 1) Lagos is, without a doubt, a multilingual and multiethnic city that can actually be defined as “a translation space [where] the focus is not on mul- tiplicity but on interaction” (Simon 2012, 7). Therefore, given its multilingual environment and the way in which various ethnic and linguistic communities have come to share its everyday life, translation can clearly be considered one of the main features of activity in Lagos. In this way, beyond dichotomist un- derstandings, translation becomes an indispensable medium through which a common coexistence may, although not always successfully, be negotiated: 52 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Multilingual contexts put pressure on the traditional vocabulary of transfer and its concepts of source and destination. Communities which have had a longstanding re- lationship inhabit the same landscape and follow similar rhythms of daily life. Facing one another across the space of the city, they are not “foreign” and so translation can no longer be configured only as a link between a familiar and a foreign culture, be- tween a local original and a distant destination, between one monolingual community and another. [. . .] The Other remains within constant earshot. The shared understand- ings of this coexistence change the meaning of translation from a gesture of benev- olence to a process through which a common civility is negotiated. (Simon 2012, 7) lagos: a multilingual and multiethnic megacity In his book Sortir de la grande nuit (2010), Achille Mbembe recently under- lined the fact that one of the main bequests of colonialism has been the un- equal development of the different countries and regions of Africa. In fact, “[n]o major coastal cities existed in Western Africa before the colonial period. However, as a result of the mostly maritime-based logistics of colonialism, countries in the sub-region began an urbanization path strongly associated with the coast” (United Nations Human Settlements Programme [UN-Hab- itat] 2014, 99). This situation has gradually led to an uneven distribution of people within multiple spaces, hence cities like Lagos, Dakar, Accra, and Ab- idjan have actually become major metropolitan centers where interaction and negotiations are commonplace and transcultural forms of different elements such as modes of dress, music, or language are constantly emerging. It be- comes apparent, therefore, that in many African cities such as Lagos attaining even the minimum often requires complex styles of staying attuned to the shifting intersections of gestures, excitements, languages, anxieties, determinations and comportments enacted across markets, streets and other venues. The city is a field of affect where specific dispositions and attainments are contingent upon the ways actors’ bodies, histories and capacities are mobilized and enacted. (Simone 2007, 237) As Ato Quayson explains in regard to Oxford St., in the Ghanaian capital of Accra the streets in many African cities may be seen as archives, rather than just geographical locations, where it is possible to find “a rich and intricate relationship between tradition and modernity, religion and secularity as well as local and transnational circuits of images and ideas” (Quayson 2010, 72). Lagos is a burgeoning city, the largest in Nigeria (Falola and Genova 2009, 202), and, according to the figures published by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) in its 2014 report The State of African Cities 2014. Re-imagining Sustainable Urban Transitions, it “has recent- ly joined the ranks of the world’s megacities” (2014, 17). Lagos has undoubt- edly been shaped by its history, not only as one of the most important ports isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 53  in West Africa from the eighteenth century onwards, but also as the federal capital of Nigeria (1914–1991). In this respect, although Abuja has been the federal capital of the country since 1991, Lagos, whose population is expected to rise to over eighteen million by 2025 (United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 23–25), is now the center of one of the largest urban areas in Western Africa and continues to be a main hub in the southwestern region of Nigeria for the circulation of peoples as well as goods. Growing urbaniza- tion and rural–urban migration are responsible for the cultural heterogeneity of this major Western African city, which was at one point described “as an ancient city inhabited by the Awori and Ijebu people, both subgroups of the Yoruba” (Falola and Genova 2009, 202). Nevertheless, as a result of Nigeria’s national history, Lagos is currently populated by varying and distinct ethnic groups. Although there is still a Yoruba majority, it can be said that “Nigeria’s myriad ethnic and religious identities are found throughout the city’s neigh- borhoods, usually managing to coexist, though periodically sparking tensions” (Lewis 2009, 115). The artificial boundaries which were drawn when Nigeria was created by British administrators in 1914,1 have given rise to an incredibly heteroge- neous space both in ethnical and linguistic terms. As can be seen in the map below, there is an extremely wide range of ethnic groups which, as a conse- quence of colonialism, have come to inhabit the same nation; this has often provoked ethnic and religious tensions, the Biafran War (1967–1970) being a case in point: The Nigeria of today [...] is a relatively new creation, dating back to the early 20th century. Boundaries prior to that time included numerous chieftaincies and empires that expanded and contracted geographically without regard to modern Nigeria’s boundaries. For the early peoples of Nigeria, only geographic boundaries, such as the Sahara Desert or Atlantic Ocean, might have kept them in place. Western European powers competing for territory and political control in Africa during the late-19th cen- tury determined Nigeria’s boundaries to suit their needs. Much of Nigeria’s western, eastern, and northern borders are the results of rivalry and compromise by Euro- pean powers. As a result, ethnic groups and former kingdoms straddle boundaries. [...] Modern-day Nigeria is a conglomeration of hundreds of ethnic groups, spanning across different geographical zones. [...] To identify a single Nigerian culture is diffi- cult. (Falola and Genova 2009, xxx-xxxi) 1 The name ‘Nigeria’ is credited to the colonial editor of the Times of London, Flora Shaw, who later married the new entity’s governor, Lord Frederick Lugard. The name stuck. But the new name was not accompanied by any sense of national unity. [. . .] The British yoking together of so many different peoples into a huge state [. . .] shaped the future of about a fifth of Africa’s sub-Saharan population” (Campbell 2013, 2). 54 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  From a demographic point of view, within Nigeria the Hausa-Fulani, the Igbo, and the Yoruba can be considered to be the largest of the ethnic groups. According to Iyoha (2010, 169), around 29% of the population is Hausa-Fulani who live mainly in the northern regions in cities such as Kano, Sokoto, and Kaduna. The Yoruba, more or less 21%, are based primarily in the southwest of the country, in cities such as Ife-Ife, Lagos, and Ibadan. On the other hand, the Igbo, approximately 18% of the population, inhabit the areas situated in the southeast of Nigeria, for example in Port Harcourt, Owerri, and Enugu. These aforementioned groups can, however, be said to live all around the country. Other, numerically smaller ethnic groups include the Tiv, the Nupe, the Igala, and the Jukun in the Middle Belt region and the Ijaw, the Itsekiri, the Urhobo, the Ogoni, and the Ibibio in the Niger Delta. They have long been demanding greater political and economic representation within the national space, as Saro-Wiwa has pointed out on many occasions in regard to the Ogoni people: Colonialism is not a matter only of British, French, or European dominance over Af- ricans. In African society, there is and has always been colonial oppression. In my case, the Ogoni had never been conquered by their Igbo neighbors. But the fact of British colonialism brought both peoples together under a single administration for the first time. And when the British colonialists left, the numerically inferior Ogoni were consigned to the rule of the more numerous Igbos, who always won elections in the Region since ethnic loyalties and cultural habits were and continue to be strong throughout Nigeria. (Saro-Wiwa 1992, 155) Not only is Nigeria diverse in terms of its ethnicity, but it also boasts an enormous variety of languages and dialects—more than four hundred ac- cording to Garuba (2001, 11) and more than five hundred according to the isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 55  Ethnologue database (Simons and Fennig 2017). As Adekunle (1997) and Adeg- bija (2000, 2004) highlight, multilingualism is a common feature of many West African regions, and Nigeria can be said to be the country where the largest number of different languages is spoken. Together with English, which is used as an official language and is employed in diverse forms, Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba have become the three major national languages.2 Moreover, a wide range of languages and dialects spoken by the different Nigerian ethnic groups is to be found: Apart from the indigenous languages, which are the mother tongues of Nigerians, there also exist non-indigenous languages. They include English, which has become a second language; Nigerian Pidgin (the language in Nigeria with probably the larg- est number of speakers), which derives from the contact between English and the indigenous languages; Classical Arabic, which is learnt by Muslims; and other for- eign languages such as French, German, and Russian, which are taken as academic subjects at the secondary and tertiary levels of education. (Igboanusi 2002, 13–14) Faced with this highly complex web of languages, many Nigerians have resorted to both English and Nigerian Pidgin (NP)3 as a way of favoring communication with each other: Originally mainly restricted to trade, Pidgin has spread to become the language of market places, sports, the army and police force, taxi drivers, playgrounds, university campuses, and generally of interethnic discourse in lower-class and informal con- texts. In recent decades it has therefore been utilized for mass communication—in advertising, political campaigning, government propaganda, announcements, and mass media, e.g. news broadcasts on the radio [. . .] It is labeled “the most widely spoken language in Nigeria” [. . .] Though the language still carries a strong stigma in the eyes of many educated Nigerians, many others have come to use it in informal conversations, also in banks, offices, and businesses, utilizing its ethnographic role as a code of friendliness and proximity. (Schneider 2007, 205–206) Nonetheless, it is interesting to take into consideration that whilst NP and the vernacular languages are normally used in informal and familiar conversations, administrative and educational matters are mainly dealt with in English: “For a great many speakers from different groups, English is [...] valued as a language of prestige, a sign of education, and a mark of modernity” 2 “The dominance of English in the Nigerian Constitution continued until 1979, when the Con- stitution that emerged under a military regime specifically provided for the use of the three major languages (Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba) in addition to English for proceedings in the Na- tional Assembly: ‘The business of the National Assembly shall be conducted in English, and in Hausa, Ibo, and Yoruba when adequate arrangements have been made therefore (Section 51)’” (Bamgbose 1996, 358). 3 It is important to bear in mind that, as Igboanusi points out, “Nigerian English” (NE) and “Ni- gerian Pidgin” (NP) are considered to be different languages: “Nigerian Pidgin is different from Nigerian English (the variety of English used in Nigeria). However, the line between them is sometimes difficult to draw, particularly at the lexical level” (Igboanusi 2008, 78). 56 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  (Simpson 2008,194). According to different critics (Bamgbose 1971; Bamgbose 1996, 366; Igboanusi 2002; Gut 2004, 813), only a small percentage of the Ni- gerian population may understand or speak English, but, despite the fact that in recent years there have been repeated attempts to increase the importance of the vernacular languages, it continues to be used on a regular basis, espe- cially by the local elites: As ex-colonial people, Nigerians hold English in great awe. They so overrate English that literacy in English is considered the only mark of being an educated person. For example, for them science and technology are not within the reach of any person who cannot master the English language. Not surprisingly, therefore, the language, unlike any of the Nigerian mother tongues, is regarded as being politically neutral for adoption by the people. [. . .] Consequently, political expediency makes the English lan- guage the ready language for adoption for national literacy today. (Afolayan 2001, 83) Just as in other African countries, the increasing use of new technologies such as the Internet and cable TV among specific sectors of Nigerian society has resulted in a growing interest on the part of the younger generation in learning the English language. This situation has been skillfully described by the widely acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who, on many occasions, has stated that English is no longer considered by some as a “foreign” language, but rather as a Nigerian language adapted to the Nigerian cultural context: I’d like to say something about English [...] which is simply that English is mine. Some- times we talk about English in Africa as if Africans have no agency, as if there is not a distinct form of English spoken in Anglophone African countries. I was educated in it; I spoke it at the same time as I spoke Igbo. My English-speaking is rooted in a Nigerian experience and not in a British or American or Australian one. I have taken ownership of English. (Adichie, quoted in Uzoamaka 2008, 2) The general trend encountered in multilingual communities consists in usage gradually determining the role each language has in particular domains, and Nigeria is no exception. Although English remains the most important language in education and matters pertaining to government and administration, the vernacu- lar languages—such as Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo as well as NP—are used primarily in informal contexts. Taking these matters into consideration, it is important to underline the “diglossic,” or rather “poliglossic,” relations that, as Zabus (2007) and Bandia (2008) point out, have been established between the different languages that are employed in many of the countries in West Africa, including Nigeria:4 4 It is interesting to mention here that, according to Warren-Rothlin, in Nigeria digraphia is also a social reality which can result in social divisions (Warren-Rothlin 2012, 6–7). There also exist multiple orthographies and writing scripts within the country (ibid. 7). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 57  For our purposes, the sociolinguistic concept of diglossia needs to be expanded to include not only Ferguson’s genetically linked “high” and “low” varieties (to which he erroneously attributed scripturality and orality, respectively) but unrelated languages as well. Indeed, in a country like Ghana, Ewe is not a dialect of English and has a written literature of its own but, functionally, Ewe is to English what a dominated or subordinate language is to a dominant or superordinate language. [. . .] Also, the West African auxiliary languages resulting from languages in contact such as pidgins have a diglossic relation to the dominant European language that is similar to the more conventional relation between a prestige or power language and its regional dialect. Conversely, a statistically dominant language like Wolof in Senegal can be consid- ered as being hegemonic like French and would thus be in diglossia with a minor language like Ndût. (Zabus 2007, 14) In the case of the Nigerian linguistic landscape, English has gradually come to be accepted as the dominant language in some domains while specific forms of some of the vernacular languages such as Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba have been gaining ground in others. In many instances, however, these vernac- ular languages are in a diglossic situation in relation to the English language. Likewise, although it is now defined as “the most widely spoken language in Nigeria,” NP appears to be in a diglossic situation with respect to English. It is also important to bear in mind that the three major vernacular languages can be categorized as hegemonic vis-à-vis those considered as minor. Thus, faced with the linguistic variation characteristic of a territory like Nigeria, it may be said that, in Zabus’s own words, “[w]e can therefore advance the notions of ‘triglossia’ or even ‘polyglossia,’ and ‘intertwined diglossias’” (Zabus 2007, 14). The Nigerian cultural and linguistic situation that we have been describing, although very succinctly, is reflected in the city of Lagos where, as illustrated by the different examples that follow, diverse languages, and therefore translation, are used on a daily basis, not only in the ever-chang- ing “discourse ecologies” (Quayson 2010) that exist on its streets, but also in the conversational exchanges that take place in its crowded markets, “motor parks,” taxis or buses. In this regard, in their work both Adedun and Shodipe have underlined the fact that, although most people in Lagos use Yoruba and Nigerian Pidgin in their daily interactions, Hausa, Igbo, and other vernacular languages together with English are also a common feature in this cosmopol- itan African city: The nature of Lagos, which accommodates various ethnic, and religious groups, ac- counts for the present state of its language repertoire. [. . .] Without any doubt, Lagos is a potpourri of different peoples and tribes and these have had a noticeable impact on the linguistic repertoire, language choice, and language shift in the area. (Adedun and Shodipe 2011, 131) 58 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  the sounds of lagos in swallow and everything good will come One of the main characteristics of Atta’s work, as mentioned previously, is the accuracy with which she manages to portray the city of Lagos and the wide range of sounds that fill its streets and buildings. Both in her first novel, Every- thing Good Will Come (EG in the citations, below), and in her second novel, Swallow (SW in the citations, below), in addition to other works, Atta de- scribes different parts of the city along with its diverse languages and accents: Our continent was a tower of Babel, Africans speaking colonial languages: French, English, Portuguese, and their own indigenous languages. Most house help in Lagos came from outside Lagos; from the provinces and from neighboring African coun- tries. If we didn’t share a language, we communicated in Pidgin English. (EG, 212) Sheri’s younger siblings greeted me as I walked across the cement square. “Hello, Sister Enitan.” “Long time no see.” “Barka de Sallah, Sister Enitan.” (EG, 247) Street hawkers sat behind wooden stalls in a small market . . . They were Fulani peo- ple from the North. The men wore white skull caps and the women wrapped chiffon scarves around their heads. [. . .] They talked loud in their language, and together they sounded like mourners ululating. (EG, 198) Baba came to collect his monthly salary [. . .] “Compliments of the season,” I said. “How are you?” I spoke to him in Yoruba, addressing him by the formal you, because he was an elder. He responded with the same formality because I was his employer. Yoruba is a lan- guage that doesn’t recognize gender—he the same as she, him the same as her—but respect is always important. (EG, 312). In her fiction, Atta includes many instances in which translation ap- pears as an indispensable tool and a necessary medium through which ev- eryday life may be negotiated in Lagos, a place where diverse peoples and languages have come to share a common space. For instance, when Enitan, the main character in Everything Good Will Come, is sent to Royal College in La- gos and encounters girls from varying ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, cul- tural and linguistic translation becomes indispensable on a day-to-day basis: I met Moslem girls [. . .] Catholic girls [. . .] Anglican girls, Methodist girls. One girl, San- gita, was Hindu [. . .] I learned also about women in my country, from Zaria, Katsina, Kaduna who decorated their skin with henna dye and lived in purdah [. . .] Uncle Alex had always said our country was not meant to be one. The British had drawn a circle on the map of West Africa and called it a country. Now I understood what he meant. The girls I met at Royal College [in Lagos] were so different. I could tell a girl’s ethnic- ity even before she opened her mouth. Hausa girls had softer hair because of their Arab heritage. Yoruba girls like me usually had heart-shaped faces and many Igbo girls were fair-skinned; we called them Igbo Yellow. We spoke English, but our native tongues were as different as French and Chinese. So, we mispronounced names and spoke English with different accents. Some Hausa girls could not “fronounce” the isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 59  letter P. Some Yoruba girls might call these girls “Ausas,” and eggs might be “heggs.” Then there was that business with the middle-belters who mixed up their L’s and R’s. (EG, 44–45) Moreover, when Enitan meets one of her neighbors, a Muslim girl named Sheri, they are each faced with both cultural and linguistic translation. Since they come from different ethnic communities and religious backgrounds, Enitan, who is Yoruba, and Sheri, a “half-caste” with Hausa roots, need to understand one another’s cultural and linguistic circumstances before they can become friends: [Sheri] was funny, and she was also rude, but that was probably because she had no home training. She yelled from our gates. “I’ll call you aburo, little sister, from now on. And I’ll beat you at ten-ten, wait and see.” (EG, 16) The woman in the photograph by [Sheri’s] bedside table was her grandmother. “Alha- ja,” Sheri said. “She’s beautiful.” [...] There were many Alhajas in Lagos. This one wasn’t the first woman to go on hajj to Mec- ca, but for women like her, who were powerful within their families and communities, the title became their name. [...] She pressed the picture to her chest and told me of her life in downtown Lagos. She lived in a house opposite her Alhaja’s fabric store. She went to a school where children didn’t care to speak English. After school, she helped Alhaja in her store and knew how to measure cloth. I listened, mindful that my life didn’t extend beyond Ikoyi Park. What would it be like to know downtown as Sheri did, haggle with customers, buy fried yams and roasted plantains from street hawkers, curse Area Boys and taxi cabs who drove too close to the curb. [...] Sheri was a Moslem and she didn’t know much about Christianity. [...] I asked why Moslems didn’t eat pork. “It’s a filthy beast,” she said, scratch- ing her hair. I told her about my own life. (EG, 33–34) As Enitan mentions in several parts of the novel, although Hausa resonates in the streets and markets of Lagos, without translation into other languages it is not always understood by the Yoruba majority or by people from other ethnic communities. That is why, in many cases, people from di- verse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds who live in the city translate their vernacular languages into Pidgin English or English: Our gate man unlocked the gates. His prayer beads hung from his wrist. I realized I must have disturbed his prayer. Soon it would be the Moslem fasting period, Rama- dan. “Sanu, madam,” he said. “Sanu, mallam,” I replied in the only Hausa I knew. (EG, 201) In my first year of marriage, there was a hawker who sat by the vigilante gates of our state. She was one of those Fulani people from the north. We never said a word to each other: I could understand her language no more than she could mine. (EG, 243) This situation is also underlined by another Nigerian writer, Buchi Emecheta, in her well-known novel The Joys of Motherhood: The early market sellers were making their way to the stalls in single file. [Nnu Ego] 60 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  in her haste almost knocked the poor man down [. . .] There followed a loud curse, and an unintelligible outpouring from the mouth of the beggar in his native Hausa language, which few people in Lagos understood. (Emecheta 1994, 9) In the colorful markets of Lagos and other African cities, peoples from varied ethnic and linguistic environments constantly mingle and in- teract. Markets, as Simone puts it, are “the site for incessant performance, for feigned connections and insider deals, for dissimulation of all kinds, for launching impressions and information, rumors and advice” (Simone 2008, 81). Hence, given the mélange of languages and cultures, “[t]he resulting con- fusion about what is really going on breeds its own makeshift interpreters, who pretend to have real skills of discernment and can steer customers to the best price, quality, or hidden deal” (Simone 2008, 81). In the extract below, taken from Everything Good Will Come, Enitan, who was brought up in Ikoyi, one of Lagos’s affluent neighborhoods,5 high- lights the fact that class differences are extremely important in the city and can greatly influence the way in which people talk to one another: Pierre, my present house boy, began to wash the vegetables [. . .] I needed Pierre to place the okras on the chopping board. “Ici,” I said pointing. “Over there, please.” Pierre raised a brow. “Là bas, madame?” “My friend,” I said. “You know exactly what I mean.” It was my fault for attempting to speak French to him. [. . .] “I beg, put am for there,” I said [in Nigerian Pidgin]. [. . .] The general help we called house boys or house girls. [. . .] They helped with daily chores in exchange for food, lodgings, and a stipend. Most were of working age, barely educated. [. . .] (EG, 212) In this particular situation, because Pierre, the house boy, comes from the neighboring Republic of Benin, Enitan tries to translate her orders into French. Nevertheless, in the end, she resorts to a translation into Pidgin En- glish, which, as stated earlier in the article, is the language normally used as the medium of communication among peoples who belong to different ethnic and linguistic groups in Lagos. On other occasions, however, depending on the educational level of the speakers and the specific context in which interaction takes place, when 5 According to Fourchard (2012a, 68), this comes as a direct result of the colonial era, when the city of Lagos was divided into a residential area reserved for Europeans (Ikoyi) and a commer- cial area in which Europeans lived, worked, traded, and interacted with Africans (Lagos Island). In this regard, Lagos, like other contemporary African cities, may be described as what Triulzi (2002, 81) refers to as “the ‘site of memory’ of colonisation, with its divisions (the colonial city was conceived and grew opposite to and separate from the native town), its visible remains (buildings, town plans, statues) and its obligatory ‘synthesis’ of tradition and modernity.” isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 61  people whose ethnicities differ speak with one another, they translate their vernacular languages into English, instead of Pidgin English: We [Rose and Tolani] always spoke in English because she couldn’t speak Yoruba and I couldn’t understand her own language, Ijaw. (SW, 8) Enitan and Tolani, the main protagonists of Everything Good and Swallow respectively, recount their stories in English yet, as Atta herself has pointed out (quoted in Rodríguez Murphy 2012, 107–108), it actually consists of a transcultural form of English (Rodríguez Murphy 2015b, 72), which is inscribed with Nigerian vernacular languages and expressions as well as with Nigerian cultural markers: “[Nigerian readers] tell me they enjoy seeing those kinds of Englishes in my work. They come up to me and say: ‘Oh, you really do know Nigeria, you really do know Lagos very well.’ They enjoy it” (Atta quoted in Rodríguez Murphy 2012, 108). In her work, Atta manages to reflect the different varieties of English used in Lagos. These varieties have come to be defined as NE, and now form part of the wide range of “World Englishes” (see Kachru 1992 and Kachru, Kachru, and Nelson 2006) or “New Englishes” (see Crystal 2003), in reference to local adaptations of the English language which suit specific cultural contexts. This can be seen in the following examples: Yellow Sheri’s afro was so fluffy, it moved as she talked [. . .] She had a spray of rashes and was so fair-skinned. People her color got called “Yellow Pawpaw” or “Yellow Banana” in school. (EG, 18) Peter Mukoro tapped my arm. “I was calling that lady, that yellow lady in the kitchen, but she ignored me. Tell her we need more rice. Please.” (EG, 125–126) I’d heard men say that women like Sheri didn’t age well: they wrinkled early like white women. It was the end of a narration that began when they first called her yellow banana, and not more sensible, I thought. (EG, 206) In diverse passages of Atta’s novels, we may observe that the word “yellow” has come to acquire a specific meaning in NE: “a NE way of describ- ing a fellow Black who is fairly light-skinned” (Igboanusi 2002, 303). Area boys “You won’t believe. We were having a peaceful protest, calling on the government to reconsider our demands, when we noticed a group in the crowd who did not belong to our union. [. . .] They were shouting insults and acting rowdy [. . .]” The people she was talking about had to be area boys. They waited for any protest so they could misbehave. (SW, 133) In this extract taken from Swallow, Atta uses the term “area boy,” a phrase now commonly heard in urban settings, which, in NE, makes reference to a job- 62 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  less young man who participates in criminal acts and is often involved in criminal activities. Such a term is one of many linguistic reflections of what, according to some critics (Fourchard 2012b, Lewis 2009), is now happening in the streets of the city where, for several decades, criminal activity has been on the increase. High-life music As he spoke, I fell asleep dreaming of him, an eleven-year-old boy with khaki shorts holding a rifle made of sticks, dancing to high-life music with his mother and learning how to drink palm-wine from his father’s calabash. (EG, 116-117) “High-life music,” sometimes referred to just as “highlife,” is a very well-known musical genre in the Western regions of Africa,6 “a brand of music style combining jazz and West African elements, popular in Nigeria and other West African countries. In BE, ‘high life’ denotes a style of life that involves spending a lot of money on entertainment, good food, expensive clothes, etc.” (Igboanusi 2002, 138). As Igboanusi remarks, it is important to take into con- sideration that there is a difference between the way the term is used in British English and the meaning it has come to acquire in Nigerian English. Not only “Highlife,” but also other types of transcultural Nigerian mu- sic such as apala or juju music are often mentioned in Atta’s novels. Along with language, another element that permeates daily life in Lagos and many Nigerian cities is music that, as in other countries on the African continent, has been adapted and translated to suit diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds: Through the fence we heard Akanni’s juju music. Sheri stuck her bottom out and began to wriggle. She dived lower and wormed up. (EG, 15) The street was narrow and juju music blared from a battered cassette player perched on a wooden stool. Street hawkers sat around selling boxes of sugar, bathing spong- es, tinned sardines, chewing sticks, cigarettes, and Bazooka Joe gum. (EG, 89) Lagos. The street on which we lived was named after a military governor. Our neigh- borhood smelled of burned beans and rotten egusi leaves. Juju and apala music, disco and reggae music jumped from the windows, and fluorescent blue cylinders lit up the entire place past midnight. (SW, 21) In her writing, Atta includes both NE and NP, and also the vernacu- lar languages with which she was brought up, Yoruba and Hausa. This helps situate the reader in Lagos’s translational spaces, where the sounds of different accents and languages share a common linguistic environment: 6 Although “highlife music” is a popular genre in West Africa, it is necessary to emphasize that each region has managed to maintain its own specificity: “Generally, as the music and its ac- companying highlife dance spread across West Africa, each region maintained its ethnic spec- ificity by composing songs in the local language, and some bands, especially the multinational ones, created compositions in English or pidgin English” (Ajayi-Soyinka 2008, 526). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 63  He pronounced his visions between chants that sounded like the Yoruba words for butterfly, dung beetle, and turkey: labalaba, yimiyimi, tolotolo. (EG, 10) Yoruba people believed in reincarnation. The Yoruba religion had a world for the living and another for spirits. There was a circle of life and other complex concepts regarding deity, royalty, and fate that I couldn’t fully understand. For anyone to understand the Yoruba cosmos was a challenge without the wisdom and guidance of a babalawo [. . .] (SW, 88) On the day of the Moslem festival, Id-el-fitr, I left home for the first time that month to break fast with the Bakares. [. . .] As I drove through their gates, I heard a ram bleat- ing in the back yard of the Bakare’s house. It had been tied to a mango tree for two weeks and would be slain for the Sallah feast. (EG, 245) “How’s your husband?” Mama Gani asked. Her gold tooth flashed. “He’s fine,” I said [. . .] “Still nothing about your father?” “Still nothing,” I said. She clapped her hands. “Insha Allah, nothing will happen to him, after the kindness he’s shown us.” (EG, 245) The multilingualism which is typical in Lagos makes communication based on translation and transculturation inevitable. The following dialogues from Everything Good Will Come and Swallow clearly illustrate this point: We heard a cry from the road. “Pupa! Yellow!” A taxi driver was leaning out of his window. [. . .] “Yes, you with the big yansh,” he shouted. Sheri spread her fingers at him. “Nothing good will come to you!” [. . .] “And you, Dudu,” the taxi driver said. Startled, I looked up. “Yes you with the black face. Where is your own yansh hiding?” I glared at him. “Nothing good will come to you.” He laughed with his tongue hanging out. “What, you’re turning up your nose at me? You’re not that pretty, either of you. Sharrap. Oh, sharrap both of you. You should feel happy that a man noticed you. If you’re not careful, I’ll sex you both.” Sheri and I turned our backs on him. (EG, 135-136) There was a strong smell of simmering palm oil in the flat. Rose was in the kitchen. [. . .] She laughed at my expression. “My sister,” she said. “You think say I no know how to cook or what?” “I’ve just seen Mrs. Durojaiye,” I said, shutting the door. “I saw her too.” “She says you visited her?” She clucked. “The woman done craze [. . .]” (SW, 135) On my way to the bus stop, I passed a group of women selling roasted corn under a breadfruit tree. [. . .] I heard two men discussing women. “Statuesque,” one of them said. “The first one is black and skinny, the second is yellow and fat. I can’t decide. I love them both. You think say I fit marry both of them?” (SW, 236) At the bus stop, an army officer with his stomach protruding over his belt parted the crowd to board a bus. “Single-file line,” he repeated and lifted his horsewhip to warn those who protested. [. . .] “Those who give orders,” I said in a voice loud enough for the others to hear. “Question them. You can’t just obey without thinking.” [. . .] “Oh, I hate people like this,” [a] woman said. “What is wrong with her? Move your 64 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  skinny self, sister.” [. . .] “Sister [. . .]. Move before I move you to one side, oh!” “Abi she’s deaf?” “Maybe she done craze.” “Sister, ‘dress oh!” “Yes, address yourself to the corner and continue to tanda for dat side with your body like bonga fish.” “Tss, keep shut. Don’t start another fight.” (SW, 188–189) Enitan’s and Tolani’s stories take place in a particular context which Atta succeeds in describing in great detail through a specific use of language that evokes, in the mind of the reader, the smells, images and languages which define the city of Lagos, where it is possible to come across interesting con- trasts and a wide range of lifestyles as well as “cultural inscriptions [. . .] seen in mottos and slogans on lorries, cars, pushcarts and other mobile surfaces that may be encountered on the street” (Quayson 2010, 73): Millions lived in Lagos [. . .] Most days it felt like a billion people walking down the labyrinth of petty and main streets: beggar men, secretaries, government contractors (thieves, some would say), Area Boys, street children [. . .] There was a constant din of cars, popping exhaust pipes, and engines, commuters scrambling for canary-yellow buses and private transport vans we called kabukabu and danfo. They bore bible epi- taphs: Lion of Judah, God Saves [. . .] There were countless billboards: Pepsi, Benson and Hedges, Daewoo, Indomie Instant Noodles, Drive Carefully, Fight Child Abuse [. . .] a taxi driver making lurid remarks; people cursing themselves well and good; All right-Sirs, our urban praise singers or borderline beggars, who hailed any person for money. Chief! Professor! Excellency! [. . .] My favourite time was early morning, before people encroached, when the air was cool and all I could hear was the call from Cen- tral Mosque: Allahu Akhbar, Allahu Akhbar. (EG, 98–99) In the different examples cited above, one can appreciate to what extent Atta accomplishes a very creative and engaging use of language in her novels. She skillfully manages to transmit the specific characteristics of the cultures that have come to constitute her identity;7 similarly she also succeeds in representing the diverse range of accents that define the city of Lagos as a translational space, where “[a]ccents, code-switching and translation are to be valued for the ways in which they draw attention to the complexities of difference, for the ways in which they interrupt the self-sufficiencies of ‘mono’ cultures” (Simon 2012, 1). 7 “I had an unusual upbringing [. . .] and was surrounded by people from other ethnic groups and religions. Many Nigerian writers I meet feel that they are Yoruba, Igbo or something else, but I actually feel Nigerian and it comes out in my writing. I write about people who don’t have any strong ethnic allegiance or people who are in mixed marriages. [. . .] What I have picked up is language from different parts of the world and it comes out in my writing. I have to be very careful when I am writing in the voices of people who have not had my experiences. My second novel, Swallow, is written in the voice of a Yoruba woman, for instance. I couldn’t use language I had picked up here or in England” (Atta as cited in Collins 2007, 7). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 65  conclusion As several critics (Bandia 2008, Bandia as cited in Rodríguez Murphy 2015a, Gyasi 1999, Mehrez 1992, Inggs and Meintjes 2009) have rightly emphasized, the high rate of multilingualism or “polilingualism” (Bandia 2008, 136–137, Bandia as cited in Rodríguez Murphy 2015a, 149) which characterizes many of the African postcolonies,8 including Nigeria, is of great importance for translation studies in this day and age. Without a doubt, taking into account the ever-growing transculturation and transnationalization of cultures in our present-day global world, multilingualism can be considered an increasingly relevant feature both in literature and society: As a corollary of colonization, the displacement and migration of peoples brought about changes that would challenge the notion of a national language and a homo- geneous culture paving the way for understanding language and culture from the point of view of a transnational experience. According to Bhabha, hybridity, a main characteristic of the postcolonial condition, disrupts the relation between national language and culture, and points to a culture of difference, of displacement of signifi- cation, of translation. (Bandia 2008, 139). In this regard, in many African cities new transcultural and hybrid forms of diverse elements are being created every day. Ranging from trans- cultural types of music (Osumare 2012), such as afrobeat or highlife music, to other transcultural phenomena, including the Azonto dance in Ghana (Jaka- na, 2012) and the Nollywood film industry, which is now a major influence in Lagos’s streets and markets (Haynes 2007, Fuentes-Luque 2017). In the specific case of language, and as we have seen in the examples quoted from Atta’s novels, the prominence of the multilingualism that permeates African cities in general, and the continuous emergence of new hybrid linguistic forms and new semantic associations, which are typical features of the discourse em- ployed in situations involving interaction in urban areas, are, and will contin- ue to be, compelling topics when analyzing issues related to translation and translatability in the twenty-first century. 8 Here “postcolony” (Mbembe 2010) refers to the postcolonial context which, according to Bandia, is part of the colonial space: “Colonial space is ‘the postcolony’ itself, but it is also that space where people with postcolonial experiences, people with postcolonial backgrounds, exist” (Bandia as cited in Rodríguez Murphy 2015a, 149). This “colonial space” should not be understood as a static entity, but rather as characterized by ongoing translation, translocation and transculturation. 66 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  <References> Adedun, Emmanuel and Mojisola Shodipe. 2011. “Yoruba-English bilingualism in cen- tral Lagos—Nigeria.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 23 (2): 121–132. Adegbija, Efurosibina E. 2000. “Language Attitudes in West Africa.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 141 (1): 75–100. . 2004. Multilingualism: A Nigerian Case Study. Trenton/Asmara: Africa World Press. Adekunle, Mobolaji. 1997. “English in Nigeria: Attitudes, Policy and Communicative Realities.” In New Englishes: A West African Perspective, edited by Ayo Bamgbose, Ayo Banjo, and Andrew Thomas, 57–86. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press. 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Falola, Toyin, and Ann Genova. 2009. Historical Dictionary of Nigeria. Lanham, Toron- to, and Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press. Fourchard, Laurent. 2012a. “Lagos.” In Power and Powerless. Capital Cities in Africa, edited by Simon Bekker and Göran Therborn, 66–82. Cape Town: HSRC Press. . 2012b. “Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Nigeria.” In The Third Wave of Historical Scholarship on Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Ayodeji Olukoju, edited by Saheed Aderinto and Paul Osifodunrin, 243–276. New- castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Fuentes-Luque, Adrián. 2017. “Nollywood Stands Up: Mapping Nigeria’s Audiovi- sual Sector.” In Translation Studies beyond the Postcolony, edited by Ko- isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 67  bus Marais and Ilse Feinauer, 130-153. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Garuba, Harry. 2001. “Language and Identity in Nigeria.” In Shifting African Identities, edited by Simon Bekker, Martine Dodds, and Meshack M. 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Mehrez, Samia. 1992. “Translation and the Postcolonial Experience: The Franco- phone North African Text.” In Rethinking Translation. Discourse, Subjectiv- ity, Ideology, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 120–138. London and New York: Routledge. Osumare, Halifu. 2012. The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Quayson, Ato. 2010. “Signs of the Times: Discourse Ecologies and Street Life on Oxford St., Accra.” City & Society 22 (1): 72–96. Rodríguez Murphy, Elena. 2012. “An Interview with Sefi Atta.” Research in African Literatures 43 (3): 106–114. . 2015a. “An Interview with Professor Paul Bandia.” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 23 (1): 143–154 . 2015b. Traducción y literatura africana: multilingüismo y transculturación en la narrativa nigeriana de expresión inglesa (Translation and African litera- ture: multilingualism and transculturation in anglophone Nigerian writing). Granada: Comares. Saro-Wiwa, Ken. 1992. “The Language of African Literature: A Writer’s Testimony.” Research in African Literatures 23 (1): 153–157. Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English. Varieties around the World. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press. 68 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Simon, Sherry. 2012. Cities in Translation. Intersections of Language and Memory. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2007. “Deep into the Night the City Calls as the Blacks Come Home to Roost.” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (7–8): 224–237. . 2008. “Some Reflections on Making Popular Culture in Urban Africa.” African Studies Review 51 (3): 75-89. Simons, Gary F. and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2017. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Twentieth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com. Simpson, Andrew, ed. 2008. Language and National Identity in Africa. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Triulzi, Alessandro. 2002 “African Cities, Historical Memory and Street Buzz.” In The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, edited by Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, 78–91. London and New York: Routledge. United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). 2014. The State of African Cities 2014. Re-imagining sustainable urban transitions. Nairobi: UN-Habitat. Uzoamaka, Ada. 2008. “Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Creative Writing and Literary Activism.” http://www.iun.edu/~minaua/interviews/interview_ chimamanda_ngozi_adichie.pdf Warren-Rothlin, Andy. 2012. “Arabic script in modern Nigeria.” In Advances in Minority Language Research in Nigeria (vol. I), edited by Roger M. Blench and Stuart McGill, 105–121. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. Zabus, Chantal. 2001. “Oil Boom, Oil Doom. Interview by Chantal Zabus.” Interview with Ken Saro-Wiwa, in No Condition is Permanent: Nigerian Writing and the Struggle for Democracy, edited by Holger G. Ehling and Claus-Peter Holste-von Mutius, 1–12. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. First pub- lished 1993 by Rodopi (Amsterdam and New York). . 2007. The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. <Elena Rodríguez Murphy> holds a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Salamanca (Spain), where she works in the Depart- ment of Translation and Interpreting. Her research interests include Af- rican literatures, translation studies, and linguistics. She has published several articles and book chapters on these areas of study, including “An Interview with Sefi Atta” (published Research in African Literatures, 2012) and “An Interview with Professor Paul Bandia” (Perspectives, 2015). She is the author of Traducción y literatura africana: multilingüis- mo y transculturación en la narrativa nigeriana de expresión inglesa (Granada, 2015). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 69 

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https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15751

Translation and Asymmetrical Spaces, the Strait of Gibraltar as a Case in Point África Vidal and Juan Jesús Zaro University of Salamanca, Spain [email protected] University of Malaga, Spain [email protected] <Abstract> As a geographical location, defined by Paul Bowles as “the center of the uni- verse,” which separates continents—Europe in the North and Africa in the South—but also world views, cultures, religions, and languages, the Strait of Gibraltar was and remains an authentic translation space. At present, the metaphor of the separation that the Strait evokes incessantly continues to be valid every day, taking into account, for example, events such as the succesive waves of African immigrants who have been arriving on the European coasts for several years “illegally.” In addition to these tensions, there are cities located in the Strait, such as Tangier and Gibraltar, that are by themselves multilingual and multicul- tural places and therefore spaces of translation and conflict that deserve specific sections in this paper. While Tangier, during the second half of the twentieth century was a unique “interzone” characterized by cosmopolitanism and the coexistence of spaces and multiple and confronted texts, Gibraltar is now a territory reinvented as a result of its past, in which hybridity would be a fundamental part of its complex and young identity. introduction Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary practice. (hooks 1991, 152) Human beings access reality by means of translations, of provisional, rele- vant, interesting or interested versions of realities which are continually being contextualized, rectified, and translated. With the hermeneutic and ethical journeys of each individual, we come to realize that translating is an inevitable means of encountering the other. Not only of encountering the other, but also of coming face to face with immigration and national identities, the global and the local, the problem of marginal groups, difference, or encountering what we sometimes agree with and sometimes detest. And we come across all of these things because when we translate we invade spaces, we occupy alien, far-away spaces which overlap and clash. When we translate, we shape these spaces and walk over the tracks we find on the way; but, on occasion, when we move around in others’ spaces, our aim is also to rewrite them and translate them. Translating is shifting smells, flavors, or passions from places that are 70 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  not ours. Translation is movement, flow, and passage between spaces that are not, and should never be, unidirectional or closed. Our starting-point in this paper is that all cultural experience arises at the crossroads between language, topos, and identity, and that precisely the ex- perience of what is different is produced by the destabilization of these cross- roads (Robinson 1998, 24). Our point of departure, therefore, is that translat- ing, and more specifically translating spaces, is a very political activity which is certainly not neutral—it is the locus where the coexistence of heterogeneity becomes possible, and as a result space must always be under construction (Massey 2011, 9). As an example of this way of understanding translation, we aim to focus on the Strait of Gibraltar, with the cities of Tangier and Gibraltar at opposite sides of its coast. It is a fascinating area because it is the space that joins Africa and Europe, a space of cultural encounter that espouses the concept of hybridity, a hybridity distinct from syncretism, creolization, and métissage, which would suggest that the dynamics of cultural encounters give rise to new, long-lasting identities. On the contrary, these are spaces in which the hybrid is that space in construction just mentioned that problematizes binary oppositions since each is part of the construction of the other. Within this context, translating in these spaces means offering a culturally constructed version away from dualisms. The analysis of this space, which includes the Strait, Tangier, and Gi- braltar, will lead us to reflect on the fact that translating is today the condition of living of many cities with a double or triple history behind them. The study of these spaces will make clear that translation, far from being a benevolent act of hospitality toward a guest from another space, is a relentless transaction (Si- mon 2003, 77), a hybrid act which does not mean a new synthesis but a zone of negotiation, dissent, and exchange, a locus that short-circuits patterns of alterity in order to express the drift of contemporary identities (Simon 1999, 39–40). The Strait of Gibraltar, which is in turn a clash space between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, is the starting point of this essay; it is here that all stories—those that go to the North and those that remain in the South—begin and it is also the narrative constructions on the Strait that make this space such a complicated, multicultural space, because “places without stories are unthinkable” (Price 2004, xxi). In fact, the Strait of Gibraltar and the stories shaping it throughout the centuries make it a space of conflicts, silences, discontinuities, and exclu- sions that turn it into a place which is unstable and multilayered, never fin- ished, never determined, processual, porous (Price 2004, 5). Because although the Strait of Gibraltar is currently a natural border between two continents (Africa and Europe) and two countries (Morocco and Spain), and it is unique isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 71  in that it also has Gibraltar (an overseas territory of the United Kingdom), and Ceuta (a Spanish city with its own statute of autonomous government) on opposite sides of its shores, the truth is that, throughout history, both sides have been united longer than they have been separated. They were governed as one territory by the Romans and also during the eight centuries of Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. In 1492, after the fall of the Kingdom of Granada, the two shores separated forever, a separation that was only occa- sionally interrupted during the time of the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco (1913–1956). Since 1956, when the kingdom of Morocco became independent, the two shores have once again become administratively, politically, and cul- turally independent. The waters of the Strait are, therefore, a palimpsest accumulating well-known stories and also, unfortunately, other stories we will never hear about because they were lost forever with the bodies that have sunk to the depths. The waters of the Strait are “a layered text of narratives of belonging and exclusion, always negotiated, always struggled over, never finished” (Price 2004, 7); they are the intermediate, imaginary zone between Africa and the West that every culture needs: “Somewhere every culture has an imaginary zone for what it excludes, and it is that zone we must try to remember today” (Cixous and Clément 1986, 6). And that imaginary zone is the line that joins the two “dual cities” (Simon 2012, 3 and following pages) we shall go on to examine in detail, Tangier and Gibraltar. Currently, communication between both sides of the Strait is in the form of fast or traditional ferries between Tarifa, Algeciras, and Gibraltar on the European side and Ceuta and Tangier in Africa. Crossings take between thirty and ninety minutes. Sometimes crossings cannot be made due to storms or strong winds, especially in winter. One of these ferries is called “the whale,” a carrier of unknown treasures which, with a curious symbolism reminding us of Captain Ahab’s quest to hunt down Moby Dick, is pursued by an old fish- erman from Tangier in the film Moroccan Chronicles (1999) by the Moroccan director Moumen Smihi. The journey between the two shores is made legally by almost three million people a year and illegally by more than ten thousand, who use their own means to get across in “pateras.” The Strait of Gibraltar is the only gateway into and out of the Mediterranean for all marine traffic. It is estimated that more than 82,000 ships cross it every year. As Alfred Chester points out in his short story “Glory Hole”: “The hills of Spain are there like civilized laughter across the narrow water; two ferries a day, or six, or ten— who can remember anymore? Spain is on the other, the inaccessible side of Styx” (Chester 1990, 221). The possibility of building a bridge or a tunnel between both shores 72 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  has often been discussed. From the technical viewpoint, the tunnel option would appear to be the most feasible, even though the depth of the water of the Strait would make it the deepest (and most expensive) tunnel in Europe. However, the existence of a tunnel or bridge across the Strait would be a huge improvement in traffic and mobility between both sides, something which, from a symbolic and political point of view, would not seem to be totally acceptable at this moment in time: the idea of a tunnel or bridge, ultimately a metaphor of union and communication between the two shores, clashes with other well-known metaphorical narratives about the Strait which focus more on the idea of battle and separation. One is the familiar mythological tale of the “columns,” identified fairly vaguely as the Rock of Gibraltar and Mount Hacho in Ceuta, which Hercules separated to open up a passage for the Atlantic Ocean. Another is the myth surrounding Julian, Count of Ceu- ta, a Visigoth governor of the city who is alleged to have facilitated entry of Muslim troops into the Spanish mainland in 711, enabling them to put an end to the Visigothic rule established after the fall of the Roman Empire. This act changed the history of Spain forever. It is said that Julian did this out of revenge after his daughter was raped in Toledo by Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king of Spain who would finally be defeated and killed by the invading army in the Battle of Guadalete. In this sense, the fact that it was a question of honor that caused the Muslim invasion of Spain has led to numerous interpre- tations. In his novel Reivindicación del conde don Julián (1970), Juan Goytisolo identifies with the main character more than one thousand years later in his desire to put an end to the essential, homogeneous, and nationalist–Catholic Spain of the Franco regime, in the same way that the Visigothic count had indirectly helped to put an end to Christian Spain and, ultimately, promote miscegenation and the fusion of races. We must not forget that the last sig- nificant act of war in the Strait took place in August 1936, when around eight thousand troops from the rebel Spanish army in Morocco were transported by sea to the Spanish mainland to join the rebel troops once the Civil War started. The history of the Strait, therefore, has been, and continues to be, a history of conflict involving the clash of two different civilizations, established on the two continents located on either side of this stretch of water, which also economically represent two very different zones—Europe on the north side and Africa on the south, which are profoundly asymmetrical in economic terms. It is, in this sense, perhaps the most unequal border in the whole world, and crossing the Strait was, and perhaps still is, travelling to another reality. This is how it was described by the Spanish traveller and spy Ali Bey when he said in 1814, on crossing from Tarifa to Tangier, that whoever crosses the isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 73  Strait goes “en tan breve espacio de tiempo a un mundo absolutamente nuevo, y sin la más remota semejanza con el que se acaba de dejar, se halla realmente como transportado a otro planeta” (Bey 2009, 147). Nowadays, the most vis- ible aspect of this conflict is that of illegal migrants, who, as we have pointed out above, use the Strait to enter Europe, and who in recent years consist mainly of people from sub-Saharan countries. This is why this intermediate space that is the sea is the space in movement that, although in the middle, is the space of the beginning and the end, the space of the in-between which necessarily has to be crossed by these fragmented lives. It is the only space in which, unfortunately, they will be full citizens. However, there are other conflicts in the area, including claims from other countries for territories they consider to have been illegally occupied for centuries. This is the case, above all, of Spain and Gibraltar, but also of Morocco and Ceuta. Exile, or immigration for political or ideological reasons, is also linked to the history of the Strait of Gibraltar. Many historical diasporas have traversed it, including, for example, the Jews (around 80,000) or the Moriscos (around 300,000) when they were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively, who abandoned Spain and crossed over to Africa. Some Spanish Jews settled in towns in the north of Morocco, where they lived for centuries with a largely Muslim population. Many migrated to Israel shortly after the new state was founded and now form part of the Sephardic community, one of the most visible and well-known communities of that country. The Spanish Moriscos who took refuge in Morocco, on the other hand, contributed their andalusí character to Moroccan culture and it is now one of its signs of identity. And not only that, but the space we will examine below is, as well as being a multicultural space, or perhaps precisely for that reason, a multilingual space. Four languages live side by side on both shores: Spanish on the Spanish side in Ceuta, in Gibraltar, and to a much lesser degree throughout North Morocco; English in Gibraltar; and French and Arabic in Morocco. The two most used languages, Spanish and Arabic, correspond to diatopical dialect forms, Andalusian Spanish in Spain and colloquial Moroccan Arabic or dāriŷa on the Moroccan coast of the Strait. The Andalusian variant is also used by the citizens of Gibraltar, which immediately makes them Andalusians for the rest of Spain when they speak Spanish, although they do in fact speak a hybrid variety called “llanito,” a kind of small-scale European Spanglish. Moroccan Arabic, on the other hand, has a strong Berber substrate and influences from French and Spanish and is an identitarian dialect, far removed from modern standard Arabic and unintelligible to many Moroccans. Due to their own particular history, a number of coastal towns on the Strait, such as Tangier 74 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  for example, can be considered to be multilingual spaces where it is possible to be understood in three or four languages. Others, like Gibraltar, are clearly bilingual. Ceuta is similarly an interesting example, as it is also becoming a bilingual city due to the increasing Muslim population, to which we must likewise add a significant Hindu community which is completely bilingual in Spanish and Hindi. These multicultural and multilingual spaces will allow us to better understand the Strait’s coastal “dual cities”—to use Sherry Simon’s terminol- ogy—which we will examine below. tangier, a dual city The place [Tangier] was counterfeit, a waiting room between connections, a transition from one way of being to another… (Bowles 2006, 382). Tangier is not part of Morocco. It’s international. Paul Bowles interviewed by Abdelhak Elghandor (Elghandor 1994, 16) From the end of the 1940s until Moroccan independence in 1956, the city of Tangier, located to the extreme west of the African coast of the Strait of Gi- braltar, had a unique political status, that of being an “international zone.” But it was, at the same time, a multilayered space where many languages existed, and still do exist, at the same time, a space where translation was never a mere language transfer but a practice of writing that took place at the crossroads (Simon 2012, 8). Perched on the northern tip of Morocco with its eyes trained across the Strait of Gibraltar toward Spain, “Tangier certainly has long been at the crossroads, a point of intersection of various civilizations, notably African/ Islamic and European Christian” (Hibbard 2009, 1). This is why Tangier is a space that has always generated multiple discourses; it is a city that has always “spoken,” because it is a site of representation. However, the discourses it has generated have been different translations of reality, rewritings of a space that some, Westerners, exoticized, and others, Moroccans, understood differently, as a way of “writing back to the West” (Elkouche 2008, 1). Tangier was, on the one hand, a space of rich British expatriates and, on the other, the receiving space of many expatriates from Paris during the years between the World wars, artists and writers who sought in the “interna- tionalized” Tangier what the Lost Generation had searched for in the French capital a few years earlier, a space open to less conventional ways of life. The era during which both artists and writers lived in Tangier was especially rele- isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 75  1. View of Tangier vant with regard to political and social change, because during these years the Maghreb moved on from being an area under European colonial control to one of postcolonial independence Halfway between nations, cultures, and languages, Tangier became an “interzone,” to use Burroughs’s word—that is, “a place of intermediacy and ambiguity, a place that remains outside standard narratives of nationhood and identity. It proved to be an expedient location for [writers] to sort out the multiple crises of identity, desire, and loss that motivated their writing” (Mul- lins 2002, 3). In this sense, we must not forget that, as Tangier’s legal situation allowed moral permissiveness with regard, for example, to sexuality and drugs 76 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain and was considered to be a mental illness in the United States, it was logical that this unorthodox space should attract many gay artists of the time, from Jean Genet to Robert Rauschenberg, William Burroughs and Paul Bowles (who lived in Tangier for over fifty years, from 1947 until his death in 1999). To these names we could add a long list of intellectuals who spent time in Tangier, such as Gertrude Stein, Francis Bacon, Djuna Barnes, Brion Gysin, Samuel Beckett, Alfred Chester, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Aaron Copeland, Juan Goytisolo, Ian Fleming, and many others. Because Tangier was the promised land of the bohemian Diaspora and refuge of many rich, eccentric Westerners (see Pulsifer 1992 and Walonen 2011) who sought ways of life that constituted an alternative to the orthodoxy of their countries of origin. This is something that, in spite of everything, the city is still proud of and still attracts a lot of tourists. A recent tourist brochure, Tangier in Morocco, published by the Mo- roccan National Tourist Office, states: “The streets of Tangier are teeming with artistic and literary memories. Countless painters, novelists, playwrights, poets, photographers, actors, filmmakers and couturiers from every nation under the sun have stayed here a while or made their home here, inspired and bewitched by the city’s magic” (Moroccan National Tourist Office n.d., 12). Truman Capote, in a 1950 article entitled “Tangier” (Capote 2013), reminds us of the radical heterogeneity and idiosyncrasies arising from this huge amount of freedom. Tangier was the space on the border between Eu- rope and Africa, between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity; a place where nationalities, cultures, and languages mixed to the point of promiscuity. In fact, in Morocco translation is still a means of survival today. Although the official language is Arabic, the economic and cultural life of the country has always been carried out in several languages. The educated classes speak and write standard Arabic and French, while the majority of people use varieties of Moroccan Arabic or Berber variants. In the north many people speak Span- ish and also English, particularly those involved in tourism and commerce. Therefore, “no single Moroccan language can universally speak to and for all Moroccans; rather, Moroccans must daily translate among themselves, or in the formation of literary narratives, both written and oral” (Sabil 2005, 176). It is no surprise, then, that this open locus, especially that of Tangier when it was an International Zone, should have been so attractive a place for writers whose lives and works were considered unorthodox in Western circles. Tangier was a space where for many years national structures and rigid codes of ethics were deconstructed and where confusion of all binary logic was favored. However, the spaces inhabited by Westerners in Tangier were gen- isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 77  erally separate from those inhabited by Moroccans. We see this in the case of Bowles, whose descriptions of the spaces his characters are situated in speak of class, race, or cultural differences. Moreover, Bowles describes in many of his translations the horror of not having a place in space, in For Bread Alone by Choukri (2010), for example. The above-mentioned rich British expats created a series of separate places that reflected English ways of life, places of worship like St. Andrew’s Church, tea parties and lavish parties with film stars (Finlayson 1992, 271 and following pages), although it is also true that the density of the population and the physical and social distribution of the city led to inevitable contact between the communities. The center of Tangier had been designed initially for around 12,000 people and it remained un- changed when population numbers increased. So, the streets were always full of people, cultures, and religions as reflected in the pages of Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch or Bowles’s Let it Come Down. The narrow streets in the center showed multiplicity and the two main axes of the town, the Boulevard Pas- teur running from east to west, and the Rue du Statut running from north to south, crossed at Place de France, “a bustling roundabout ringed by popular cafés frequented by the diplomatic community and Moroccan nationalists” (Edwards 2005, 130). In Tangier, the European powers were initially the producers of spac- es, the power groups who designed, distributed, named, and built spaces and who also established the rules for the use of these spaces. This divided spatial- ity is typical, as Fanon reminds us in The Wretched of the Earth, of colonizing processes: “The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits” (Fanon 1968, 52). The space of colonial order is always one of luxury, cleanliness, and entertainment; the other formed of wretched places, as we see, for example, in Choukri’s For Bread Alone. Without a doubt, for Bowles and many other writers and artists, Tang- ier was a “third space,” in Edward Soja’s sense of the term—that is, “the space where all places are capable of being seen from every angle, each standing clear; but also a secret and conjectured object, filled with illusions and allu- sions, a space that is common to all of us yet never able to be completely seen and understood” (Soja 1996, 56). Perhaps this is why Bowles never considered himself to be Tangierian but, rather, a vocational stateless person. In March 1992 he said in an interview, “I am not American and I am not Moroccan. I’m a visitor on earth. You have to be Muslim to really be accepted in Morocco, to be a part of it” (Choukri 2008, 304). Bowles was also against the Westernization of Moroccan spaces after independence—for him geography was a way of reading identity. Spaces were texts and the scenery was the reflection of his characters’ inner self, some- 78 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  thing the critics have discussed in detail (Pounds 1985; Olson 1986; Hassan 1995; Caponi 1998; Patteson 2003; Walonen 2011) and that he himself recognized in some of his travel writings such as Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue (1963), and in his novels and several interviews. Characters like Thami in Let it Come Down identify with the place and the space, but when they are taken somewhere else like New York many of his characters feel out of place. It was in his translations of oral texts by Moroccan narrators (Ahmed Yacoubi, Layachi Larbi, Abdeslam Boulaich, and Mohammed Mrabet, among others), howev- er, that he rewrites in that contact zone that is no good to imperialism, like many other postcolonial translations, but comes from within the Other(‘s) space, “involves a much looser notion of the text, interacts intensely with local forms of narrative and is a revigorating and positive global influence [. . .] a con- tinuous life-giving and creative process” (Simon and St-Pierre 2000, 10). After October 1956, when Tangier was no longer an International Zone (in 1961 it became part of Morocco), people came to suspect that “the good times, the high-living years for foreign residents with substantial assets in Tangi- er, might be ending” (Finlayson 1992, 75). In 1957 the British Post Office closed its offices; the Spanish Post Office did the same in 1958. In addition, many banks and companies closed and transferred their branches to other countries. The lux- ury goods shops on Boulevard Pascal were replaced by shops selling local crafts and clothing. But one of the most revealing details of the change was “a new edict banning the sale of liquor within a certain distance from a mosque” and another determining the places that stayed and those that did not: “There were a great many mosques, and a great many Spanish, Jewish and other foreign-owned bars. The mosques stayed open, the bars closed” (Finlayson 1992, 75). That is, the places that Lefebvre calls “representations of space” (1991, 33) closed, that experience of space referring to hegemonic ideological representations, to space constructed by professionals and technocrats (engineers, architects, urban plan- ners, geographers, etc.), a space where ideology, power, and knowledge are in- variably linked to representation. Besides, when it was no longer an International Zone, many Moroccans living in the country moved to Tangier, which changed the city space. The clean, luxurious Tangier of today is Muslim, the best areas be- long to citizens of countries in the Persian Gulf and to Moroccans who have made their fortune from drug-trafficking between Africa and Europe, traffick- ing in which the city is a crucial point (Walonen 2011, 127). The city and its population have evolved and so has their interaction with the first world, to such an extent that the essentialist vision of the Muslim population, which to- day reproaches the former foreign residents of the Tangier of the International Zone, might have changed. The foreign residents and tourists currently in isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 79  Tangier (many attracted by the literary past of the city) still mix with the local people, but probably in a different way to that of the foreign community of the Tangier of the 1940s and ‘50s. Despite this, it is curious that in the tourist brochure mentioned above, Tangier in Morocco, Tangier’s special character, compared to that of other Moroccan cities, is highlighted in the following words: “Today, the city still has its cosmopolitan side, with a wide variety of outside influences contributing to its cultural diversity and unique personali- ty” (Moroccan National Tourist Office n.d., 7). Or with these other puzzling words: “There is something altogether unique about the town, something impalpable, indefinable –a sense of freedom that hangs in the air like the scent of orange blossom” (Moroccan National Tourist Office n.d., 5). Tangier, with its linguistic and cultural contrasts and the social and classist inequalities reflected in its spaces, is therefore the living example that spaces are socially created entities, political constructions that reveal prejudices, asymmetries, and inequalities. But, in addition, the places are “practiced” spaces (De Certeau 1988, 117). De Certeau compares spatiality, place and narrative, and, for him, the narrative ends up “transforming places into spaces or spaces into places” (De Certeau 1988, 130). The writer and the translator take the reader by the hand when they describe an apartment, a street, a country, or a border. gibraltar, a translational city [...] dual cities have their origins in conquest, when a stronger language group comes to occupy or impinge upon a pre-existent language which may itself have displaced another before it. (Simon 2012, 3) The city of Gibraltar (Jebel-al-Tariq, or “the mountain of Tarik,” an Arab leader who led the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 ce), resting on its Rock, has been, as we all know, a British colony since the beginning of the eighteenth century. In 1704 Gibraltar was occupied by an English fleet involved in the War of the Spanish Succession and included in the Spanish territories ruled by the Archduke Charles of Austria, one of the pretenders to the throne (the other was Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis xvi of France and legitimate heir according to the last will and testament of the last king of Spain, Charles II, who had died in 1700). However, the detachment that expelled the citizens from the city—they founded the town of San Roque, whence an irate stone lion stills looks threateningly over at the Rock—never left, not even when the war ended and Philip V was proclaimed King. One of the conditions of the famous Treaty of Utrecht (1713) was that Spain should recognize British sovereignty over the Rock of Gibraltar, the city, and the 80 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  port. The Treaty, which has never been revoked and is, therefore, still in force today, continues to be invoked by Spain today on the grounds that, among other things, the land occupied by Gibraltar Airport is in a neutral area that had never been signed over to the British and, therefore, was occupied illegally during the First World War. More than three hundred years of British sovereignty have made Gi- braltar a unique enclave. It is located on the southern tip of Andalusia and its only land border is with Spain. This Lilliputian territory is 5.8 square kilo- meters in size and has a population of almost 30,000 inhabitants, making it one of the most densely populated places in the world (4,290 inhabitants per square kilometer). As the original Spanish population of the city abandoned the Rock after the British occupation, it soon filled with immigrants from several places—Genoa, Portugal, India, Malta, Morocco, and Spain, among others—and also had a significant Jewish community, who had migrated to Gibraltar to “serve” the British troops and their families. As we have men- tioned above, the city is also practically bilingual, English is spoken, as well as “llanito” or a kind of Spanglish spoken on the Rock which the locals call “suichito” or “switch,” a hybrid language where code switching is constantly used. Many Gibraltarians also speak fluent Spanish with a marked Andalusian accent. Relations with Spain have never been easy. In Spain, whatever the ideology of the ruling party, Gibraltar is always considered to be a colonized territory which should be returned to Spain as it was taken by force in an act of war. Today most Gibraltarians think that the Treaty of Utrecht is obsolete, that history has shown that Gibraltar is a territory demographically, linguis- tically, and culturally different from Spain, and that the current autonomous status of the territory, approved by all its inhabitants, is proof of its democrat- ic nature. Although the United Nations declared in 1964 that Gibraltar should be “decolonized,” under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht it could never be an independent country—it could only be British or, should the latter abandon the territory, Spanish. At that time, the United Kingdom refused to enter into any kind of negotiation with Franco’s Spain, and the Spanish gov- ernment, in retaliation, closed the land border between Gibraltar and Spain, leaving Gibraltar isolated via land from 1969 to 1985. Recent attempts to set up negotiations to try to reach an agreement of British and Spanish cosovereignty of the territory have met the refusal of almost all the Gibraltarians. In any case, there is still a problem between Gibraltar and Spain which is visible, especially at the moment, in the “queues” of cars and people that have been forming at the Spanish border crossing every summer since 2013, when the Spanish government decided to periodically tighten the con- isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 81  trol of vehicles and persons, which only adds to the active conflicts in the area of the Strait. In this case, however, it is a political conflict more than a social or cultural one, but it affects the daily life of people who live in the area and have become hostages, in a way, of decisions taken very far away for reasons they often do not understand. This “distance” from the centers of power can be seen in the references to the population of Gibraltar in the media. Therefore, while the Spanish government said these queues were “necessary” to stop smuggling, Gibraltar’s Chief Minister, Fabián Picardo, denounced the “passivity” of the British government in this affair for fear of worsening relations with Spain (Ayllón 2014), and the Spanish workers on the Rock expressed their disagreement with the measures put into place by their own government (Romaguera 2013). This is, therefore, a deep-rooted problem with no easy solution. Gi- braltar is a prosperous place with a high standard of living—it is, in fact, the second most prosperous territory in the European Union, which is in stark contrast with the Spanish region surrounding it. The Campo de Gibraltar is a depressed area with a high level of unemployment and is still far behind other areas of Spain. But, this prosperity is due, above all, to the fact that it is a tax haven where companies and financial institutions pay hardly any taxes, which would explain the huge amount of investment and increasing number of com- panies registered on the Rock. From Spain it is argued that this prosperity is largely due to fiscal rules and regulations, which are very different to those in Spain and prevent investment, for example, reaching Campo de Gibraltar, the area around the Rock. The Gibraltarian stereotype as seen from Spain is that of a smuggler on a motorbike who takes advantage of his situation as an islander with respect to Spain to obtain economic benefits, but who, deep down, is just an Andalusian in denial. From the Gibraltarian point of view, Spaniards are considered to be provincial individuals anchored in the past who have never been able to understand that Gibraltar is not a part of Spain, that its population is more heterogeneous in comparison to that of Spain, and that it is so prosperous. Whatever the case, we cannot forget that currently more than seven thousand Spaniards work in Gibraltar and that many Gibral- tarians have invested large amounts of money in properties in Spain. This “insularity” or impermeability of Gibraltar, even though it is not an island as such, has led to it being a place of stability and freedom in contrast with the turbulent history of its neighbor. During the nineteenth century, the Rock was a refuge for Spanish exiles who had to abandon their country for political reasons and were making their way to the United Kingdom or other European countries. During the twentieth century the Rock, as a British terri- tory, maintained standards of religious freedom and tolerance which were un- 82 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  2. Views of Gibraltar known in Spain, especially during the Franco regime, and this would make it a more advanced society in all aspects. We cannot forget the famous wedding of John Lennon and Yoko Ono which took place in Gibraltar in 1969, a media event highlighting the “modernity” of the Rock, which was much closer to the “swinging London” of the 1960s than backward, conservative Spain. In any case, the closure of the border crossing in 1969 made communication between Gibraltar and Spain almost nonexistent. Today, Gibraltar (or “Gib” as it is known in Britain) could be any town on the southern coast of England, or perhaps the Channel Islands. There are typical references found in British territories, red telephone box- es, “bobbies” and the Union Jack, which continues to fly in many places. The supermarkets and shops belong to British groups—Marks and Spencer, BHS, Boots, Morrisons, and so on—and the pubs are authentic. However, this translation of a southern space to a northern one does not include all the codes or elements: in Gibraltar people drive on the right, as they do in Spain; the Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, the most “British” space in the whole area, is built in an oriental style with horseshoe arches over doors and windows; at the entrance to the city the Muslim fort, which could never be seen in an English town, is still standing strong; and the Andalusian accent of the inhabitants when they speak Spanish or “llanito” assimilates them to their neighbors in Campo de Gibraltar. There are two theories regarding the origin of the term “llanito,” both related to the clash between languages. Ac- cording to one theory, “llanito” was coined in Gibraltar in the early twentieth century by Andalusian workers who would hear Gibraltar mothers call their “yanitos” (the Spanish diminutive for Johnny—Johnnito) and began to call all Gibraltarians “yanis” (Johnnys), which led in turn to the current “llanitos” isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 83  or “yanitos.” The other theory is that the word derives from the large num- ber of “Giovannis,” or “Giannis” as they are familiarly called, in the large Genoese colony which settled on the Rock. The simultaneous use of Spanish and English can often be very amusing. Main Street, the commercial artery of the city, is also called the “Calle Reá,” and Gibraltar is “Gibrartá,” both in “llanito” and Andalusian Spanish. Manuel Leguineche (2002, 2) mentions his surprise when a Gibraltarian bobby replied “Zí, zeñó” to the question “Do you speak English?” This way of speaking is only the reflection of the coexistence of asym- metrical spaces where at least two cultures live side by side or occasionally clash. It is a way of speaking that, as Susan Bassnett states (in Simon 2012, n.p.), shows the fundamental importance of languages shaping cultural, geo- graphical, and historical space. In effect, the particular language used in Gi- braltar demonstrates the power of language to mark the urban landscape, to understand it, and how important it is to listen to cities (Simon 2012, xix and 1), especially these types of cities which are contact zones (see Pratt 1992), noisy streets of polyglot neighborhoods. These are very clear examples that language is an area of negotiation, a space where connections are created through rewritings and where ideas circulate, converge, and clash in the translational city, which imposes its own patterns of interaction and these emerge out of their spaces and their own narrative pasts (Simon 2012, 2). But in Gibraltar, as in Tangier or the Strait, languages share the same terrain but rarely participate in a peaceful and egali- tarian conversation. And there is some, albeit not a great deal of, Gibraltarian literature, written mostly in Spanish by authors like Héctor Licudi, Alberto Pizzarello, or Elio Cruz (see Yborra Aznar 2005). More recent writers, how- ever, write in both languages (Mario Arroyo, for example) or only in English. One of the most interesting current Gibraltarian authors is Trino Cruz, a poet who writes in Spanish, translates Moroccan poetry from Arabic, and defends the multiethnic and multilinguistic character of the territory. These and many other authors allow us to see that translation (or self-translation, depending on your point of view) “can no longer be configured only as a link between a familiar and a foreign culture, between a local original and a distant destination, between one monolingual community and another. [. . .] The Other remains within a constant earshot. The shared understandings of this coexistence change the meaning of translation from a gesture of benevolence to a process through which a common civility is negotiated” (Simon 2012, 7). As we have seen, given its history and the composition of its popu- lation, Gibraltar is now also a hybrid or “dual” city whose complex, young identity is based, above all, on the wishes of its population to maintain their 84 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  status as a British overseas territory and not be absorbed in any way by Spain in the long term. It is clear that the friendly relations between the two parties at the beginning of the twentieth century collapsed, probably permanently, when the border crossing was closed from 1969 until 1985, isolating the two peoples and provoking in Gibraltar both anti-Spanish feelings and a lack of proficiency in the Spanish language. Even so, certain data (Grocott and Stock- ey 2012, 125) show that the inhabitants of the Rock consider themselves to be more and more Gibraltarian and less British, although it is not clear what this feeling, whose signs of identity are still fairly vague yet real, consists of, the city now celebrates a “National Day” on September 10 to commemorate the date of the first referendum, held in 1967, to reject annexation to Spain; the red and white flag of Gibraltar can be seen more and more often flying over the territory, “llanito” is sometimes used in the local press instead of English, and the project to publish the first local paper Calpe Press is already under way. This nationalist feeling would only assimilate Gibraltar to tiny European nations such as Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and San Marino, which are historically much older. If this “national” sentiment were to become consol- idated, which does not appear to have happened yet, Gibraltar would be an example of a relatively new “heterogeneous,” hybrid, multilingual communi- ty, seeking to define its own identity, composed in turn of hybrid elements from different cultures. concluding remarks Living in different places means growing separate selves, learning other languages and ways of being, and looking at the world from different vantage points, without ever quite belonging to any of them. The state of being of a foreigner wherever I am has become second nature to me. It is a condition that sharpens the eye and the ear, that keeps awareness on its toes, and that takes nothing for granted. It means also that whatever I am, the ghosts of other places and other lives are hovering close. (Reid 1994, 3) The linguistic forms used in a space like Gibraltar cause us to reflect on how diffi- cult it can become to find or create equivalent idioms for local, nonstandard lan- guages, but in general everything mentioned above in relation to other spaces such as Tangier and the waters of the Strait of Gibraltar confirms that “the translator’s dilemmas are not to be found in dictionaries, but rather in an understanding of the way language is tied to local realities [. . .] and to changing identities” (Simon 1995, 10). This is why nowadays, in a global and transcultural society, translation is a transversal and interdisciplinary activity that has much to do with geography, while only a few years ago they were both considered to be fields of research far removed from each other (Bassnett 2011; Vidal 2012). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 85  By examining in this essay spaces such as Tangier and Gibraltar, cit- ies of ethnicities with shifting centers and peripheries, sites of transitory events, movements, memories, open spirals of heterogeneous collaborations and con- taminations, heterotopic, multiform and diasporic realities, spaces which un- dermine the presumed purity of thought (Chambers 1994, 93 and 95), we hope to have shown the need to access both space and translation in a different way, to have questioned what we understand today by space and why translation has forced us to very seriously analyze how ideology and power interfere in the creation of a space and a translation, what cultural contact points we have seen between peoples whose spaces become joined or clash in translations of those texts that define them in this way; what role is played by cartography of the plac- es understood as texts; and how this concept of knowledge is instrumentalized in asymmetrical and multidirectional contexts. From this point of view, translating in the hybrid spaces studied here, spaces like the Strait, Tangier, or Gibraltar that are sites of displacement, in- terference, and constructed and disputed historicities (Clifford 1997, 25), has shown itself to be a border experience able to produce powerful political vi- sion, the subversion of binarism which makes us wonder how translatable these places/metaphors of crossing are, how like and unlike diasporas. What does it take to define and defend a homeland? What are the political stakes in claiming a “home” in hooks’s (1991) sense? How are ethnic communities’ “insides” and “outsides” sustained, policed, subverted, crossed by historical subjects with different degrees of power (Clifford 1997, 36)? Considered from this state of things, translation is a foundational activity, an activity of cultural creation that takes into account the unstable and liminal identities it trans- forms and that partakes of the incompleteness of cultural belonging in spaces informed by estrangement, diversity, plurality, and already saturated with a logic of translation (Simon 1996, 152, 165, and 166) and dual cities may not serve only to impose an alien and oppressive presence but also to be part of a process of exchange which involves “an active chain of response, a vivifying interaction” (Simon and St-Pierre 2000, 10). This article is part of the research projects entitled “Violencia simbólica y traducción: retos en la representación de identidades fragmentadas en la sociedad global” (Symbolic violence and translation: challenges in the representation of fragmented identities within the global society) and “La traducción de clásicos en su aspecto editorial: una visión transatlántica” (Publishing strategies in the translation of classics: a transatlantic approach) (respectively FFI2015-66516-P and FFI2013-41743-P; MINECO/FEDER, UE) financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. 86 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  <References> Ayllón, Luis. 2014. “Picardo enfurece contra Cameron.” http://abcblogs.abc. es/luis-ayllon/public/post/picardo-enfurece-contra-cameron-16073. asp/ Bassnett, Susan. 2011. “From Cultural Turn to Transnational Turn, A Transnational Journey.” In Literature, Geography, Translation. Studies in World Writing, edited by Cecilia Alvstad, Stefan Helgesson, and David Watson, 67–80. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bey, Ali. 2009. Viajes por Marruecos. Edited by Salvador Barberá Fraguas. Barcelona: Zeta. First published 1814. First English translation, revised and completed by Mrs. Helen Maria Williams, published 1816 under the title Travels of Ali Bey in Morocco, Tripoli, Cyprus, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Turkey between the Years 1803 and 1807 in Two Volumes for Longman, Rees, Orme, and Brown (Paternoster-Row, London). Bowles, Paul. 2006. Let It Come Down. New York: Harper. First published 1952 by Random House (New York). Caponi, Gena Dagel. 1998. Paul Bowles. New York: Twayne Publishers. Capote, Truman. 2013. “Tangier.” In Portraits and Observations, 63–72. New York: Random House. Chambers, Ian. 1994. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Chester, Alfred. 1990. “Glory Hole: Nickel Views of the Infidel in Tangiers.” In Head of a Sad Angel. Stories 1953–1966, edited by Edward Field, 217–231. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press. Choukri, Mohamed. 2008. Paul Bowles, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams in Tangier. London: Telegram. . 2010. For Bread Alone. Translated and introduced by Paul Bowles. London: Telegram. First published 1973 by Peter Owen (London). Clifford, James. 1997. Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. 1986. The Newly Born Woman. Trans- lated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1975 under title La Jeune née by Union Générale d’Éditions (Paris). De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edwards, Brian T. 2005. Morocco Bound. Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Durham and London: Duke Univer- sity Press. Elghandor, Abdelhak. 1994. “Atavism and Civilization, An Interview with Paul Bowles.” Ariel. A Review of International English Literature 25 (2): 7–30. Elkouche, Mohamed. 2008. “Space and Place, Tangier Speaks.” http://interac- tive-worlds.blogspot.com.es/2008/03/tangier-speaks.html. Fanon, Frantz. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press. Finlayson, Iain. 1992. Tangier. City of Dream. London: Harper Collins. Goytisolo, Juan. 1970. Reivindicación del conde don Julián. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Grocott, Chris, and Gareth Stockey. 2012. Gibraltar. A Modern Story. Cardiff: Univer- sity of Wales Press. Hassan, Ihab. 1995. “Paul Bowles, The Pilgrim as Prey.” In Rumors of Change, Essays of Five Decades, 3–16. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Hibbard, Allen. 2009. “Tangier at the Crossroads, Cross-cultural Encounters and Lit- isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 87  erary Production.” In Writing Tangier, edited by Ralph M. Coury and R. Kevin Lacey, 1–12. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. hooks, bell. 1991. Yearning. Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nichol- son-Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. First published 1974 under the title of La Production de l’espace by Éditions Anthropos (Paris). Leguineche, Manuel. 2002. Gibraltar. La roca en el zapato de España. Barcelona: Planeta. Massey, Doreen. 2011. For Space. London: Sage. First published 2005 by Sage (Lon- don). Moroccan National Tourist Office. N.d. Tangier in Morocco. Tourist brochure. N.p. Mullins, Greg A. 2002. Colonial Affairs, Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester Write Tangier. Madison: Wisconsin University Press. Olson, Steven E. 1986. “Alien Terrain, Paul Bowles Filial Landscapes.” Twentieth Cen- tury Literature 32 (3/4): 334–349. Patteson, Richard F. 2003. A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pounds, Wayne. 1985. Paul Bowles: The Inner Geography. New York: Peter Lang. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. Price, Patricia L. 2004. Dry Place. Landscapes of Belonging and Exclusion. Minneap- olis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Pulsifer, Gary ed. 1992. Paul Bowles by His Friends. London: Peter Owen. Reid, Alastair. 1994. An Alastair Reid Reader. Selected Prose and Poetry. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Robinson, Douglas. 1998. Translation and Empire. Postcolonial Theories Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome. Romaguera, Cándido. 2013. “Los trabajadores españoles en Gibraltar, en contra del dictamen sobre los controles.” http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2013/11/15/ andalucia/1384519777_182467.html. Sabil, Abdelkader. 2005. Translating/Rewriting the Other. A Study of Paul Bowles’ Translation of Moroccan Texts by Choukri, Mrabet and Charhadi. Saarbrück- en: Lambert Academic Publishing. Simon, Sherry ed. 1995. Culture in Transit. Translating the Literature of Quebec. Mon- tréal: Véhicule Press. . 1996. Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge. . 2003. “Crossing Town, Montreal in Translation.” In Bilingual Games. Some Lit- erary Investigations, edited by Doris Sommer, 77–86. New York: Palgrave. . 2012. Cities in Translation. Intersections of Language and Memory. London and New York: Routledge. Simon, Sherry, and Paul St-Pierre, eds. 2000. Changing the Terms. Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Smihi, Moumen, dir. 1999. Moroccan Chronicles/Chroniques Marocaines/Waqa’i maghribia. 35mm, 70 minutes. Distributed by POM films (Montreuil). Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell. Vidal, M. Carmen África. 2012. La traducción y los espacios: viajes, mapas, fronteras. Granada: Comares. Walonen, Michael K. 2011. Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition. Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature. Surrey: Ashgate. 88 / translation / issue 7 / 2018 isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451  Yborra Aznar, José Juan. 2005. “La frontera estéril. La literatura en español en Gi- braltar.” In El español en el mundo. Anuario del Instituto Cervantes. Madrid: Instituto Cervantes. <M. Carmen África Claramonte> is Professor of Translation at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her research interests include trans- lation theory, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, contemporary art, and gender studies. She has published a number of books, anthologies, and essays on these issues, including Traducción, manipulación, des- construcción (Salamanca, 1995), El futuro de la traducción (Valencia, 1998), Translation/Power/Subversion (coedited with Román Álvarez, Clevedon, 1996), En los límites de la traducción (Granada, 2006), Tra- ducir entre culturas: diferencias, poderes, identidades (Frankfurt, 2007), Traducción y asimetría (Frankfurt, 2010), La traducción y los espacios: viajes, mapas, fronteras (Granada, 2013), ”Dile que le he escrito un blues.” Del texto como partitura a la partitura como traducción (Frank- furt, 2017), and La traducción y la(s) historia(s) (Comares, 2017). She is a practicing translator specializing in the fields of philosophy, literature, and contemporary art. <Juan Jesús Zaro> has been professor of translation studies at the University of Málaga since 2008. His research interests include trans- lation theory, history of translation, and literary translation. He obtained an MA from New York University, as a Fulbright student, and a PhD in English Literature from the University de Granada (1983). He has pub- lished a number of books, anthologies, and articles, including Manual de Traducción/A Manual of Translation (Madrid, 1998), Shakespeare y sus traductores (Bern, 2008), Traductores y traductores de literatura y ensayo (Granada, 2007), and Diez estudios sobre la traducción en la España del siglo xix (Granada, 2009). He is also a practicing translator and has translated, among other books, Charles Dickens’ Historia de dos ciudades (Cátedra, 2000); Samuel Butler’s El destino de la carne (Alba Editorial, 2001), Edith Wharton’s El arrecife (Alba Editorial, 2003), and Jane Austen’s Persuasión (Cátedra, 2004). isbn 978-88-85622-47-0 issn 2240-0451 translation / issue 7 / 2018 / 89 

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Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 8 Introduction Translation: a new paradigm T oday, translation scholarship and practice face a twofold situation. On the one hand translation studies is enjoying unprecedented success: translation has become a fe- cund and frequent metaphor for our contemporary intercultural world, and schol- ars from many disciplines, for instance, linguistics, comparative literature, cultural studies, anthropology, psychology, communication and social behavior, and global studies have begun investigating translational phenomena. On the other hand, many scholars in the field rec- ognize an epistemological crisis in the discipline of translation studies, noticing a repetition of theories and a plethora of stagnant approaches. This impasse derives largely from the field’s inability to renew the discipline and its unwillingness to develop approaches that are able to say something original or reflect the complex situations of migration and hybrid cul- tures and languages we live in today. Translation needs to redefine its role in a context of fragmented texts and languages in a world of crises within national identities and emerging transnational and translocal realities. The fertility of the metaphor of translation is worthy of study, and we probably will find out that it is not merely a metaphor. Since Salman Rushdie’s well-known statement “Having been borne across the world, we are translated men” (1991), translation has become a frequent concept to describe and even explain identity as it surfaces in travelling, migrating, diasporic, and border-crossing individuals and cultures. It has been so frequent that some even state we are experiencing a “translation turn” in the humanities. The anthropologist Talal Asad’s concept of “cultural translation” became central in the seminal Writing Cultures edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus in 1986. Later Clifford developed this concept and imagined travels and even museums as translations (1997). Even though many scholars today are familiar with such a broad use of the concept of translation, they tend to keep them sep- arated from “real” translation. The step forward we want to make with and through this jour- nal is to consider Rushdie’s translated men and Asad and Clifford’s cultural translations as real acts of translation, as representations of how translations appear in our world. Beyond disciplinary boundaries: post-translation studies W ith this new journal the editors attempt to go beyond disciplinary borders, and specifically beyond the bounds of translation studies. We invite original thinking translation / inaugural issue / 2011 about what translation is today and where translation occurs. We welcome new concepts that speak about translation and hope to reshape translation discourse within these new terms and ideas. To achieve this goal, we must go beyond the traditional borders of the discipline, and even beyond interdisciplinary studies. We propose the inauguration of a trans- disciplinary research field with translation as an interpretive as well as operative tool. We imagine a sort of new era that could be termed post-translation studies, where translation is viewed as fundamentally transdisciplinary, mobile, and open ended. The “post” here recog- 8 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 9 Introduction nizes a fact and a conviction: new and enriching thinking on translation must take place out- side the traditional discipline of translation studies. The time is past when we can maintain the usual borders of translation studies, just as the time is past when in a more general way we can close the borders of certain disciplines and exclude translation discourse from entering their intellectual space. We are convinced that today—at least in the humanities but surely in principle for all academic fields—exchange and dynamic discourse are fundamental. Gay- atri Spivak’s discourse in Death of a Discipline (2003), dealing specifically with comparative literature, is emblematic of concerns within translation studies: We cannot not try to open up, from the inside, the colonialism of European national language-based Comparative Literature and the Cold War format of Area Studies, and infect history and anthropol- ogy with the ‘other’ as producer of knowledge. From the inside, acknowledging complicity. No accu- sations. No excuses. Rather, learning the protocol of those disciplines, turning them around, laboriously, not only by building institutional bridges but also by persistent curricular interventions. The most difficult thing here is to resist mere appropriation by the dominant. (2003: 10-11) The crisis of translation studies: a missing epistemology T he crisis of translation studies compares with other situations of crisis in many dis- ciplines, especially those in the humanities and social sciences: all have to do with fundamental questions of knowledge and meaning. The crisis or, let’s say, the death of translation studies as a discipline, leads us necessarily to transdisciplinarity. To speak of transdisciplinarity is not to propose that we create new relationships between closed disci- plines; rather, transdisciplinarity opens up closed disciplines and inquires into translational features that they have in common or toward translational moments that transcend them. Such a perspective implies that no single logic, no single tool, no single perspective by itself is sufficient to explain the world’s complexity, and that research cannot be inscribed in one discipline, with one defined object and method. Translation in this sense is a “nomadic con- cept”; it is born in transdisciplinarity and it lives in transdisciplinarity. Epistemologically this transdisciplinarity signals a change: it is not the disciplines that decide how to analyse their objects of research, but the objects themselves that ask for certain instruments, neither inside nor outside the academic boundaries of the disciplines, but “above” them. We are speaking of a different way of facing the great epistemological questions of what we know and how we know, and these questions model new transdisciplinary re- search. Such research cannot follow linear paths that conceive of structures as trees, but must rather walk along rhizomatic paths, in the sense given to it by Deleuze and Guattari: translation / inaugural issue / 2011 “unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the one nor the multiple” [1980 (1987): 21]. In an epistemological sphere it becomes less important to distinguish and define clearly what translation is and what it is not, what stands inside the borders of translation and what 9 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 10 Introduction stands outside. Such distinctions and definitions belong to an older and widespread sense of limits that scholars register when they create categorical, but also hierarchical and di- chotomous divisions between self and other, true and false, original and translation, inside and outside, feminine and masculine, pretending that they are natural. From queer theory as well as from border studies, and in general from poststructuralist thinking, we have learned that these divisions are constructed and that many texts, identities and cultures move in between, on the edges and in the interstices, in transversal movements. In this sense we can also evoke other deleuzian conceptualisations, such as multiplicity, and even that of transpositions of multiple differences developed by Rosi Braidotti (2006), to promote the idea of a multiple transdisciplinary concept of translation. The evolution of translation studies I n order to create a common ground for our future dialogue, we sketch in the following paragraphs a brief history of what we consider the principal stages in the evolution of the discipline of translation studies (from the Seventies until today). In 1990 Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere stated that “the growth of translation studies as a separate dis- cipline is a success story of the 1980s.” We take this claim to mean that translation studies was at that time no longer in a subordinate position to linguistics or comparative literature. Still, when translation studies sought out its own autonomy, it relied heavily on the definition James S. Holmes had already given the discipline in the early Seventies. At that time Holmes moved translation studies away from prescriptivism towards empirical description of what happens when cultures translate each other’s texts. At the beginning of the Eighties, and still in this theoretical context, the Israeli scholars Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury introduced a perspective that saw translations as a part of a culture’s literary polysystem. Elsewhere, in the so-called “manipulation school,” scholars like Theo Hermans, André Lefe- vere and José Lambert defined all translations inevitably as manipulations of an original text. These scholars located the causes for such manipulations not only in the differences between the structures and segmentation of meaning within languages, but also in the struc- ture of cultures, for instance in a culture’s range of ideologies. Inevitably, then, the Nineties came to be characterized by a “cultural turn” that insisted on the intercultural nature of any translation, whereby ideology was a determining factor. Here scholars took some of the first interdisciplinary steps. This cultural turn defined the questions surrounding translation in new terms. As translation studies drew on and was in- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 spired by cultural studies and poststructuralism, it took into account questions of gender and postcolonialism and recognized the political value of translating. With this turn trans- lation studies struck out in international directions, reaching beyond Europe and influencing Asia (see the work of Z. Tan, M. Cheung), Canada (S. Simon), and North America (L. Venuti, E. Gentzler, M. Tymoczko). Postcolonial studies, on the other hand, started to ques- tion the Eurocentric perspectives of translation studies, turning its attention to alternative 10 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 11 Introduction directions that recognize how every translation implies a conflict between dominating and dominated cultures and languages. To summarize: the Eighties and Nineties were characterized by an eagerness to found a new and autonomous discipline. No doubt this effort has been successful and of funda- mental importance for the recognition of what translation is, and for its role in the develop- ment and transformation of language and culture. Still, and in terms of a conscious appreciation of the important role occupied by translators and translations both throughout history and today, there is still much work to be done. While we encourage the continuation of this very important work in translation studies, we also see that this concentration on the definition of translation as an autonomous discipline represents a problem, a problem for translation studies itself. It is the problem of epistemological roots, or rather the lack of epis- temological roots. Translation studies, having “collected” data and knowledge from other dis- ciplines, was so eager to stand on its own feet that it neglected to develop and explain its own overarching epistemology and to show how it knew what it claimed to know. In our view what was created as the discipline of translation studies was actually an illusion: it existed in a sort of epistemological naïvety. Pieces from other disciplines like linguistics and comparative literature were assembled without being really questioned. What was done was simply to open up pathways on a terrain already covered with well-travelled pathways, and with exactly the same epistemological map and guiding principles as those present in the disciplines from which the so-called founders borrowed. What should have been done, or what was lacking in our opinion, was an epistemological and paradigmatic shift. In this panorama we should nevertheless recognize and salute the important efforts made by translation studies as it introduced new and alternative paradigms. André Lefevere significantly proposed the category of ideology and introduced the concept of rewriting. Edwin Gentzler introduced at a critical moment the category of power. But inside the boundaries of translation studies these new concepts did not develop completely. It is our hope that the research of such scholars might find fertile ground and wide reception through the transdisciplinary perspective we are proposing. We are confident that the journal’s con- tributors will rethink and, hopefully, re-establish the epistemological foundations behind our conceptualization of translation. This re-establishing will, we think, necessarily follow because the material of our research is new, or better; its focus is both broader than and dif- ferent from the focus and material conceived by traditional translation studies. Setting a fresh course translation / inaugural issue / 2011 D espite an original focus and fresh material content, the object of our research, namely translation, remains the same. But it will appear differently. New objects called translation will emerge, letting the already existing ones take a different shape and value. It is similar to those moments when scholarship uses new words to speak about and describe a thing, allowing the thing itself to appear different and, in addition, al- lowing us to see things in a fresh light. 11 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 12 Introduction It is more and more difficult to define translation and to limit the situations in which translation occurs. Today many of us are familiar with the idea that translation is a transfor- mative process not only of texts produced in different languages and media, but one that af- fects cultures and individuals. While some express concern about an ill-defined and delimited concept, we are of the view that such an approach is a strength and that any premature and a priori definition of the limits and borders of translation prevents us from evolving new the- ories and changing our assumptions and directions. The tendency within the discipline of translation studies is to continue to operate with traditional definitions and conceptualizations of translation, and thus with the same epistemological paradigm, sometimes proposing ad- ditional definitions, but never new and alternative ones. We believe this tendency is reductive and unhelpful for thinking about translation and suggest that it is time to open up new and in some cases startlingly new uses of the concept of translation. By accepting new ideas, by moving the focus, and by revealing new objects, we believe it will be possible to develop and organize the necessary theoretical consequences, to more fully understand what translation entails, to pinpoint where translation occurs today, and to formulate a perspective able to deal with all these different translation situations. Jakobson and beyond: the hybrid nature of culture S ince we believe translation is a universal and characteristic aspect of our contemporary world we will have to go far beyond the tripartite model (intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation) proposed by Roman Jakobson in 1959. His model had the advantage of considering translation also outside language and written texts, and as a transformative interpretive practice taking place between different semiotic systems. But even this approach is much too reductive. Today, translation has to be considered as a transformative representation of, in, and among cultures and individuals. Until recently translation has been studied almost exclu- sively as a transaction between cultures, where cultures have been identified within single nation states and linguistic limits. Only in the latest studies have scholars begun to consider the phenomenon of translation among other cultural identities that are situated inside, upon, or across the traditional delimitations of national and linguistic borders. These scholars have recognized the fragmented, hybrid nature of cultures and texts. The direction indicated by Edwin Gentzler, who states that “translations in the Amer- icas are less something that happens between separate and distinct cultures and more some- thing that is constitutive of these cultures” expresses the way forward (2008: 5). We think that translation is constitutive not only for American cultures, but for all cultures and culture translation / inaugural issue / 2011 as such. When we speak of cultures here, we also think about individuals, subjectivities and identities. And even in a broader sense, it is not only about widening the perspective, but seeing translation in new and different spaces. 12 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 13 Introduction Radically rethinking translation T his kind of radical rethinking of translation is what our new journal brings forward as its special contribution to research: translational processes are fundamental for the creation of culture(s) and identities, for the ongoing life of culture(s), and for the creation of social and economic values. As the Russian cultural semiotician Jury M. Lot- man puts it, translation is the necessary mechanism of cultural dynamics: For culture to exist as a mechanism organizing the collective personality with a common memory and a collective consciousness, there must be present a pair of semiotic systems with the consequent possibility of text translation. (2000: 34) We believe translation constitutes a fundamental condition for the existence and the transformation of cultures, and especially of cultural spheres where values, and in particular economic values, reside: as Chakrabarty persuasively asserts, “the problem of capitalist modernity cannot any longer be seen simply as a sociological transition […] but as a problem of translation, as well” (2000: 17). In effect, translation appears to us as the social relation from which the critique of communication and its corollary “culture” as the reigning ideology of Capital is most directly linked to a politics of life, or again, the politics in which life becomes invested by Capital. (Solomon 2007: 6) We also recognize that everything said so far should also be applied to the new, and still renewing, media environments in which translation occurs. Our use of the internet, so- cial media, and digital and screen tools produces consequences for translation that transform identities, power structures, theoretical models and day-to-day practices that constitute so- ciety. These transformations in all their radical implications deserve our profound investi- gation. From this point of view, the project called Open Translation appears particularly interesting, as it proposes “a new participatory ecology of translation emerging on the inter- net” questioning in this way “the proposition that discrete languages exist before the act of translation” (Neilson 2009). Within contemporary translation studies the traditional concept of translation is un- able to determine what translation actually is or identify all the different situations in which it occurs. Ironically, the larger, contemporary world of scholarship, outside the discipline of translation studies, understands translation in a much broader sense. As we indicate above, we do not dismiss the possibility that “real” translation and the metaphor of translation over- lap and mix. On the contrary, we wish to establish a dialogue with any area of research in which translation is, implicitly or explicitly, occupying a central conceptual position, or even a marginal one. The way, for instance, that Ulf Hannerz (1990, 1996) or Tullio Maranhão (2003) have conceptualized cultural translation in anthropology is illuminating for thinking translation / inaugural issue / 2011 about translation itself. In the same way, Sakai and Solomon’s (2006) way of thinking about translation in economic, ontological and political terms is equally illuminating. Translation in these uses of the concept has taken on additional meaning and given deeper meaning to the whole translation problem. 13 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 14 Introduction Translation matters in different fields of research O ther scholars, representing different fields of research, have written on translation in terms that have been new for studies on translation, and that we think should be given more credit than hitherto afforded. We are thinking of scholars such as Derrida and his concepts of monolingualism (1998) and hospitality (2000) as they bear on translation, and of Bhabha and his concept of cultural translation (1994). In recent years, due to the discipline’s stronger interdisciplinarity, many areas of human experience and representation connected to translation have begun to be explored. The dif- ferent aspects of translation connected to issues of postcolonialism are perhaps the most evident examples of positive exchange among the disciplines: through postcolonial perspec- tives, translation studies has been able to put aside a Eurocentric dominance that has on both a theoretical and practical level blinded research to important questions of cultures in contact. With a postcolonial perspective, research has been able to uncover the many varieties of inequality in cultural exchange. Back to epistemology T his epistemological potentiality of the concept of translation is an untapped re- source and seems central to us here. Both inside and outside translation studies scholars are today working on epistemologically relevant themes that clearly con- nect to translation: memory (B. Brodzki), space (S. Simon), conflict (E. Apter, M. Baker) and economics ( J. Solomon, S. Mezzadra). What is new in this work is that translation functions as an interpretive and operative instrument for deeper analysis and a more pro- found comprehension of these themes. By reconceptualizing these themes in and around the concept of translation, we believe new perspectives will emerge. Translation is poised to become a powerful epistemological instrument for reading and assessing the transformation and exchange of cultures and identities. As we see it, this new appreciation of translation compares favorably with the emergence of the concept of structure in the Seventies. We welcome this tendency because we are sure it is a way to study how translation is constitutive for cultures. We are witnessing nothing less than a sea-change in the world of translation. Translation is moving away from being simply a concept based in certain disciplines to being an epistemological principle applicable to the whole field of humanistic, social and natural sciences. If we follow this path, we will reshape the epistemological principles of the humanities and at the same time fashion a new instrument that also will permit us to reconsider trans- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 lation in all its properties and facets. Only in this sense do we see a future for reflection on translation. 14 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 15 Introduction New directions W hat kind of new directions will the journal follow? Without excluding any fruit- ful direction, we can already anticipate that it will seek to investigate the hybrid nature of languages, cultures, identities in our present deterritorialized world of difference and the ways in which space is continuously crossed, translated, and rede- fined through migration. It will be attuned to our globalized and localized world that is at one and the same time a common and divided world, structured around differential power relations and ideologies, where new media scenarios occupy an active role both reflecting and causing completely new conditions for representation and translation. War and conflict for their part will have the power to transform our world into a “translation zone” (Apter 2006), where economy and politics of course play the most powerful role in terms of value. The journal will also direct us to knowledge, especially to its acquisition and distribution, but also to the important channel called memory, which is responsible for the transmission and cultural translation of present cultural knowledge and litera- ture to future cultures and their encyclopedias of knowledge. As the journal develops into a natural and much needed space for a new kind of analysis of translation, this will always be characterized by its transdisciplinary approach. STEFANO ARDUINI and SIRI NERGAARD References Apter, Emily (2006) The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Asad, Talal (1986) “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Anthropology” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.) Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnog- raphy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Baker, Mona (2006) Translation and Conflict. London – New York: Routledge. Bassnett, Susan and André Lefevere (eds.) (1990) Translation, History and Culture. London – New York: Pinter Publishers. Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Culture. London – New York: Routledge. Braidotti, Rosi (2006) Transpositions. On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge, UK – Malden, Mass: Polity Press. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 15 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 16 Introduction Brodzki, Bella (2007) Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Dif- ference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Clifford, James (1997) Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cam- bridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (eds.) (1986) Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Fèlix Guattari [1980] (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schiz- ophrenia. Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques (1998) Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford: Stanford University Press. — (2000) Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gentzler, Edwin (2008) Translation and Identity in the Americas. New Directions in Transla- tion Theory. London – New York: Routledge. Hannerz, Ulf (1990) Cultural Complexity. Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. — (1996) Transnational Connections. Culture, People, Places. London – New York: Rout- ledge. Jakobson, Roman (1959) “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In R. Brower (ed.) On Translation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lotman, Yuri M. (2000) Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Maranhão, Tullio and Bernhard Streck (eds.) (2003) Translation and Ethnography. The An- thropological Challenge of Intercultural Understanding. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Mezzadra, Sandro (2008) La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale. Verona: Ombre corte. Neilson, Brett (2009) “Opening Translation.” Transeuropeennes. International Journal of Crit- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 ical Thought. November http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/107/-Open- ing_translation Rushdie, Salman (1991) Imaginary Homelands. New York: Penguin. Sakai, Naoki and Jon Solomon (eds.) (2006) Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference. (Traces), Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 16 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 17 Introduction Simon, Sherry (2006) Translating Montreal. Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal – London – Itacha: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Solomon, Jon (2007) “Translation as a Critique of The West: Sakai, Agamben, and Liu” http://phen.nsysu.edu.tw/culturalskin/Translation%20as%20a%20Critique%20of%2 0The%20West%20_Chilhac_Solomon_.pdf Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2003) Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 17 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17548

Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 18 Introduction The journal: a presentation W e are honored to introduce the twenty-two prominent scholars who have ac- cepted to serve as members of translation’s advisory board, and are grateful to them for supporting our project. With this publication, we let the words of each of these scholars represent their initial positions. Their words, whether written explicitly for this journal or taken from their previously published work (notes and/or references of original publications are not included here), represent suggestions, directions, and even pro- grams for the journal’s future issues. While presenting each member of the advisory board with a short bio–bibliography, we have made rhizomatic collages of their texts, creating links and even unexpected and surprising connections between them, with a view to stimulating ideas for a new reflection on translation. These connections are organized according to a se- lection of key words that are representative of the vision of the journal; they are intended to function like guidelines for reading the texts and to invite reflection about translation. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 18 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17552

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 19 Hybridity HOMI K. BHaBHa From: The Location of Culture (1994) London – New York: Routledge. f hybridity is heresy, then to blaspheme is to dream. To dream not of the past or pres- I ent, nor the continuous present; it is not the nostalgic dream of tradition, nor the Utopian dream of modern progress; it is the dream of translation as ‘survival’ as Derrida translates the ‘time’ of Benjamin’s concept of the after-life of translation, as sur- vivre, the act of living on borderlines. Rushdie translates this into the migrant’s dream of Homi K. Bhabha is the survival: an initiatory interstices; an empow- Anne F. Rothenberg ering condition of hybridity; an emergence Professor of the that turns ‘return’ into reinscription or Humanities in the Department of English, redescription; an iteration that is not belated, Director of the but iconic and insurgent. For the migrant’s Mahindra Humanities survival depends, as Rushdie put it, on dis- Center, and Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost covering ‘how newness enters the world’. The at Harvard University. He is the author focus is on making the linkages through the of numerous works exploring postcolonial unstable elements of literature and life—the theory, cultural change and power, and dangerous tryst with the ‘untranslatable’— cosmopolitanism, among other themes. His works include Nation and Narration rather than arriving at ready-made names. and The Location of Culture. He has two The ‘newness’ of migrant or minority forthcoming books titled A Global Measure discourse has to be discovered in medias res: a and The Right to Narrate. Bhabha most recently contributed essays to exhibition newness that is not part of the ‘progressivist’ catalogues on the work of Anish Kapoor, division between past and present, or the Raqib Shaw, and Shahzia Sikander archaic and the modern; nor is it a ‘newness’ and interviews with Akbar Padamsee and on the work of ORLAN. that can be contained in the mimesis of ‘orig- He serves as an advisor at key art inal and copy’. In both these cases, the image institutions, as well as on the Steering of the new iconic rather than enunciatory; in Committee of the Aga Khan Architectural translation / inaugural issue / 2011 both instances, temporal difference is repre- Prize. He is a Trustee of the UNESCO World Report on Cultural Diversity and the Chair sented as epistemological or mimetic dis- of the World Economic Forum’s Global tance from an original source. The newness Agenda Council on Human Rights. of cultural translation is akin to what Walter Educated at the University of Bombay and the University of Oxford, Bhabha was Benjamin describes as the ‘foreignness of lan- profiled by Newsweek as one of “100 guages’—that problem of representation Americans for the Next [21st] Century”. 19 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 20 Homi K. Bhabha Hybridity native to representation itself. If Paul de Man focused on the ‘metonymy’ of translation, I want to foreground the ‘foreignness’ of cultural translation. With the concept of ‘foreignness’ Benjamin comes closest to describing the performa- tivity of translation as the staging of cultural difference. The argument begins with the sug- gestion that though Brot and pain intend the same object, bread, their discursive and cul- tural modes of signification are in conflict with each other, striving to exclude each other. The complementary of language as communication must be understood as emerging from the constant state of contestation and flux caused by the differential of social and cultural sig- nification. This process of complementary as the agonistic supplement is the seed of the ‘untranslatable’—the foreign element in the midst of the performance of cultural transla- tion. And it is this seed that turns into the famous, overworked analogy in the Benjamin essay: unlike the original where fruit and skin form a certain unity, in the act of translation the content or subject matter is made disjunct, overwhelmed and alienated by the form of signification, like a royal robe with ample folds. Unlike Derrida and de Man, I am less interested in the metonymic fragmentation of the ‘original’. I am more engaged with the ‘foreign’ element that reveals the interstitial; insists in the textile superfluity of folds and wrinkles; and becomes the ‘unstable element of link- age’, the indeterminate temporality of the in-between, that has to be engaged in creating the conditions through which ‘newness comes into the world’. The foreign element ‘destroys the original’s structures of reference and sense communication as well not simply by negating it but by negotiating the disjunction in which successive cultural temporalities are ‘pre- served in the work of history and at the same time cancelled… The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed. And through this dialectic of cultural negation-as-negotiation, this splitting of skin and fruit through the agency of foreignness, the purpose is, as Rudolf Pannwitz says, not ‘to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German [but] instead to turn German into Hindi, Greek, English’. Translation is the performative nature of cultural communication. It is language in actu (enunciation, positionality) rather than language in situ (énoncé, or propositionality). And the sign of translation continually tells, or ‘tolls’ the different times and spaces between cultural authority and its performative practices. The ‘time’ of translation consists in that movement of meaning, the principle and practice of a communication that, in the words of de Man ‘puts the original in motion to decanonise it, giving it the movement of fragmenta- tion, a wandering of errance, a kind of permanent exile’. (pp. 227-228) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 20 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17553

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 21 Difference KwaMe antHOny appIaH From: “Thick Translation” (2000)L. Venuti (ed.) The Translation Studies Reader, London – New York: Routledge. Previously published in Callaloo 16:4 (1993). tterances are the products of actions, which like all actions, are undertaken for U reasons. Understanding the reasons characteristic of other cultures and (as an instance of this) other times is part of what our teaching is about: this is especial- ly important because in the easy atmosphere of relativism—in the world of ‘that’s just your opinion’ that pervades the high schools that produce our students—one thing that can get entirely lost is the rich differences of human life in culture. One thing that needs to be Kwame Anthony Appiah challenged by our teaching is the confusion is a philosopher, cultural theorist, and of relativism and tolerance so scandalously novelist whose interests perpetuated by Allan Bloom, in his, the latest include political and in a long succession of American jeremiad. moral theory, the philosophy of language And that, of course, is a task for my sort of and mind, and African intellectual history. teaching—philosophical teaching—and it is He is currently the Laurance S. Rockefeller one I am happy to accept. But there is a role University Professor of Philosophy at the Princeton University. Appiah was raised here for literary teaching also, in challenging in Ashanti Region, Ghana, and educated this easy tolerance, which amounts not to a at Bryanston School and Clare College, celebration of human variousness but to a Cambridge, where he earned a PhD refusal to attend to how various other people in philosophy. Appiah is the author of several books including The Ethics of really are or were. A thick description of the Identity, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World context of literary production, a translation of Strangers, Experiment in Ethics, and that draws on and creates that sort of under- The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. Appiah has also written three standing, meets the need to challenge our- novels. selves and our students to go further, to undertake the harder project of a genuinely informed respect for others. Until we face up to difference, we cannot see what price tolerance is demanding of us. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 In the American academy, therefore, the translation of African texts seems to me to need to be directed at least by such purposes as these: the urge to continue the repudiation of racism (and, at the same time, through explorations of feminist issues and women’s writ- ing, of sexism); the need to extend the American imagination—an imagination that regu- lates much of the world system economically and politically—beyond the narrow scope of the United States; the desire to develop views of the world elsewhere that respect more 21 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 22 Rosemary Arrojo Difference deeply the autonomy of the Other, views that are not generated solely by the legitimate but local political needs of America’s multiple diasporas. To stress such purposes in translation is to argue that, from the standpoint of analy- sis of the current cultural situation—an analysis that is frankly political—certain purpos- es are productively served by the literary, the text-teaching, institutions of the academy. To offer our proverbs to American students is to invite them, by showing how sayings can be used within an oral culture to communicate in ways that are complex and subtle, to a deep- er respect for the people of pre-industrial societies. (pp. 427-428) ROseMaRy aRROjO From: “Translation and Impropriety: A Reading of Claude Bleton’s Les Nègres du Traducteur” (2006) Translation and Interpretation Studies, vol. I, No. 2, Fall. ranslation has been frequently associated with different forms of improprierty— T betrayal, infidelity, theft, indecency, seduction, invasion of property, etc.—that may be directly related to the translator’s necessarily close and often ambivalent relation- ship with the original and/or its author. In fact, translation entails a very close contact with somebody else’s text, not simply as “the most intimate act of reading” (Spivak 2004: 397), but also as a form of rewriting that claims to replace the original in another language and context. It is not surprising, then, that the ethical implications of this complex relationship have been one of the main concerns of Western translation theories, which, at least since Cicero, have focused on devising strategies to help translators behave properly. The apparently dangerous relationship that translation is perceived to establish between the original and the translated text, and between the author and the translator, has been asso- ciated, for instance, with the disappointments involved in parasitic, unreliable friendships. The Earl of Roscommon’s An Essay on Translated Verse, written in 1684, gives us an insightful illus- tration of the basic issues at stake in these relationships. According to Roscommon, the trans- lator, after becoming aware of his own preferences and inclinations, should find an author or a poet with whom he is compatible, and with whom he could establish a strong connection: “Examine how your humour is inclined,/ And which the ruling passion of your mind;/ Then seek a poet who your way does bend,/ And choose an author as you choose a friend” (Robinson 176). However, the pursuit of intimacy with the author and his original, which is translation / inaugural issue / 2011 supposedly part and parcel of the groundwork for successful translations, is also basically improper and, of course, highly risky for the author since the translator is told to insidiously take advantage of his closeness with the latter in order to take his place: “United by this sym- pathetic bond,/ You grow familiar, intimate, and fond;/ Your thoughts, your words, your styles, your souls agree,/ No longer his interpreter, but he” (176). Moreover, to the extent that in this plot both the translator and the author are represented as males while the text itself is 22 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 23 Rosemary Arrojo identified as a fickle young muse who must be both conquered and protected, the triangular relationship in which they find themselves is inextricably tinted with sexual overtones, suggest- ing that the translator is indeed a double-faced character, a traduttore-traditore who befriends the author in order to take possession of his precious text and muse. Most of the traditional statements about translation, whether found in formal theories or in the usual prejudices disseminated by what one might call common sense, will reveal that the translator’s activity often seems to be caught up in descriptions and conceptions that are gen- erally haunted by fears of betrayal and disrespect, which are compatible with an underlying anx- iety about the fact that texts are indeed always at risk of falling prey to spurious interpreta- Rosemary Arrojo is Professor tions. Therefore, one is tempted to speculate of Comparative that there might be a close connection between Literature the supposed danger of unreliable collabora- at Binghamton tions and the persistent ideal of translation as University. She joined the Department of an activity that should be performed ‘invisibly’. Comparative Literature in January of 2003 In other words, according to the idealized and directed the Translation Research and terms conceived by our patriarchal, essentialist Instruction Program until June of 2007. Before that, from 1984 to 2002, she taught tradition, translators are expected to do their English and Translation Studies at the State work without leaving any traces of their inter- University of Campinas (Brazil), and also ference, that is, without actually taking on an worked as a free-lance translator. Her main publications in Portuguese include the authorial role that might threaten the author’s following books: Oficina de Tradução: A position or the alleged integrity of the original. Teoria na Prática, first published in 1986 and currently in its 5th edition; O Signo Desconstruí do: Implicações para a Tradução, his deeply embedded distrust in the T activity that is expected to make it possible for meaning to safely travel between languages and cultures also emerges a Leitura e o Ensino (1992), as the editor and main contributor; and Tradução, Desconstrução e Psicanálise (1993). Her publications in English include chapters in several book collections, essays in all the in several works of fiction, which explore main journals specializing in translation some of the age-old prejudices associated studies, as well as book reviews. She is with translators, their task, and their rela- currently preparing two books on representations of translation in fiction, tionships with originals and authors. In these which will include pieces on Borges, Kafka, texts one can find representations of transla- Poe, Saramago, Guimarães Rosa, Calvino, tors in close connection with an array of Kosztolányi, among others. Samples of her work have been translated into German, ambivalent feelings triggered by the ethical Spanish, Catalan, Turkish, and Hungarian. dilemmas that constitute their craft. It has been my belief that the examination of these pieces by several authors from different tra- ditions will help us further understand the conflicts that seem to motivate, at least on some translation / inaugural issue / 2011 level, the ways in which Western culture tends to respond, perhaps even unconsciously, to the role of translators and their ‘dangerously’ intimate association with originals and their authors. In recent years I have examined stories and novels whose revealing plots have allowed me to reflect on the power struggles and the emotional investments that are usu- ally at stake both in the writing and in the reception of translations and originals, and which are not made quite so explicit in formal, theoretical statements. (pp. 92-94) 23 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 24 Homi K. Bhabha Difference HOMI K. BHaBHa From: “DissemiNation” in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration (1990) London – New York: Routledge. he signs of cultural difference cannot […] be unitary or individual forms of iden- T tity because their continual implication in other symbolic systems always leaves them ‘incomplete’ or open to cultural translation. (p. 313) In keeping with its subaltern, substitutive,—rather than synchronic—temporality, the subject of cultural difference is neither pluralistic nor relativistic. The frontiers of cul- tural difference are always belated or secondary in the sense that their hybridity is never simply a question of admixture of pre-given identities, or essences. Hybridity is the per- plexity of the living as it interrupts the representation of the fullness of life; it is an instance of iteration, in the minority discourse, of the time, of the arbitrary sign—‘the minus in the origin’—through which all forms of cultural meaning are open to translation because their enunciation resists totalization. (p. 314) […] Cultural difference emerges from the borderline moments of translation that Benjamin describes as the ‘foreignness’ of languages. Translation represents only an extreme instance of the figurative fate of writing that repeatedly generates a movement of equiva- lence between representation and reference but never gets beyond the equivocation of the sign. The ‘foreignness’ of language is the nucleus of untranslatable that goes beyond the transparency of subject matter. The transfer of meaning can never be total between differ- ential systems of meaning, or within them, for ‘the language of translation envelopes its content like a royal robe with ample folds. … [it] signifies a more exalted language than its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering an alien’. It is too often slip- page of the signification that is celebrated at the expense of this disturbing alienation, or powering of content. The erasure of content in the invisible but insistent structure of lin- guistic difference does not lead us to some general, formal acknowledgement of the func- tion of the sign. The ill fitting robe of a language alienates content in the sense that it deprives it of an immediate access to a stable or holistic reference ‘outside’ itself—in socie- ty. It suggests that social conditions are themselves being reinscribed or reconstituted in the very act of enunciation, revealing the instability of any division of meaning into an inside and outside. Content becomes the alien mise en scène that reveals the signifying structure of linguistic difference which is never seen for itself, but only glimpsed in the gap or the translation / inaugural issue / 2011 gapping of the garment. Benjamin’s argument can be elaborated for theory of cultural dif- ference it is only by engaging which what he calls the ‘purer linguistic air’—the anteriority of the sign—that the reality-effect of content can be overpowered which then makes all cultural languages ‘foreign’ to themselves. And it is from this foreign perspective that it becomes possible to inscribe the specific locality of cultural systems—their incommensu- 24 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 25 Bella Brodzki rable difference—and through that apprehension of difference to perform the act a cultur- al translation. In the act of translation the ‘given’ content becomes alien and estranged; and that, in its turn, leaves the language of translation Aufgabe, always confronted by its dou- ble, the untranslatable—alien and foreign. (pp. 314-315) Bella BROdzKI From: Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007) Stanford: Stanford University Press. he principal concern of this book is not the comical underside of translation, but T rather its underlying gravity. It would be difficult to overstate the role of transla- tion in shaping history, culture, and memory. It is imperative, I believe, especially given the current international political climate, in which relations with the Other are so volatile, that concentrated interest and material resources be directed toward recognizing the crucial role of translation in culture, of translation as culture. This is more than an Bella Brodzki is academic matter. At the same time, however, Professor of Comparative Literature it is one thing to make rhetorical claims at Sarah Lawrence about the (over)determinacy of translation in College. She teaches our lives and in the lives of future genera- courses in tions, and another to show how and why autobiography; modern and contemporary fiction; literary and being more attentive to the fundamental, cultural theory; and translation studies though intricate and often elusive, workings and holds the Alice Stone Ilchman Chair of translation can crucially benefit inter- in Comparative Studies. Her articles and essays on the critical intersections with and preters of the humanities. My aim is the lat- impact of translation on other fields and ter, but I doubt whether the demonstration disciplines have appeared in a range of can be effective without the assertion. We are publications, most recently in the collection Translating Women edited by Luise von utterly dependent on translation, but that Flotow (2011). She is the coeditor of does not mean that we respect the enterprise Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography or want to think too much about how it gets (1989) and author of Can These Bones Live?: done. It bears repeating, I believe, that there Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007).Her current project is coediting is translation because there are different lan- a special volume of Comparative Literature translation / inaugural issue / 2011 guages, and that this multilingualism is a gift, Studies entitled Trials of Trauma. rather than a necessary (or natural) evil best defended with reductive instrumentalism and resignation. Because translation is a shared commodity whose value is not equally distributed, its labor must be recognized to ensure both quality and fairness; it cannot be consigned only to bureaucrats, ‘experts’, or custodial others. 25 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 26 Bella Brodzki Difference As subjects in a multicultural, polyglot, transnationìal, and intertextual universe, all of us ‘live in translation’, but we also occupy that space differently, depending on our linguis- tic capital and the status of our language(s) in rapidly changing historical, political, and geographic contexts. We also occupy that space more or less self-consciously, and are more or less deluded by what passes as transparency in our communicative encounters around the globe. The specific asymmetric relations that currently incorporate translation into globalization (call it ‘linguistic outsourcing’) mean that non-native speakers of English are expected to fulfill most of the translating demands in the world. The refusal to translate that both literally and figuratively characterizes most Anglophones’ cultural comportment bespeaks a sense of power and privilege and has devastating consequences for everyone. As the study of foreign languages declines in the United States and English increasingly becomes the dominant global language, despite having fewer native speakers than Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish, we ignore the impact of unidirectional translation and mistranslation in international relations, mass tourism, science, and technology at incalculable cost. Although I do not address these concerns directly here, I conceive of this critical project as being wedded to them. We need to encourage, simultaneously, on two fronts, both the study of foreign languages and the study of translation, because—of course—they are not mutually exclusive, but mutually reinforcing. (pp. 11-12) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 26 

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translation

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 27 Space IaIn cHaMBeRs From: “The translated city”. o think of the modern city—Cairo, London, Istanbul, Lagos or Buenos Aires—is T to experience a perpetual translating machine. Economical, cultural and historical forces are here locally configured and acquire form, substance and sense. These days much attention is given to how global flows become local realities in the multiple real- isations of ‘globalisation’, but the archive that Iain Chambers is the city proposes actually represents an alto- Professor of Cultural, gether deeper set of sedimentations. Cities as Postcolonial and the sites of cultural encounters—from fifth Mediterranean Studies at the Oriental century Athens with its Greeks, Persians and University in Naples. Egyptians, to present-day multi-cultured Los He is known for his Angeles—are precisely where the outside interdisciplinary and intercultural work on music, popular, and metropolitan cultures. world pushes into our interiors to propose More recently he has transmuted this line of immediate proximities. In this context, dif- research into a series of postcolonial ferences may also be accentuated: think of analyses of the formation of the modern the ghettoes and ethnic areas and communi- Mediterranean. He is author of Urban Rhythms: pop music and popular culture ties of many a modern Euro-American city. (1985), Popular Culture: The metropolitan Cultural and historical overspills, most experience (1986), Border dialogues: Journeys immediately registered in culinary, musical in postmodernity (1990), Migrancy, culture, identity (1994), Hendrix, hip hop e and cultural taste, do not automatically lead l'interruzione del pensiero (with Paul Gilroy) to physical convivalities and friendship. (1995), Culture after humanism (2001); and Nevertheless, even if we cling to familiar most recently, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (2008). accents, the grammar of the city undergoes He is also editor with Lidia Curti of transformation. This occurs without our The Post-colonial question: Common skies, consent. We inevitably find ourselves speak- divided horizons (1996,) and the volume ing in the vicinity of other histories and cul- Esercizi di Potere. Gramsci, Said e il postcoloniale (2006). Several of these titles translation / inaugural issue / 2011 tures, in the vicinity of others who may refuse have been translated into various our terms of translation, who insist on opac- languages, including Italian, Spanish, ity and refuse to be represented in our rea- German, Japanese, and Turkish. He is presently preparing a work on music and son. As a translating and translated space, the postcolonial criticism, tentatively entitled language of the city is never merely a linguis- Mediterranean Blues, for publication in 2012. 27 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 28 Iain Chambers Space tic matter. For what is being ‘spoken’ in a mixture of asymmetrical powers is precisely the intricate accumulation of historical encounters established in the conjunctural syntax of a particular urban cultural formation. As the concentrated locality of such processes, and their augmented velocity, the city continually proposes the urgency of considering life, both ours, and that of others, in the transit proposed by translation. What precisely might all of this mean? Beyond the obvious threshold of translation inaugurated by the arrival of the other, the stranger, invariably called upon to transform his history and her culture into our language and understanding, there emerges the disquiet- ing insistence that we, too, are somehow being translated by complex processes occurring in the very city that we consider our own. The city becomes increasingly problematic, and we grow accustomed to walking on troubled ground. The foundations of our history and culture, of our lives and sense of belonging, are disturbed. The assurance of a domestic place is exposed to unauthorised questions, unplanned procedures, and unhomely prac- tices. We are literally transported elsewhere and are ourselves translated. For what is ren- dered explicit in translation is not merely the contingency of language and the manner in which it sustains our movement, but also a persistent interrogation. Seeded in ambiguity, uncertainty, mis-understanding, re-formulations, semantic contestation, and the uncon- trolled passage of language elsewhere, there emerges the insistence on an irreducible opac- ity. Not all will be revealed to our eyes and reason. This, of course, is the complex challenge of the postcolonial city. It is here, where the colonial ghosts who haunt the making of modernity are housed and accommodated, that we encounter the most acute site of trans- lation, deferred representations and opacity. The forces of translation can be traced in multiple forms and formations: in the phe- nomenology of everyday life, in musical, pictorial and literary aesthetics, in clothing and culi- nary practices, in debating questions of faith, in renewing the lexicon of philosophical and critical discourse… Among the many ways of thinking of such processes, processes that are intrinsic to the making of the modern city and the modernity it is presumed to represent, is that provoked by critical considerations of contemporary architecture and urban planning. rchitecture as the material and technical appropriation of ground, history and A memory proposes a problematic site of power and politics, of technics, technology and aesthetics. All of this is unconsciously secreted in the seemingly neutral grid lines of the survey, the plan and the project. If architecture provides us with a habitat, a home, it also contributes to the language in which ideas of home, belonging and domestic- ity, and the supposed opposites of the unhomily, the non-identical and the foreign, are con- ceived and received. This renders space both agonistic and partisan: no longer an empty, ‘neutral’ container, waiting to be filled by the abstract protocols of ‘progress’, but rather the translation / inaugural issue / 2011 site of a complex and troubled inheritance that questions all desires to render it transpar- ent to a conclusive logic. Architecture, even if it chooses to ignore it, is about the translation of this troubled inheritance. So, opening up the languages of building, urban planning and civic projection, seeding them with doubt, and criss-crossing their concerns with lives lived, living and yet to come, is to render the ‘laws’ of cultural codification vulnerable to what they 28 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 29 Iain Chambers seek to contain and control. Every act of representation is simultaneously an act of repres- sion. Every excluded trace becomes the site of a potential transformation, the point of departure for unsuspected meanings. For, despite the presumption of the explorer’s map and the architectural drawing board, space is never empty; it is has already been inhabited, nominated and produced by some body. Abstract coordinates are themselves the purified signals of altogether more tur- bulent and terrestrial transit. In this stark affirmation lies a profound challenge to an eye/I that has historically been accustomed to colonising a space considered ‘empty’ prior to its occupation by occidental ‘progress’. Against a grade zero of history inaugurated by the West, its languages, disciplines, technologies and political economy, it is ethically and aesthetically possible to pose the historical heterogeneity of what persistently precedes and exceeds such a singular and unilateral framing of time and space. In translating abstract coordinates into worldly concerns they become both multiple and mutable. In the situated realisation of sym- bolic artifacts—the ‘house’, the ‘square’, the ‘building’, the ‘street’—a complex historical prove- nance is pronounced in the shifting syntagms of an ultimately planetary frame. he interruption posed by the other and the elsewhere encourages the interrogation T released in a sidereal, oblique glance that cuts across the site and crumples the map with other times. Set free from the assumptions of disciplinary protocols secured in the institutional authority of architecture, civil engineering and public administration, the plan, the project, is here exposed to questions and queries that were previously silenced and unheard. The desire for the totalising translation of transparency, and hence control, is deterritorialised and reterritorialised by what insists and resists the architectural and administrative will (to power). All of this crosses and contaminates aesthetics with ethics. A closed, idealist and metaphysical imperative—the idea of ‘beauty’, the ‘order’ of reason, the ‘rationality’ of the plan, the stable ‘meaning’ of the discourse—is transferred into the turbulent, open-ended syntactical turmoil of a quotidian event. We are invited to look and think again; to touch and feel the experience of the everyday and the ordinary rendered extra-ordinary. In this transitory exposure (Heidegger’s aletheia or revealing), a breach in the predictable tissues of a cultural and critical discourse is temporarily achieved. Here the solution proposed is nei- ther permanent nor conclusive; it is precisely in ‘solution’, in the chemical and physical sense of the term: a liquid state in which diverse forces, languages and histories are suspended and culturally configured in the shifting currents of a worldly unfolding. This architecture, and aesthetics, shadows, occasionally spilling over, the borders of more permanent preten- sions. As a border discourse, this translating perspective proposes tactical interruptions of a hegemonic strategy seeking to realise its unilateral plan (often under the label of ‘progress’, translation / inaugural issue / 2011 ‘modernity’ and ‘democracy’). It is in the borders, in a social and historical ‘no man’s’ land where both civil rights, and frequently the very concept of the ‘human’, are suspended or yet to come, that it becomes necessary to elaborate another architecture of sense, another geometry of meaning: a poetics whose trajectory and potential translations literally leaves the political speechless. (pp. 1-3) 29 

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translation

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 30 Globalization aRjun appaduRaI From: Modernity at Large (1996) Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press. he central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural T homogenization and cultural heterogenization. (p. 32) […] For polities of smaller scale, there is always a fear of cultural absorption by polities of larger scale, especial- ly those that are nearby. One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison. This scalar dynamic, which has wide- spread global manifestations, is also tied to the Arjun Appadurai is a relationship between nations and states, to contemporary social- which I shall return later. For the moment let cultural anthropologist focusing on modernity us note that the simplification of these many and globalization, based forces (and fears) of homogenization can also in New York. Appadurai be exploited by nation-states in relation to was born in Bombay, their own minorities, by posing global com- India in 1949 and educated in India before coming to the United States. He graduated moditization (or capitalism, or some other from St. Xavier's High School, Fort, Mumbai, such external enemy) as more real than the and earned his Intermediate Arts degree threat of its own hegemonic strategies. (p. 32) from Elphinstone College, Mumbai, before coming to the United States. He then […] received his B.A. from Brandeis University The new global cultural economy has in 1970. He was formerly a professor at the to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunc- University of Chicago where he received his M.A. (1973) and PhD (1976). After working tive order that cannot any longer be under- there, he spent a brief time at Yale before stood in terms of existing center-periphery going to the New School University. models (even those that might account for He currently is a faculty member of New multiple centers and peripheries). Nor is it York University's Media Culture and Communication department in the susceptible to simple models of push and pull Steinhardt School. Some of his most (in terms of migration theory), or of surplus- important works include Worship and es and deficits (as in traditional models of Conflict under Colonial Rule (1981), “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global translation / inaugural issue / 2011 balance of trade), or of consumers and pro- Cultural Economy” (1990) found in Modernity ducers (as in most neo-Marxist theories of at Large (1996), and Fear of Small Numbers development). (2006). Even the most complex and flexible theories of global development that have come out of the Marxist tradition (Amin 1980; Mandel 1978; Wallerstein 1974; Wolf 1982) are inadequately quirky and have failed to 30 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 31 Arjun Appadurai come to terms with what Scott Lash and John Urry called disorganized capitalism (1987). The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamen- tal disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics that we have only begun to theo- rize. (pp. 32-33) I propose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship among five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes. The suffix –scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that char- acterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles. These terms with the common suffix -scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as subnational groupings and movements (whether religious, political, or economic), and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighborhoods, and families. Indeed, the individual actor is the last locus of this perspectival set of landscapes, for these landscapes are eventu- ally navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger formations, in part from their own sense of what these landscapes offer. These landscapes thus are the building blocks of what (extending Benedict Anderson) I would like to call imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds that are consti- tuted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe. An important fact of the world we live in today is that many persons on the globe live in such imagined worlds (and not just in imagined communities) and thus are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them. (p. 33) s a result of the differential diaspora of these [landscapes], the political narratives A that govern communication between elites and followers in different parts of the world involve problems of both a semantic and pragmatic nature: semantic to the extent that words (and their lexical equivalents) require careful translation from context to context in their global movements, and pragmatic to the extent that the use of these words by political actors and their audiences may be subject to very different sets of contextual conventions that mediate their translation into public politics. Such conventions are not only matters of the nature of political rhetoric: for example, what does the aging Chinese leadership mean when it refers to dangers of hooliganism? What does the South Korean leadership mean when it speaks of discipline as the key to democratic industrial growth? translation / inaugural issue / 2011 (p. 36) 31 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 32 Kwame Anthony Appiah Globalization KwaMe antHOny appIaH From: Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) London: Penguin. o there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the S idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are already by the ties of kith and kin, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences. Because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person of every society should converge on a single mode of life. Whatever our obligations are to others (or theirs to us) they often have the right to go their own way. As we’ll see, there will be times when these two ideals—univer- sal concern and respect for legitimate difference—clash. There’s a sense in which cos- mopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge. A citizen of the world: how far can we take that idea? Are you really supposed to abjure all local allegiances and partialities in the name of this vast abstraction, humanity? Some proponents of cosmopolitanism were pleased to think so; and they often made easy targets of ridicule. “Friend of men, and enemy of almost every man he had to do with,” Thomas Carlyle memorably said of the eighteenth-century physiocrat the Marquis de Mirabeau, who wrote the treatise L’Ami des hommes when he wasn’t too busy jailing his own son. “A lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred”, Edmund Burke said of Jean- Jacques Rousseau, who handed each of the five children he fathered to an orphanage. Yet the impartialist version of the cosmopolitan creed has continued to hold a steely fascination. Virginia Woolf once exhorted “freedom from unreal loyalties”—to nation, sex, school, neighbourhood, and on and on. Leo Tolstoy, in the same spirit, inveighed against the ‘stupidity’ of patriotism. “To destroy war, destroy patriotism”, he wrote in an 1896 essay—a couple of decades before the tsar was swept away by a revolution in the name of the international working class. Some contemporary philosophers have similarly urged that the boundaries of nations are morally irrelevant—accidents of history with no rightful claim on our conscience. But if there are friends of cosmopolitanism who make me nervous, I am happy to be opposed to cosmopolitanism’s noisiest foes. Both Hitler and Stalin—who agreed about lit- tle else, save that murder was the first instrument of politics—launched regular invectives translation / inaugural issue / 2011 against “rootless cosmopolitans”; and while, for both, anti-cosmopolitanism was often just a euphemism for anti-Semitism, they were right to see cosmopolitanism as their enemy. For they both required a kind of loyalty to one portion of humanity—a nation, a class— that ruled out loyalty to all of humanity. And the one thought that cosmopolitans share is that no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities 32 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 33 Kwame Anthony Appiah to every other. Fortunately, we need take sides neither with the nationalist who abandons all foreigners nor with the hard-core cosmopolitan who regards her friends and fellow cit- izens with icy impartiality. The position worth defending might be called (in both senses) a partial cosmopolitanism. (pp. XIII-XIV) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 33 

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translation

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 34 Power ROseMaRy aRROjO From: “Writing, Interpreting, and the Power Struggle for Control of Meaning: Scenes from Kafka, Borges, and Kosztolány” in Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (ed.) Translation and Power (2002) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. f, as Nietzsche argues, any attempt at mastering a text, or the world as text, “involves a I fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated” (1969:12), the implicit relationship that is usually established between authors and interpreters is not exactly inspired by coopera- tion or collaboration, as common sense and the essentialist tradition would have it but, rather, is constituted by an underlying competition, by a struggle for the power to deter- mine that which will be (provisionally) accepted as true and definite within a certain con- text and under certain circumstances. As Kafka’s and Borges’s stories have shown us, in this textualized, human world, where immortal essences and absolute certainties are not to be found, the indisputable control over a text, its full completion, and the definite establish- ment of its limits cannot be simplistically determined nor merely related to its author once and for all. If one cannot clearly and forever separate the author from the interpreter, the text from its reading, or even one text from another, and if the will to power as authorial desire is that which moves both writers and readers in their attempts at constructing tex- tual mazes that could protect their meanings and, thus, also imprison and neutralize any potential intruder, is it ever possible for interpreters to be faithful to the authors or to the text they visit? Obviously, it is not by chance that this has always been the central issue and the main concern for all those interested in the mechanism of translation, an activity that provides a paradigmatic scenario for the underlying struggle for the control over meaning that consti- tutes both writing and interpretation as it involves the actual production of another text: the writing of the translator’s reading of someone else’s text in another language, time, and cultural environment. As it necessarily constitutes material evidence of translator’s passage through the original and as it offers documented proof of the differences brought about by translation / inaugural issue / 2011 such a passage, any translation is bound to be an exemplary site for the competitive nature of textual activity. In a tradition that generally views originals as the closed, fixed recepta- cle of their authors’ intentional meanings, the struggle for the power to determine the “truth” of a text is obviously decided in favor of those who are considered as the “rightful” owners of their texts’ meanings and who supposedly deserve unconditional respect from anyone who dares to enter their textual “property”. In such a tradition, translators are not 34 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 35 Rosemary Arrojo only denied the rights and privileges of authorship but also must endure a reputation for treachery and ineptitude while being urged to be as invisible and as humble as possible. (pp. 73-74) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 35 

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translation

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 36 Media susan Bassnett From: Susan Bassnett and Esperança Bielsa, Translation in Global News (2009) London – New York: Routledge. he asymmetries of globalization and the current inequalities in the production of T knowledge and information are directly mirrored in translation, and this becomes visible when the directionality of global information flows starts to be questioned. Thus, some accounts of globalization have pointed to the number of book translations Susan Bassnett is a from English and into English as an indication scholar of comparative literature. She served of the power distribution in global informa- as pro-vice-chancellor tion flows, where those at the core do the at the University of transmission and those at the periphery mere- Warwick for ten years and taught in its Centre ly receive it. […] The global dominance of for Translation and Comparative Cultural English is expressed in the fact that, in 1981, Studies, which she founded in the 1980s. books originally written in English accounted She was educated in several European for 42 per cent of translations worldwide, countries, and began her academic career in Italy, lecturing in universities around the compared with 13.5 per cent from Russian world. Author of over twenty books, her and 11.4 per cent from French. At the same Translation Studies, which first appeared in time, British and American book production 1980, has remained in print ever since and has become an important international is characterized by a low number of transla- textbook in this field. Her Comparative tions: 2.4 per cent of books published in 1990 Literature (1993) has also become in Britain and 2.96 per cent in the United internationally renowned and has been translated into several languages. In 1996 States […] Global English dominance is she co-edited Constructing Cultures: Essays expressed, on the one hand, in the sheer vol- on Literary Translation with André Lefevere, ume of English-language information in cir- and together with Harish Trivedi she is the culation. Thus, for example, current statistics editor of Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (1998). The Translator as Writer on languages on the internet reveal the large (2006) was coedited with Peter Bush. number of English-speaking users (about Her most recent book is Translation in translation / inaugural issue / 2011 one-third of the total), but also the even Global News (2008) written with Esperança Bielsa. In addition to her scholarly works, stronger predominance of English-language Bassnett writes poetry. internet content (which is estimated at over half of the total). On the other hand, translation, which makes it possible for people to have access to information in their own language, contributes to the global dominance of Anglo- American culture, as we have seen above for the case of book translations, which account for 36 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 37 Lawrence Venuti only the smallest part of the volume of translation, the bulk of which is in commercial trans- lation, politics and administration and in the mass media. Nevertheless, global or international English itself needs to be qualified and should be examined more carefully. […] International English, which in this sense can be viewed as a bad translation of itself, is a supraterritorial language that has lost its essential connection to a specific cultural context. It thus expresses in itself the fundamental abstractions derived from disembedding or the lift- ing out of social relations from their local contexts of interaction. […] Globalization has caused an exponential increase of translation. The global domi- nance of English has been accompanied by a growing demand for translation, as people’s own language continues to be the preferred language for access into informational goods. An area of significant growth in the translation industry in recent decades has been the activity of localization, through which global products are tailored to meet needs of specif- ic local markets (Cronin 2003, Pym 2004). In an informational economy characterized by instantaneous access to information worldwide, the objective of the localization industry becomes simultaneous availability in all the languages of the product’s target markets. Translation values and strategies in localization and elocalization (website localization) are not uniform but combine elements of domestication and foreignization to market products that have to appeal to their target buyers but, at the same time, often retain exoticizing con- nections to the language of technological innovation. Similarly, translation plays a central role in negotiating cultural difference and in shap- ing the dialects between homogeneity and diversity in the production of global news. […] [There are] present trends towards the homogenization of global news. However, these need to be examined alongside domesticating translation strategies aimed at a fluid com- munication with target readers and exotizicing devices through which the discourse of the other is staged in media (in, for example, English translations of Osama Bin Laden’s tapes or Saddam Hussein’s speeches). (pp. 28-31) lawRence venutI “Film Adaptation and Translation Theory: Equivalence and Ethics”. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 he shift in adaptation studies away from the discourse of fidelity toward a discourse T of intertextuality continues to raise conceptual problems. Is the emphasis on inter- textuality, to formulate one problem, just as essentialist as the concern with fidelity that it seeks to displace by devising film analyses and ideological critiques that assume among all audiences, regardless of their social diversity and historical moment, the same cultural lit- 37 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 38 Lawrence Venuti Media eracy and critical competence required to process the different sets of intertextual connec- tions at work in any film adaptation (namely, connections between the film and the adapted material as well as connections between that material and the context where it originated and between the film and its own originary context)? The most pressing problem, however, must be the necessity to reformulate a relation of correspondence between the film and the adapt- ed material that would justify calling a particular film an adaptation, that is to say, a film for which the processing of prior materials, including but in addition to a screenplay, is central to its signifying process. To treat a film as the second-order creation known as an adaptation (as distinct from such other second-order creations as a translation, a dramatic performance, a textual edition, or an anthology), its relation- ship to the prior material cannot be described Lawrence Venuti, Professor of English at simply as intertextual and analyzed as differ- Temple University, ential or interrogative. The film must also dis- works in early modern play a recognizable resemblance or similarity literature, British, to that material so as to share the title, name or American, and foreign poetic traditions, label by which it is designated. translation theory and history, and literary To conceptualize and supply this theo- translation. He is the author of The retical lack does not entail a return to the dis- Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995), and The Scandals of course of fidelity. In a previous study that Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference drew on translation theory to give a more (1998). He is the editor of the anthology of nuanced account of the discourse of intertex- essays, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (1992), and of The tuality (“Adaptation, Translation, Critique,” Translation Studies Reader (2nd ed. 2004). Journal of Visual Culture 6/1 [2007]: 25-43), I He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of constructed a hermeneutic model that treated Translation Studies (1998) and the Oxford as fundamentally interpretive the relation Guide to Literature in English Translation (2000). Recent articles and reviews have between second-order creations and the appeared in New York Times Book Review, materials they process. This relation should Performance Research, Translation and be seen as interpretive because it is contin- Literature, and Yale Journal of Criticism. In 1998, he edited a special issue of The gent, in the first instance, on the forms and Translator devoted to translation and practices which are deployed in the transla- minority. His translations from the Italian tion or adaptation and which differ in lan- include Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati (1983), I.U. Tarchetti’s Fantastic guage or medium from those deployed in the Tales (1992), Juan Rodolfo Wilcock’s prior materials (the relation is also contingent collection of real and imaginary biographies, on different kinds of reception, on different The Temple of Iconoclasts (2000), Antonia cultural situations, and on different historical Pozzi’s Breath: Poems and Letters (2002), Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2003), moments). The key category that enables a and Melissa P.’s fictionalized memoir, 100 translation to inscribe an interpretation in the Strokes of the Brush before Bed (2004). translation / inaugural issue / 2011 source text is the interpretant, usually a complicated set of interpretants, which can be either formal or thematic. Formal interpre- tants include a concept of equivalence, such as a semantic correspondence based on diction- ary definitions, or discursive strategy, such as close adherence to the source text, or a concept of style, a lexicon and syntax linked to a specific genre. Thematic interpretants are codes. 38 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 39 Lawrence Venuti They include an interpretation of the source text that has been formulated independently in commentary, a discourse in the sense of a relatively coherent body of concepts, problems, and arguments, or an ensemble of values, beliefs, and representations affiliated with specific social groups. These thematic interpretants can be interrelated: an interpretation of the source text set forth in a work of literary criticism may be used to encode a translation with an ideolo- gy, establishing an institutional or political affiliation. Formal and thematic interpretants can also be mutually determining: a concept of equivalence may in a certain cultural situation be reserved for canonical texts, so that when used to render a marginalized text it inscribes a code of canonicity. Similarly, a style or genre can encode a discourse in a translation, while a discourse can lead the translator to cultivate a style or construct a genre when neither exist- ed in the source text. he hermeneutic model can not only be reformulated to analyze an intersemiotic T translation like a film adaptation, but it can be used to reformulate a relation of resemblance or similarity between the film and the adapted materials. In a film adaptation, formal interpretants include a relation of equivalence, such as a structural cor- respondence between narrative point of view or plot details, a particular style that distin- guishes the work of a director or studio, or a concept of genre that necessitates a distinctive treatment of the adapted materials, whether retention or revision, imitation or manipula- tion. Thematic interpretants may include an interpretation of the adapted materials artic- ulated in commentary, a morality or cultural taste shared by the filmmakers and used to appeal to a particular audience, or a political position that reflects the interests of a specif- ic social group. In a film adaptation, formal and thematic interpretants can be interrelated and mutually determining. An actor’s previous roles (an interfilmic connection) might add a layer of meaning to the characterization in an adaptation for the informed spectator. A film genre like noir or the musical might introduce an entire discourse when used to adapt a novel or play composed in a different genre. he hermeneutic model does not entail a return to the discourse of fidelity because T it does not assume that the source text or adapted materials contain an invariant which is reproduced or transferred in the translation or adaptation. On the con- trary, the assumption is that a second-order creation transforms what it processes, that the interpretation inscribed by the translation or adaptation varies the form and meaning of the source text or adapted materials by removing them from their originary context and recon- textualizing them in a different language and medium in a different cultural situation at a different historical moment. Relations of resemblance simultaneously disclose relations of difference and vice versa. The hermeneutic model also avoids the risk of essentialism in the translation / inaugural issue / 2011 discourse of intertextuality because no formulation of the interpretants that enable and constrain a second-order creation is possible without the application of critical interpre- tants, that is to say, the critic’s or analyst’s own set of interpretive categories. To isolate rela- tions of resemblance and difference between the translation or adaptation, on the one hand, and the source text or adapted materials, on the other, the critic must apply a critical 39 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 40 Lawrence Venuti Media methodology (a formal interpretant, such as the hermeneutic model) or an interpretation of the text or material (a thematic interpretant) so as to fix their form and meaning of the source text or adapted materials and thereby bring to light the interpretants in the transla- tion or adaptation. The promise of the hermeneutic model, then, is not only a more nuanced account of translational and adaptational practices but a greater theoretical self- consciousness on the part of the critic. The hermeneutic model complicates the issue of value in second-order creations. Every interpretation is fundamentally evaluative insofar as it rests on the implicit judgment that a text is worth interpreting, not only in commentary but through translation or adaptation. Interpretants, moreover, are always already implicated in the hierarchies of value that struc- ture the receiving culture at a particular historical moment, its centers and peripheries, its canons and margins. Yet because a translation or adaptation necessarily transforms the source text or adapted materials, at once detaching them from their originary context and recontex- tualizing them, neither can be evaluated merely through a comparison to that text or those materials without taking into account the cultural and social conditions of their interpreta- tion. The evaluation must be shifted to a different level that seems to me properly ethical: in inscribing an interpretation, a translation or adaptation can stake out an ethical position and thereby serve an ideological function in relation to competing interpretations. second-order creation, more specifically, might be evaluated according to its impact, A potential or real, on cultural institutions in the receiving situation, according to whether it challenges the styles, genres, and discourses that have gained institution- al authority, according to whether it stimulates innovative thinking, research, and writing. This ethics of translation or adaptation does not treat the bad as “the non-respect of the name of the Other” (Alain Badiou), the move made by such theorists as Henri Meschonnic and Antoine Berman who argued that translation can and ought to respect the differences of for- eign texts and cultures through discursive strategies designed to preserve and make manifest those differences. Rather, the bad in translation or adaptation “is much more the desire to name at any price” (Badiou), imposing cultural norms that seek to master cognitively and thereby deny the singularity that stands beyond them, the alternative set of interpretants that enable a different translation or adaptation, a different interpretation. Hence a translation or adaptation should not be faulted for exhibiting features that are commonly called unethical, such as wholesale manipulation of the source text or adapted materials. We should instead examine the cultural and social conditions of the translation or adaptation, considering whether its interpretants initiate an event, creating new values and knowledges by supplying a lack that they reveal in those that are currently dominant in the receiving culture. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 40 

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translation

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 41 Representation MaRtHa p. y. cHeung From: “The (un)importance of flagging Chineseness. Making sense of a recur- rent theme in contemporary Chinese discourses on translation” (2011) Translation Studies, vol. 4, Issue 1. ranslation studies in China is best understood in the context of the cultural politics T of the time. Many debates about translation are in fact debates about the perennial problem of China’s cultural relationship with the world. In its most recent form, the debate is about whether the ‘influx’ of foreign translation theories and the wholesale accept- ance of these theories has resulted in a loss of identity for Chinese translation studies. A Martha P.Y. Cheung is related question concerns the appropriateness Chair Professor in of asserting Chineseness in academic dis- Translation and courses on translation. (p. 1) Director of the Centre for Translation of Hong […] Kong Baptist University. On the Chinese mainland, the notion of She has translated Chineseness emerged in the theoretical con- many Chinese literary works into English, and has published on translation theory, sciousness of scholars in different branches of literary translation, and translation history. the humanities in the mid-1980s. That devel- Her most recent publications are opment, which I will analyse in the following An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on pages, was initially a reaction to the theories, Translation, Volume 1: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project (St. Jerome imported through translation, which became Publishing, 2006) and a Special Issue of so influential on the Mainland after the The Translator on “Chinese Discourses on Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) that they Translation: Positions and Perspectives” (2009). She is now preparing Volume 2 came to be regarded not only as a threat to the of the Anthology. Her main research indigenous modes of scholarship, but also as interests include discourse and reflecting a general loss of confidence in metadiscourse of translation, the relation between translation theory and the practice Chinese culture. The arrival of other cultural of translation, and the changing meanings goods—such as films, fast food items, fashion of the concept of “translation” in different and others—which became equally popular translation traditions. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 with the Chinese people was also seen by many as a violent intrusion driven by greed and by thinly veiled cultural imperialism. There was concern that unless the development was checked in time, Chinese culture would be abandoned or changed beyond recognition, all its unique features eroded. This ‘threat’ is generally believed to have come from ‘the West’, with ‘the West’ to be understood in this article as a construct and, in the words of Naoki Sakai, as a “cartograph- 41 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 42 Martha P. Y. Cheung Representation ic category” (Sakai 2005: 201) denoting “the geographic areas imagined to constitute the West—mainly Western Europe in the nineteenth century, with North America being added later in the twentieth century” (ibid.: 194). Sakai also stresses, rightly I think, that the notion of modernity as a historical development and the process of “developmental tele- ology” have (mis)led many into believing that the West has the right “to expand and radi- ate towards the peripheries of the world”, so that “the representation of the world became hierarchically organized into the West and the Rest, the modern and its others, the white and the coloured” (ibid.: 202). The West also came to be regarded as centres of power where theories and models are produced, disseminated to the peripheries, and consumed by local academics keen to be part of the global community. As a category, I think that ‘the West’ is as much of a gross generalization and biased discursive construction as ‘the Orient’. But since this article deals with the historical circumstances in which Chineseness became a discursive topic as a result of the perceived threat posed by theories from ‘the West’, it is necessary to retain the use of such a category whilst bearing in mind that there are “no neu- tral, uncontaminated terms or concepts”, only “compromised, historically encumbered tools” (Clifford 1997: 39). (p. 2) […] s the debate about Chineseness, which has taken a myriad of forms and has erupted I repeatedly in different cultural and intellectual domains in China since the mid-1980s, indicative of an obsessive compulsive disorder plaguing the Chinese? Is it a minor and purely local affair? What significance, if any, does it have for the international community of scholars? In the field of translation studies, that significance can be gleaned from the appear- ance of a number of publications in English thematizing translation in China or discourse on translation in China. The fact that these publications—edited or authored by Chinese scholars based in the PRC—all came out in the first decade of the twenty-first century is significant. It indicates that on the international translation studies scene, Chinese voices are making themselves heard in quick succession. Perhaps the West is beginning to take an interest in listening to what China, or for that matter, what the non-West, has to say, fol- lowing the initiatives taken by Western scholars themselves to learn from other translation traditions and guard against Eurocentric tendencies. With such an interest, and with the availability of primary material in translation, the West can, should it choose to make the effort, achieve a deeper and more thorough understanding of the Other, an understanding that is absolutely necessary if translation studies is to become “truly ‘international’” (Susam- Sarajeva 2002: 203). Certainly, understanding is a prerequisite for conducting what I have called explorations in a dialogic, fully collaborative mode, meaning a mode of discourse translation / inaugural issue / 2011 based not on the pattern of “one topic, separate narratives”, but on the exchange of views on equal terms. The debate about Chineseness also has significance for the international community of scholars. Voicelessness or speaking with a voice not one’s own is not peculiar to the Chinese, but is the common affliction of scholars in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This 42 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 43 Martha P. Y. Cheung being the case, the Chinese sense of culture in crisis assumes significance as an instance of the general sense of vulnerability and defencelessness that is tormenting the (intellectually and culturally) subjugated. The fact that this is the plight of the Third World intellectuals in general is a chastening reminder that although knowledge, ethnicity, identity and nation- alism should be separate and independent concepts, in reality they are often hopelessly entangled. We do not live in a post-nationalist world—not yet. he debate about Chineseness has implications, too, for the promotion of intercul- T tural dialogue in the new geopolitical settings of the twenty-first century. One of these settings will be ushered in by the rise of China as a major power and the rad- ical changes that are likely to follow in the power politics of the world. Bearing this in mind, I would argue that a productive debate about Chineseness will be an enabling condition for intercultural dialogue. As we have seen, that debate, though occasionally given to belliger- ent assertion of nationalistic sentiments, is equally accompanied by stern warnings against such sentiments and against academic sinocentrism. It is also characterized by discursive attempts to project interpretations and constructions of China via a range of media. The intensity of these activities suggests that Chineseness will continue to be a contested con- cept, and that the Chinese will be engaged in a continuous process of self-constitution and cultural self-translation. This is healthy. In the course of their history, the Chinese lived all too long in the mentality of a Middle Kingdom. For centuries they were used to imagining themselves as the centre of power, taming and domesticating their nomadic neighbours with their superior civilization and turning them into vassal states. No doubt, there were occasional periods when China lived in self-imposed isolation. It is also true that for much of the last two centuries, the Chinese were driven by the humiliation of national defeat into a pattern of behaviour typical of the cowed and wounded. Nonetheless, the Middle Kingdom still features prominently in the imagination of the Chinese. Unless China becomes fully aware that identity is not fixed but is an ongoing narrative with a plot criss- crossed with possibilities and an indeterminate end, it could easily get trapped in a victim- turned-aggressor complex and become a monolithic entity determined to dominate the world—through either a policy of aggression or cultural imperialism. Far from being con- ducive to intercultural dialogue, that would only lead to a clash of empires. The debate about Chineseness—whether philosophical or discursive in orientation, and whether onto- logical, epistemological, existential, hermeneutical, or political and ideological in empha- sis—will prevent China from hardening into such a monolithic entity. (pp. 13-14) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 43 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 44 Theo Hermans Representation tHeO HeRMans From: Conference of the Tongues (2007) Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. The thick of it et us leave the examples for what they are and try to formulate the more general issue L at stake. I think it is at least twofold. First, there is the problem of grasping and gain- ing access to concepts and discursive practices, in our case those pertaining to trans- lation, in languages and cultures other than our own; this is primarily a problem of hermeneutics, of understanding and interpretation. Secondly, the cross-lingual and cross- cultural study of concepts and discursive practices involves recourse to translation if we want to articulate in our own language what we have understood as happening in another lan- Theo Hermans is guage. We need to translate in order to study Professor of Dutch and translation across languages and cultures. Comparative Literature at University College […] London (UCL). Beyond Both issues are familiar territory for UCL he is involved in anthropologists and historians, and for com- the Translation paratists in a number of other disciplines. Research Summer School (TRSS) and with the International Association for Translation Both also carry an element of latent or overt and Intercultural Studies (IATIS). He also self-reflection on the terms on which and the edits the book series Translation Theories contexts in which the representation of other- Explored for St. Jerome Publishing. He has published on translation theory and history, ness is acted out. But while these problems and on Dutch and comparative literature. have been debated anxiously and extensively Monographs include The Structure of by ethnographers and historiographers, they Modernist Poetry (1982), Translation in Systems (1999) and The Conference of the have remained largely and surprisingly absent Tongues (2007). He has edited The from the study of translation. Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary The absence is not inevitable, as becomes Translation (1985), The Flemish Movement: A Documentary History (1992), Crosscultural clear when we recall some earlier attempts to Transgressions (2002), Translating Others create a methodology for the cross-cultural (2006) and A Literary History of the Low study and representation of concepts. In 1932, Countries (2009). His work has been for example, in his book Mencius on the Mind, translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, Spanish, and Turkish. I.A. Richards developed what he called a “tech- In October 2006 he was awarded the nique of multiple definition” as a way of nego- honorary post of Adjunct Professor in the translation / inaugural issue / 2011 tiating alien meaning. Department of Translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. […] Twenty years after Mencius, in Speculative Instruments (1955), Richards reviewed his cross-cultural mapping tool in the essay Toward a Theory of Comprehending…. As regards the cross-cultural study of con- 44 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 45 Theo Hermans cepts, he observed, we compare things in certain respects, and we select those respects that will serve our purpose. […] Any similarity thus established between two entities is a function of the respects that were selected as the ground for comparison in the first place. Comprehending, as the per- ception and positing of similarities and differences, is continually thrown back on an exam- ination of the instrument which enables the similarities and differences to be established. […] This brings us to what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called “thick translation” (Appiah 2004). Appiah means by it the academic, heavily footnoted translation of texts from traditions alien to that of the translating language. I will not use the term in Appiah’s sense. Instead I will use it as a label for a self-critical form of cross-cultural translation stud- ies. The transposition seems appropriate if, as I suggested above, we take the study of trans- lation as consisting in translating concepts and practices of translation. Appiah grafted his term “thick translation” on Clifford Geertz’s characterization of the ethnographer’s work as “thick description.” This was a notion that Geertz introduced in the programmatic essay “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” which introduced his collection The Interpretation of Cultures in 1973. […] Applying this line of thought to ethnographic work, Geertz notes several practical points. Firstly he insists on both the interpretive and constructivist nature of the ethnogra- phers descriptions (1973: 15-16). The point at issue for him is not whether the ethnogra- pher’s thick description presents an accurate account of a particular society…but whether it allows an appreciation both of what is similar and what is different, and in what ways, from what angles,—in what “respects,” as Richards might have said—things appear similar and different. Finally, thick description keeps the universalizing urge of theory in check. Preferring the microhistories of particular situations, it prides itself on the “delicacy of its distinctions, not on the sweep of its abstractions” (Geertz 1973: 25). As one commentator phrases it, thick description privileges the many over the one (Inglis 2000: 115). […] For all these reasons, “thick translation” seems to me a line worth pursuing if we want to study concepts and practices of translation across languages and cultures. As a form of translation studies, thick translation has the potential to bring about a double dislocation: of the foreign terms and concepts, which are probed by means of a methodology and vocab- ulary alien to them, and of the describer’s own terminology, which must be wrenched out of its familiar shape to accommodate both alterity and similarity. In other words, thick translation / inaugural issue / 2011 translation is a double-edged technique. It engages with very different ways of conceptual- izing translation, and it serves as a critique of current translation studies. (pp. 145-150) 45 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 46 Elsa Tamez Representation elsa taMez From: “Three Narratives in Dialogue: the Text, the Translators and the Readers”, presented at the conference “Translation, Identity and Heterogeneity”, organized by the Nida Institute and other institutions at the University of San Marcos, Peru, December 2007. o see cultures as narratives allows us to see the ‘other’ as an event impossible to cap- T ture in rigid or static concepts, univocal or one dimensional. This starting point for a reflection on translation in the context of pluriculturalism carries two conse- quences. On the one hand it challenges all pretension of absolute equivalency in translations, already refuted by the new translation theories. On the other hand, it re-dimensions the contribution of dynamic and functional equivalencies by radicalizing them. Now, speaking of dialogue, we need to bring together the elements we are working with, that is, the biblical text, the translator and the reader. In this light, the figures of body and narrative are important in relation to the translator and the reader, the same as the text, because in the end a narrative is also a text and a narrated text is a body. The semiotician Elsa Tamez is Emeritus Professor of the Latin Roland Barthes has said that in the circle of American Biblical Arab scholars they speak of the text as a body. University and If the body is text, then the translator and the Translation Consultant reader are also texts because they are bodies of the United Bible Societies. She was born made up of an infinity of interwoven tissues in Mexico. Prof. Tamez received her and textures; the text is interwoven; as bodies Doctor's Degree in Theology from the are weavings of flesh and texts are weavings of University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She received her Licentiate in Theology in 1979 linguistic signs, but all are narratives, bodies from the Latin American Biblical Seminary, and texts. and a Licentiate in Literature and Linguistics at the National University of Costa Rica in 1986. Among her most known This symbolic terminology is important publications in English are: The Bible of the because it breaks with fundamentalism, giv- Oppressed (1980), The Scandalous Message of ing life, specificity and spontaneity to the James (1989), The Amnesty of Grace (1993), and When the Horizons Close: Rereading three elements in the approach that we are Ecclesiastes (2000). Her latest publication is attempting to develop in this essay. Jesus and Courageous Women (2001) and Struggles of Power in Early Christianity Of these three narrative elements, that (2007). She has received several awards for her contribution to Contextual Biblical translation / inaugural issue / 2011 of the readers is the motor that starts up the Hermeneutics. dialogue in the translation process. The Bible is not translated just because, or in order to impose a particular kind of message. It is done in order to share a message that dignifies and empowers the person and it does so with a particular audience in mind that has requested said translation. This happens when that audience wishes to hear or read in its own mother tongue what it has heard or read in anoth- 46 

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translation

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 49 War and conflict eMIly apteR From: The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature (2006) Princeton: Princeton University Press. Twenty Theses on Translation • Nothing is translatable. • Global translation is another name for comparative literature. • Humanist translatio is critical secularism. • The translation zone is a war zone. • Contrary to what U.S. military strategy would suggest, Arabic is translatable. • Translation is a petit métier, translators the literary proletariat. • Mixed tongues contest the imperium of global English. • Translation is an oedipal assault on the mother tongue. • Translation is the traumatic loss of native language. • Translation is plurilingual and postmedial expressionism. • Translation is Babel, a universal language that is universally unintelligible. • Translation is the language of planets and monsters. • Translation is a technology. • Translationese is the generic language of global markets. • Translation is a universal language of techne. • Translation is a feedback loop. • Translation can transpose nature into data. • Translation is the interface between language and genes. • Translation is the system-subject. • Everything is translatable. (pp. XI-XII) he urgent, political need for skilled translators became abundantly clear in the trag- T translation / inaugural issue / 2011 ic wake of 9/11, as institutions charged with protecting national security scram- bled to find linguistically proficient specialists to decode intercepts and docu- ments. Translation and global diplomacy seemed never to have been so mutually implicat- ed. As America’s monolingualism was publicly criticized as part of renewed calls for shared information, mutual understanding across cultural and religious divides, and multilateral cooperation, translation moved to the fore as an issue of major political and cultural signif- 49 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 50 Emily Apter War and conflict icance. No longer deemed a mere instrument of international relations, business, education, and culture, translation took on special relevance as a matter of war and peace. It is in this political situation that The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature took shape. The book aims to rethink translation studies—a field traditionally defined by problems of linguistic and textual fidelity to the original—in a broad theoreti- cal framework that emphasizes the role played by mistranslation in war, the influence Emily Apter teaches at New York University of language and literature wars on canon for- since 2002, after having mation and literary fields, the aesthetic sig- taught in French and nificance of experiments with nonstandard Comparative Literature at UCLA, Cornell language, and the status of the humanist tra- University, UC-Davis, dition of translatio studii in an area of techno- Penn and Williams College. At NYU she logical literacy. teaches in the departments of French, Structuring my lines of inquiry has English, and Comparative Literature, specializing in courses on French Critical been an awareness of the contradictory Theory, the History and Theory of process by which globally powerful languages Comparative Literature, the problem of such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Swahili, “Francophonie,” translation studies, French feminism, and nineteenth and twentieth Spanish, Arabic, French simultaneously century French literature. Recent essays reduce linguistic diversity and spawn new have focused on paradigms of forms of multilingual aesthetic practice. "oneworldedness," the problem of self- property and self-ownership, literary While it has become commonplace, for world-systems and the translatability of example, to bemoan the hegemony of global genres, and how to think about translation English as the lingua franca of technocracy, as a form of intellectual labor. Since 1998 there has been insufficient attention paid to she has edited the book series, Translation/Transnation for Princeton how other global languages are shifting the University Press. In progress: coediting with balance of power in the production of world Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood the culture. Chinese, for example, is now a major English edition of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des language of internet literacy and is taking on intraduisibles [Dictionary of Untranslatables: English as never before. A Philosophical Lexicon]. With Bruno An underlying promise of this book Bosteels she is editing a selection of Alain Badiou’ s literary writings. Work in has been that language wars, great and small, preparation also includes two books: shape the politics of translation in the “Politics small p:” Essays on the Society of spheres of media, literacy, literary markets, Calculation in Nineteenth Century France and electronic information transfer, and codes of Against World Literature: On Untranslatability in Comparative Literature. literariness. The field of translation studies has been accordingly expanded to include on the one hand, pragmatic, real world issues— intelligence-gathering in war, the embattlement of minority languages within official state translation / inaugural issue / 2011 cultures, controversies over ‘other Englishes’—and on the other, more conceptually abstract considerations such as the literary appropriation of pidgins and creoles, or multilingual experimentalism among historic avant-gardes, or translation across media. Translation studies has always had to confront the problem of whether it best serves the ends of perpetuating cultural memory or advancing its effacement. A good translation, 50 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 51 Vicente L. Rafael as Walter Benjamin famously argued, makes possible the afterlife of the original by jump- ing the line between the death of the source language and its futural transference to a tar- get. This death/life aporia leads to split discourses in the field of translation studies: while translation is deemed essential to the dissemination and preservation of textual inheritance, it is also understood to be an agent of language extinction. For translation, especially in a world dominated by the languages of powerful economies and big populations, condemns minority tongues to obsolescence, even as it fosters access to the cultural heritage of “small” literatures, or guarantees a wider sphere of reception to seIected, representative authors of minoritarian traditions. (pp. 3-4) vIcente l. Rafael From: “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of Empire” (2009) Social Text, 101, v. 27, no. 4, Winter. n a time of war, the task of the translator Vicente L. Rafael is I is invariably mired in a series of professor of history at intractable and irresolvable contradic- the University of Washington in Seattle. tions. It begins with the fact that translation Much of his work has itself is a highly volatile act. As the displace- focused on such topics ment, replacement, transfer and transforma- as comparative colonialism and nationalism, translation, tion of the original into another language, language and power, and the cultural translation is incapable of fixing meanings histories of analog and digital media across languages. Rather, as with the story of especially in the context of Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and the United States. Babel, it consists precisely in the proliferation His books include Contracting Colonialism: and confusion of possible meanings and there- Translation and Christian Conversion in fore in the impossibility of arriving at a single Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (1993); White Love and Other Events in Filipino one. For this reason, it repeatedly brings into Histories (2000), and The Promise of the crisis the locus of address, the interpretation Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of of signs, the agency of mediation, and the Translation in the Spanish Philippines (2005). ethics of speech. Hence is it impossible for anyone to fully control much less recuperate its workings. The treachery and treason inher- ent in translation in a time of war are the insistent counterpoints to the pervasive wish for translation / inaugural issue / 2011 language to be fully transparent to meaning and fully compliant with the intentions of its speakers regardless of what side of the conflict they are on. Any attempt to reduce language into a sheer instrument of either the will to power or the will to resistance, thanks to trans- lation, will invariably fail. Undercutting attempts to impose domination or hegemony, trans- lation betrays both by promoting the circulation of what remains untranslatable. It would seem then that in the context of war, translation is at permanent war with itself. 51 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 52 Vicente L. Rafael War and conflict ranslation at war and as war: how do we understand this? If translation is like war, T is it possible that war is also like translation? It is possible I think if we consider that the time of war is like the movement of translation. There is a sense that both lead not to the privileging of order and meaning but to emergence of what I’ve referred to as the untranslatable. ‘Wartime’ spreads what Nietzsche called in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, “an all consuming fever” that creates a crisis in historical thinking. So much of the way we think about history, certainly in the Westernized parts of our planet since the Enlightenment, is predicated on a notion of time as the succession of events leading towards increasingly more progressive ends. Wartime decimates that mode of thinking. Instead, it creates mass disorientation at odds with the temporal rhythms of progress and civilization. In this way, wartime is what Samuel Weber refers to as “pure movement.” It is a “whirlwind… that sweeps everything up in its path and yet goes nowhere. As a movement, the whirlwind of war marks time, as it were, inscribing it in a destructive circularity that is both centripetal and centrifugal, wrenching things and people out of their accustomed places, displacing them and with them, all [sense] of place as well. …Wartime thus wrecks havoc with tradi- tional conceptions of space and time and with the order they make possible.” It is precisely the disordering effect of war on our notions of space and time that brings it in association with translation that tends to scatter meaning, displace origins, and expose the radical undecidability of references, names and addressees. Put differently, translation in wartime intensifies the experience of untranslatability and thus defies the demands of any particular power to reorder a place and call forth the submission of its inhabitants. Just as civilizational time engenders the permanent possibility of wartime, the time that is out of joint and out of whack, so the time of translation is haunted by untranslatability, the fever- ish circulation of misrecognition and uncertainty from which we can find neither safety nor security, national or otherwise. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 52 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17562

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 53 Politics eMIly apteR From: The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature (2006) Princeton: Princeton University Press. have real reservations about pushing translation studies in the direction of linguistic I ecology even if this new direction offers potentially rich possibilities for interdiscipli- nary work between comparative literature and area studies. More worries are ground- ed in the concern that a translation studies overly indebted to linguistic ecology risks fetishizing heritage language as it devotes itself to curatorial salvage: exoticizing burrs, calques and idiomatic expressions as so many ornaments of linguistic local color, reinforc- ing linguistic cultural essentialism, and subjecting the natural flux and variation of dialect to a standard language model of grammatical fixity. I am personally more inclined toward a critical model of language politics that would continue to emphasize aesthetic and theo- retical questions, while invigorating the investigation of linguistic nominalism, or what a language name really names when it refers to grammatical practices in linguistic territories. Language wars have also remained a central theme in my conceptualization of trans- lation zones. In fastening on the term ‘zone’ as a theoretical mainstay, the intention has been to imagine a broad intellectual topography that is neither the property of a single nation, nor an amorphous condition associated with postnationalism, but rather a zone of critical engagement that connects the ‘l’ and the ‘n’ of transLation and transNation. The common root ‘trans’ operates as a connecting port of translational transnationalism (a term I use to emphasize translation among small nations or minority language communities), as well as the point of debarkation to cultural caesura—a trans—ation—where transmission failure is marked. (p. 5) […] The zone, in my ascription, has designated sites that are ‘in-translation’, that is to say, belonging to no single, discrete language or single medium of communication. Broadly con- ceived in these terms, the translation zone applies to diasporic language communities, print and media public spheres, institutions of governmentality and language policy-making, the- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 aters of war, and literary theories with particular relevance to the history and future of com- parative literature. The translation zone defines the epistemological interstices of politics, poetics, logic, cybernetics, linguistics, genetics, media, and environment; its locomotion characterizes both psychic transference and the technology of information transfer. (p. 6) 53 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 54 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Politics gayatRI cHaKRavORty spIvaK From: Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993) London – New York: Routledge. Translation as reading ow does the translator attend to the Gayatri Chakravorty H specificity of the language she translates? There is a way in which the rhetorical nature of every language dis- Spivak is University Professor and founding member of the Institute for Comparative rupts its logical systematicity. If we emphasize Literature and Society at Columbia University. Her the logical at the expense of these rhetorical translation with critical introduction of interferences, we remain safe. “Safety” is the Jacques Derrida’ s De la grammatologie appropriate term here, because we are talking appeared in 1976. Among her books are In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics of risks, of violence to the translating medium. (1987; Routledge Classics 2002), Selected I felt that I was taking those risks when Subaltern Studies (ed., 1988), The Post- I recently translated some eighteenth-century Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues Bengali poetry. I quote a bit from my (1990), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993; Routledge Classics 2003), Imaginary Maps “Translator’s Preface”: (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1994), A Critique of I must overcome what I was taught in school: the Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the highest mark for the most accurate collection of Vanishing Present (1999), Old Women (translation with critical introduction of two synonyms, strung together in the most proximate stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1999), Imperatives syntax. I must resist both the solemnity of chaste to Re-Imagine the Planet / Imperative zur Victorian poetic prose and the forced simplicity Neuerfindung des Planeten (ed. Willi of “plain English”, that have imposed themselves Goetschel, 1999; 2d ed. forthcoming), Chotti as the norm ... Translation is the most intimate Munda and His Arrow (translation with critical introduction of a novel by Mahasweta Devi, act of reading. I surrender to the text when I 2002), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias translate. These songs, sung day after day in fam- (2005), An Aesthetic Education in the Age of ily chorus before clear memory began, have a Globalization (forthcoming). Significant peculiar intimacy for me. Reading and surrender- articles: “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing ing take on new meanings in such a case. The Historiography” (1985), “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), “The Politics of Translation” translator earns permission to transgress from the (1992), “Moving Devi” (1999), “Righting trace of the other—before memory—in the clos- Wrong” (2003), “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, est places of the self. Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching” (2004), “Translating into English” (2005), translation / inaugural issue / 2011 “Rethinking Comparativism” (2010). Activist Yet language is not everything. It is only in rural education and feminist and ecological a vital clue to where the self loses its bound- social movements since 1986. aries. The ways in which rhetoric of figura- tion disrupt logic themselves point at the possibility of random contingency, beside lan- guage, around language. Such a dissemination cannot be under our control. Yet in transla- 54 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 55 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak tion, where meaning hops into the spacy emptiness between two named historical lan- guages, we get perilously close to it. By juggling the disruptive rhetoricity that breaks the sur- face in not necessarily connected ways, we feel the selvedges of the language-textile give way, fray into frayages or facilitations. Although every act of reading or communication is a bit of this risky fraying which scrambles together somehow, our stake in agency keeps the fraying down to a minimum except in the communication and reading of and in love. (What is the place of “love” in the ethical? [...] Irigaray has struggled with this question.) The task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying, holds the agency of the translator and the demands of her imagined or actual audi- ence at bay. The politics of translation from a non-European woman’s text too often sup- presses this possibility because the translator cannot engage with, or cares insufficiently for, the rhetoricity of the original. The simple possibility that something might not be meaningful is contained by the rhetorical system as the always possible menace of a space outside language. This is most eerily staged (and challenged) in the effort to communicate with other possible intelligent beings in space. (Absolute alterity or otherness is thus differed-deffered into an other self who resembles us, however minimally, and with whom we can communicate). But a more homely staging of it occurs across two earthly languages. The experience of contained alter- ity in an unknown language spoken in a different cultural milieu is uncanny. Let us now think that, in that other language, rhetoric may be disrupting logic in the matter of the production of an agent, and indicating the founding violence of the silence at work within rhetoric. Logic allows us to jump from word to word by means of clearly indi- cated connections. Rhetoric must work in the silence between and around words in order to see what works and how much. The jagged relationship between rhetoric and logic, con- dition and effect of knowing, is a relationship by which a world is made for the agent, so that the agent can act in an ethical way, a political way, a day-to-day way; so that the agent can be alive, in a human way, in the world. Unless one can at least construct a model of this for the other language, there is no real translation. (pp. 180-181) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 55 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17563

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 56 Ideology MaRtHa p. y. cHeung From: “Representation, Intervention and Mediation: A Translation Anthologist’s Reflections on the Complexities of Translating China” in Luo, Xuanmin & He, Yuanjian (eds.), Translating China (2009) Bristol: Multilingual Matters. he “need to think ideologically about translation research” is a call I made in anoth- T er paper (Cheung 2002). I would like to reiterate it here. To think ideologically about translation research does not mean that we treat everything as ideologically suspect. It does mean, however, that we accept ideological leanings/bias/convictions as an epistemological fact, as something that is built into our attempts to make sense of things. And this, I think, is one way of dealing with the problem of representation—both self-rep- resentation as well as representation of ‘the other’. As far as An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation: From Ancient Times to the Revolution of 1911 is concerned, think- ing ideologically about translation research means admitting that the kind of understanding provided by this anthology for its English-speaking reader will be mediated by all who are involved in the preparation of the project, and above all, by my own theoretical and ideolog- ical orientations. These orientations can be summed up as at once a readiness to help—in a non-innocent manner—‘Western’ readers understand ‘Chinese’ thinking about translation in its context as well as a determination to engage with ‘Western’ thinking about translation on its own terms. These orientations are the result of my attempt to make full use of Hong Kong’s marginal position—marginal in relation to China as well as the West—which enables me to look East and also to look West rather than at or from a single direction. These orientations mark the limits, and perhaps also the excitement, of the kind of inter- vention I am trying to achieve through the compilation of this anthology. (pp. 13-14) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 56 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 57 Francis Jones fRancIs jOnes From: “‘Geldshark Ares god of War’: Ideology and Time in Literary Translation” (2006) in The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 36, No. 1, Translation. iterary source texts, the translator’s raw materials, are often crucially time-marked. A L text may have aged so much that its language, the content and allusions of its text world, or even its genre strike the translator as markedly non-modern, thus creating an ‘external’ time-gap between source and target text (translation). Or the source writer may deliberately use language, content, or genre to allude to or site the text world in previous time, thus creating an ‘internal’ time-gap within the source text. Thus, when a translator reads the Watchman’s speech at the opening of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, she or he knows Francis Jones teaches that, externally, the language is distinct from MA modules in translation studies and Modern Greek, long-distance communication research methods, and by signal-fires manned by watchmen was a supervise translation- feature of the pre-modern world, and a music, based PhD projects at dance, and recitative retelling of a well-known the University of Newcastle. His research focuses on poetry legend was a standard literary genre of the translation: especially translating processes time. She or he also knows that, internally, and strategies, and how translators work Aeschylus in the fifth century B.C. is telling a with others within a social-political context. He is particularly interested in translation story set eight or nine centuries earlier. within the South Slav region (ex- Time-marking, therefore, can be central Yugoslavia). He translates mainly poetry. to a source work’s textuality, which means He also edits translations, mainly in South Slav culture, politics, and philosophy. that translators must choose how to reflect He works largely from Dutch and Bosnian- this marking in the target work. Translators’ Croatian-Serbian, though he also translates choices can be seen as forming a spectrum from German, Hungarian, Russian, and from extreme archaization (ageing) to Caribbean creoles. He has about 15 published volumes of translated poetry, extreme modernization (updating). The most several of which have won prizes. common are: • ‘Time-matched archaization’: target language and text world are of a similar time to those of the source. For example, an English translation of a Dutch Renaissance poem might use lan- guage and imagery from Herbert and Donne. • ‘Superficial archaization’: retaining the past text world; linguistically, inserting occasional ‘past’ signals (such as verily) in an otherwise modern target idiom. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 • ‘Minimal modernization’: retaining the past text world; target language and often genre are broadly present-day, without being marked for specific year/decade. • ‘Violent modernization’: using linguistic signals and even text-world items that are specifical- ly marked as present-day. For example, James Holmes translates Charles d’Orléans’s fifteenth- century ‘amoureux nouveaulx’ (literally ‘new lovers’) as ‘rockers’, and ‘chevauchent’ (lit. ‘ride’) as ‘revving their engines’. 57 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 58 Francis Jones Ideology Such decisions prompt readers to construct representations of translated texts that are both temporal and cultural. Thus when Holmes translates ‘amoureux nouveaulx’ as ‘lusty yonge bacheleres’ (time-matched archaization), he sites the poem in a medieval love-poetry tradition familiar to target readers; and when he translates them as ‘rockers’, he signals its modern cultural relevance. Moreover, translation norms (that is, culture-specific conven- tions governing literary translation) prompt translators and readers to prefer certain repre- sentations and disprefer others. For recent English translations of older literary works, for example, minimal modernization is the most favoured strategy; archaization is largely dis- favoured, and violent modernization meets with a mixed reception. In other words, the main UK/US norm advocates concealing time-markings, rather than highlighting them by fore- grounding the historicity or present-day relevance of the translated literary text. This is only a convention, however: no discourse, even minimal modernization, can stand outside time. Some choices which translators make may be random and ungrounded. Others, how- ever, may be based on a socially shared system or systems of ideas, values, or beliefs. These we term, with no pejorative undertone, ‘ideologies of translation’. They may convey transla- tors’ attitudes towards the source text and writer, towards the source and target culture, towards their own role as mediators, and more besides. Moreover, literary communication via translation is affected not only by translators’ ideologies, but also by those of others in the writing, publishing, and reading process. And ideologies of translation can have wider cultural and even social effects: for example, in helping shape attitudes between countries. Investigating ideologies of translation, therefore, can give important insights into the nature of literary communication, as many studies attest. Time-marking in translation, how- ever, remains remarkably under-researched (a fact probably linked to the stigmatization of strategies that highlight it). Hence there has been little analysis of how ideology might influ- ence translators’ strategies for tackling time-marked literary works and readers’ opinions of the resulting target texts. (pp. 191-192) […] deologies, being socially shared systems, are created and maintained through discourse: I with ideologies of literary translation, for example, by making and performing, reading and hearing, promoting and discussing translated works. This discourse takes place within tighter or looser social networks, such as those involving source writer, translator, publisher, critics, and general readers. And as individuals and groups have multiple ideolo- gies, ideologies may stand in dominant, subservient, or transgressive relationships with one another. Ideologies informing the use and reception of translators’ time-reference strategies appear to fall into three types, closely interlinked though they may be: the socio-political, the intercultural, and the aestethic. (p. 193) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 58 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17565

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 59 Knowledge ROBeRt j. c. yOung “Some Questions about Translation and the Production of Knowledge”. he practice of translation has always been described in metaphorical terms, as T ‘fidelity’ or ‘license’, notably, and this tendency to describe it solely in terms of what it is not (to borrow Aristotle’s description of metaphor) means that as a result it is therefore always running away from itself, while its content remains unspecified. Perhaps this is why one of the fates of translation as a word is also to find itself incessantly being translated in turn by being used as a metaphor for something else—and never more so than now—perhaps because as a metaphor it remains in some sense an empty signifier. A whole range of changing human, institutional and cultural experiences are deemed to fall under the rubric of the translational. Translation, the activity of the transposition of one lan- Robert J.C. Young is guage into another, has itself been translated Julius Silver Professor of English and by cultural commentators into a modus Comparative Literature operandi of our times, reflecting on the one at New York University. hand the preference for dynamic rather than He was formerly static concepts or metaphors, and on the Professor of English and Critical Theory at Oxford University and other, though not entirely disassociated from a fellow of Wadham College. In different the first, the increasing cultural, economic, ways, his work has been primarily electronic, institutional and material interac- concerned with people and their cultures who exist or have existed on the margins tion of different sections within society and and peripheries of society, whether between different societies. In a globalizing nationally or globally. He has published world, translation seems to offer the most apt White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Routledge, 1990, new edition 2004), metaphor for the ways in which practices are Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory being daily transformed in almost every area and Race (Routledge, 1995), Postcolonialism: of society, from academia to zoology. What, An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2001), however, is exactly being performed in such Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003) and The Idea of English translation / inaugural issue / 2011 processes of translation? Ethnicity (Blackwell, 2008). He is the general editor of Interventions: International Journal The ‘translational turn’, if we may call it of Postcolonial Studies, and was also a founding editor of the Oxford Literary Review that, is occurring at the very moment when which he edited from 1977 to 1994. His work current work in translation studies has been has been translated into 20 languages. 59 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 60 Robert J. C. Young Knowledge focussing on the ways in which translation is not a neutral activity that transforms one text into another language in a transparent way, but always involves a form of power relations that directs the terms of the translation, which in turn affects its result, massages the mes- sage. Translation, it may be said, always takes place on someone’s terms, and the results are those which best conform to the terms that have been preset. Translation never involves a transparent or neutral act of substitution or negotiation; rather it produces a transforma- tion that may embody a whole range of philosophical, political and cultural agendas (whether conscious or unconscious) that translation helps to put into practice—and never more so than when translation is negotiating between significantly different cultures (whether between different times, between different strata within a particular society, or between different societies). Here translation begins to participate within the hidden, determining processes of a particular ideology. A good example is provided by Cliff Siskin and Bill Warner: at the beginning of Kant’s “An Answer to the Question, What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), Kant translates Horace’s two-word admonition, ‘sapere aude!’ (‘dare to understand!’ or ‘dare to gain wisdom!’) as ‘Habe Muth dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen!’--‘Have the courage to use your own understanding!’ With this single free or, strictly, mistranslation, Kant turns the pursuit of knowledge inside out, from gaining understanding of the world, to daring to use your own inner principles of under- standing, pointing knowledge henceforth in a thoroughly Kantian direction. Kant revolu- tionizes the modern subject by turning him or her inwards upon the self so that under- standing henceforth becomes its own object of knowledge. Does translation produce new knowledge or does it sometimes end up providing forms of false or bogus knowledge, trav- esties that, paradoxically, seem to work better? Kant’s creative (mis)translation effectively refracted the trajectory of the Enlightenment that he is discussing. The structure of translation, however, is not always simply a binary one, between two texts. In fact it always involves at least four dimensions—the translator, the source and tar- get texts, and the eventual reader. Translation is equally often inserted in a power field oper- ating according to a range of simultaneously incompatible demands and needs, between dif- ferent authorities, multiple languages, requiring production of a certain kind of knowledge that may be very different from that or those in the texts in other languages—or domain— that are being translated. In general terms, Enlightenment ideals of comprehensive or uni- versal forms of knowledge required them to be deployed on a level playing field in which they could make up part of a compatible system, and transparent translation was one means through which that universal economic system of knowledge exchange was sup- posed to be effected and produced. We could say that this was an early version of Jakobson’s radical equivalence in difference. Today we would add that the epistemological and cultur- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 al differences embedded in the forms of different languages means that translation always involves transformation, it is not a transparent and exact process. It offers a process of equivalence, but the equivalent is never fully equivalent. Translation theory focuses on this paradoxical moment when translation makes the different into the same, but a same which is at the same time different. Philosophically, this perception has produced a movement the other way, towards an emphasis on untranslatability. What does it mean that today we have 60 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 61 Robert J. C. Young moved the stress to the untranslatable? Knowledges, we now wish to say in a counter- Enlightenment move, are not necessarily constructed in a translatable way; so Jacques Derrida argued that philosophical ‘concepts [cannot] transcend idiomatic differences’, and this has produced continuing reverberating effects in the history of philosophy which until recently has been presented as a multilingual discipline unaffected by the linguistic differ- ence that forms its own medium. Exactly the same point can be made about Translation Studies itself. Following Derrida, recent commentators have stressed how such knowledge contains forms of resistance that emerge in moments of ‘untranslatability’. hat, then, in a world of translation are the effects of this particular twist of the W current translational turn? What are the conditions of the contemporary per- formance of translation? What forms of transformation or mistranslation are being produced under the rubric of ‘translation’, and which if any of them are providing sig- nificant examples of transformation, re-alignment, or resistance? Which forms of transla- tion in our current translational world have proved enabling, which disempowering? Does translation produce new knowledge or does it rather end up providing forms of distorted knowledge through ‘fuzzy translation’ that nevertheless manages to work as knowledge but which are as much determined by linguistic difference as by any mediator? What is the difference between translation and ‘mediation’? At what point does mediation encounter irremediable untranslatability, how does it deal with it when it does and what effects are produced? translation / inaugural issue / 2011 61 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17566

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 62 Memory Bella BROdzKI From: Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007) Stanford: Stanford University Press. ranslation is an intercultural as well as a translingual phenomenon, a transcultural T as well as an interlingual process. It involves the transfer of a narrative or text from one signifying form to another, the transporting of texts from one historical con- text to another, and the tracking of the migration of meanings from one cultural space to another. Because translation is a movement never fully achieved, both trans, meaning ‘across’, and inter, meaning ‘between’, are crucial to an understanding of the breadth of the workings of translation. We are most accustomed to thinking of translation as an empirical linguis- tic maneuver, but excavating or unearthing burial sites or ruins in order to reconstruct traces of the physical and textual past in a new context is also a mode of translation, just as resurrecting a memory or interpreting a dream are acts of translation. In the process of being transferred from one realm or condition to another, the source event or idea is neces- sarily reconfigured; the result of translation is that the original, also inaccessible, is no longer an original per se; it is a pretext whose identity has been redefined. The significance of this point as an idea, and its implications for understanding the relationship between survival and cultural memory, will be reiterated throughout this study. Even if, hypothetically, it were possible to excavate a body, a text, a narrative, an image, or even a memory intact, the necessarily delayed, translated context of such an excavation would be transformed in the interval between the moment of production and the moment of its translation. As Benjamin states in the sixth of his eighteen Theses on the Philosophy of History, a testament written not long before his suicide in 1940 in Port Bou at the French- Spanish border, as he fled the Nazis: To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it actually was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wish- es to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a translation / inaugural issue / 2011 moment danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition an its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. This is memory resurrected and reconstructed in the breach, rescued from the breach. Benjamin conceives of remembrance as a corrective flash of insight that emerges in times of 62 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 63 Bella Brodzki crisis, and in response to political and cultural persecution, to the threat of erasure of the voices of resistance, disruption, and heterogeneity by totalitarian regimes. Arguably, the idea that a seamless continuity of the past exists or should be desired could itself be taken as a sign of crisis (of conscience): a deliberate or enforced concealment or forgetting that requires redress. Recent accounts by forensic anthropologists who have retrieved, extricat- ed, identified, and reconstituted the corporeal evidence of mass slaughter, on behalf of those who mourn the victims and to promote social justice, explain how the reading of human remains can “give a voice to people silenced… to people suppressed in the most final way: murdered and put into clandestine graves.” But before bodily remains can be read, they claim an irrefutable form of evidence. Clyde Snow explains: “Bones…are often our last and best witnesses: they never lie, and they never forget.” I proceed, then, by linking translation to a concept of survival—“survival” as a cul- tural practice and symbolic action, and above all as a process that extends life, but one that also prolongs the meaning traces of death-in-life, life after death, and life after life. Both bod- ies and texts harbour the prospect of living on in their own remarkable ways. Echoing the haunting, unanswerable question about the possibility of resurrection in the biblical book of Ezekiel, my title Can These Bones Live? seeks to affirm survival’s ongoing poetic and politi- cal significance and rhetorical power. Despite its usual connotations, prophetic speech is not only annunciatory; it involves recovery, too, which is another kind of revelation. To cross the threshold from life to death and from death to afterlife is to be translated, to be in translation. Translation is the mode through which what is dead, disappeared, forgotten, buried, or sup- pressed overcomes its determined fate by being borne (and thus born anew) to other con- texts across time and space, as famously asserted by Salman Rushdie: “I, too, am a translat- ed man. I have been borne across. It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion…that something can also be gained.” (pp. 4-6) […] o, what really hangs in the balance? That translation is a function of every cognitive S and communicative operation, that every exchange (and non-exchange) has the transforming potential of a fateful encounter. We can postulate that one side or the other inevitably has the “wrong language,” but a connection can, and must, be made from the space of difference. Can we afford not to make the effort? (p. 9) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 63 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17568

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 64 Cultural translation gayatRI cHaKRavORty spIvaK From: “Translation as Culture” (2000) parallax, vol. 6, no. 1. Oviedo n every possible sense, translation is necessary but impossible. Melanie Klein, the I Viennese psychoanalyst whom the Bloomsbury Group killed with kindness, suggest- ed that the work of translation is an incessant shuttle that is a ‘life’. The human infant grabs on to some one thing and then things. This grabbing (begreifen) of an outside indis- tinguishable from an inside constitutes an inside, going back and forth and coding every- thing into a sign-system by the thing(s) grasped. One can call this crude coding a ‘transla- tion’. In this never-ending weaving, violence translates into conscience and vice versa. From birth to death this ‘natural’ machine, programming the mind perhaps as genetic instructions program the body (where does body stop and mind begin?), is partly metapsychological and therefore outside the grasp of the mind. Thus ‘nature’ passes and repasses into ‘culture’, in a work or shuttling site of violence (deprivation—evil—shocks the infant system-in-the- making more than satisfaction, some say Paradiso is the dullest of The Divine Comedy): the violent production of the precarious subject of reparation and responsibility. To plot this weave, the reader—in my estimation, Klein was more a reader than an analyst in the strict Freudian sense—, translating the incessant translating shuttle into that which is read, must have the most intimate knowledge of the rules of representation and permissible narratives which make up the substance of a culture, and must also become responsible and account- able to the writing/translating presupposed original. It is by way of Melanie Klein that I grasped a certain statement which comes to me from Australian Aboriginals. But before I go on to talk about it I want to say just a little bit more about Melanie Klein. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 The subject in the shuttling described by Klein is something that will have happened, not something that definitely happens; because, first, it is not under the control of the I that we think of as the subject and because, second, there is such a thing as a world out there, however discursive. In this understanding of translation in Melanie Klein, therefore, the word translation itself loses its literal sense, it becomes a catachresis, a term I use not for obscurity, but because I find it indispensable. 64 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 65 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Here is why I have to use the word catachresis. I was recently having a discussion with Dr. Aniruddha Das, a cell biologist. He is working on how cells recognize, how parasites recognize, what to attack in the body. I asked him why he used the word recognize, such a mindy word, a word that has to do with intellect and consciousness. Why use that word to describe something that goes on in the body, not really at all in the arena of what we rec- ognize as mind? Wouldn’t the word affinity do for these parasites ‘knowing’ what to attack? He explained to me that no, indeed, the word affinity would not do, and why it is that pre- cisely the word recognize had to be used. (I cannot reproduce the explanation but that does not matter for us at this moment.) He added that the words recognition, recognize lose their normal sense when used this way; there is no other word that can be used. Most peo- ple find this difficult to understand. And I started laughing. I said, yes, most people do find it difficult to understand, what you have just described is a catachrestic use of the word recognition. In other words, no other word will do, and yet it does not really give you the literal meaning in the history of the language, upon which a correct rather than catachrestic metaphoric use would be based. In the sense that I am deriving from Klein, translation does indeed lose its mooring in a literal meaning. Translation in this general sense is not under the control of the subject who is translating. Indeed the human subject is something that will have happened as this shuttling translation, from inside to outside, from violence to conscience: the production of the ethical subject. This originary translation thus wrenches the sense of the English word translation outside of its making. One look at the dictionary will tell you the word comes from a Latin past participle (of transferre = to transfer). It is a done deal, precisely not a future anterior, something that will have happened without our knowledge, particularly without our control, the subject coming into being. hen so-called ethnophilosophies describe the embedded ethico-cultural sub- W ject being formed prior to the terrain of rational decision making, they are dis- missed as fatalistic. But the insight, that the constitution of the subject in responsibility is a certain kind of translation, of a genealogical scripting, which is not under the control of the deliberative consciousness, is not something that just comes from Melanie Klein. What is interesting about Melanie Klein is that she does indeed want to touch responsibility-based ethical systems rather than just rights-based ethical systems and therefore she looks at the violent translation that constitutes the subject in responsibility. It is in this sense that the human infant, on the cusp of the natural and the cultural, is in translation, except the word translation loses its dictionary sense right there. Here, the body itself is a script—or perhaps one should say a ceaseless inscribing instrument. (pp. 13-14) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 65 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 66 Babli Moitra Saraf Cultural translation BaBlI MOItRa saRaf From: “Translation as Cultural Practice”. he introduction to the present issue agonizes about an “epistemological crisis” con- T fronting the discipline of translation studies, laments the impasse within and looks towards “startlingly new” ways of defining translation. We are given to under- stand that it articulates the anxiety of scholars and practitioners of the discipline in “single nation states and linguistic limits”. Babli Moitra Saraf is an It is difficult for us in India to appreciate Associate Professor in these anxieties and find ourselves in an intel- the Department of English, and the lectual cul-de-sac just yet with translation. Principal of There are 22 officially recognized languages, Indraprastha College SIL Ethnologue lists 415 living ones, and one for Women, University of Delhi. She has received her MPhil degree count puts the number of languages at 1652. in English and PhD in Sociology. However, languages are also dying with each Her doctoral thesis studies language generation resulting in epistemological losses. change in the advertising industry in India in the first phase of globalization (1984-94), The crisis of the humanities has hit language and the emergence of the Indian urban learning particularly hard. In a rapidly global- middle class identity. Her current work izing world large swathes of geographical and focuses on orality and performance in mental landscapes in India stay cocooned in a relation to Translation Studies. Her teaching interests include Modern Indian Literature time warp while others translate and are trans- in Translation, Classical Literature, lated, transformed and transmitted. In a Renaissance and Modern European Drama, nation of story-tellers, oral and written narra- Milton, The Bible, Cultural Studies, and Literary Theory. Babli Moitra Saraf has been tives are recovered by scholars, scribes and a scholar under the Indo-Italian Cultural performers to be translated. However, gaps Exchange Program. She has a Diploma have to be bridged between dialects and stan- in Spanish. She has translated the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi’s works into Italian dard languages and languages which are spo- in collaboration with Maria Federica Oddera, ken but do not have a script. Then there is the entitled La Cattura (Theoria, 1996) and presence since ancient times of vigorous oral La Preda e altri Racconti (Einaudi, 2004). traditions as well as rigorous traditions of Her work Rajouri Remembered (2007), a translated memoir located in the states writing for dissemination of knowledge and of Jammu and Kashmir during the Partition these continue to be recuperated. of India, also engages with the problem The national educational agenda fac- of recuperating memory and negotiating translation / inaugural issue / 2011 the translator’s position as a participant tors in translation as a tool to open up the in the narrative. world of knowledge of a specialized kind to native vernacular speakers. With the formation of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), translation is also on the regional agenda as countries grappling with languages and cultures of the region strive to promote mutual understanding and eco- 66 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 67 Babli Moitra Saraf nomic co-operation. With so many permutations and combinations of the communicative contexts, the potential of translation studies is far from exhausted. For the Indian sub-continent, the world has always been intercultural and cultural exchange has long been a mode of being. Five definitive moments can be identified for our purposes. The first is the translation of Buddhist texts and their travel right up to the Far East. The second is the encounter with Islam and the great cultural energy that encounter produced. The third is the colonial experience which culminated in the organization of the nation state along linguistic lines. The fourth, the post-independence era, which marked a spurt in regional translation activity, promoted by state patronage. The last is the contem- porary condition of globalization. Yet predating these identifiable epochs is a continuum stretching back into the era of maritime and overland activity of trade and commerce, a ‘globalization’ with its own set of markers. For a region of such linguistic diversity where since ancient times translation is axiomatic, a given of the great commercial and social net- works of trade routes, it seems an activity so innocuous and un-selfconscious that there is no reflection on it till we come to the translation activity undertaken with the advent of Buddhism and then in the encounter with the world of Islam, when we also see the oper- ation of translation as metaphor, as two world views come into contact. Different histori- cal epochs have thrown up their particular problematic. We in India are still negotiating these epochs in translation and translation studies. Ethnographic studies might just hold the key to opening new vistas and thinking about translation in new/different ways. My ongoing work with texts of pre-colonial Bengal (1204-1756), confronts the problem of reconciling the massive cultural knowledge in circulation with the fact of mass illiteracy. How does a text travel across linguistic bound- aries, cultural borders, geographical spaces in pre-literacy contexts? It leads me to think about translation as cultural practice. As a cultural practice translation needs to be viewed in the specific contexts of what people are doing with texts, how they are circulated, dis- seminated and received. My findings suggest that cultural articulation of the time, both erudite and folk, is oriented towards performance and mediated by an acute sense of an audience: through ritual, recitation, song, dance, puppets, paintings, and other modes of folk expression. Do performance and its dynamics in the social space, especially in pre-lit- eracy, pre-print mass cultures constitute and produce legitimate and viable texts as well as methodologies of translation? Further, may these methodologies constitute a paradigm shift from the Eurocentric modes of regarding translation within the parameters of source texts and target languages, in terms of the ‘original’ and its equivalent in the ‘translated’? Is it possible to redefine the notion of ‘original text’ in specific cultural milieus? Is there an ‘original text’? Can we retrieve translational strategies in oral cultures? May ‘adaptation’ for performance function as a translational strategy? translation / inaugural issue / 2011 he caste structure of society in India, the division into jatis and upajatis—largely T occupational groups and subgroups—and the nature of their encounter with texts, both oral and written, is fundamental to the understanding of translation as cultur- al practice. The existing social stratification has been crucial to the development of cultural 67 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 68 Maria Tymoczko Cultural translation practices which are more often linked to occupation and economic conditions, than to eru- dition and literacy, a situation in which impoverished and illiterate peoples may actually pro- duce the text by providing the supporting infrastructure and human resources to realize it in the performative. Canonical texts were meant to be performed, through recitation, song, dance, puppets and other modes of folk practices which clustered around caste occupations, particularly of the ‘nimnakoti’, or the lower castes. The Namasudras of Bengal produce the castes of Gope (writers), Sutradhar (storytellers), Gayans (singers), Bayen (Percussionists), the caste of Teli who cured leather and made musical instruments, Patua (painters and pic- torial storytellers), Nat (magicians/actors), practically constituting the production team of a performance. These occupations groups could be Hindus or Muslims, drawing upon the common heritage of the oral tradition and shared cultural codes. The occupational diversi- ty and division of labor, the presence of many jatis, and within them of religious groupings means that a text could find diverse articulations within its locale, as well as travel with itin- erant performing troupes across discrete linguistic and cultural regions. A text in pre-mod- ern Bengal therefore, may be thought of as translated and retranslated as many times as the number of performances, and edited/adapted for its audience and for the occasion on which it was performed. This permitted the text the cultural crossovers that translation allows and the former also reinvented itself in various languages. This process produced a dynamism within the act of translation which carried the text through the many linguistic and cultur- al regions that it traveled in this trajectory. And texts did travel, from the deserts of Arabia to the forests of Bengal and back. The arena of performance we find is actually an overlap, an encounter of the oral and the written text. It is also a space which produces a new text. I call this new text a translation. Would this notion of translation stand critical scrutiny and be accommodated in translation theory? (pp. 1-3) MaRIa tyMOczKO From: “Reconceptualizing Translation Theory” in Theo Hermans (ed.) Translating Others (2006) vol. 1, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. here are a number of things that should be done in translation studies to enlarge T and redefine the object of study (and its corollary, to reconfigure concepts about ways that a text and its translation are related), including examining the meanings translation / inaugural issue / 2011 of words for translation in non-Western contexts and looking at specific historical traditions associated with those variant conceptions of translation. In theorizing the data it is essential to view translation as a cluster concept, moving beyond attempts to define translation as a logical concept or a prototype concept, which have resulted in so many Eurocentric pro- nouncements about the field. Clearly, in order to understand the scope of the cluster con- cept called translation in English, translation studies scholars must be assiduous in seeking 68 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 69 Maria Tymoczko out more of the world’s words for translation, as well as investigating in detail the connota- tions, implications, translation practices and actual histories of translation associated with those terms. Only by engaging in such an investigative enterprise can translation scholars fully understand the objects of research in translation studies—encompassed in the Maria Tymoczko is large and complicated cluster concept of Professor in translation—and the types of family resem- Comparative Literature at the University of blances that bind these objects conceptually, Massachusetts. Her thus expanding translation theory in the fields are Translation process. Studies, Celtic medieval In broadening the definition of transla- literature and Irish Studies. Her critical studies The Irish “Ulysses” (University of tion and breaking the hold of Eurocentric California Press, 1994) and Translation in a stereotypes of translation, it may also be help- Postcolonial Context (St. Jerome Publishing, ful to consider forms and modes of cultural 1999) have both won prizes and commendations. Prof. Tymoczko has interface that are related to translation but dis- published widely on translation theory and tinct from it. Such forms include, for example, on translation as an engaged social postcolonial literature and related hybridized practice; her articles have appeared in forms of cultural production; work on these major collections of essays about translation and in many translation studies forms of translation studies has already been journals. She has edited several volumes productive for the field. Three additional including Born into a World at War (with modes of cultural interface to explore are illus- Nancy Blackmun, 2000), Translation and Power (with Edwin Gentzler, 2002), Language trated by the English words transference, repre- and Tradition in Ireland (with Colin Ireland, sentation and transculturation. 2003), Language and Identity in Twentieth- In transference or transmission, material Century Irish Culture (with Colin Ireland, 2003; special issue of Éire-Ireland), and is moved from one cultural context to anoth- Translation as Resistance (2006, special er, but the mode of transfer is not specified. It section in the Massachusetts Review). can range from physical transfer to symbolic Her most recent books are Enlarging transfer (such as happens in a bank transfer) Translation, Empowering Translators (St. Jerome Publishing, 2007), a major or transfer that involves a radical shift in reconceptualization of translation theory, medium (such as a television transmission). and the edited volume Translation, Thus, transference can result in cultural Resistance, Activism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). products that are either very close (even iden- tical) to the source substance or very different from the source material. In cultural transfer, then, there is no presupposition about either the process or product of the cultural transposition. By contrast, translation in a single cul- ture at a single point in time is usually governed by cultural prototype encompassing both product and process, notwithstanding the fact that such prototypes have varied widely translation / inaugural issue / 2011 through history, from close linguistic transfer to free adaptation, from fluency to radical abridgment, and so forth […]. Thinking about transference or transmission can remind translation studies scholars of how varied cultural mediation can be in process and prod- uct, helping to move their thinking beyond their own particular cultural presuppositions and stereotypes. 69 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 70 Maria Tymoczko Cultural translation Still another strand of translation is indicated by the word representation. […] [It] constructs an image, but implies as well the exhibition of that image. It involves clarity of knowledge and symbolic substitution. It has a serious import connected with social goals, including social change. Representation, therefore, presupposes both a perspective on what is represented and a purpose in the activity itself. In fact, since the decline of positivism, there has been a new awareness of the constructivist aspect of representation, of the fact that representation is not an ‘objective’ process. As a form of definition that involves substi- tution in the symbolic realm, representation creates images that have an ideological aspect. It is the power inherent in representation, the potential for speaking with authority on behalf of another, and the ability to make statements that have legal or political standing, as well as the inescapability of a perspective of purpose, that have led to the crisis of repre- sentation in the social sciences, most particularly in anthropology and ethnography, where the potential for manipulation and ethnocentrism in representations has been discussed and debated (see, for example, Clifford and Marcus 1986). Obviously translation is a major intercultural form of representation, and, as such, translations must be scrutinized for the various factors associated with representation, even when translation occurs internally to a plurilingual society. inally, translation can bee seen in the light of the process of transculturation, which F can be defined as “the transmission of cultural characteristics from one cultural group to another”. The term has come into English from Spanish, where it was first used to speak about the interchange of cultural characteristics between Europeans and the indigenous population in Latin America, and to describe the creolization and hybridization of most Latin American cultures. Transculturation goes far beyond the transfer of verbal materials and includes such things as the transfer of ideas about religion and government; the spread of artistic forms including music and the visual arts; the transfers having to do with material culture including clothing, food, housing, transportation, and so forth, not to mention more recent cultural domains such as the modern media. Thus, the popularity of Chinese food, reggae and US films around the world are all examples of transculturation. Transculturation has elements in common with intersemiotic translation, for it is not exclusively or even primarily a linguistic process. With respect to texts, transculturation is often a matter of transposing elements that constitute overcodings, such as the poetics, for- mal literary elements and genres of literary systems, as well as discourses, worldviews, and so forth. Obviously transculturation is an essential aspect of cultural interchange in cul- tures where more than one language and culture are in interface; indeed transculturation is operative in any postcolonial nation. One of the distinguishing aspects of transculturation, in contrast to either represen- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 tation or transmission, is that it entails the performance of specific forms or aspects of another culture. It is not sufficient that Chinese food be displayed nor defined nor described for transculturation to occur: the food must be eaten and enjoyed as well. At the same time, paradoxically, transculturation does not always involve representation; one can easily imagine a person receiving and incorporating into her life a cultural form with little 70 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 71 Maria Tymoczko or no sense that it originated in another cultural setting. That is, a cultural form can become completely naturalized in the receptor culture or transculturation can proceed in such a way as to obscure the point of origin of a specific cultural element. This aspect of easy interchange through transculturation is very common in places that bring together more than one cultural group; many things may be perceived as perfectly natural in a hybridized culture without people having a strong sense of their cultural point of origin. (pp. 26-29) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 71 

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 72 (World) Literature susan Bassnett From: “When is a Translation Not a Translation?” in Susan Bassnett & André Lefevere, Constructing Cultures. Essays on Literary translation (1998) Clevedon – Philadelphia – Toronto – Sydney – Johannesburg: Multilingual Matters. nce we start to consider the way in which both the terminology of translation and O the idea of authentic ‘original’ that exits somewhere beyond the text in front of us are used by writers, then the question of when a translation is or is not taking place becomes increasingly difficult to answer. It is probably more helpful to think of trans- lation not so much as a category in its own right, but rather as a set of textual practices with which the writer and reader collude. This suggests that literary studies, and discourse analy- sis in particular, need to look again at translation, for the investigation of translation as a set of textual practices has not received much attention. This is doubtless because we have been far too obsessed with binary oppositions within the translation model and have been too concerned with defining and redefining the relationship between translation and original. Even where the model of dominant original and subservient translation has been chal- lenged, the idea of some kind of hegemonic original still remains—either in the source lan- guage or target language. It is time to free ourselves from the constraints that the term ‘translation’ has placed upon us and recognise that we have immense problems in pinning down a term that continues to elude us. For whether we acknowledge it or not, we have been colluding with alternative notions of translation all our lives. (p. 39) davId daMROscH From: “Death in Translation” in Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (eds.) Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation (2005) Princeton – Oxford: Princeton University Press. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 o understand the workings of world literature we need more of a phenomenology T than an ontology of the work of art: a work manifests differently abroad than it does at home. (p. 394) […] 72 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 73 David Damrosch It shouldn’t be necessary to treat a for- David Damrosch is eign work with an uncomprehending sympa- Professor of English and Comparative thy in order to appreciate its excellence. It Literature at Harvard does no service to works of world literature to University. A past set them loose in some deracinated space, president of the whether the “great conversation” of a 1950s- American Comparative Literature Association, David Damrosch has style academic humanism or the “closed self- written widely on comparative and world referential loop” of recent poststructuralist literature. His books include The Narrative metafiction. Aesthetically as well as ethically, Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We a pure universalism of either variety is finally Scholars: Changing the Culture of the reductive, missing the real complexity of a University (1995), What Is World Literature? work, just as much as would an opposite (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh insistence that a work can only be read effec- (2007), and How to Read World Literature tively in the original language, inextricably (2009). He is the founding general editor of linked at all points to its local context. An the six-volume Longman Anthology of World informed reading of a work of world litera- Literature (2004), and of the six-volume Longman Anthology of British Literature (4th ture should keep both aspects in play togeth- ed. 2010), editor of Teaching World Literature er, recognizing that it brings us elements of a (2009), co-editor of The Princeton time and place different from our own, and at Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009), and co-editor of a recent collection, Xin the same time recognizing that these ele- Fang Xiang: Bi Jiao Wen Xue Yu Shi Jie Wen ments change in force as the book gets farther Xue Du Ben [New Directions: A Reader of from home. Comparative and World Literature] (Beijing U. P., 2010). He is presently writing a book […] called Comparing the Literatures: What Every [W]hen we read a work of world liter- Comparatist Needs to Know. ature we have a great deal of freedom in deciding what use we will make of such contextual understanding. This freedom can most readily be seen when we are reading a work from a distant time as well as place. To take the case of Dante, for instance, it seems to me trivializing to treat the Divine Comedy as an essential secular work, though various modern commentators have chosen to focus on Dante as “poet of the secular world,” in Erich Auerbach’s phrase. Auerbach went so far as to claim that Dante’s realism overwhelmed his theology “and destroyed it in the very process or realizing it” (Mimesis, 202). We can dispute such a claim on both historical and aesthet- ic grounds, taking seriously the idea that the Divine Comedy may actually have been a suc- cessful Christian poem. Even so, appreciating Dante’s profound religious vision does not require us to convert to Catholicism, or to take a stand on issues of Florentine politics, though both of these responses are ones that Dante might well have desired. A work of world literature has its fullest life, and its greatest power, when we can read it with a kind translation / inaugural issue / 2011 of a detached engagement, informed but not confined by a knowledge of what the work would likely mean in its original time and place, even as we adapt it to our present context and purposes. (pp. 394-395) 73 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 74 David Damrosch (World) Literature davId daMROscH From: “How American is World Literature?” (2009) The Comparatist, 33. t would be well worth while to undertake a comparative study of world literature as it I is construed in differing locations around the globe. Such a study could help scholars everywhere to think directly about the relations (whether symbiotic or hegemonic; whether unusually close or unusually disjointed) between their national tradition and their presentation of the wider plenum of world literature. A fuller sense of the range of possibil- ity might keep scholars from falling unwittingly into nationalistic patterns in the construal of global literary relations, such as the Gallicentrism so prominent in Pascale Casanova’s otherwise wide-ranging République mondiale des lettres. Perhaps in time only a third of the essays in the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, instead of the two-thirds or more, would center on India’s authors and linguistic traditions. American comparatists, on the other hand, seem clearly to be at the opposite end of the range of continuity/discontinuity. For too long, we have accepted a high degree of uprooted- ness and the internal exile in relation to our home culture. This orientation may have had a certain logic for the émigrés who taught us or our teachers, but it makes less and less sense for our field today—even for foreign-born scholars, as can be seen in the cross-cultural work of such comparatist Americanists as Wai Chee Dimock and Djelal Kadir. There are encouraging signs of a budding rapprochement between Amarican and comparative literary studies, seen for instance in a valuable recent collection edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007). It is symptomatic, though, that both editors are based in departments of English and American studies rather than com- parative literature. They and their contributors clearly see the benefits that can accrue to American studies by taking a comparative and global perspective; more departments of com- parative literature need to accept the converse realization, that a vital comparatism can best thrive in creative symbiosis with its home traditions as well as those of the wider world. A comparative study of different national approaches to world literature should also help us to do a better job construing the world’s literary traditions, whether to move beyond an overemphasis on a few literary great powers, as Werner Friederich urged, or to avoid pro- jecting liberal American multiculturalism outward, as Spivak fears that our courses (and pos- sibly some anthologies!) may do. Already in the early 1960s René Wellek commented, in a trenchant article on “American Literary Scholarship,” that “The selection of European writ- ers which have attracted the attention of modern critics in the United States is oddly nar- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 row and subject to the distortion of a very local and temporary perspective”. Such distortions can become endemic in any scholarly community that pays little attention to foreign tradi- tions, and this danger applies to patterns of construing world literature as much as individ- ual national traditions. The study of world literature in America has much to gain if it can become both more American and more wordly as well. (pp. 18-19) 74 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 75 Suzanne Jill Levine suzanne jIll levIne From: The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (first edition: 1991; 2009) Champaign – London – Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press. n 1932, in Las versiones homéricas, an essay that could be translated as “Some version of I Homer,” Jorge Luis Borges questioned the privileged status of the original books we call the Odyssey and the Iliad. Which interpretation of the original is the “original”? he asked; only a Greek from the tenth century B.C. (according to Borges) might be able to tell us. Borges prefigured here Michel Foucault’s challenge to the concept of authorship: What is an author? How can we determine intentionality? The only real difference between original and Suzanne Jill Levine is a leading translator of translation—Borges playfully specified—is Latin American that the translator’s referent is a visible text literature, and against which the translation can be judged; Professor at the University of California the original escapes this sceptical scrutiny in Santa Barbara where because its referent is unspoken, perhaps for- she directs a translation studies doctoral gotten, and probably embarrassingly banal. program. Her scholarly and critical works This meditation of translation contains include her award-winning literary biography Manuel Puig and the Spider the subversive seed of Borges’s poetics of Woman (FSG and Faber & Faber, 2000) and “reading as writing,” which he articulated fur- her groundbreaking book on the poetics of ther in 1939 in his perverse parable “Pierre translation The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (published Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” the piece in 1991 and reissued this year by Dalkey that George Steiner, in After Babel, considers Archive Press, along with her classic the summa of all translation theory. Here translations of novels by Manuel Puig). Aside from numerous volumes of Cervantes’s masterpiece becomes a tentative translations of Latin American fiction and web of propositions that change with each poetic works, she has regularly contributed new historical act of reading; each successive articles, reviews, essays, and translations of reading, rewriting, translating of a text enrich- prose and poetry to major anthologies and journals including the New Yorker. Her many es and ensures the original’s survival anew. honors include National Endowment for the Every work enters into a dialogue with other Arts and NEH fellowship and research texts, and with a context; texts are relation- grants, the first PEN USA West Prize for Literary Translation (1989), the PEN ships that of necessity evolve in other contexts. American Center Career Achievement award Borges has shown us how literary works (1996), and a Guggenheim Foundation already give us the theoretical models through fellowship. She has just completed a five translation / inaugural issue / 2011 volume project as general editor of the which we may interpret them: “Some Version works of Borges for Penguin Classics. of Homer” and “Pierre Menard” both prefig- ure reader-response and reception theories. These texts reveal not only the thin line between originals and their interpretations but the parallel and complementary nature of these inter- pretations. “Pierre Menard” in particular illuminates the related functions of translation, parody, and literary criticism. 75 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 76 Suzanne Jill Levine (World) Literature “Pierre Menard” is a stylized parody of the laborious bibliographic homage an obscure French provincial writer pays to his mentor Pierre Menard, an obscure French symbolist whose most fantastic project is his attempt to rewrite word-for-word, in the language of Cervantes, Don Quixote. Our vertigo upon reading this ficcion is infinite. To begin with, Don Quixote— often labeled the first modern novel—was born both as a parody (of the chivalresque novel) and a “translation”. The narrator suggests in an aside that the “original” is a found manuscript written by an Arab named Cide Hamete Benengeli (to wit, Sir Eggplant). That a French writer of the late nineteenth century would attempt to re-create (without plagiarizing) a seventeenth- century Spanish classic, and that an Argentine writer—Borges—would attempt to write Menard’s disciple’s homage, produces a mise en abîme. Menard’s faithful rendition of a sentence from the Quixote turns out as different as a parody, that is, an imitation with a critical differ- ence, because the same Spanish phrase becomes an affectation and takes on different, even opposite meanings, reinscribed in another linguistic and historical context. Borges’s Spanish “rendition” of a supposed French original (the invented disciple’s homage to the invented men- tor) is both a “translation” and a parody (about the parody/translation of a parody/translation) that makes us question the status of what appears to be an ever-elusive original. Indeed, where does the French end and the Spanish begin in this text? Here Borges conflates the modes of parody or satirical imitation and translation or imitation in another language, and also shows how they function as literary criticism with one important difference: Both translations and parodies attempt to repeat the discourse of the original; the critical essay uses another rhetoric. orges has proposed, essentially, a tentative status for the original as one of many pos- B sible versions. James Joyce, collaborative translator of the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” sec- tion of Finnegans Wake into Italian, was thinking along similar lines when he chose to call his original “work in progress”—which he continued to complete in the next stage— translation. Joyce “transelaborated” aspects of the original, which became more explicit in Italian. He took advantage of his relationship to what he experienced as the earthy musical- ity of the target language to invent a more slangy version, and different double, even triple puns. The poet laureate Robert Penn Warren once observed, Dante’s Inferno on his lap in the original Italian, that those outside of the language, like himself, could appreciate its musicality more than a native speaker—precisely because the outside reader would tend to focus more on (exotic) sound than sense. In a sacred vein Walter Benjamin privileges the original, radiating an infinity of ver- sions, over translation, one limited version among many, but he coincides with the profane Joyce in seeing the original “embodiment” as, in George Steiner’s words in Antigones, “an annunciation, however well wrought, of forms of being yet to come.” Steiner shows how Benjamin’s theory of “absolute translation and of the confluence of all secular tongues translation / inaugural issue / 2011 towards a mythical Ursprache, a primal source of perfect unison and facsimile” was inspired, in part, by Hölderlin’s journey to the source, seeking through his translations of Sophocles to bring forth “the ‘Oriental’ substratum and well-spring stifled in fifth century Greek art.” The bringing forth of a “substratum” is implied in the concept of subversion, in which translation betrays in the traditional traduttore, traditore sense but also because it makes evi- 76 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 77 Suzanne Jill Levine dent a version underneath that becomes explicit, a latent version implied in the original. In a sense this latent version is a subtext, a term borrowed from psychoanalytical theory, which Terry Eagleton has defined as A text running within a work, visible at certain “symptomatic” points of ambiguity, evasion or overem- phasis and which we as readers are able to “write” even if the novel itself does not. All literary texts contain one or more such sub-texts… which can be called the “unconscious” of the work. The work’s insights… deeply related to its blindness—that is does not say, and how it does not say it—may be as important as what it articulates; what seems absent, marginal or ambivalent about it may provide the central clue. Persuasive translations uncover subtexts, or underlying meanings, for, after all is said and done, translation’s first and final function is to relate meaning. (Sub)versions uthorized geniuses such as Borges, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, and A Vladimir Nabokov command an authority, unlike most translators, to re-create, to “sub- vert” the original—particularly their own. They offer an ideal model, nonetheless, for what literary translations should be: creation. Having collaborated with such polyglots as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Manuel Puig, I have been able to observe a symbiotic if not parasitic relationship between translation and original composition. Far from the traditional view of translators as servile, nameless scribes, the literary trans- lator can be considered a subversive scribe. Something is destroyed—the form of the origi- nal—but meaning is reproduced through another form. A translation in this light becomes a continuation of the original, which already always alters the reality it intends to re-create. But let’s take this argument beyond the cliché about what gets lost in translation— from reality to original, as well as from original to translation. The disruptive effect of books such as Tres tristes tigres and La traición de Rita Hayworth occurs through the violation of usage, through a resistance to language as useful or usual. Proper names become puns in Cabrera Infante’s books; the communicative function of spoken language is subverted when Puig and Cabrera Infante transform it, with all its grammatical violations, into writing. The translation of their “abuses”—a term Philip Lewis applies to creative translation—must also violate, and in doing so sustain, their comment about language, in ways that are not arbitrary but which make the reader aware of decisive linguistic or textual knots of signification. The translation of Cabrera Infante’s title La habana para un infante difunto into Infante’s Inferno translation / inaugural issue / 2011 offers a prime example of this both abusive and sustaining process. Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy-principal exemplars in this meditation on my work as a translator-see their originals already as translations of texts and traditions as well as of realities; each in his own way is a parodist, a creator-commentator. Dethroning language’s dominion over mean- ing, they have also in a sense dethroned the “author”. As collaborators or self-translators they are self-subverters. (pp. 4-8) 77 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17571

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 78 Transdisciplinarity susan Bassnett From: “The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies” in Susan Bassnett & André Lefevere, Constructing Cultures. Essays on Literary translation (1998) Clevedon – Philadelphia – Toronto – Sydney – Johannesburg: Multilingual Matters. oth translation studies and cultural studies have come of age. Both interdisciplines B have entered a new internationalist phase, and have been moving for some time away from their more overtly parochial and Eurocentric beginnings, towards a more sophisticated investigation of the relationship between the local and the global. Both are now vast wide-ranging fields, within which there is no consensus, but neither are there rad- ical disagreements that threaten fragmentation or destruction from within. There are now clearly several areas that would lend themselves fruitfully to greater cooperation between practitioners of both interdisciplines. • There needs to be more investigation of the acculturation process that takes place between cultures and the way in which different cultures construct their image of writers and texts. • There needs to be more comparative study of the ways in which texts become cultur- al capital across cultural boundaries. • There needs to be greater investigation of what Venuti has called ‘the ethnocentric violence of translation’ and much more research into the politics of translating. • There needs to be a pooling of resources to extend research into intercultural train- ing and the implications of such training in today’s world. It is not accidental that the genre of travel literature is providing such a rich field of exploration by both translation studies and cultural studies practitioners, for this is the genre in which individual strategies employed by writers deliberately to construct images of other cultures for consumption by readers can be most clearly seen. In pointing out that none of us are able to comprehend fully the entirety of the com- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 plex network of signs that constitutes culture, Raymond Williams effectively freed us from the old myth of the definitive version of anything. His thesis also offers a way forward that invites a collaborative approach, for if the totality is denied the individual, then a combina- tion of individuals with different areas of expertise and different interests must surely be advantageous. Both cultural studies and translation studies have tended to move in the direction of the collaborative approach, with the establishment of research teams and 78 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 79 Lourens J. de Vries groups, and with more international networks and increased communication. What we can see from both cultural studies and translation studies today is that the moment of the iso- lated academic sitting in an ivory tower is over, and indeed in these multifaceted interdisci- plines, isolation is counterproductive. Translation is, after all, dialogic in its very nature, involving as it does more than one voice. The study of translation, like the study of culture, needs a plurality of voices. And, similarly, the study of culture always involves an examina- tion of the processes of encoding and decoding that comprise translation. (pp. 138-139) lOuRens j. de vRIes From: “Runny icky material moved into liquid from the wind blowing on it: linguistics as translation”. inguistics and translation theory used to have a somewhat asymmetrical relation- L ship, with the latter graciously emphasizing that she needed linguistics (along with other partners, to be sure) but with only very few linguists acknowledging that they needed translation theory or translation studies. In fact, there was a time that translation theory, especially in the field of Bible translation, was dominated by linguistics, with trans- lation theory almost becoming an applied subfield of linguistics. The truth is that linguis- tics very badly needs translation studies as an autonomous, independent discipline, espe- cially when translation studies embraces a broader, transdisciplinary perspective that sees translation as an instantiation of more general cognitive and cultural processes of the cre- ation, communication and transformation of meaning, within and across cultures. There are many reasons why linguistics needs translation studies. Here are the most impor- tant. First, translation studies can save linguistics from the follies of extreme universalism and extreme relativism. Second, linguistic description of the languages of the world crucial- ly involves translation, and it is very dangerous for linguists to leave that translation aspect of their work untheorized. Translation studies is a discipline predicated on difference, as is translation itself. The very act of translating emphasizes differences between people. But emphasizing differences is not innocent. And disciplines predicated on difference such as translation studies and cultural anthropology may have an uneasy relationship with this focus on difference. Modern anthropologists sometimes deal with this uneasiness by downplaying Otherness translation / inaugural issue / 2011 and by refusing to portray the people they study as Exotic Others. They have a history of colonial anthropology to come to terms with, an anthropology that emphasized Otherness and a West that never would meet the East. Translators and students of translation are pulled into opposite directions. There is fear to lose Otherness in translation, a fear to tame and domesticate the Other Culture in translation and at the same time the fear to lose the audience, the awareness that transla- 79 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 80 Lourens J. de Vries Transdisciplinarity tors are ‘doomed’ to communicate with audiences in the terms of those audiences. Even translators committed to conveying the very Otherness of the source text and source cul- ture have to do so in terms of Otherness that the audience can relate to, that is the paradox of exotization. The most exoticizing translations of the Bible invariably turned out to be monuments to the Zeitgeist, the spirit, ideologies and mentality of their time and place. For example, the German translation of the Hebrew Bible by Buber and Rosenzweig tried very hard to capture the Hebrew Otherness in the translation but it is a monument to German Lourens J. de Vries is Neo-Romanticism of the late nineteenth and Professor at the early twentieth century, more specifically a University of monument to German Neo-Romantic Amsterdam. His main interests are the study understanding of Hebrew Otherness. of Papuan and Translators become acutely aware of Austronesian languages two things at the same time: of linguistic and in functional, typological, and cultural otherness and difference, of gaps and anthropological frameworks, history and theory of Bible translation in the broader divides on the one hand, and of continuities, context of translation studies, linguistic bridges and overlap on the other hand. This aspects of (Bible) translation processes, specific sensitivity to both gaps and bridges, skopos theory and effective communication in Bible translations, and Bible translations to cultural continuity and discontinuity, in languages of Asia and Oceania. His recent should be celebrated as the heart of transla- publications are The Korowai of Irian Jaya. tion studies because one of the central and Their Language in its Cultural Context (Oxford lasting contributions of translation studies to University Press, 1997), A Short Grammar of Inanwatan, an Endangered Language of the the humanities is to be an antidote to the dis- Bird’s Head of Papua, Indonesia (Australian torting impact of ideologies of both univer- National University Press, 2004), “Areal salism and relativism. When linguistics was pragmatics of New Guinea: Thematization, distribution and recapitulative linkage in in the iron grip of naïve universalism, with Papuan languages” in Journal of Pragmatics ‘universal grammar’ and with ‘universal mean- 38 (2006), “Translation Functions and ings’ (mostly English words in capitals), it Interculturality” in Translation and Interculturality: Africa and the West, vol. 16 was among students of translation that the (2008), and “From clause conjoining to awareness of the incommensurability prob- clause chaining in the Dumut languages of lem, of limits to translatability and of the New Guinea” in Studies in Language Series very real, deep differences between languages (Peter Lang, 2010). and cultures was kept alive. And when the ideological pendulum swings back to rela- tivism and towards denials of very real cross-linguistic and cross-cultural continuities, it is in the field of translation that the awareness of such continuities remains alive. Translation is core business for any linguist. This insight was never totally lost in lin- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 guistics (e.g. Grace 1981: 36: “Translation is a sine qua non in the analysis of a new lan- guage”). But few linguists see the core role of translation in their work, let alone that they use the insights from translation studies to illuminate this core element. When linguists are aware of the central place of the translational element in their work and when they theo- rize that translational aspect, the quality of their work dramatically increases, for example 80 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 81 Lourens J. de Vries in increased focus on the emic, language-specific and unique meanings of simple construc- tions such as adnominal genitives or coordinated nouns that look deceptively similar and ‘universal’ under the guise of English translation equivalents (see Reesink 2008 for the role of translation in linguistics in relation to Pike’s notion of emic/etics). (pp. 1-2) […] inguists are often incredibly unreflective and naïve in providing glosses and transla- L tions; they should learn from translation studies to critically reflect on the skopos of their translations and on what is lost and gained in translation. Many linguists would look at the situation that the Atsugewi utterance wanted to describe, for example rotten tomatoes blowing into a pond, and then translate according to that denotation, with something like ‘rotten tomatoes blew into the water’. There is a very real danger that con- structions are classified and understood by linguists in terms of the English translation equivalents, for example Papuan thematic constructions that were classified as relative or adverbial clauses because they were translated in English with adverbial and/or relative clauses (De Vries 2005; 2006). English, the language of international grammar writing, is an enemy linguists rarely recognize as such. Just like Latin in the past, English easily becomes a channel through which grammars of other languages are forced to flow when linguists do not pay attention to the insights of students of translation. Linguistics is a form of translation with a very specific scholarly skopos: to translate the categories and distinctions of the lexicons and the grammars of the languages of the world in an English-based metalanguage with strong traces of an earlier Latin-based lin- guistic metalanguage, with categories such as ablative, switch reference, noun phrase, inalienable, animate, direct object and with English lexical glosses such as ‘move’, ‘hit’ and ‘black’. The grammatical terms such as ‘relative clause’ and ‘first person’, the lexical glosses such as ‘hit’ and ‘move’ and the translations of the utterances of the object language (‘runny icky material’) are all part of 'linguish' in the context of grammar writing, that is English as a linguistic metalanguage. This translational process of object language categories into metalanguage categories can only be done properly when linguists are constantly aware of the need to force their English-based metalanguage away from the categories and distinc- tions of English as a natural language. This is turn can only be done when the English- based linguistic metalanguage is transformed and sharpened by the study of as many lan- guages as possible, languages with different lexical and grammatical categories such as Atsugewi or Spanish. When I was a young linguist my discipline had almost absorbed translation theory, now that I am no longer all that young I find myself arguing that linguistics would improve dramatically if it could look at itself from the perspective of a broadly defined field of trans- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 disciplinary translation studies. Had it embraced the lessons of translation studies on the deep differences between languages and cultures, it would have been spared the unfruitful episode of pointless universalism. Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the temporary dominance of linguistics in translation theory was the reduction of translation to a ‘purely’ linguistic process, a process of words, phrases and sentences only; for a while this reduction 81 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 82 Patricia Willson Transdisciplinarity hid the true nature of interlingual translation as a social and cultural process that can only be understood in wider cognitive contexts of the creation and transformation of meaning in and across cultural boundaries. (pp. 3-4) patRIcIa wIllsOn “Translation as a metaphor in scientific discourse”. his still incipient research aims at exploring the metaphoric uses of translation to T account for transformations concomitant with a certain degree of invariance in the field of science and technique. It aims as well at inquiring into the possible connec- tions between such uses and metaphors of translation already studied in philosophy, anthro- pology, sociology, among other disciplines. The field explored insofar is molecular Patricia Willson has a degree in biochemistry biology, an avant-garde domain in scientific and is Professor discourse in the sixties and seventies. In 1961, (Translation / biochemists François Jacob and Jacques Comparative Literature) at El Colegio de México. Monod proposed a model to explain deoxyri- Between 1998 and 2010, bonucleic acid (DNA) duplication and protein she was Lecturer in Argentine Literature at synthesis in the cell. They used the terms code, University of Buenos Aires; between 2004 transcription and translation, and called messen- and 2010, she chaired the Permanent Seminar of Translation Studies at Instituto ger RNA (mRNA) the chain of ribonucleic de Enseñanza Superior en Lenguas Vivas, acid required as an intermediate in such dupli- Buenos Aires. She is also a translator and cation. The terminology shows that translation has translated, among other authors, Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Paul is ‘the scene of striking metaphorics’ not only in Sartre, Gustave Flaubert, Richard Rorty, the field of social sciences. In 1970, in his Le H.P. Lovecraft, Mark Twain, and Mary hasard et la nécessité, Monod analyzed the Shelley. She is currently translating Darwin’ s On the Origin of Species. She has implications of the discovery in the history of published La Constelación del Sur. sciences, and claimed that “the fundamental Traducciones y traducciones en la literatura biologic invariant is DNA”, and that «the argentina del siglo XX (Siglo XXI Editores, process of translation by which DNA dupli- 2004), and was awarded in Madrid the Panhispanic Prize for Specialized cates» is «uni-directional», and is, in this sense, Translation (2005). She is counted among a “Cartesian” and not a “Hegelian” process. In a the founding members of IATIS (Seoul 2004). famous statement that completed Francis translation / inaugural issue / 2011 Crick’s “central dogma of molecular biology” and has been often refuted since then (In 1970, Howard Temin demonstrated that genetic information in retroviruses is stocked in RNA and transcripted into DNA; in other words, the duplication occurs the other way around, due to the existence of reverse transcriptase, and proceeding through a ‘back translation’.), Monod maintained that it is unconceivable that DNA duplication occurs backwards. 82 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 83 Patricia Willson ollowing the model by Jacob and Monod, some mechanisms of gene expression have F been referred to by molecular biologists as ‘translational control’, ‘translational regu- lation’, ‘translation inhibition’, ‘translation masking’ and so forth. However, since the target of this research is not science itself but the ideas suggested by scientific discourse, the corpus to examine is also composed by texts where these ideas are supported, contested or invested with different or vaster implications. For instance, in Hermès III. La traduction, the philosopher of science Michel Serres refers to Monod’s claims and gives them a wider frame: he affirms that science is the set of invariant messages in every optimal translation situation; when this maximum is not attained, we are in one of the other cultural fields. According to Serres, translation goes across the most diverging fields, hence the interest in studying trans- lating processes, not in abstract, but in the concrete transformations they operate. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 83 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17543

Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 8 Introduction Translation: a new paradigm T oday, translation scholarship and practice face a twofold situation. On the one hand translation studies is enjoying unprecedented success: translation has become a fe- cund and frequent metaphor for our contemporary intercultural world, and schol- ars from many disciplines, for instance, linguistics, comparative literature, cultural studies, anthropology, psychology, communication and social behavior, and global studies have begun investigating translational phenomena. On the other hand, many scholars in the field rec- ognize an epistemological crisis in the discipline of translation studies, noticing a repetition of theories and a plethora of stagnant approaches. This impasse derives largely from the field’s inability to renew the discipline and its unwillingness to develop approaches that are able to say something original or reflect the complex situations of migration and hybrid cul- tures and languages we live in today. Translation needs to redefine its role in a context of fragmented texts and languages in a world of crises within national identities and emerging transnational and translocal realities. The fertility of the metaphor of translation is worthy of study, and we probably will find out that it is not merely a metaphor. Since Salman Rushdie’s well-known statement “Having been borne across the world, we are translated men” (1991), translation has become a frequent concept to describe and even explain identity as it surfaces in travelling, migrating, diasporic, and border-crossing individuals and cultures. It has been so frequent that some even state we are experiencing a “translation turn” in the humanities. The anthropologist Talal Asad’s concept of “cultural translation” became central in the seminal Writing Cultures edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus in 1986. Later Clifford developed this concept and imagined travels and even museums as translations (1997). Even though many scholars today are familiar with such a broad use of the concept of translation, they tend to keep them sep- arated from “real” translation. The step forward we want to make with and through this jour- nal is to consider Rushdie’s translated men and Asad and Clifford’s cultural translations as real acts of translation, as representations of how translations appear in our world. Beyond disciplinary boundaries: post-translation studies W ith this new journal the editors attempt to go beyond disciplinary borders, and specifically beyond the bounds of translation studies. We invite original thinking translation / inaugural issue / 2011 about what translation is today and where translation occurs. We welcome new concepts that speak about translation and hope to reshape translation discourse within these new terms and ideas. To achieve this goal, we must go beyond the traditional borders of the discipline, and even beyond interdisciplinary studies. We propose the inauguration of a trans- disciplinary research field with translation as an interpretive as well as operative tool. We imagine a sort of new era that could be termed post-translation studies, where translation is viewed as fundamentally transdisciplinary, mobile, and open ended. The “post” here recog- 8 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 9 Introduction nizes a fact and a conviction: new and enriching thinking on translation must take place out- side the traditional discipline of translation studies. The time is past when we can maintain the usual borders of translation studies, just as the time is past when in a more general way we can close the borders of certain disciplines and exclude translation discourse from entering their intellectual space. We are convinced that today—at least in the humanities but surely in principle for all academic fields—exchange and dynamic discourse are fundamental. Gay- atri Spivak’s discourse in Death of a Discipline (2003), dealing specifically with comparative literature, is emblematic of concerns within translation studies: We cannot not try to open up, from the inside, the colonialism of European national language-based Comparative Literature and the Cold War format of Area Studies, and infect history and anthropol- ogy with the ‘other’ as producer of knowledge. From the inside, acknowledging complicity. No accu- sations. No excuses. Rather, learning the protocol of those disciplines, turning them around, laboriously, not only by building institutional bridges but also by persistent curricular interventions. The most difficult thing here is to resist mere appropriation by the dominant. (2003: 10-11) The crisis of translation studies: a missing epistemology T he crisis of translation studies compares with other situations of crisis in many dis- ciplines, especially those in the humanities and social sciences: all have to do with fundamental questions of knowledge and meaning. The crisis or, let’s say, the death of translation studies as a discipline, leads us necessarily to transdisciplinarity. To speak of transdisciplinarity is not to propose that we create new relationships between closed disci- plines; rather, transdisciplinarity opens up closed disciplines and inquires into translational features that they have in common or toward translational moments that transcend them. Such a perspective implies that no single logic, no single tool, no single perspective by itself is sufficient to explain the world’s complexity, and that research cannot be inscribed in one discipline, with one defined object and method. Translation in this sense is a “nomadic con- cept”; it is born in transdisciplinarity and it lives in transdisciplinarity. Epistemologically this transdisciplinarity signals a change: it is not the disciplines that decide how to analyse their objects of research, but the objects themselves that ask for certain instruments, neither inside nor outside the academic boundaries of the disciplines, but “above” them. We are speaking of a different way of facing the great epistemological questions of what we know and how we know, and these questions model new transdisciplinary re- search. Such research cannot follow linear paths that conceive of structures as trees, but must rather walk along rhizomatic paths, in the sense given to it by Deleuze and Guattari: translation / inaugural issue / 2011 “unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the one nor the multiple” [1980 (1987): 21]. In an epistemological sphere it becomes less important to distinguish and define clearly what translation is and what it is not, what stands inside the borders of translation and what 9 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 10 Introduction stands outside. Such distinctions and definitions belong to an older and widespread sense of limits that scholars register when they create categorical, but also hierarchical and di- chotomous divisions between self and other, true and false, original and translation, inside and outside, feminine and masculine, pretending that they are natural. From queer theory as well as from border studies, and in general from poststructuralist thinking, we have learned that these divisions are constructed and that many texts, identities and cultures move in between, on the edges and in the interstices, in transversal movements. In this sense we can also evoke other deleuzian conceptualisations, such as multiplicity, and even that of transpositions of multiple differences developed by Rosi Braidotti (2006), to promote the idea of a multiple transdisciplinary concept of translation. The evolution of translation studies I n order to create a common ground for our future dialogue, we sketch in the following paragraphs a brief history of what we consider the principal stages in the evolution of the discipline of translation studies (from the Seventies until today). In 1990 Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere stated that “the growth of translation studies as a separate dis- cipline is a success story of the 1980s.” We take this claim to mean that translation studies was at that time no longer in a subordinate position to linguistics or comparative literature. Still, when translation studies sought out its own autonomy, it relied heavily on the definition James S. Holmes had already given the discipline in the early Seventies. At that time Holmes moved translation studies away from prescriptivism towards empirical description of what happens when cultures translate each other’s texts. At the beginning of the Eighties, and still in this theoretical context, the Israeli scholars Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury introduced a perspective that saw translations as a part of a culture’s literary polysystem. Elsewhere, in the so-called “manipulation school,” scholars like Theo Hermans, André Lefe- vere and José Lambert defined all translations inevitably as manipulations of an original text. These scholars located the causes for such manipulations not only in the differences between the structures and segmentation of meaning within languages, but also in the struc- ture of cultures, for instance in a culture’s range of ideologies. Inevitably, then, the Nineties came to be characterized by a “cultural turn” that insisted on the intercultural nature of any translation, whereby ideology was a determining factor. Here scholars took some of the first interdisciplinary steps. This cultural turn defined the questions surrounding translation in new terms. As translation studies drew on and was in- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 spired by cultural studies and poststructuralism, it took into account questions of gender and postcolonialism and recognized the political value of translating. With this turn trans- lation studies struck out in international directions, reaching beyond Europe and influencing Asia (see the work of Z. Tan, M. Cheung), Canada (S. Simon), and North America (L. Venuti, E. Gentzler, M. Tymoczko). Postcolonial studies, on the other hand, started to ques- tion the Eurocentric perspectives of translation studies, turning its attention to alternative 10 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 11 Introduction directions that recognize how every translation implies a conflict between dominating and dominated cultures and languages. To summarize: the Eighties and Nineties were characterized by an eagerness to found a new and autonomous discipline. No doubt this effort has been successful and of funda- mental importance for the recognition of what translation is, and for its role in the develop- ment and transformation of language and culture. Still, and in terms of a conscious appreciation of the important role occupied by translators and translations both throughout history and today, there is still much work to be done. While we encourage the continuation of this very important work in translation studies, we also see that this concentration on the definition of translation as an autonomous discipline represents a problem, a problem for translation studies itself. It is the problem of epistemological roots, or rather the lack of epis- temological roots. Translation studies, having “collected” data and knowledge from other dis- ciplines, was so eager to stand on its own feet that it neglected to develop and explain its own overarching epistemology and to show how it knew what it claimed to know. In our view what was created as the discipline of translation studies was actually an illusion: it existed in a sort of epistemological naïvety. Pieces from other disciplines like linguistics and comparative literature were assembled without being really questioned. What was done was simply to open up pathways on a terrain already covered with well-travelled pathways, and with exactly the same epistemological map and guiding principles as those present in the disciplines from which the so-called founders borrowed. What should have been done, or what was lacking in our opinion, was an epistemological and paradigmatic shift. In this panorama we should nevertheless recognize and salute the important efforts made by translation studies as it introduced new and alternative paradigms. André Lefevere significantly proposed the category of ideology and introduced the concept of rewriting. Edwin Gentzler introduced at a critical moment the category of power. But inside the boundaries of translation studies these new concepts did not develop completely. It is our hope that the research of such scholars might find fertile ground and wide reception through the transdisciplinary perspective we are proposing. We are confident that the journal’s con- tributors will rethink and, hopefully, re-establish the epistemological foundations behind our conceptualization of translation. This re-establishing will, we think, necessarily follow because the material of our research is new, or better; its focus is both broader than and dif- ferent from the focus and material conceived by traditional translation studies. Setting a fresh course translation / inaugural issue / 2011 D espite an original focus and fresh material content, the object of our research, namely translation, remains the same. But it will appear differently. New objects called translation will emerge, letting the already existing ones take a different shape and value. It is similar to those moments when scholarship uses new words to speak about and describe a thing, allowing the thing itself to appear different and, in addition, al- lowing us to see things in a fresh light. 11 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 12 Introduction It is more and more difficult to define translation and to limit the situations in which translation occurs. Today many of us are familiar with the idea that translation is a transfor- mative process not only of texts produced in different languages and media, but one that af- fects cultures and individuals. While some express concern about an ill-defined and delimited concept, we are of the view that such an approach is a strength and that any premature and a priori definition of the limits and borders of translation prevents us from evolving new the- ories and changing our assumptions and directions. The tendency within the discipline of translation studies is to continue to operate with traditional definitions and conceptualizations of translation, and thus with the same epistemological paradigm, sometimes proposing ad- ditional definitions, but never new and alternative ones. We believe this tendency is reductive and unhelpful for thinking about translation and suggest that it is time to open up new and in some cases startlingly new uses of the concept of translation. By accepting new ideas, by moving the focus, and by revealing new objects, we believe it will be possible to develop and organize the necessary theoretical consequences, to more fully understand what translation entails, to pinpoint where translation occurs today, and to formulate a perspective able to deal with all these different translation situations. Jakobson and beyond: the hybrid nature of culture S ince we believe translation is a universal and characteristic aspect of our contemporary world we will have to go far beyond the tripartite model (intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation) proposed by Roman Jakobson in 1959. His model had the advantage of considering translation also outside language and written texts, and as a transformative interpretive practice taking place between different semiotic systems. But even this approach is much too reductive. Today, translation has to be considered as a transformative representation of, in, and among cultures and individuals. Until recently translation has been studied almost exclu- sively as a transaction between cultures, where cultures have been identified within single nation states and linguistic limits. Only in the latest studies have scholars begun to consider the phenomenon of translation among other cultural identities that are situated inside, upon, or across the traditional delimitations of national and linguistic borders. These scholars have recognized the fragmented, hybrid nature of cultures and texts. The direction indicated by Edwin Gentzler, who states that “translations in the Amer- icas are less something that happens between separate and distinct cultures and more some- thing that is constitutive of these cultures” expresses the way forward (2008: 5). We think that translation is constitutive not only for American cultures, but for all cultures and culture translation / inaugural issue / 2011 as such. When we speak of cultures here, we also think about individuals, subjectivities and identities. And even in a broader sense, it is not only about widening the perspective, but seeing translation in new and different spaces. 12 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 13 Introduction Radically rethinking translation T his kind of radical rethinking of translation is what our new journal brings forward as its special contribution to research: translational processes are fundamental for the creation of culture(s) and identities, for the ongoing life of culture(s), and for the creation of social and economic values. As the Russian cultural semiotician Jury M. Lot- man puts it, translation is the necessary mechanism of cultural dynamics: For culture to exist as a mechanism organizing the collective personality with a common memory and a collective consciousness, there must be present a pair of semiotic systems with the consequent possibility of text translation. (2000: 34) We believe translation constitutes a fundamental condition for the existence and the transformation of cultures, and especially of cultural spheres where values, and in particular economic values, reside: as Chakrabarty persuasively asserts, “the problem of capitalist modernity cannot any longer be seen simply as a sociological transition […] but as a problem of translation, as well” (2000: 17). In effect, translation appears to us as the social relation from which the critique of communication and its corollary “culture” as the reigning ideology of Capital is most directly linked to a politics of life, or again, the politics in which life becomes invested by Capital. (Solomon 2007: 6) We also recognize that everything said so far should also be applied to the new, and still renewing, media environments in which translation occurs. Our use of the internet, so- cial media, and digital and screen tools produces consequences for translation that transform identities, power structures, theoretical models and day-to-day practices that constitute so- ciety. These transformations in all their radical implications deserve our profound investi- gation. From this point of view, the project called Open Translation appears particularly interesting, as it proposes “a new participatory ecology of translation emerging on the inter- net” questioning in this way “the proposition that discrete languages exist before the act of translation” (Neilson 2009). Within contemporary translation studies the traditional concept of translation is un- able to determine what translation actually is or identify all the different situations in which it occurs. Ironically, the larger, contemporary world of scholarship, outside the discipline of translation studies, understands translation in a much broader sense. As we indicate above, we do not dismiss the possibility that “real” translation and the metaphor of translation over- lap and mix. On the contrary, we wish to establish a dialogue with any area of research in which translation is, implicitly or explicitly, occupying a central conceptual position, or even a marginal one. The way, for instance, that Ulf Hannerz (1990, 1996) or Tullio Maranhão (2003) have conceptualized cultural translation in anthropology is illuminating for thinking translation / inaugural issue / 2011 about translation itself. In the same way, Sakai and Solomon’s (2006) way of thinking about translation in economic, ontological and political terms is equally illuminating. Translation in these uses of the concept has taken on additional meaning and given deeper meaning to the whole translation problem. 13 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 14 Introduction Translation matters in different fields of research O ther scholars, representing different fields of research, have written on translation in terms that have been new for studies on translation, and that we think should be given more credit than hitherto afforded. We are thinking of scholars such as Derrida and his concepts of monolingualism (1998) and hospitality (2000) as they bear on translation, and of Bhabha and his concept of cultural translation (1994). In recent years, due to the discipline’s stronger interdisciplinarity, many areas of human experience and representation connected to translation have begun to be explored. The dif- ferent aspects of translation connected to issues of postcolonialism are perhaps the most evident examples of positive exchange among the disciplines: through postcolonial perspec- tives, translation studies has been able to put aside a Eurocentric dominance that has on both a theoretical and practical level blinded research to important questions of cultures in contact. With a postcolonial perspective, research has been able to uncover the many varieties of inequality in cultural exchange. Back to epistemology T his epistemological potentiality of the concept of translation is an untapped re- source and seems central to us here. Both inside and outside translation studies scholars are today working on epistemologically relevant themes that clearly con- nect to translation: memory (B. Brodzki), space (S. Simon), conflict (E. Apter, M. Baker) and economics ( J. Solomon, S. Mezzadra). What is new in this work is that translation functions as an interpretive and operative instrument for deeper analysis and a more pro- found comprehension of these themes. By reconceptualizing these themes in and around the concept of translation, we believe new perspectives will emerge. Translation is poised to become a powerful epistemological instrument for reading and assessing the transformation and exchange of cultures and identities. As we see it, this new appreciation of translation compares favorably with the emergence of the concept of structure in the Seventies. We welcome this tendency because we are sure it is a way to study how translation is constitutive for cultures. We are witnessing nothing less than a sea-change in the world of translation. Translation is moving away from being simply a concept based in certain disciplines to being an epistemological principle applicable to the whole field of humanistic, social and natural sciences. If we follow this path, we will reshape the epistemological principles of the humanities and at the same time fashion a new instrument that also will permit us to reconsider trans- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 lation in all its properties and facets. Only in this sense do we see a future for reflection on translation. 14 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 15 Introduction New directions W hat kind of new directions will the journal follow? Without excluding any fruit- ful direction, we can already anticipate that it will seek to investigate the hybrid nature of languages, cultures, identities in our present deterritorialized world of difference and the ways in which space is continuously crossed, translated, and rede- fined through migration. It will be attuned to our globalized and localized world that is at one and the same time a common and divided world, structured around differential power relations and ideologies, where new media scenarios occupy an active role both reflecting and causing completely new conditions for representation and translation. War and conflict for their part will have the power to transform our world into a “translation zone” (Apter 2006), where economy and politics of course play the most powerful role in terms of value. The journal will also direct us to knowledge, especially to its acquisition and distribution, but also to the important channel called memory, which is responsible for the transmission and cultural translation of present cultural knowledge and litera- ture to future cultures and their encyclopedias of knowledge. As the journal develops into a natural and much needed space for a new kind of analysis of translation, this will always be characterized by its transdisciplinary approach. STEFANO ARDUINI and SIRI NERGAARD References Apter, Emily (2006) The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Asad, Talal (1986) “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Anthropology” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.) Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnog- raphy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Baker, Mona (2006) Translation and Conflict. London – New York: Routledge. Bassnett, Susan and André Lefevere (eds.) (1990) Translation, History and Culture. London – New York: Pinter Publishers. Bhabha, Homi (1994) The Location of Culture. London – New York: Routledge. Braidotti, Rosi (2006) Transpositions. On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge, UK – Malden, Mass: Polity Press. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 15 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 16 Introduction Brodzki, Bella (2007) Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Dif- ference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Clifford, James (1997) Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cam- bridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (eds.) (1986) Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Fèlix Guattari [1980] (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schiz- ophrenia. Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques (1998) Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford: Stanford University Press. — (2000) Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gentzler, Edwin (2008) Translation and Identity in the Americas. New Directions in Transla- tion Theory. London – New York: Routledge. Hannerz, Ulf (1990) Cultural Complexity. Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. — (1996) Transnational Connections. Culture, People, Places. London – New York: Rout- ledge. Jakobson, Roman (1959) “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In R. Brower (ed.) On Translation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lotman, Yuri M. (2000) Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Maranhão, Tullio and Bernhard Streck (eds.) (2003) Translation and Ethnography. The An- thropological Challenge of Intercultural Understanding. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Mezzadra, Sandro (2008) La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale. Verona: Ombre corte. Neilson, Brett (2009) “Opening Translation.” Transeuropeennes. International Journal of Crit- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 ical Thought. November http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/107/-Open- ing_translation Rushdie, Salman (1991) Imaginary Homelands. New York: Penguin. Sakai, Naoki and Jon Solomon (eds.) (2006) Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference. (Traces), Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 16 Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 17 Introduction Simon, Sherry (2006) Translating Montreal. Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal – London – Itacha: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Solomon, Jon (2007) “Translation as a Critique of The West: Sakai, Agamben, and Liu” http://phen.nsysu.edu.tw/culturalskin/Translation%20as%20a%20Critique%20of%2 0The%20West%20_Chilhac_Solomon_.pdf Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2003) Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 17 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17548

Translation Inaugural Introduction:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.03 Pagina 18 Introduction The journal: a presentation W e are honored to introduce the twenty-two prominent scholars who have ac- cepted to serve as members of translation’s advisory board, and are grateful to them for supporting our project. With this publication, we let the words of each of these scholars represent their initial positions. Their words, whether written explicitly for this journal or taken from their previously published work (notes and/or references of original publications are not included here), represent suggestions, directions, and even pro- grams for the journal’s future issues. While presenting each member of the advisory board with a short bio–bibliography, we have made rhizomatic collages of their texts, creating links and even unexpected and surprising connections between them, with a view to stimulating ideas for a new reflection on translation. These connections are organized according to a se- lection of key words that are representative of the vision of the journal; they are intended to function like guidelines for reading the texts and to invite reflection about translation. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 18 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17552

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 19 Hybridity HOMI K. BHaBHa From: The Location of Culture (1994) London – New York: Routledge. f hybridity is heresy, then to blaspheme is to dream. To dream not of the past or pres- I ent, nor the continuous present; it is not the nostalgic dream of tradition, nor the Utopian dream of modern progress; it is the dream of translation as ‘survival’ as Derrida translates the ‘time’ of Benjamin’s concept of the after-life of translation, as sur- vivre, the act of living on borderlines. Rushdie translates this into the migrant’s dream of Homi K. Bhabha is the survival: an initiatory interstices; an empow- Anne F. Rothenberg ering condition of hybridity; an emergence Professor of the that turns ‘return’ into reinscription or Humanities in the Department of English, redescription; an iteration that is not belated, Director of the but iconic and insurgent. For the migrant’s Mahindra Humanities survival depends, as Rushdie put it, on dis- Center, and Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost covering ‘how newness enters the world’. The at Harvard University. He is the author focus is on making the linkages through the of numerous works exploring postcolonial unstable elements of literature and life—the theory, cultural change and power, and dangerous tryst with the ‘untranslatable’— cosmopolitanism, among other themes. His works include Nation and Narration rather than arriving at ready-made names. and The Location of Culture. He has two The ‘newness’ of migrant or minority forthcoming books titled A Global Measure discourse has to be discovered in medias res: a and The Right to Narrate. Bhabha most recently contributed essays to exhibition newness that is not part of the ‘progressivist’ catalogues on the work of Anish Kapoor, division between past and present, or the Raqib Shaw, and Shahzia Sikander archaic and the modern; nor is it a ‘newness’ and interviews with Akbar Padamsee and on the work of ORLAN. that can be contained in the mimesis of ‘orig- He serves as an advisor at key art inal and copy’. In both these cases, the image institutions, as well as on the Steering of the new iconic rather than enunciatory; in Committee of the Aga Khan Architectural translation / inaugural issue / 2011 both instances, temporal difference is repre- Prize. He is a Trustee of the UNESCO World Report on Cultural Diversity and the Chair sented as epistemological or mimetic dis- of the World Economic Forum’s Global tance from an original source. The newness Agenda Council on Human Rights. of cultural translation is akin to what Walter Educated at the University of Bombay and the University of Oxford, Bhabha was Benjamin describes as the ‘foreignness of lan- profiled by Newsweek as one of “100 guages’—that problem of representation Americans for the Next [21st] Century”. 19 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 20 Homi K. Bhabha Hybridity native to representation itself. If Paul de Man focused on the ‘metonymy’ of translation, I want to foreground the ‘foreignness’ of cultural translation. With the concept of ‘foreignness’ Benjamin comes closest to describing the performa- tivity of translation as the staging of cultural difference. The argument begins with the sug- gestion that though Brot and pain intend the same object, bread, their discursive and cul- tural modes of signification are in conflict with each other, striving to exclude each other. The complementary of language as communication must be understood as emerging from the constant state of contestation and flux caused by the differential of social and cultural sig- nification. This process of complementary as the agonistic supplement is the seed of the ‘untranslatable’—the foreign element in the midst of the performance of cultural transla- tion. And it is this seed that turns into the famous, overworked analogy in the Benjamin essay: unlike the original where fruit and skin form a certain unity, in the act of translation the content or subject matter is made disjunct, overwhelmed and alienated by the form of signification, like a royal robe with ample folds. Unlike Derrida and de Man, I am less interested in the metonymic fragmentation of the ‘original’. I am more engaged with the ‘foreign’ element that reveals the interstitial; insists in the textile superfluity of folds and wrinkles; and becomes the ‘unstable element of link- age’, the indeterminate temporality of the in-between, that has to be engaged in creating the conditions through which ‘newness comes into the world’. The foreign element ‘destroys the original’s structures of reference and sense communication as well not simply by negating it but by negotiating the disjunction in which successive cultural temporalities are ‘pre- served in the work of history and at the same time cancelled… The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed. And through this dialectic of cultural negation-as-negotiation, this splitting of skin and fruit through the agency of foreignness, the purpose is, as Rudolf Pannwitz says, not ‘to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German [but] instead to turn German into Hindi, Greek, English’. Translation is the performative nature of cultural communication. It is language in actu (enunciation, positionality) rather than language in situ (énoncé, or propositionality). And the sign of translation continually tells, or ‘tolls’ the different times and spaces between cultural authority and its performative practices. The ‘time’ of translation consists in that movement of meaning, the principle and practice of a communication that, in the words of de Man ‘puts the original in motion to decanonise it, giving it the movement of fragmenta- tion, a wandering of errance, a kind of permanent exile’. (pp. 227-228) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 20 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17553

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 21 Difference KwaMe antHOny appIaH From: “Thick Translation” (2000)L. Venuti (ed.) The Translation Studies Reader, London – New York: Routledge. Previously published in Callaloo 16:4 (1993). tterances are the products of actions, which like all actions, are undertaken for U reasons. Understanding the reasons characteristic of other cultures and (as an instance of this) other times is part of what our teaching is about: this is especial- ly important because in the easy atmosphere of relativism—in the world of ‘that’s just your opinion’ that pervades the high schools that produce our students—one thing that can get entirely lost is the rich differences of human life in culture. One thing that needs to be Kwame Anthony Appiah challenged by our teaching is the confusion is a philosopher, cultural theorist, and of relativism and tolerance so scandalously novelist whose interests perpetuated by Allan Bloom, in his, the latest include political and in a long succession of American jeremiad. moral theory, the philosophy of language And that, of course, is a task for my sort of and mind, and African intellectual history. teaching—philosophical teaching—and it is He is currently the Laurance S. Rockefeller one I am happy to accept. But there is a role University Professor of Philosophy at the Princeton University. Appiah was raised here for literary teaching also, in challenging in Ashanti Region, Ghana, and educated this easy tolerance, which amounts not to a at Bryanston School and Clare College, celebration of human variousness but to a Cambridge, where he earned a PhD refusal to attend to how various other people in philosophy. Appiah is the author of several books including The Ethics of really are or were. A thick description of the Identity, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World context of literary production, a translation of Strangers, Experiment in Ethics, and that draws on and creates that sort of under- The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. Appiah has also written three standing, meets the need to challenge our- novels. selves and our students to go further, to undertake the harder project of a genuinely informed respect for others. Until we face up to difference, we cannot see what price tolerance is demanding of us. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 In the American academy, therefore, the translation of African texts seems to me to need to be directed at least by such purposes as these: the urge to continue the repudiation of racism (and, at the same time, through explorations of feminist issues and women’s writ- ing, of sexism); the need to extend the American imagination—an imagination that regu- lates much of the world system economically and politically—beyond the narrow scope of the United States; the desire to develop views of the world elsewhere that respect more 21 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 22 Rosemary Arrojo Difference deeply the autonomy of the Other, views that are not generated solely by the legitimate but local political needs of America’s multiple diasporas. To stress such purposes in translation is to argue that, from the standpoint of analy- sis of the current cultural situation—an analysis that is frankly political—certain purpos- es are productively served by the literary, the text-teaching, institutions of the academy. To offer our proverbs to American students is to invite them, by showing how sayings can be used within an oral culture to communicate in ways that are complex and subtle, to a deep- er respect for the people of pre-industrial societies. (pp. 427-428) ROseMaRy aRROjO From: “Translation and Impropriety: A Reading of Claude Bleton’s Les Nègres du Traducteur” (2006) Translation and Interpretation Studies, vol. I, No. 2, Fall. ranslation has been frequently associated with different forms of improprierty— T betrayal, infidelity, theft, indecency, seduction, invasion of property, etc.—that may be directly related to the translator’s necessarily close and often ambivalent relation- ship with the original and/or its author. In fact, translation entails a very close contact with somebody else’s text, not simply as “the most intimate act of reading” (Spivak 2004: 397), but also as a form of rewriting that claims to replace the original in another language and context. It is not surprising, then, that the ethical implications of this complex relationship have been one of the main concerns of Western translation theories, which, at least since Cicero, have focused on devising strategies to help translators behave properly. The apparently dangerous relationship that translation is perceived to establish between the original and the translated text, and between the author and the translator, has been asso- ciated, for instance, with the disappointments involved in parasitic, unreliable friendships. The Earl of Roscommon’s An Essay on Translated Verse, written in 1684, gives us an insightful illus- tration of the basic issues at stake in these relationships. According to Roscommon, the trans- lator, after becoming aware of his own preferences and inclinations, should find an author or a poet with whom he is compatible, and with whom he could establish a strong connection: “Examine how your humour is inclined,/ And which the ruling passion of your mind;/ Then seek a poet who your way does bend,/ And choose an author as you choose a friend” (Robinson 176). However, the pursuit of intimacy with the author and his original, which is translation / inaugural issue / 2011 supposedly part and parcel of the groundwork for successful translations, is also basically improper and, of course, highly risky for the author since the translator is told to insidiously take advantage of his closeness with the latter in order to take his place: “United by this sym- pathetic bond,/ You grow familiar, intimate, and fond;/ Your thoughts, your words, your styles, your souls agree,/ No longer his interpreter, but he” (176). Moreover, to the extent that in this plot both the translator and the author are represented as males while the text itself is 22 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 23 Rosemary Arrojo identified as a fickle young muse who must be both conquered and protected, the triangular relationship in which they find themselves is inextricably tinted with sexual overtones, suggest- ing that the translator is indeed a double-faced character, a traduttore-traditore who befriends the author in order to take possession of his precious text and muse. Most of the traditional statements about translation, whether found in formal theories or in the usual prejudices disseminated by what one might call common sense, will reveal that the translator’s activity often seems to be caught up in descriptions and conceptions that are gen- erally haunted by fears of betrayal and disrespect, which are compatible with an underlying anx- iety about the fact that texts are indeed always at risk of falling prey to spurious interpreta- Rosemary Arrojo is Professor tions. Therefore, one is tempted to speculate of Comparative that there might be a close connection between Literature the supposed danger of unreliable collabora- at Binghamton tions and the persistent ideal of translation as University. She joined the Department of an activity that should be performed ‘invisibly’. Comparative Literature in January of 2003 In other words, according to the idealized and directed the Translation Research and terms conceived by our patriarchal, essentialist Instruction Program until June of 2007. Before that, from 1984 to 2002, she taught tradition, translators are expected to do their English and Translation Studies at the State work without leaving any traces of their inter- University of Campinas (Brazil), and also ference, that is, without actually taking on an worked as a free-lance translator. Her main publications in Portuguese include the authorial role that might threaten the author’s following books: Oficina de Tradução: A position or the alleged integrity of the original. Teoria na Prática, first published in 1986 and currently in its 5th edition; O Signo Desconstruí do: Implicações para a Tradução, his deeply embedded distrust in the T activity that is expected to make it possible for meaning to safely travel between languages and cultures also emerges a Leitura e o Ensino (1992), as the editor and main contributor; and Tradução, Desconstrução e Psicanálise (1993). Her publications in English include chapters in several book collections, essays in all the in several works of fiction, which explore main journals specializing in translation some of the age-old prejudices associated studies, as well as book reviews. She is with translators, their task, and their rela- currently preparing two books on representations of translation in fiction, tionships with originals and authors. In these which will include pieces on Borges, Kafka, texts one can find representations of transla- Poe, Saramago, Guimarães Rosa, Calvino, tors in close connection with an array of Kosztolányi, among others. Samples of her work have been translated into German, ambivalent feelings triggered by the ethical Spanish, Catalan, Turkish, and Hungarian. dilemmas that constitute their craft. It has been my belief that the examination of these pieces by several authors from different tra- ditions will help us further understand the conflicts that seem to motivate, at least on some translation / inaugural issue / 2011 level, the ways in which Western culture tends to respond, perhaps even unconsciously, to the role of translators and their ‘dangerously’ intimate association with originals and their authors. In recent years I have examined stories and novels whose revealing plots have allowed me to reflect on the power struggles and the emotional investments that are usu- ally at stake both in the writing and in the reception of translations and originals, and which are not made quite so explicit in formal, theoretical statements. (pp. 92-94) 23 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 24 Homi K. Bhabha Difference HOMI K. BHaBHa From: “DissemiNation” in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration (1990) London – New York: Routledge. he signs of cultural difference cannot […] be unitary or individual forms of iden- T tity because their continual implication in other symbolic systems always leaves them ‘incomplete’ or open to cultural translation. (p. 313) In keeping with its subaltern, substitutive,—rather than synchronic—temporality, the subject of cultural difference is neither pluralistic nor relativistic. The frontiers of cul- tural difference are always belated or secondary in the sense that their hybridity is never simply a question of admixture of pre-given identities, or essences. Hybridity is the per- plexity of the living as it interrupts the representation of the fullness of life; it is an instance of iteration, in the minority discourse, of the time, of the arbitrary sign—‘the minus in the origin’—through which all forms of cultural meaning are open to translation because their enunciation resists totalization. (p. 314) […] Cultural difference emerges from the borderline moments of translation that Benjamin describes as the ‘foreignness’ of languages. Translation represents only an extreme instance of the figurative fate of writing that repeatedly generates a movement of equiva- lence between representation and reference but never gets beyond the equivocation of the sign. The ‘foreignness’ of language is the nucleus of untranslatable that goes beyond the transparency of subject matter. The transfer of meaning can never be total between differ- ential systems of meaning, or within them, for ‘the language of translation envelopes its content like a royal robe with ample folds. … [it] signifies a more exalted language than its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering an alien’. It is too often slip- page of the signification that is celebrated at the expense of this disturbing alienation, or powering of content. The erasure of content in the invisible but insistent structure of lin- guistic difference does not lead us to some general, formal acknowledgement of the func- tion of the sign. The ill fitting robe of a language alienates content in the sense that it deprives it of an immediate access to a stable or holistic reference ‘outside’ itself—in socie- ty. It suggests that social conditions are themselves being reinscribed or reconstituted in the very act of enunciation, revealing the instability of any division of meaning into an inside and outside. Content becomes the alien mise en scène that reveals the signifying structure of linguistic difference which is never seen for itself, but only glimpsed in the gap or the translation / inaugural issue / 2011 gapping of the garment. Benjamin’s argument can be elaborated for theory of cultural dif- ference it is only by engaging which what he calls the ‘purer linguistic air’—the anteriority of the sign—that the reality-effect of content can be overpowered which then makes all cultural languages ‘foreign’ to themselves. And it is from this foreign perspective that it becomes possible to inscribe the specific locality of cultural systems—their incommensu- 24 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 25 Bella Brodzki rable difference—and through that apprehension of difference to perform the act a cultur- al translation. In the act of translation the ‘given’ content becomes alien and estranged; and that, in its turn, leaves the language of translation Aufgabe, always confronted by its dou- ble, the untranslatable—alien and foreign. (pp. 314-315) Bella BROdzKI From: Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007) Stanford: Stanford University Press. he principal concern of this book is not the comical underside of translation, but T rather its underlying gravity. It would be difficult to overstate the role of transla- tion in shaping history, culture, and memory. It is imperative, I believe, especially given the current international political climate, in which relations with the Other are so volatile, that concentrated interest and material resources be directed toward recognizing the crucial role of translation in culture, of translation as culture. This is more than an Bella Brodzki is academic matter. At the same time, however, Professor of Comparative Literature it is one thing to make rhetorical claims at Sarah Lawrence about the (over)determinacy of translation in College. She teaches our lives and in the lives of future genera- courses in tions, and another to show how and why autobiography; modern and contemporary fiction; literary and being more attentive to the fundamental, cultural theory; and translation studies though intricate and often elusive, workings and holds the Alice Stone Ilchman Chair of translation can crucially benefit inter- in Comparative Studies. Her articles and essays on the critical intersections with and preters of the humanities. My aim is the lat- impact of translation on other fields and ter, but I doubt whether the demonstration disciplines have appeared in a range of can be effective without the assertion. We are publications, most recently in the collection Translating Women edited by Luise von utterly dependent on translation, but that Flotow (2011). She is the coeditor of does not mean that we respect the enterprise Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography or want to think too much about how it gets (1989) and author of Can These Bones Live?: done. It bears repeating, I believe, that there Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007).Her current project is coediting is translation because there are different lan- a special volume of Comparative Literature translation / inaugural issue / 2011 guages, and that this multilingualism is a gift, Studies entitled Trials of Trauma. rather than a necessary (or natural) evil best defended with reductive instrumentalism and resignation. Because translation is a shared commodity whose value is not equally distributed, its labor must be recognized to ensure both quality and fairness; it cannot be consigned only to bureaucrats, ‘experts’, or custodial others. 25 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 26 Bella Brodzki Difference As subjects in a multicultural, polyglot, transnationìal, and intertextual universe, all of us ‘live in translation’, but we also occupy that space differently, depending on our linguis- tic capital and the status of our language(s) in rapidly changing historical, political, and geographic contexts. We also occupy that space more or less self-consciously, and are more or less deluded by what passes as transparency in our communicative encounters around the globe. The specific asymmetric relations that currently incorporate translation into globalization (call it ‘linguistic outsourcing’) mean that non-native speakers of English are expected to fulfill most of the translating demands in the world. The refusal to translate that both literally and figuratively characterizes most Anglophones’ cultural comportment bespeaks a sense of power and privilege and has devastating consequences for everyone. As the study of foreign languages declines in the United States and English increasingly becomes the dominant global language, despite having fewer native speakers than Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish, we ignore the impact of unidirectional translation and mistranslation in international relations, mass tourism, science, and technology at incalculable cost. Although I do not address these concerns directly here, I conceive of this critical project as being wedded to them. We need to encourage, simultaneously, on two fronts, both the study of foreign languages and the study of translation, because—of course—they are not mutually exclusive, but mutually reinforcing. (pp. 11-12) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 26 

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translation

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 27 Space IaIn cHaMBeRs From: “The translated city”. o think of the modern city—Cairo, London, Istanbul, Lagos or Buenos Aires—is T to experience a perpetual translating machine. Economical, cultural and historical forces are here locally configured and acquire form, substance and sense. These days much attention is given to how global flows become local realities in the multiple real- isations of ‘globalisation’, but the archive that Iain Chambers is the city proposes actually represents an alto- Professor of Cultural, gether deeper set of sedimentations. Cities as Postcolonial and the sites of cultural encounters—from fifth Mediterranean Studies at the Oriental century Athens with its Greeks, Persians and University in Naples. Egyptians, to present-day multi-cultured Los He is known for his Angeles—are precisely where the outside interdisciplinary and intercultural work on music, popular, and metropolitan cultures. world pushes into our interiors to propose More recently he has transmuted this line of immediate proximities. In this context, dif- research into a series of postcolonial ferences may also be accentuated: think of analyses of the formation of the modern the ghettoes and ethnic areas and communi- Mediterranean. He is author of Urban Rhythms: pop music and popular culture ties of many a modern Euro-American city. (1985), Popular Culture: The metropolitan Cultural and historical overspills, most experience (1986), Border dialogues: Journeys immediately registered in culinary, musical in postmodernity (1990), Migrancy, culture, identity (1994), Hendrix, hip hop e and cultural taste, do not automatically lead l'interruzione del pensiero (with Paul Gilroy) to physical convivalities and friendship. (1995), Culture after humanism (2001); and Nevertheless, even if we cling to familiar most recently, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (2008). accents, the grammar of the city undergoes He is also editor with Lidia Curti of transformation. This occurs without our The Post-colonial question: Common skies, consent. We inevitably find ourselves speak- divided horizons (1996,) and the volume ing in the vicinity of other histories and cul- Esercizi di Potere. Gramsci, Said e il postcoloniale (2006). Several of these titles translation / inaugural issue / 2011 tures, in the vicinity of others who may refuse have been translated into various our terms of translation, who insist on opac- languages, including Italian, Spanish, ity and refuse to be represented in our rea- German, Japanese, and Turkish. He is presently preparing a work on music and son. As a translating and translated space, the postcolonial criticism, tentatively entitled language of the city is never merely a linguis- Mediterranean Blues, for publication in 2012. 27 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 28 Iain Chambers Space tic matter. For what is being ‘spoken’ in a mixture of asymmetrical powers is precisely the intricate accumulation of historical encounters established in the conjunctural syntax of a particular urban cultural formation. As the concentrated locality of such processes, and their augmented velocity, the city continually proposes the urgency of considering life, both ours, and that of others, in the transit proposed by translation. What precisely might all of this mean? Beyond the obvious threshold of translation inaugurated by the arrival of the other, the stranger, invariably called upon to transform his history and her culture into our language and understanding, there emerges the disquiet- ing insistence that we, too, are somehow being translated by complex processes occurring in the very city that we consider our own. The city becomes increasingly problematic, and we grow accustomed to walking on troubled ground. The foundations of our history and culture, of our lives and sense of belonging, are disturbed. The assurance of a domestic place is exposed to unauthorised questions, unplanned procedures, and unhomely prac- tices. We are literally transported elsewhere and are ourselves translated. For what is ren- dered explicit in translation is not merely the contingency of language and the manner in which it sustains our movement, but also a persistent interrogation. Seeded in ambiguity, uncertainty, mis-understanding, re-formulations, semantic contestation, and the uncon- trolled passage of language elsewhere, there emerges the insistence on an irreducible opac- ity. Not all will be revealed to our eyes and reason. This, of course, is the complex challenge of the postcolonial city. It is here, where the colonial ghosts who haunt the making of modernity are housed and accommodated, that we encounter the most acute site of trans- lation, deferred representations and opacity. The forces of translation can be traced in multiple forms and formations: in the phe- nomenology of everyday life, in musical, pictorial and literary aesthetics, in clothing and culi- nary practices, in debating questions of faith, in renewing the lexicon of philosophical and critical discourse… Among the many ways of thinking of such processes, processes that are intrinsic to the making of the modern city and the modernity it is presumed to represent, is that provoked by critical considerations of contemporary architecture and urban planning. rchitecture as the material and technical appropriation of ground, history and A memory proposes a problematic site of power and politics, of technics, technology and aesthetics. All of this is unconsciously secreted in the seemingly neutral grid lines of the survey, the plan and the project. If architecture provides us with a habitat, a home, it also contributes to the language in which ideas of home, belonging and domestic- ity, and the supposed opposites of the unhomily, the non-identical and the foreign, are con- ceived and received. This renders space both agonistic and partisan: no longer an empty, ‘neutral’ container, waiting to be filled by the abstract protocols of ‘progress’, but rather the translation / inaugural issue / 2011 site of a complex and troubled inheritance that questions all desires to render it transpar- ent to a conclusive logic. Architecture, even if it chooses to ignore it, is about the translation of this troubled inheritance. So, opening up the languages of building, urban planning and civic projection, seeding them with doubt, and criss-crossing their concerns with lives lived, living and yet to come, is to render the ‘laws’ of cultural codification vulnerable to what they 28 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 29 Iain Chambers seek to contain and control. Every act of representation is simultaneously an act of repres- sion. Every excluded trace becomes the site of a potential transformation, the point of departure for unsuspected meanings. For, despite the presumption of the explorer’s map and the architectural drawing board, space is never empty; it is has already been inhabited, nominated and produced by some body. Abstract coordinates are themselves the purified signals of altogether more tur- bulent and terrestrial transit. In this stark affirmation lies a profound challenge to an eye/I that has historically been accustomed to colonising a space considered ‘empty’ prior to its occupation by occidental ‘progress’. Against a grade zero of history inaugurated by the West, its languages, disciplines, technologies and political economy, it is ethically and aesthetically possible to pose the historical heterogeneity of what persistently precedes and exceeds such a singular and unilateral framing of time and space. In translating abstract coordinates into worldly concerns they become both multiple and mutable. In the situated realisation of sym- bolic artifacts—the ‘house’, the ‘square’, the ‘building’, the ‘street’—a complex historical prove- nance is pronounced in the shifting syntagms of an ultimately planetary frame. he interruption posed by the other and the elsewhere encourages the interrogation T released in a sidereal, oblique glance that cuts across the site and crumples the map with other times. Set free from the assumptions of disciplinary protocols secured in the institutional authority of architecture, civil engineering and public administration, the plan, the project, is here exposed to questions and queries that were previously silenced and unheard. The desire for the totalising translation of transparency, and hence control, is deterritorialised and reterritorialised by what insists and resists the architectural and administrative will (to power). All of this crosses and contaminates aesthetics with ethics. A closed, idealist and metaphysical imperative—the idea of ‘beauty’, the ‘order’ of reason, the ‘rationality’ of the plan, the stable ‘meaning’ of the discourse—is transferred into the turbulent, open-ended syntactical turmoil of a quotidian event. We are invited to look and think again; to touch and feel the experience of the everyday and the ordinary rendered extra-ordinary. In this transitory exposure (Heidegger’s aletheia or revealing), a breach in the predictable tissues of a cultural and critical discourse is temporarily achieved. Here the solution proposed is nei- ther permanent nor conclusive; it is precisely in ‘solution’, in the chemical and physical sense of the term: a liquid state in which diverse forces, languages and histories are suspended and culturally configured in the shifting currents of a worldly unfolding. This architecture, and aesthetics, shadows, occasionally spilling over, the borders of more permanent preten- sions. As a border discourse, this translating perspective proposes tactical interruptions of a hegemonic strategy seeking to realise its unilateral plan (often under the label of ‘progress’, translation / inaugural issue / 2011 ‘modernity’ and ‘democracy’). It is in the borders, in a social and historical ‘no man’s’ land where both civil rights, and frequently the very concept of the ‘human’, are suspended or yet to come, that it becomes necessary to elaborate another architecture of sense, another geometry of meaning: a poetics whose trajectory and potential translations literally leaves the political speechless. (pp. 1-3) 29 

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translation

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 30 Globalization aRjun appaduRaI From: Modernity at Large (1996) Minneapolis – London: University of Minnesota Press. he central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural T homogenization and cultural heterogenization. (p. 32) […] For polities of smaller scale, there is always a fear of cultural absorption by polities of larger scale, especial- ly those that are nearby. One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison. This scalar dynamic, which has wide- spread global manifestations, is also tied to the Arjun Appadurai is a relationship between nations and states, to contemporary social- which I shall return later. For the moment let cultural anthropologist focusing on modernity us note that the simplification of these many and globalization, based forces (and fears) of homogenization can also in New York. Appadurai be exploited by nation-states in relation to was born in Bombay, their own minorities, by posing global com- India in 1949 and educated in India before coming to the United States. He graduated moditization (or capitalism, or some other from St. Xavier's High School, Fort, Mumbai, such external enemy) as more real than the and earned his Intermediate Arts degree threat of its own hegemonic strategies. (p. 32) from Elphinstone College, Mumbai, before coming to the United States. He then […] received his B.A. from Brandeis University The new global cultural economy has in 1970. He was formerly a professor at the to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunc- University of Chicago where he received his M.A. (1973) and PhD (1976). After working tive order that cannot any longer be under- there, he spent a brief time at Yale before stood in terms of existing center-periphery going to the New School University. models (even those that might account for He currently is a faculty member of New multiple centers and peripheries). Nor is it York University's Media Culture and Communication department in the susceptible to simple models of push and pull Steinhardt School. Some of his most (in terms of migration theory), or of surplus- important works include Worship and es and deficits (as in traditional models of Conflict under Colonial Rule (1981), “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global translation / inaugural issue / 2011 balance of trade), or of consumers and pro- Cultural Economy” (1990) found in Modernity ducers (as in most neo-Marxist theories of at Large (1996), and Fear of Small Numbers development). (2006). Even the most complex and flexible theories of global development that have come out of the Marxist tradition (Amin 1980; Mandel 1978; Wallerstein 1974; Wolf 1982) are inadequately quirky and have failed to 30 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 31 Arjun Appadurai come to terms with what Scott Lash and John Urry called disorganized capitalism (1987). The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamen- tal disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics that we have only begun to theo- rize. (pp. 32-33) I propose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship among five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes. The suffix –scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that char- acterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles. These terms with the common suffix -scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as subnational groupings and movements (whether religious, political, or economic), and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighborhoods, and families. Indeed, the individual actor is the last locus of this perspectival set of landscapes, for these landscapes are eventu- ally navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger formations, in part from their own sense of what these landscapes offer. These landscapes thus are the building blocks of what (extending Benedict Anderson) I would like to call imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds that are consti- tuted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe. An important fact of the world we live in today is that many persons on the globe live in such imagined worlds (and not just in imagined communities) and thus are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them. (p. 33) s a result of the differential diaspora of these [landscapes], the political narratives A that govern communication between elites and followers in different parts of the world involve problems of both a semantic and pragmatic nature: semantic to the extent that words (and their lexical equivalents) require careful translation from context to context in their global movements, and pragmatic to the extent that the use of these words by political actors and their audiences may be subject to very different sets of contextual conventions that mediate their translation into public politics. Such conventions are not only matters of the nature of political rhetoric: for example, what does the aging Chinese leadership mean when it refers to dangers of hooliganism? What does the South Korean leadership mean when it speaks of discipline as the key to democratic industrial growth? translation / inaugural issue / 2011 (p. 36) 31 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 32 Kwame Anthony Appiah Globalization KwaMe antHOny appIaH From: Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) London: Penguin. o there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the S idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are already by the ties of kith and kin, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences. Because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person of every society should converge on a single mode of life. Whatever our obligations are to others (or theirs to us) they often have the right to go their own way. As we’ll see, there will be times when these two ideals—univer- sal concern and respect for legitimate difference—clash. There’s a sense in which cos- mopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge. A citizen of the world: how far can we take that idea? Are you really supposed to abjure all local allegiances and partialities in the name of this vast abstraction, humanity? Some proponents of cosmopolitanism were pleased to think so; and they often made easy targets of ridicule. “Friend of men, and enemy of almost every man he had to do with,” Thomas Carlyle memorably said of the eighteenth-century physiocrat the Marquis de Mirabeau, who wrote the treatise L’Ami des hommes when he wasn’t too busy jailing his own son. “A lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred”, Edmund Burke said of Jean- Jacques Rousseau, who handed each of the five children he fathered to an orphanage. Yet the impartialist version of the cosmopolitan creed has continued to hold a steely fascination. Virginia Woolf once exhorted “freedom from unreal loyalties”—to nation, sex, school, neighbourhood, and on and on. Leo Tolstoy, in the same spirit, inveighed against the ‘stupidity’ of patriotism. “To destroy war, destroy patriotism”, he wrote in an 1896 essay—a couple of decades before the tsar was swept away by a revolution in the name of the international working class. Some contemporary philosophers have similarly urged that the boundaries of nations are morally irrelevant—accidents of history with no rightful claim on our conscience. But if there are friends of cosmopolitanism who make me nervous, I am happy to be opposed to cosmopolitanism’s noisiest foes. Both Hitler and Stalin—who agreed about lit- tle else, save that murder was the first instrument of politics—launched regular invectives translation / inaugural issue / 2011 against “rootless cosmopolitans”; and while, for both, anti-cosmopolitanism was often just a euphemism for anti-Semitism, they were right to see cosmopolitanism as their enemy. For they both required a kind of loyalty to one portion of humanity—a nation, a class— that ruled out loyalty to all of humanity. And the one thought that cosmopolitans share is that no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities 32 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 33 Kwame Anthony Appiah to every other. Fortunately, we need take sides neither with the nationalist who abandons all foreigners nor with the hard-core cosmopolitan who regards her friends and fellow cit- izens with icy impartiality. The position worth defending might be called (in both senses) a partial cosmopolitanism. (pp. XIII-XIV) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 33 

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translation

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 34 Power ROseMaRy aRROjO From: “Writing, Interpreting, and the Power Struggle for Control of Meaning: Scenes from Kafka, Borges, and Kosztolány” in Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (ed.) Translation and Power (2002) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. f, as Nietzsche argues, any attempt at mastering a text, or the world as text, “involves a I fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated” (1969:12), the implicit relationship that is usually established between authors and interpreters is not exactly inspired by coopera- tion or collaboration, as common sense and the essentialist tradition would have it but, rather, is constituted by an underlying competition, by a struggle for the power to deter- mine that which will be (provisionally) accepted as true and definite within a certain con- text and under certain circumstances. As Kafka’s and Borges’s stories have shown us, in this textualized, human world, where immortal essences and absolute certainties are not to be found, the indisputable control over a text, its full completion, and the definite establish- ment of its limits cannot be simplistically determined nor merely related to its author once and for all. If one cannot clearly and forever separate the author from the interpreter, the text from its reading, or even one text from another, and if the will to power as authorial desire is that which moves both writers and readers in their attempts at constructing tex- tual mazes that could protect their meanings and, thus, also imprison and neutralize any potential intruder, is it ever possible for interpreters to be faithful to the authors or to the text they visit? Obviously, it is not by chance that this has always been the central issue and the main concern for all those interested in the mechanism of translation, an activity that provides a paradigmatic scenario for the underlying struggle for the control over meaning that consti- tutes both writing and interpretation as it involves the actual production of another text: the writing of the translator’s reading of someone else’s text in another language, time, and cultural environment. As it necessarily constitutes material evidence of translator’s passage through the original and as it offers documented proof of the differences brought about by translation / inaugural issue / 2011 such a passage, any translation is bound to be an exemplary site for the competitive nature of textual activity. In a tradition that generally views originals as the closed, fixed recepta- cle of their authors’ intentional meanings, the struggle for the power to determine the “truth” of a text is obviously decided in favor of those who are considered as the “rightful” owners of their texts’ meanings and who supposedly deserve unconditional respect from anyone who dares to enter their textual “property”. In such a tradition, translators are not 34 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 35 Rosemary Arrojo only denied the rights and privileges of authorship but also must endure a reputation for treachery and ineptitude while being urged to be as invisible and as humble as possible. (pp. 73-74) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 35 

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translation

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 36 Media susan Bassnett From: Susan Bassnett and Esperança Bielsa, Translation in Global News (2009) London – New York: Routledge. he asymmetries of globalization and the current inequalities in the production of T knowledge and information are directly mirrored in translation, and this becomes visible when the directionality of global information flows starts to be questioned. Thus, some accounts of globalization have pointed to the number of book translations Susan Bassnett is a from English and into English as an indication scholar of comparative literature. She served of the power distribution in global informa- as pro-vice-chancellor tion flows, where those at the core do the at the University of transmission and those at the periphery mere- Warwick for ten years and taught in its Centre ly receive it. […] The global dominance of for Translation and Comparative Cultural English is expressed in the fact that, in 1981, Studies, which she founded in the 1980s. books originally written in English accounted She was educated in several European for 42 per cent of translations worldwide, countries, and began her academic career in Italy, lecturing in universities around the compared with 13.5 per cent from Russian world. Author of over twenty books, her and 11.4 per cent from French. At the same Translation Studies, which first appeared in time, British and American book production 1980, has remained in print ever since and has become an important international is characterized by a low number of transla- textbook in this field. Her Comparative tions: 2.4 per cent of books published in 1990 Literature (1993) has also become in Britain and 2.96 per cent in the United internationally renowned and has been translated into several languages. In 1996 States […] Global English dominance is she co-edited Constructing Cultures: Essays expressed, on the one hand, in the sheer vol- on Literary Translation with André Lefevere, ume of English-language information in cir- and together with Harish Trivedi she is the culation. Thus, for example, current statistics editor of Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (1998). The Translator as Writer on languages on the internet reveal the large (2006) was coedited with Peter Bush. number of English-speaking users (about Her most recent book is Translation in translation / inaugural issue / 2011 one-third of the total), but also the even Global News (2008) written with Esperança Bielsa. In addition to her scholarly works, stronger predominance of English-language Bassnett writes poetry. internet content (which is estimated at over half of the total). On the other hand, translation, which makes it possible for people to have access to information in their own language, contributes to the global dominance of Anglo- American culture, as we have seen above for the case of book translations, which account for 36 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 37 Lawrence Venuti only the smallest part of the volume of translation, the bulk of which is in commercial trans- lation, politics and administration and in the mass media. Nevertheless, global or international English itself needs to be qualified and should be examined more carefully. […] International English, which in this sense can be viewed as a bad translation of itself, is a supraterritorial language that has lost its essential connection to a specific cultural context. It thus expresses in itself the fundamental abstractions derived from disembedding or the lift- ing out of social relations from their local contexts of interaction. […] Globalization has caused an exponential increase of translation. The global domi- nance of English has been accompanied by a growing demand for translation, as people’s own language continues to be the preferred language for access into informational goods. An area of significant growth in the translation industry in recent decades has been the activity of localization, through which global products are tailored to meet needs of specif- ic local markets (Cronin 2003, Pym 2004). In an informational economy characterized by instantaneous access to information worldwide, the objective of the localization industry becomes simultaneous availability in all the languages of the product’s target markets. Translation values and strategies in localization and elocalization (website localization) are not uniform but combine elements of domestication and foreignization to market products that have to appeal to their target buyers but, at the same time, often retain exoticizing con- nections to the language of technological innovation. Similarly, translation plays a central role in negotiating cultural difference and in shap- ing the dialects between homogeneity and diversity in the production of global news. […] [There are] present trends towards the homogenization of global news. However, these need to be examined alongside domesticating translation strategies aimed at a fluid com- munication with target readers and exotizicing devices through which the discourse of the other is staged in media (in, for example, English translations of Osama Bin Laden’s tapes or Saddam Hussein’s speeches). (pp. 28-31) lawRence venutI “Film Adaptation and Translation Theory: Equivalence and Ethics”. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 he shift in adaptation studies away from the discourse of fidelity toward a discourse T of intertextuality continues to raise conceptual problems. Is the emphasis on inter- textuality, to formulate one problem, just as essentialist as the concern with fidelity that it seeks to displace by devising film analyses and ideological critiques that assume among all audiences, regardless of their social diversity and historical moment, the same cultural lit- 37 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 38 Lawrence Venuti Media eracy and critical competence required to process the different sets of intertextual connec- tions at work in any film adaptation (namely, connections between the film and the adapted material as well as connections between that material and the context where it originated and between the film and its own originary context)? The most pressing problem, however, must be the necessity to reformulate a relation of correspondence between the film and the adapt- ed material that would justify calling a particular film an adaptation, that is to say, a film for which the processing of prior materials, including but in addition to a screenplay, is central to its signifying process. To treat a film as the second-order creation known as an adaptation (as distinct from such other second-order creations as a translation, a dramatic performance, a textual edition, or an anthology), its relation- ship to the prior material cannot be described Lawrence Venuti, Professor of English at simply as intertextual and analyzed as differ- Temple University, ential or interrogative. The film must also dis- works in early modern play a recognizable resemblance or similarity literature, British, to that material so as to share the title, name or American, and foreign poetic traditions, label by which it is designated. translation theory and history, and literary To conceptualize and supply this theo- translation. He is the author of The retical lack does not entail a return to the dis- Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995), and The Scandals of course of fidelity. In a previous study that Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference drew on translation theory to give a more (1998). He is the editor of the anthology of nuanced account of the discourse of intertex- essays, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (1992), and of The tuality (“Adaptation, Translation, Critique,” Translation Studies Reader (2nd ed. 2004). Journal of Visual Culture 6/1 [2007]: 25-43), I He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of constructed a hermeneutic model that treated Translation Studies (1998) and the Oxford as fundamentally interpretive the relation Guide to Literature in English Translation (2000). Recent articles and reviews have between second-order creations and the appeared in New York Times Book Review, materials they process. This relation should Performance Research, Translation and be seen as interpretive because it is contin- Literature, and Yale Journal of Criticism. In 1998, he edited a special issue of The gent, in the first instance, on the forms and Translator devoted to translation and practices which are deployed in the transla- minority. His translations from the Italian tion or adaptation and which differ in lan- include Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati (1983), I.U. Tarchetti’s Fantastic guage or medium from those deployed in the Tales (1992), Juan Rodolfo Wilcock’s prior materials (the relation is also contingent collection of real and imaginary biographies, on different kinds of reception, on different The Temple of Iconoclasts (2000), Antonia cultural situations, and on different historical Pozzi’s Breath: Poems and Letters (2002), Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2003), moments). The key category that enables a and Melissa P.’s fictionalized memoir, 100 translation to inscribe an interpretation in the Strokes of the Brush before Bed (2004). translation / inaugural issue / 2011 source text is the interpretant, usually a complicated set of interpretants, which can be either formal or thematic. Formal interpre- tants include a concept of equivalence, such as a semantic correspondence based on diction- ary definitions, or discursive strategy, such as close adherence to the source text, or a concept of style, a lexicon and syntax linked to a specific genre. Thematic interpretants are codes. 38 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 39 Lawrence Venuti They include an interpretation of the source text that has been formulated independently in commentary, a discourse in the sense of a relatively coherent body of concepts, problems, and arguments, or an ensemble of values, beliefs, and representations affiliated with specific social groups. These thematic interpretants can be interrelated: an interpretation of the source text set forth in a work of literary criticism may be used to encode a translation with an ideolo- gy, establishing an institutional or political affiliation. Formal and thematic interpretants can also be mutually determining: a concept of equivalence may in a certain cultural situation be reserved for canonical texts, so that when used to render a marginalized text it inscribes a code of canonicity. Similarly, a style or genre can encode a discourse in a translation, while a discourse can lead the translator to cultivate a style or construct a genre when neither exist- ed in the source text. he hermeneutic model can not only be reformulated to analyze an intersemiotic T translation like a film adaptation, but it can be used to reformulate a relation of resemblance or similarity between the film and the adapted materials. In a film adaptation, formal interpretants include a relation of equivalence, such as a structural cor- respondence between narrative point of view or plot details, a particular style that distin- guishes the work of a director or studio, or a concept of genre that necessitates a distinctive treatment of the adapted materials, whether retention or revision, imitation or manipula- tion. Thematic interpretants may include an interpretation of the adapted materials artic- ulated in commentary, a morality or cultural taste shared by the filmmakers and used to appeal to a particular audience, or a political position that reflects the interests of a specif- ic social group. In a film adaptation, formal and thematic interpretants can be interrelated and mutually determining. An actor’s previous roles (an interfilmic connection) might add a layer of meaning to the characterization in an adaptation for the informed spectator. A film genre like noir or the musical might introduce an entire discourse when used to adapt a novel or play composed in a different genre. he hermeneutic model does not entail a return to the discourse of fidelity because T it does not assume that the source text or adapted materials contain an invariant which is reproduced or transferred in the translation or adaptation. On the con- trary, the assumption is that a second-order creation transforms what it processes, that the interpretation inscribed by the translation or adaptation varies the form and meaning of the source text or adapted materials by removing them from their originary context and recon- textualizing them in a different language and medium in a different cultural situation at a different historical moment. Relations of resemblance simultaneously disclose relations of difference and vice versa. The hermeneutic model also avoids the risk of essentialism in the translation / inaugural issue / 2011 discourse of intertextuality because no formulation of the interpretants that enable and constrain a second-order creation is possible without the application of critical interpre- tants, that is to say, the critic’s or analyst’s own set of interpretive categories. To isolate rela- tions of resemblance and difference between the translation or adaptation, on the one hand, and the source text or adapted materials, on the other, the critic must apply a critical 39 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 40 Lawrence Venuti Media methodology (a formal interpretant, such as the hermeneutic model) or an interpretation of the text or material (a thematic interpretant) so as to fix their form and meaning of the source text or adapted materials and thereby bring to light the interpretants in the transla- tion or adaptation. The promise of the hermeneutic model, then, is not only a more nuanced account of translational and adaptational practices but a greater theoretical self- consciousness on the part of the critic. The hermeneutic model complicates the issue of value in second-order creations. Every interpretation is fundamentally evaluative insofar as it rests on the implicit judgment that a text is worth interpreting, not only in commentary but through translation or adaptation. Interpretants, moreover, are always already implicated in the hierarchies of value that struc- ture the receiving culture at a particular historical moment, its centers and peripheries, its canons and margins. Yet because a translation or adaptation necessarily transforms the source text or adapted materials, at once detaching them from their originary context and recontex- tualizing them, neither can be evaluated merely through a comparison to that text or those materials without taking into account the cultural and social conditions of their interpreta- tion. The evaluation must be shifted to a different level that seems to me properly ethical: in inscribing an interpretation, a translation or adaptation can stake out an ethical position and thereby serve an ideological function in relation to competing interpretations. second-order creation, more specifically, might be evaluated according to its impact, A potential or real, on cultural institutions in the receiving situation, according to whether it challenges the styles, genres, and discourses that have gained institution- al authority, according to whether it stimulates innovative thinking, research, and writing. This ethics of translation or adaptation does not treat the bad as “the non-respect of the name of the Other” (Alain Badiou), the move made by such theorists as Henri Meschonnic and Antoine Berman who argued that translation can and ought to respect the differences of for- eign texts and cultures through discursive strategies designed to preserve and make manifest those differences. Rather, the bad in translation or adaptation “is much more the desire to name at any price” (Badiou), imposing cultural norms that seek to master cognitively and thereby deny the singularity that stands beyond them, the alternative set of interpretants that enable a different translation or adaptation, a different interpretation. Hence a translation or adaptation should not be faulted for exhibiting features that are commonly called unethical, such as wholesale manipulation of the source text or adapted materials. We should instead examine the cultural and social conditions of the translation or adaptation, considering whether its interpretants initiate an event, creating new values and knowledges by supplying a lack that they reveal in those that are currently dominant in the receiving culture. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 40 

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translation

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 41 Representation MaRtHa p. y. cHeung From: “The (un)importance of flagging Chineseness. Making sense of a recur- rent theme in contemporary Chinese discourses on translation” (2011) Translation Studies, vol. 4, Issue 1. ranslation studies in China is best understood in the context of the cultural politics T of the time. Many debates about translation are in fact debates about the perennial problem of China’s cultural relationship with the world. In its most recent form, the debate is about whether the ‘influx’ of foreign translation theories and the wholesale accept- ance of these theories has resulted in a loss of identity for Chinese translation studies. A Martha P.Y. Cheung is related question concerns the appropriateness Chair Professor in of asserting Chineseness in academic dis- Translation and courses on translation. (p. 1) Director of the Centre for Translation of Hong […] Kong Baptist University. On the Chinese mainland, the notion of She has translated Chineseness emerged in the theoretical con- many Chinese literary works into English, and has published on translation theory, sciousness of scholars in different branches of literary translation, and translation history. the humanities in the mid-1980s. That devel- Her most recent publications are opment, which I will analyse in the following An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on pages, was initially a reaction to the theories, Translation, Volume 1: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project (St. Jerome imported through translation, which became Publishing, 2006) and a Special Issue of so influential on the Mainland after the The Translator on “Chinese Discourses on Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) that they Translation: Positions and Perspectives” (2009). She is now preparing Volume 2 came to be regarded not only as a threat to the of the Anthology. Her main research indigenous modes of scholarship, but also as interests include discourse and reflecting a general loss of confidence in metadiscourse of translation, the relation between translation theory and the practice Chinese culture. The arrival of other cultural of translation, and the changing meanings goods—such as films, fast food items, fashion of the concept of “translation” in different and others—which became equally popular translation traditions. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 with the Chinese people was also seen by many as a violent intrusion driven by greed and by thinly veiled cultural imperialism. There was concern that unless the development was checked in time, Chinese culture would be abandoned or changed beyond recognition, all its unique features eroded. This ‘threat’ is generally believed to have come from ‘the West’, with ‘the West’ to be understood in this article as a construct and, in the words of Naoki Sakai, as a “cartograph- 41 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 42 Martha P. Y. Cheung Representation ic category” (Sakai 2005: 201) denoting “the geographic areas imagined to constitute the West—mainly Western Europe in the nineteenth century, with North America being added later in the twentieth century” (ibid.: 194). Sakai also stresses, rightly I think, that the notion of modernity as a historical development and the process of “developmental tele- ology” have (mis)led many into believing that the West has the right “to expand and radi- ate towards the peripheries of the world”, so that “the representation of the world became hierarchically organized into the West and the Rest, the modern and its others, the white and the coloured” (ibid.: 202). The West also came to be regarded as centres of power where theories and models are produced, disseminated to the peripheries, and consumed by local academics keen to be part of the global community. As a category, I think that ‘the West’ is as much of a gross generalization and biased discursive construction as ‘the Orient’. But since this article deals with the historical circumstances in which Chineseness became a discursive topic as a result of the perceived threat posed by theories from ‘the West’, it is necessary to retain the use of such a category whilst bearing in mind that there are “no neu- tral, uncontaminated terms or concepts”, only “compromised, historically encumbered tools” (Clifford 1997: 39). (p. 2) […] s the debate about Chineseness, which has taken a myriad of forms and has erupted I repeatedly in different cultural and intellectual domains in China since the mid-1980s, indicative of an obsessive compulsive disorder plaguing the Chinese? Is it a minor and purely local affair? What significance, if any, does it have for the international community of scholars? In the field of translation studies, that significance can be gleaned from the appear- ance of a number of publications in English thematizing translation in China or discourse on translation in China. The fact that these publications—edited or authored by Chinese scholars based in the PRC—all came out in the first decade of the twenty-first century is significant. It indicates that on the international translation studies scene, Chinese voices are making themselves heard in quick succession. Perhaps the West is beginning to take an interest in listening to what China, or for that matter, what the non-West, has to say, fol- lowing the initiatives taken by Western scholars themselves to learn from other translation traditions and guard against Eurocentric tendencies. With such an interest, and with the availability of primary material in translation, the West can, should it choose to make the effort, achieve a deeper and more thorough understanding of the Other, an understanding that is absolutely necessary if translation studies is to become “truly ‘international’” (Susam- Sarajeva 2002: 203). Certainly, understanding is a prerequisite for conducting what I have called explorations in a dialogic, fully collaborative mode, meaning a mode of discourse translation / inaugural issue / 2011 based not on the pattern of “one topic, separate narratives”, but on the exchange of views on equal terms. The debate about Chineseness also has significance for the international community of scholars. Voicelessness or speaking with a voice not one’s own is not peculiar to the Chinese, but is the common affliction of scholars in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This 42 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 43 Martha P. Y. Cheung being the case, the Chinese sense of culture in crisis assumes significance as an instance of the general sense of vulnerability and defencelessness that is tormenting the (intellectually and culturally) subjugated. The fact that this is the plight of the Third World intellectuals in general is a chastening reminder that although knowledge, ethnicity, identity and nation- alism should be separate and independent concepts, in reality they are often hopelessly entangled. We do not live in a post-nationalist world—not yet. he debate about Chineseness has implications, too, for the promotion of intercul- T tural dialogue in the new geopolitical settings of the twenty-first century. One of these settings will be ushered in by the rise of China as a major power and the rad- ical changes that are likely to follow in the power politics of the world. Bearing this in mind, I would argue that a productive debate about Chineseness will be an enabling condition for intercultural dialogue. As we have seen, that debate, though occasionally given to belliger- ent assertion of nationalistic sentiments, is equally accompanied by stern warnings against such sentiments and against academic sinocentrism. It is also characterized by discursive attempts to project interpretations and constructions of China via a range of media. The intensity of these activities suggests that Chineseness will continue to be a contested con- cept, and that the Chinese will be engaged in a continuous process of self-constitution and cultural self-translation. This is healthy. In the course of their history, the Chinese lived all too long in the mentality of a Middle Kingdom. For centuries they were used to imagining themselves as the centre of power, taming and domesticating their nomadic neighbours with their superior civilization and turning them into vassal states. No doubt, there were occasional periods when China lived in self-imposed isolation. It is also true that for much of the last two centuries, the Chinese were driven by the humiliation of national defeat into a pattern of behaviour typical of the cowed and wounded. Nonetheless, the Middle Kingdom still features prominently in the imagination of the Chinese. Unless China becomes fully aware that identity is not fixed but is an ongoing narrative with a plot criss- crossed with possibilities and an indeterminate end, it could easily get trapped in a victim- turned-aggressor complex and become a monolithic entity determined to dominate the world—through either a policy of aggression or cultural imperialism. Far from being con- ducive to intercultural dialogue, that would only lead to a clash of empires. The debate about Chineseness—whether philosophical or discursive in orientation, and whether onto- logical, epistemological, existential, hermeneutical, or political and ideological in empha- sis—will prevent China from hardening into such a monolithic entity. (pp. 13-14) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 43 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 44 Theo Hermans Representation tHeO HeRMans From: Conference of the Tongues (2007) Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. The thick of it et us leave the examples for what they are and try to formulate the more general issue L at stake. I think it is at least twofold. First, there is the problem of grasping and gain- ing access to concepts and discursive practices, in our case those pertaining to trans- lation, in languages and cultures other than our own; this is primarily a problem of hermeneutics, of understanding and interpretation. Secondly, the cross-lingual and cross- cultural study of concepts and discursive practices involves recourse to translation if we want to articulate in our own language what we have understood as happening in another lan- Theo Hermans is guage. We need to translate in order to study Professor of Dutch and translation across languages and cultures. Comparative Literature at University College […] London (UCL). Beyond Both issues are familiar territory for UCL he is involved in anthropologists and historians, and for com- the Translation paratists in a number of other disciplines. Research Summer School (TRSS) and with the International Association for Translation Both also carry an element of latent or overt and Intercultural Studies (IATIS). He also self-reflection on the terms on which and the edits the book series Translation Theories contexts in which the representation of other- Explored for St. Jerome Publishing. He has published on translation theory and history, ness is acted out. But while these problems and on Dutch and comparative literature. have been debated anxiously and extensively Monographs include The Structure of by ethnographers and historiographers, they Modernist Poetry (1982), Translation in Systems (1999) and The Conference of the have remained largely and surprisingly absent Tongues (2007). He has edited The from the study of translation. Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary The absence is not inevitable, as becomes Translation (1985), The Flemish Movement: A Documentary History (1992), Crosscultural clear when we recall some earlier attempts to Transgressions (2002), Translating Others create a methodology for the cross-cultural (2006) and A Literary History of the Low study and representation of concepts. In 1932, Countries (2009). His work has been for example, in his book Mencius on the Mind, translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, Spanish, and Turkish. I.A. Richards developed what he called a “tech- In October 2006 he was awarded the nique of multiple definition” as a way of nego- honorary post of Adjunct Professor in the translation / inaugural issue / 2011 tiating alien meaning. Department of Translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. […] Twenty years after Mencius, in Speculative Instruments (1955), Richards reviewed his cross-cultural mapping tool in the essay Toward a Theory of Comprehending…. As regards the cross-cultural study of con- 44 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 45 Theo Hermans cepts, he observed, we compare things in certain respects, and we select those respects that will serve our purpose. […] Any similarity thus established between two entities is a function of the respects that were selected as the ground for comparison in the first place. Comprehending, as the per- ception and positing of similarities and differences, is continually thrown back on an exam- ination of the instrument which enables the similarities and differences to be established. […] This brings us to what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called “thick translation” (Appiah 2004). Appiah means by it the academic, heavily footnoted translation of texts from traditions alien to that of the translating language. I will not use the term in Appiah’s sense. Instead I will use it as a label for a self-critical form of cross-cultural translation stud- ies. The transposition seems appropriate if, as I suggested above, we take the study of trans- lation as consisting in translating concepts and practices of translation. Appiah grafted his term “thick translation” on Clifford Geertz’s characterization of the ethnographer’s work as “thick description.” This was a notion that Geertz introduced in the programmatic essay “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” which introduced his collection The Interpretation of Cultures in 1973. […] Applying this line of thought to ethnographic work, Geertz notes several practical points. Firstly he insists on both the interpretive and constructivist nature of the ethnogra- phers descriptions (1973: 15-16). The point at issue for him is not whether the ethnogra- pher’s thick description presents an accurate account of a particular society…but whether it allows an appreciation both of what is similar and what is different, and in what ways, from what angles,—in what “respects,” as Richards might have said—things appear similar and different. Finally, thick description keeps the universalizing urge of theory in check. Preferring the microhistories of particular situations, it prides itself on the “delicacy of its distinctions, not on the sweep of its abstractions” (Geertz 1973: 25). As one commentator phrases it, thick description privileges the many over the one (Inglis 2000: 115). […] For all these reasons, “thick translation” seems to me a line worth pursuing if we want to study concepts and practices of translation across languages and cultures. As a form of translation studies, thick translation has the potential to bring about a double dislocation: of the foreign terms and concepts, which are probed by means of a methodology and vocab- ulary alien to them, and of the describer’s own terminology, which must be wrenched out of its familiar shape to accommodate both alterity and similarity. In other words, thick translation / inaugural issue / 2011 translation is a double-edged technique. It engages with very different ways of conceptual- izing translation, and it serves as a critique of current translation studies. (pp. 145-150) 45 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 46 Elsa Tamez Representation elsa taMez From: “Three Narratives in Dialogue: the Text, the Translators and the Readers”, presented at the conference “Translation, Identity and Heterogeneity”, organized by the Nida Institute and other institutions at the University of San Marcos, Peru, December 2007. o see cultures as narratives allows us to see the ‘other’ as an event impossible to cap- T ture in rigid or static concepts, univocal or one dimensional. This starting point for a reflection on translation in the context of pluriculturalism carries two conse- quences. On the one hand it challenges all pretension of absolute equivalency in translations, already refuted by the new translation theories. On the other hand, it re-dimensions the contribution of dynamic and functional equivalencies by radicalizing them. Now, speaking of dialogue, we need to bring together the elements we are working with, that is, the biblical text, the translator and the reader. In this light, the figures of body and narrative are important in relation to the translator and the reader, the same as the text, because in the end a narrative is also a text and a narrated text is a body. The semiotician Elsa Tamez is Emeritus Professor of the Latin Roland Barthes has said that in the circle of American Biblical Arab scholars they speak of the text as a body. University and If the body is text, then the translator and the Translation Consultant reader are also texts because they are bodies of the United Bible Societies. She was born made up of an infinity of interwoven tissues in Mexico. Prof. Tamez received her and textures; the text is interwoven; as bodies Doctor's Degree in Theology from the are weavings of flesh and texts are weavings of University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She received her Licentiate in Theology in 1979 linguistic signs, but all are narratives, bodies from the Latin American Biblical Seminary, and texts. and a Licentiate in Literature and Linguistics at the National University of Costa Rica in 1986. Among her most known This symbolic terminology is important publications in English are: The Bible of the because it breaks with fundamentalism, giv- Oppressed (1980), The Scandalous Message of ing life, specificity and spontaneity to the James (1989), The Amnesty of Grace (1993), and When the Horizons Close: Rereading three elements in the approach that we are Ecclesiastes (2000). Her latest publication is attempting to develop in this essay. Jesus and Courageous Women (2001) and Struggles of Power in Early Christianity Of these three narrative elements, that (2007). She has received several awards for her contribution to Contextual Biblical translation / inaugural issue / 2011 of the readers is the motor that starts up the Hermeneutics. dialogue in the translation process. The Bible is not translated just because, or in order to impose a particular kind of message. It is done in order to share a message that dignifies and empowers the person and it does so with a particular audience in mind that has requested said translation. This happens when that audience wishes to hear or read in its own mother tongue what it has heard or read in anoth- 46 

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translation

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 49 War and conflict eMIly apteR From: The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature (2006) Princeton: Princeton University Press. Twenty Theses on Translation • Nothing is translatable. • Global translation is another name for comparative literature. • Humanist translatio is critical secularism. • The translation zone is a war zone. • Contrary to what U.S. military strategy would suggest, Arabic is translatable. • Translation is a petit métier, translators the literary proletariat. • Mixed tongues contest the imperium of global English. • Translation is an oedipal assault on the mother tongue. • Translation is the traumatic loss of native language. • Translation is plurilingual and postmedial expressionism. • Translation is Babel, a universal language that is universally unintelligible. • Translation is the language of planets and monsters. • Translation is a technology. • Translationese is the generic language of global markets. • Translation is a universal language of techne. • Translation is a feedback loop. • Translation can transpose nature into data. • Translation is the interface between language and genes. • Translation is the system-subject. • Everything is translatable. (pp. XI-XII) he urgent, political need for skilled translators became abundantly clear in the trag- T translation / inaugural issue / 2011 ic wake of 9/11, as institutions charged with protecting national security scram- bled to find linguistically proficient specialists to decode intercepts and docu- ments. Translation and global diplomacy seemed never to have been so mutually implicat- ed. As America’s monolingualism was publicly criticized as part of renewed calls for shared information, mutual understanding across cultural and religious divides, and multilateral cooperation, translation moved to the fore as an issue of major political and cultural signif- 49 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 50 Emily Apter War and conflict icance. No longer deemed a mere instrument of international relations, business, education, and culture, translation took on special relevance as a matter of war and peace. It is in this political situation that The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature took shape. The book aims to rethink translation studies—a field traditionally defined by problems of linguistic and textual fidelity to the original—in a broad theoreti- cal framework that emphasizes the role played by mistranslation in war, the influence Emily Apter teaches at New York University of language and literature wars on canon for- since 2002, after having mation and literary fields, the aesthetic sig- taught in French and nificance of experiments with nonstandard Comparative Literature at UCLA, Cornell language, and the status of the humanist tra- University, UC-Davis, dition of translatio studii in an area of techno- Penn and Williams College. At NYU she logical literacy. teaches in the departments of French, Structuring my lines of inquiry has English, and Comparative Literature, specializing in courses on French Critical been an awareness of the contradictory Theory, the History and Theory of process by which globally powerful languages Comparative Literature, the problem of such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Swahili, “Francophonie,” translation studies, French feminism, and nineteenth and twentieth Spanish, Arabic, French simultaneously century French literature. Recent essays reduce linguistic diversity and spawn new have focused on paradigms of forms of multilingual aesthetic practice. "oneworldedness," the problem of self- property and self-ownership, literary While it has become commonplace, for world-systems and the translatability of example, to bemoan the hegemony of global genres, and how to think about translation English as the lingua franca of technocracy, as a form of intellectual labor. Since 1998 there has been insufficient attention paid to she has edited the book series, Translation/Transnation for Princeton how other global languages are shifting the University Press. In progress: coediting with balance of power in the production of world Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood the culture. Chinese, for example, is now a major English edition of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des language of internet literacy and is taking on intraduisibles [Dictionary of Untranslatables: English as never before. A Philosophical Lexicon]. With Bruno An underlying promise of this book Bosteels she is editing a selection of Alain Badiou’ s literary writings. Work in has been that language wars, great and small, preparation also includes two books: shape the politics of translation in the “Politics small p:” Essays on the Society of spheres of media, literacy, literary markets, Calculation in Nineteenth Century France and electronic information transfer, and codes of Against World Literature: On Untranslatability in Comparative Literature. literariness. The field of translation studies has been accordingly expanded to include on the one hand, pragmatic, real world issues— intelligence-gathering in war, the embattlement of minority languages within official state translation / inaugural issue / 2011 cultures, controversies over ‘other Englishes’—and on the other, more conceptually abstract considerations such as the literary appropriation of pidgins and creoles, or multilingual experimentalism among historic avant-gardes, or translation across media. Translation studies has always had to confront the problem of whether it best serves the ends of perpetuating cultural memory or advancing its effacement. A good translation, 50 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 51 Vicente L. Rafael as Walter Benjamin famously argued, makes possible the afterlife of the original by jump- ing the line between the death of the source language and its futural transference to a tar- get. This death/life aporia leads to split discourses in the field of translation studies: while translation is deemed essential to the dissemination and preservation of textual inheritance, it is also understood to be an agent of language extinction. For translation, especially in a world dominated by the languages of powerful economies and big populations, condemns minority tongues to obsolescence, even as it fosters access to the cultural heritage of “small” literatures, or guarantees a wider sphere of reception to seIected, representative authors of minoritarian traditions. (pp. 3-4) vIcente l. Rafael From: “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of Empire” (2009) Social Text, 101, v. 27, no. 4, Winter. n a time of war, the task of the translator Vicente L. Rafael is I is invariably mired in a series of professor of history at intractable and irresolvable contradic- the University of Washington in Seattle. tions. It begins with the fact that translation Much of his work has itself is a highly volatile act. As the displace- focused on such topics ment, replacement, transfer and transforma- as comparative colonialism and nationalism, translation, tion of the original into another language, language and power, and the cultural translation is incapable of fixing meanings histories of analog and digital media across languages. Rather, as with the story of especially in the context of Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and the United States. Babel, it consists precisely in the proliferation His books include Contracting Colonialism: and confusion of possible meanings and there- Translation and Christian Conversion in fore in the impossibility of arriving at a single Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (1993); White Love and Other Events in Filipino one. For this reason, it repeatedly brings into Histories (2000), and The Promise of the crisis the locus of address, the interpretation Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of of signs, the agency of mediation, and the Translation in the Spanish Philippines (2005). ethics of speech. Hence is it impossible for anyone to fully control much less recuperate its workings. The treachery and treason inher- ent in translation in a time of war are the insistent counterpoints to the pervasive wish for translation / inaugural issue / 2011 language to be fully transparent to meaning and fully compliant with the intentions of its speakers regardless of what side of the conflict they are on. Any attempt to reduce language into a sheer instrument of either the will to power or the will to resistance, thanks to trans- lation, will invariably fail. Undercutting attempts to impose domination or hegemony, trans- lation betrays both by promoting the circulation of what remains untranslatable. It would seem then that in the context of war, translation is at permanent war with itself. 51 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 52 Vicente L. Rafael War and conflict ranslation at war and as war: how do we understand this? If translation is like war, T is it possible that war is also like translation? It is possible I think if we consider that the time of war is like the movement of translation. There is a sense that both lead not to the privileging of order and meaning but to emergence of what I’ve referred to as the untranslatable. ‘Wartime’ spreads what Nietzsche called in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, “an all consuming fever” that creates a crisis in historical thinking. So much of the way we think about history, certainly in the Westernized parts of our planet since the Enlightenment, is predicated on a notion of time as the succession of events leading towards increasingly more progressive ends. Wartime decimates that mode of thinking. Instead, it creates mass disorientation at odds with the temporal rhythms of progress and civilization. In this way, wartime is what Samuel Weber refers to as “pure movement.” It is a “whirlwind… that sweeps everything up in its path and yet goes nowhere. As a movement, the whirlwind of war marks time, as it were, inscribing it in a destructive circularity that is both centripetal and centrifugal, wrenching things and people out of their accustomed places, displacing them and with them, all [sense] of place as well. …Wartime thus wrecks havoc with tradi- tional conceptions of space and time and with the order they make possible.” It is precisely the disordering effect of war on our notions of space and time that brings it in association with translation that tends to scatter meaning, displace origins, and expose the radical undecidability of references, names and addressees. Put differently, translation in wartime intensifies the experience of untranslatability and thus defies the demands of any particular power to reorder a place and call forth the submission of its inhabitants. Just as civilizational time engenders the permanent possibility of wartime, the time that is out of joint and out of whack, so the time of translation is haunted by untranslatability, the fever- ish circulation of misrecognition and uncertainty from which we can find neither safety nor security, national or otherwise. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 52 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17562

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 53 Politics eMIly apteR From: The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature (2006) Princeton: Princeton University Press. have real reservations about pushing translation studies in the direction of linguistic I ecology even if this new direction offers potentially rich possibilities for interdiscipli- nary work between comparative literature and area studies. More worries are ground- ed in the concern that a translation studies overly indebted to linguistic ecology risks fetishizing heritage language as it devotes itself to curatorial salvage: exoticizing burrs, calques and idiomatic expressions as so many ornaments of linguistic local color, reinforc- ing linguistic cultural essentialism, and subjecting the natural flux and variation of dialect to a standard language model of grammatical fixity. I am personally more inclined toward a critical model of language politics that would continue to emphasize aesthetic and theo- retical questions, while invigorating the investigation of linguistic nominalism, or what a language name really names when it refers to grammatical practices in linguistic territories. Language wars have also remained a central theme in my conceptualization of trans- lation zones. In fastening on the term ‘zone’ as a theoretical mainstay, the intention has been to imagine a broad intellectual topography that is neither the property of a single nation, nor an amorphous condition associated with postnationalism, but rather a zone of critical engagement that connects the ‘l’ and the ‘n’ of transLation and transNation. The common root ‘trans’ operates as a connecting port of translational transnationalism (a term I use to emphasize translation among small nations or minority language communities), as well as the point of debarkation to cultural caesura—a trans—ation—where transmission failure is marked. (p. 5) […] The zone, in my ascription, has designated sites that are ‘in-translation’, that is to say, belonging to no single, discrete language or single medium of communication. Broadly con- ceived in these terms, the translation zone applies to diasporic language communities, print and media public spheres, institutions of governmentality and language policy-making, the- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 aters of war, and literary theories with particular relevance to the history and future of com- parative literature. The translation zone defines the epistemological interstices of politics, poetics, logic, cybernetics, linguistics, genetics, media, and environment; its locomotion characterizes both psychic transference and the technology of information transfer. (p. 6) 53 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 54 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Politics gayatRI cHaKRavORty spIvaK From: Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993) London – New York: Routledge. Translation as reading ow does the translator attend to the Gayatri Chakravorty H specificity of the language she translates? There is a way in which the rhetorical nature of every language dis- Spivak is University Professor and founding member of the Institute for Comparative rupts its logical systematicity. If we emphasize Literature and Society at Columbia University. Her the logical at the expense of these rhetorical translation with critical introduction of interferences, we remain safe. “Safety” is the Jacques Derrida’ s De la grammatologie appropriate term here, because we are talking appeared in 1976. Among her books are In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics of risks, of violence to the translating medium. (1987; Routledge Classics 2002), Selected I felt that I was taking those risks when Subaltern Studies (ed., 1988), The Post- I recently translated some eighteenth-century Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues Bengali poetry. I quote a bit from my (1990), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993; Routledge Classics 2003), Imaginary Maps “Translator’s Preface”: (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1994), A Critique of I must overcome what I was taught in school: the Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the highest mark for the most accurate collection of Vanishing Present (1999), Old Women (translation with critical introduction of two synonyms, strung together in the most proximate stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1999), Imperatives syntax. I must resist both the solemnity of chaste to Re-Imagine the Planet / Imperative zur Victorian poetic prose and the forced simplicity Neuerfindung des Planeten (ed. Willi of “plain English”, that have imposed themselves Goetschel, 1999; 2d ed. forthcoming), Chotti as the norm ... Translation is the most intimate Munda and His Arrow (translation with critical introduction of a novel by Mahasweta Devi, act of reading. I surrender to the text when I 2002), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias translate. These songs, sung day after day in fam- (2005), An Aesthetic Education in the Age of ily chorus before clear memory began, have a Globalization (forthcoming). Significant peculiar intimacy for me. Reading and surrender- articles: “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing ing take on new meanings in such a case. The Historiography” (1985), “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), “The Politics of Translation” translator earns permission to transgress from the (1992), “Moving Devi” (1999), “Righting trace of the other—before memory—in the clos- Wrong” (2003), “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, est places of the self. Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching” (2004), “Translating into English” (2005), translation / inaugural issue / 2011 “Rethinking Comparativism” (2010). Activist Yet language is not everything. It is only in rural education and feminist and ecological a vital clue to where the self loses its bound- social movements since 1986. aries. The ways in which rhetoric of figura- tion disrupt logic themselves point at the possibility of random contingency, beside lan- guage, around language. Such a dissemination cannot be under our control. Yet in transla- 54 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 55 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak tion, where meaning hops into the spacy emptiness between two named historical lan- guages, we get perilously close to it. By juggling the disruptive rhetoricity that breaks the sur- face in not necessarily connected ways, we feel the selvedges of the language-textile give way, fray into frayages or facilitations. Although every act of reading or communication is a bit of this risky fraying which scrambles together somehow, our stake in agency keeps the fraying down to a minimum except in the communication and reading of and in love. (What is the place of “love” in the ethical? [...] Irigaray has struggled with this question.) The task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying, holds the agency of the translator and the demands of her imagined or actual audi- ence at bay. The politics of translation from a non-European woman’s text too often sup- presses this possibility because the translator cannot engage with, or cares insufficiently for, the rhetoricity of the original. The simple possibility that something might not be meaningful is contained by the rhetorical system as the always possible menace of a space outside language. This is most eerily staged (and challenged) in the effort to communicate with other possible intelligent beings in space. (Absolute alterity or otherness is thus differed-deffered into an other self who resembles us, however minimally, and with whom we can communicate). But a more homely staging of it occurs across two earthly languages. The experience of contained alter- ity in an unknown language spoken in a different cultural milieu is uncanny. Let us now think that, in that other language, rhetoric may be disrupting logic in the matter of the production of an agent, and indicating the founding violence of the silence at work within rhetoric. Logic allows us to jump from word to word by means of clearly indi- cated connections. Rhetoric must work in the silence between and around words in order to see what works and how much. The jagged relationship between rhetoric and logic, con- dition and effect of knowing, is a relationship by which a world is made for the agent, so that the agent can act in an ethical way, a political way, a day-to-day way; so that the agent can be alive, in a human way, in the world. Unless one can at least construct a model of this for the other language, there is no real translation. (pp. 180-181) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 55 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17563

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 56 Ideology MaRtHa p. y. cHeung From: “Representation, Intervention and Mediation: A Translation Anthologist’s Reflections on the Complexities of Translating China” in Luo, Xuanmin & He, Yuanjian (eds.), Translating China (2009) Bristol: Multilingual Matters. he “need to think ideologically about translation research” is a call I made in anoth- T er paper (Cheung 2002). I would like to reiterate it here. To think ideologically about translation research does not mean that we treat everything as ideologically suspect. It does mean, however, that we accept ideological leanings/bias/convictions as an epistemological fact, as something that is built into our attempts to make sense of things. And this, I think, is one way of dealing with the problem of representation—both self-rep- resentation as well as representation of ‘the other’. As far as An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation: From Ancient Times to the Revolution of 1911 is concerned, think- ing ideologically about translation research means admitting that the kind of understanding provided by this anthology for its English-speaking reader will be mediated by all who are involved in the preparation of the project, and above all, by my own theoretical and ideolog- ical orientations. These orientations can be summed up as at once a readiness to help—in a non-innocent manner—‘Western’ readers understand ‘Chinese’ thinking about translation in its context as well as a determination to engage with ‘Western’ thinking about translation on its own terms. These orientations are the result of my attempt to make full use of Hong Kong’s marginal position—marginal in relation to China as well as the West—which enables me to look East and also to look West rather than at or from a single direction. These orientations mark the limits, and perhaps also the excitement, of the kind of inter- vention I am trying to achieve through the compilation of this anthology. (pp. 13-14) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 56 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 57 Francis Jones fRancIs jOnes From: “‘Geldshark Ares god of War’: Ideology and Time in Literary Translation” (2006) in The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 36, No. 1, Translation. iterary source texts, the translator’s raw materials, are often crucially time-marked. A L text may have aged so much that its language, the content and allusions of its text world, or even its genre strike the translator as markedly non-modern, thus creating an ‘external’ time-gap between source and target text (translation). Or the source writer may deliberately use language, content, or genre to allude to or site the text world in previous time, thus creating an ‘internal’ time-gap within the source text. Thus, when a translator reads the Watchman’s speech at the opening of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, she or he knows Francis Jones teaches that, externally, the language is distinct from MA modules in translation studies and Modern Greek, long-distance communication research methods, and by signal-fires manned by watchmen was a supervise translation- feature of the pre-modern world, and a music, based PhD projects at dance, and recitative retelling of a well-known the University of Newcastle. His research focuses on poetry legend was a standard literary genre of the translation: especially translating processes time. She or he also knows that, internally, and strategies, and how translators work Aeschylus in the fifth century B.C. is telling a with others within a social-political context. He is particularly interested in translation story set eight or nine centuries earlier. within the South Slav region (ex- Time-marking, therefore, can be central Yugoslavia). He translates mainly poetry. to a source work’s textuality, which means He also edits translations, mainly in South Slav culture, politics, and philosophy. that translators must choose how to reflect He works largely from Dutch and Bosnian- this marking in the target work. Translators’ Croatian-Serbian, though he also translates choices can be seen as forming a spectrum from German, Hungarian, Russian, and from extreme archaization (ageing) to Caribbean creoles. He has about 15 published volumes of translated poetry, extreme modernization (updating). The most several of which have won prizes. common are: • ‘Time-matched archaization’: target language and text world are of a similar time to those of the source. For example, an English translation of a Dutch Renaissance poem might use lan- guage and imagery from Herbert and Donne. • ‘Superficial archaization’: retaining the past text world; linguistically, inserting occasional ‘past’ signals (such as verily) in an otherwise modern target idiom. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 • ‘Minimal modernization’: retaining the past text world; target language and often genre are broadly present-day, without being marked for specific year/decade. • ‘Violent modernization’: using linguistic signals and even text-world items that are specifical- ly marked as present-day. For example, James Holmes translates Charles d’Orléans’s fifteenth- century ‘amoureux nouveaulx’ (literally ‘new lovers’) as ‘rockers’, and ‘chevauchent’ (lit. ‘ride’) as ‘revving their engines’. 57 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 58 Francis Jones Ideology Such decisions prompt readers to construct representations of translated texts that are both temporal and cultural. Thus when Holmes translates ‘amoureux nouveaulx’ as ‘lusty yonge bacheleres’ (time-matched archaization), he sites the poem in a medieval love-poetry tradition familiar to target readers; and when he translates them as ‘rockers’, he signals its modern cultural relevance. Moreover, translation norms (that is, culture-specific conven- tions governing literary translation) prompt translators and readers to prefer certain repre- sentations and disprefer others. For recent English translations of older literary works, for example, minimal modernization is the most favoured strategy; archaization is largely dis- favoured, and violent modernization meets with a mixed reception. In other words, the main UK/US norm advocates concealing time-markings, rather than highlighting them by fore- grounding the historicity or present-day relevance of the translated literary text. This is only a convention, however: no discourse, even minimal modernization, can stand outside time. Some choices which translators make may be random and ungrounded. Others, how- ever, may be based on a socially shared system or systems of ideas, values, or beliefs. These we term, with no pejorative undertone, ‘ideologies of translation’. They may convey transla- tors’ attitudes towards the source text and writer, towards the source and target culture, towards their own role as mediators, and more besides. Moreover, literary communication via translation is affected not only by translators’ ideologies, but also by those of others in the writing, publishing, and reading process. And ideologies of translation can have wider cultural and even social effects: for example, in helping shape attitudes between countries. Investigating ideologies of translation, therefore, can give important insights into the nature of literary communication, as many studies attest. Time-marking in translation, how- ever, remains remarkably under-researched (a fact probably linked to the stigmatization of strategies that highlight it). Hence there has been little analysis of how ideology might influ- ence translators’ strategies for tackling time-marked literary works and readers’ opinions of the resulting target texts. (pp. 191-192) […] deologies, being socially shared systems, are created and maintained through discourse: I with ideologies of literary translation, for example, by making and performing, reading and hearing, promoting and discussing translated works. This discourse takes place within tighter or looser social networks, such as those involving source writer, translator, publisher, critics, and general readers. And as individuals and groups have multiple ideolo- gies, ideologies may stand in dominant, subservient, or transgressive relationships with one another. Ideologies informing the use and reception of translators’ time-reference strategies appear to fall into three types, closely interlinked though they may be: the socio-political, the intercultural, and the aestethic. (p. 193) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 58 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17565

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 59 Knowledge ROBeRt j. c. yOung “Some Questions about Translation and the Production of Knowledge”. he practice of translation has always been described in metaphorical terms, as T ‘fidelity’ or ‘license’, notably, and this tendency to describe it solely in terms of what it is not (to borrow Aristotle’s description of metaphor) means that as a result it is therefore always running away from itself, while its content remains unspecified. Perhaps this is why one of the fates of translation as a word is also to find itself incessantly being translated in turn by being used as a metaphor for something else—and never more so than now—perhaps because as a metaphor it remains in some sense an empty signifier. A whole range of changing human, institutional and cultural experiences are deemed to fall under the rubric of the translational. Translation, the activity of the transposition of one lan- Robert J.C. Young is guage into another, has itself been translated Julius Silver Professor of English and by cultural commentators into a modus Comparative Literature operandi of our times, reflecting on the one at New York University. hand the preference for dynamic rather than He was formerly static concepts or metaphors, and on the Professor of English and Critical Theory at Oxford University and other, though not entirely disassociated from a fellow of Wadham College. In different the first, the increasing cultural, economic, ways, his work has been primarily electronic, institutional and material interac- concerned with people and their cultures who exist or have existed on the margins tion of different sections within society and and peripheries of society, whether between different societies. In a globalizing nationally or globally. He has published world, translation seems to offer the most apt White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Routledge, 1990, new edition 2004), metaphor for the ways in which practices are Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory being daily transformed in almost every area and Race (Routledge, 1995), Postcolonialism: of society, from academia to zoology. What, An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2001), however, is exactly being performed in such Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003) and The Idea of English translation / inaugural issue / 2011 processes of translation? Ethnicity (Blackwell, 2008). He is the general editor of Interventions: International Journal The ‘translational turn’, if we may call it of Postcolonial Studies, and was also a founding editor of the Oxford Literary Review that, is occurring at the very moment when which he edited from 1977 to 1994. His work current work in translation studies has been has been translated into 20 languages. 59 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 60 Robert J. C. Young Knowledge focussing on the ways in which translation is not a neutral activity that transforms one text into another language in a transparent way, but always involves a form of power relations that directs the terms of the translation, which in turn affects its result, massages the mes- sage. Translation, it may be said, always takes place on someone’s terms, and the results are those which best conform to the terms that have been preset. Translation never involves a transparent or neutral act of substitution or negotiation; rather it produces a transforma- tion that may embody a whole range of philosophical, political and cultural agendas (whether conscious or unconscious) that translation helps to put into practice—and never more so than when translation is negotiating between significantly different cultures (whether between different times, between different strata within a particular society, or between different societies). Here translation begins to participate within the hidden, determining processes of a particular ideology. A good example is provided by Cliff Siskin and Bill Warner: at the beginning of Kant’s “An Answer to the Question, What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), Kant translates Horace’s two-word admonition, ‘sapere aude!’ (‘dare to understand!’ or ‘dare to gain wisdom!’) as ‘Habe Muth dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen!’--‘Have the courage to use your own understanding!’ With this single free or, strictly, mistranslation, Kant turns the pursuit of knowledge inside out, from gaining understanding of the world, to daring to use your own inner principles of under- standing, pointing knowledge henceforth in a thoroughly Kantian direction. Kant revolu- tionizes the modern subject by turning him or her inwards upon the self so that under- standing henceforth becomes its own object of knowledge. Does translation produce new knowledge or does it sometimes end up providing forms of false or bogus knowledge, trav- esties that, paradoxically, seem to work better? Kant’s creative (mis)translation effectively refracted the trajectory of the Enlightenment that he is discussing. The structure of translation, however, is not always simply a binary one, between two texts. In fact it always involves at least four dimensions—the translator, the source and tar- get texts, and the eventual reader. Translation is equally often inserted in a power field oper- ating according to a range of simultaneously incompatible demands and needs, between dif- ferent authorities, multiple languages, requiring production of a certain kind of knowledge that may be very different from that or those in the texts in other languages—or domain— that are being translated. In general terms, Enlightenment ideals of comprehensive or uni- versal forms of knowledge required them to be deployed on a level playing field in which they could make up part of a compatible system, and transparent translation was one means through which that universal economic system of knowledge exchange was sup- posed to be effected and produced. We could say that this was an early version of Jakobson’s radical equivalence in difference. Today we would add that the epistemological and cultur- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 al differences embedded in the forms of different languages means that translation always involves transformation, it is not a transparent and exact process. It offers a process of equivalence, but the equivalent is never fully equivalent. Translation theory focuses on this paradoxical moment when translation makes the different into the same, but a same which is at the same time different. Philosophically, this perception has produced a movement the other way, towards an emphasis on untranslatability. What does it mean that today we have 60 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 61 Robert J. C. Young moved the stress to the untranslatable? Knowledges, we now wish to say in a counter- Enlightenment move, are not necessarily constructed in a translatable way; so Jacques Derrida argued that philosophical ‘concepts [cannot] transcend idiomatic differences’, and this has produced continuing reverberating effects in the history of philosophy which until recently has been presented as a multilingual discipline unaffected by the linguistic differ- ence that forms its own medium. Exactly the same point can be made about Translation Studies itself. Following Derrida, recent commentators have stressed how such knowledge contains forms of resistance that emerge in moments of ‘untranslatability’. hat, then, in a world of translation are the effects of this particular twist of the W current translational turn? What are the conditions of the contemporary per- formance of translation? What forms of transformation or mistranslation are being produced under the rubric of ‘translation’, and which if any of them are providing sig- nificant examples of transformation, re-alignment, or resistance? Which forms of transla- tion in our current translational world have proved enabling, which disempowering? Does translation produce new knowledge or does it rather end up providing forms of distorted knowledge through ‘fuzzy translation’ that nevertheless manages to work as knowledge but which are as much determined by linguistic difference as by any mediator? What is the difference between translation and ‘mediation’? At what point does mediation encounter irremediable untranslatability, how does it deal with it when it does and what effects are produced? translation / inaugural issue / 2011 61 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17566

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 62 Memory Bella BROdzKI From: Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007) Stanford: Stanford University Press. ranslation is an intercultural as well as a translingual phenomenon, a transcultural T as well as an interlingual process. It involves the transfer of a narrative or text from one signifying form to another, the transporting of texts from one historical con- text to another, and the tracking of the migration of meanings from one cultural space to another. Because translation is a movement never fully achieved, both trans, meaning ‘across’, and inter, meaning ‘between’, are crucial to an understanding of the breadth of the workings of translation. We are most accustomed to thinking of translation as an empirical linguis- tic maneuver, but excavating or unearthing burial sites or ruins in order to reconstruct traces of the physical and textual past in a new context is also a mode of translation, just as resurrecting a memory or interpreting a dream are acts of translation. In the process of being transferred from one realm or condition to another, the source event or idea is neces- sarily reconfigured; the result of translation is that the original, also inaccessible, is no longer an original per se; it is a pretext whose identity has been redefined. The significance of this point as an idea, and its implications for understanding the relationship between survival and cultural memory, will be reiterated throughout this study. Even if, hypothetically, it were possible to excavate a body, a text, a narrative, an image, or even a memory intact, the necessarily delayed, translated context of such an excavation would be transformed in the interval between the moment of production and the moment of its translation. As Benjamin states in the sixth of his eighteen Theses on the Philosophy of History, a testament written not long before his suicide in 1940 in Port Bou at the French- Spanish border, as he fled the Nazis: To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it actually was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wish- es to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a translation / inaugural issue / 2011 moment danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition an its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. This is memory resurrected and reconstructed in the breach, rescued from the breach. Benjamin conceives of remembrance as a corrective flash of insight that emerges in times of 62 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 63 Bella Brodzki crisis, and in response to political and cultural persecution, to the threat of erasure of the voices of resistance, disruption, and heterogeneity by totalitarian regimes. Arguably, the idea that a seamless continuity of the past exists or should be desired could itself be taken as a sign of crisis (of conscience): a deliberate or enforced concealment or forgetting that requires redress. Recent accounts by forensic anthropologists who have retrieved, extricat- ed, identified, and reconstituted the corporeal evidence of mass slaughter, on behalf of those who mourn the victims and to promote social justice, explain how the reading of human remains can “give a voice to people silenced… to people suppressed in the most final way: murdered and put into clandestine graves.” But before bodily remains can be read, they claim an irrefutable form of evidence. Clyde Snow explains: “Bones…are often our last and best witnesses: they never lie, and they never forget.” I proceed, then, by linking translation to a concept of survival—“survival” as a cul- tural practice and symbolic action, and above all as a process that extends life, but one that also prolongs the meaning traces of death-in-life, life after death, and life after life. Both bod- ies and texts harbour the prospect of living on in their own remarkable ways. Echoing the haunting, unanswerable question about the possibility of resurrection in the biblical book of Ezekiel, my title Can These Bones Live? seeks to affirm survival’s ongoing poetic and politi- cal significance and rhetorical power. Despite its usual connotations, prophetic speech is not only annunciatory; it involves recovery, too, which is another kind of revelation. To cross the threshold from life to death and from death to afterlife is to be translated, to be in translation. Translation is the mode through which what is dead, disappeared, forgotten, buried, or sup- pressed overcomes its determined fate by being borne (and thus born anew) to other con- texts across time and space, as famously asserted by Salman Rushdie: “I, too, am a translat- ed man. I have been borne across. It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion…that something can also be gained.” (pp. 4-6) […] o, what really hangs in the balance? That translation is a function of every cognitive S and communicative operation, that every exchange (and non-exchange) has the transforming potential of a fateful encounter. We can postulate that one side or the other inevitably has the “wrong language,” but a connection can, and must, be made from the space of difference. Can we afford not to make the effort? (p. 9) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 63 

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translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17568

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 64 Cultural translation gayatRI cHaKRavORty spIvaK From: “Translation as Culture” (2000) parallax, vol. 6, no. 1. Oviedo n every possible sense, translation is necessary but impossible. Melanie Klein, the I Viennese psychoanalyst whom the Bloomsbury Group killed with kindness, suggest- ed that the work of translation is an incessant shuttle that is a ‘life’. The human infant grabs on to some one thing and then things. This grabbing (begreifen) of an outside indis- tinguishable from an inside constitutes an inside, going back and forth and coding every- thing into a sign-system by the thing(s) grasped. One can call this crude coding a ‘transla- tion’. In this never-ending weaving, violence translates into conscience and vice versa. From birth to death this ‘natural’ machine, programming the mind perhaps as genetic instructions program the body (where does body stop and mind begin?), is partly metapsychological and therefore outside the grasp of the mind. Thus ‘nature’ passes and repasses into ‘culture’, in a work or shuttling site of violence (deprivation—evil—shocks the infant system-in-the- making more than satisfaction, some say Paradiso is the dullest of The Divine Comedy): the violent production of the precarious subject of reparation and responsibility. To plot this weave, the reader—in my estimation, Klein was more a reader than an analyst in the strict Freudian sense—, translating the incessant translating shuttle into that which is read, must have the most intimate knowledge of the rules of representation and permissible narratives which make up the substance of a culture, and must also become responsible and account- able to the writing/translating presupposed original. It is by way of Melanie Klein that I grasped a certain statement which comes to me from Australian Aboriginals. But before I go on to talk about it I want to say just a little bit more about Melanie Klein. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 The subject in the shuttling described by Klein is something that will have happened, not something that definitely happens; because, first, it is not under the control of the I that we think of as the subject and because, second, there is such a thing as a world out there, however discursive. In this understanding of translation in Melanie Klein, therefore, the word translation itself loses its literal sense, it becomes a catachresis, a term I use not for obscurity, but because I find it indispensable. 64 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 65 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Here is why I have to use the word catachresis. I was recently having a discussion with Dr. Aniruddha Das, a cell biologist. He is working on how cells recognize, how parasites recognize, what to attack in the body. I asked him why he used the word recognize, such a mindy word, a word that has to do with intellect and consciousness. Why use that word to describe something that goes on in the body, not really at all in the arena of what we rec- ognize as mind? Wouldn’t the word affinity do for these parasites ‘knowing’ what to attack? He explained to me that no, indeed, the word affinity would not do, and why it is that pre- cisely the word recognize had to be used. (I cannot reproduce the explanation but that does not matter for us at this moment.) He added that the words recognition, recognize lose their normal sense when used this way; there is no other word that can be used. Most peo- ple find this difficult to understand. And I started laughing. I said, yes, most people do find it difficult to understand, what you have just described is a catachrestic use of the word recognition. In other words, no other word will do, and yet it does not really give you the literal meaning in the history of the language, upon which a correct rather than catachrestic metaphoric use would be based. In the sense that I am deriving from Klein, translation does indeed lose its mooring in a literal meaning. Translation in this general sense is not under the control of the subject who is translating. Indeed the human subject is something that will have happened as this shuttling translation, from inside to outside, from violence to conscience: the production of the ethical subject. This originary translation thus wrenches the sense of the English word translation outside of its making. One look at the dictionary will tell you the word comes from a Latin past participle (of transferre = to transfer). It is a done deal, precisely not a future anterior, something that will have happened without our knowledge, particularly without our control, the subject coming into being. hen so-called ethnophilosophies describe the embedded ethico-cultural sub- W ject being formed prior to the terrain of rational decision making, they are dis- missed as fatalistic. But the insight, that the constitution of the subject in responsibility is a certain kind of translation, of a genealogical scripting, which is not under the control of the deliberative consciousness, is not something that just comes from Melanie Klein. What is interesting about Melanie Klein is that she does indeed want to touch responsibility-based ethical systems rather than just rights-based ethical systems and therefore she looks at the violent translation that constitutes the subject in responsibility. It is in this sense that the human infant, on the cusp of the natural and the cultural, is in translation, except the word translation loses its dictionary sense right there. Here, the body itself is a script—or perhaps one should say a ceaseless inscribing instrument. (pp. 13-14) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 65 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 66 Babli Moitra Saraf Cultural translation BaBlI MOItRa saRaf From: “Translation as Cultural Practice”. he introduction to the present issue agonizes about an “epistemological crisis” con- T fronting the discipline of translation studies, laments the impasse within and looks towards “startlingly new” ways of defining translation. We are given to under- stand that it articulates the anxiety of scholars and practitioners of the discipline in “single nation states and linguistic limits”. Babli Moitra Saraf is an It is difficult for us in India to appreciate Associate Professor in these anxieties and find ourselves in an intel- the Department of English, and the lectual cul-de-sac just yet with translation. Principal of There are 22 officially recognized languages, Indraprastha College SIL Ethnologue lists 415 living ones, and one for Women, University of Delhi. She has received her MPhil degree count puts the number of languages at 1652. in English and PhD in Sociology. However, languages are also dying with each Her doctoral thesis studies language generation resulting in epistemological losses. change in the advertising industry in India in the first phase of globalization (1984-94), The crisis of the humanities has hit language and the emergence of the Indian urban learning particularly hard. In a rapidly global- middle class identity. Her current work izing world large swathes of geographical and focuses on orality and performance in mental landscapes in India stay cocooned in a relation to Translation Studies. Her teaching interests include Modern Indian Literature time warp while others translate and are trans- in Translation, Classical Literature, lated, transformed and transmitted. In a Renaissance and Modern European Drama, nation of story-tellers, oral and written narra- Milton, The Bible, Cultural Studies, and Literary Theory. Babli Moitra Saraf has been tives are recovered by scholars, scribes and a scholar under the Indo-Italian Cultural performers to be translated. However, gaps Exchange Program. She has a Diploma have to be bridged between dialects and stan- in Spanish. She has translated the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi’s works into Italian dard languages and languages which are spo- in collaboration with Maria Federica Oddera, ken but do not have a script. Then there is the entitled La Cattura (Theoria, 1996) and presence since ancient times of vigorous oral La Preda e altri Racconti (Einaudi, 2004). traditions as well as rigorous traditions of Her work Rajouri Remembered (2007), a translated memoir located in the states writing for dissemination of knowledge and of Jammu and Kashmir during the Partition these continue to be recuperated. of India, also engages with the problem The national educational agenda fac- of recuperating memory and negotiating translation / inaugural issue / 2011 the translator’s position as a participant tors in translation as a tool to open up the in the narrative. world of knowledge of a specialized kind to native vernacular speakers. With the formation of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), translation is also on the regional agenda as countries grappling with languages and cultures of the region strive to promote mutual understanding and eco- 66 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 67 Babli Moitra Saraf nomic co-operation. With so many permutations and combinations of the communicative contexts, the potential of translation studies is far from exhausted. For the Indian sub-continent, the world has always been intercultural and cultural exchange has long been a mode of being. Five definitive moments can be identified for our purposes. The first is the translation of Buddhist texts and their travel right up to the Far East. The second is the encounter with Islam and the great cultural energy that encounter produced. The third is the colonial experience which culminated in the organization of the nation state along linguistic lines. The fourth, the post-independence era, which marked a spurt in regional translation activity, promoted by state patronage. The last is the contem- porary condition of globalization. Yet predating these identifiable epochs is a continuum stretching back into the era of maritime and overland activity of trade and commerce, a ‘globalization’ with its own set of markers. For a region of such linguistic diversity where since ancient times translation is axiomatic, a given of the great commercial and social net- works of trade routes, it seems an activity so innocuous and un-selfconscious that there is no reflection on it till we come to the translation activity undertaken with the advent of Buddhism and then in the encounter with the world of Islam, when we also see the oper- ation of translation as metaphor, as two world views come into contact. Different histori- cal epochs have thrown up their particular problematic. We in India are still negotiating these epochs in translation and translation studies. Ethnographic studies might just hold the key to opening new vistas and thinking about translation in new/different ways. My ongoing work with texts of pre-colonial Bengal (1204-1756), confronts the problem of reconciling the massive cultural knowledge in circulation with the fact of mass illiteracy. How does a text travel across linguistic bound- aries, cultural borders, geographical spaces in pre-literacy contexts? It leads me to think about translation as cultural practice. As a cultural practice translation needs to be viewed in the specific contexts of what people are doing with texts, how they are circulated, dis- seminated and received. My findings suggest that cultural articulation of the time, both erudite and folk, is oriented towards performance and mediated by an acute sense of an audience: through ritual, recitation, song, dance, puppets, paintings, and other modes of folk expression. Do performance and its dynamics in the social space, especially in pre-lit- eracy, pre-print mass cultures constitute and produce legitimate and viable texts as well as methodologies of translation? Further, may these methodologies constitute a paradigm shift from the Eurocentric modes of regarding translation within the parameters of source texts and target languages, in terms of the ‘original’ and its equivalent in the ‘translated’? Is it possible to redefine the notion of ‘original text’ in specific cultural milieus? Is there an ‘original text’? Can we retrieve translational strategies in oral cultures? May ‘adaptation’ for performance function as a translational strategy? translation / inaugural issue / 2011 he caste structure of society in India, the division into jatis and upajatis—largely T occupational groups and subgroups—and the nature of their encounter with texts, both oral and written, is fundamental to the understanding of translation as cultur- al practice. The existing social stratification has been crucial to the development of cultural 67 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 68 Maria Tymoczko Cultural translation practices which are more often linked to occupation and economic conditions, than to eru- dition and literacy, a situation in which impoverished and illiterate peoples may actually pro- duce the text by providing the supporting infrastructure and human resources to realize it in the performative. Canonical texts were meant to be performed, through recitation, song, dance, puppets and other modes of folk practices which clustered around caste occupations, particularly of the ‘nimnakoti’, or the lower castes. The Namasudras of Bengal produce the castes of Gope (writers), Sutradhar (storytellers), Gayans (singers), Bayen (Percussionists), the caste of Teli who cured leather and made musical instruments, Patua (painters and pic- torial storytellers), Nat (magicians/actors), practically constituting the production team of a performance. These occupations groups could be Hindus or Muslims, drawing upon the common heritage of the oral tradition and shared cultural codes. The occupational diversi- ty and division of labor, the presence of many jatis, and within them of religious groupings means that a text could find diverse articulations within its locale, as well as travel with itin- erant performing troupes across discrete linguistic and cultural regions. A text in pre-mod- ern Bengal therefore, may be thought of as translated and retranslated as many times as the number of performances, and edited/adapted for its audience and for the occasion on which it was performed. This permitted the text the cultural crossovers that translation allows and the former also reinvented itself in various languages. This process produced a dynamism within the act of translation which carried the text through the many linguistic and cultur- al regions that it traveled in this trajectory. And texts did travel, from the deserts of Arabia to the forests of Bengal and back. The arena of performance we find is actually an overlap, an encounter of the oral and the written text. It is also a space which produces a new text. I call this new text a translation. Would this notion of translation stand critical scrutiny and be accommodated in translation theory? (pp. 1-3) MaRIa tyMOczKO From: “Reconceptualizing Translation Theory” in Theo Hermans (ed.) Translating Others (2006) vol. 1, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. here are a number of things that should be done in translation studies to enlarge T and redefine the object of study (and its corollary, to reconfigure concepts about ways that a text and its translation are related), including examining the meanings translation / inaugural issue / 2011 of words for translation in non-Western contexts and looking at specific historical traditions associated with those variant conceptions of translation. In theorizing the data it is essential to view translation as a cluster concept, moving beyond attempts to define translation as a logical concept or a prototype concept, which have resulted in so many Eurocentric pro- nouncements about the field. Clearly, in order to understand the scope of the cluster con- cept called translation in English, translation studies scholars must be assiduous in seeking 68 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 69 Maria Tymoczko out more of the world’s words for translation, as well as investigating in detail the connota- tions, implications, translation practices and actual histories of translation associated with those terms. Only by engaging in such an investigative enterprise can translation scholars fully understand the objects of research in translation studies—encompassed in the Maria Tymoczko is large and complicated cluster concept of Professor in translation—and the types of family resem- Comparative Literature at the University of blances that bind these objects conceptually, Massachusetts. Her thus expanding translation theory in the fields are Translation process. Studies, Celtic medieval In broadening the definition of transla- literature and Irish Studies. Her critical studies The Irish “Ulysses” (University of tion and breaking the hold of Eurocentric California Press, 1994) and Translation in a stereotypes of translation, it may also be help- Postcolonial Context (St. Jerome Publishing, ful to consider forms and modes of cultural 1999) have both won prizes and commendations. Prof. Tymoczko has interface that are related to translation but dis- published widely on translation theory and tinct from it. Such forms include, for example, on translation as an engaged social postcolonial literature and related hybridized practice; her articles have appeared in forms of cultural production; work on these major collections of essays about translation and in many translation studies forms of translation studies has already been journals. She has edited several volumes productive for the field. Three additional including Born into a World at War (with modes of cultural interface to explore are illus- Nancy Blackmun, 2000), Translation and Power (with Edwin Gentzler, 2002), Language trated by the English words transference, repre- and Tradition in Ireland (with Colin Ireland, sentation and transculturation. 2003), Language and Identity in Twentieth- In transference or transmission, material Century Irish Culture (with Colin Ireland, 2003; special issue of Éire-Ireland), and is moved from one cultural context to anoth- Translation as Resistance (2006, special er, but the mode of transfer is not specified. It section in the Massachusetts Review). can range from physical transfer to symbolic Her most recent books are Enlarging transfer (such as happens in a bank transfer) Translation, Empowering Translators (St. Jerome Publishing, 2007), a major or transfer that involves a radical shift in reconceptualization of translation theory, medium (such as a television transmission). and the edited volume Translation, Thus, transference can result in cultural Resistance, Activism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). products that are either very close (even iden- tical) to the source substance or very different from the source material. In cultural transfer, then, there is no presupposition about either the process or product of the cultural transposition. By contrast, translation in a single cul- ture at a single point in time is usually governed by cultural prototype encompassing both product and process, notwithstanding the fact that such prototypes have varied widely translation / inaugural issue / 2011 through history, from close linguistic transfer to free adaptation, from fluency to radical abridgment, and so forth […]. Thinking about transference or transmission can remind translation studies scholars of how varied cultural mediation can be in process and prod- uct, helping to move their thinking beyond their own particular cultural presuppositions and stereotypes. 69 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 70 Maria Tymoczko Cultural translation Still another strand of translation is indicated by the word representation. […] [It] constructs an image, but implies as well the exhibition of that image. It involves clarity of knowledge and symbolic substitution. It has a serious import connected with social goals, including social change. Representation, therefore, presupposes both a perspective on what is represented and a purpose in the activity itself. In fact, since the decline of positivism, there has been a new awareness of the constructivist aspect of representation, of the fact that representation is not an ‘objective’ process. As a form of definition that involves substi- tution in the symbolic realm, representation creates images that have an ideological aspect. It is the power inherent in representation, the potential for speaking with authority on behalf of another, and the ability to make statements that have legal or political standing, as well as the inescapability of a perspective of purpose, that have led to the crisis of repre- sentation in the social sciences, most particularly in anthropology and ethnography, where the potential for manipulation and ethnocentrism in representations has been discussed and debated (see, for example, Clifford and Marcus 1986). Obviously translation is a major intercultural form of representation, and, as such, translations must be scrutinized for the various factors associated with representation, even when translation occurs internally to a plurilingual society. inally, translation can bee seen in the light of the process of transculturation, which F can be defined as “the transmission of cultural characteristics from one cultural group to another”. The term has come into English from Spanish, where it was first used to speak about the interchange of cultural characteristics between Europeans and the indigenous population in Latin America, and to describe the creolization and hybridization of most Latin American cultures. Transculturation goes far beyond the transfer of verbal materials and includes such things as the transfer of ideas about religion and government; the spread of artistic forms including music and the visual arts; the transfers having to do with material culture including clothing, food, housing, transportation, and so forth, not to mention more recent cultural domains such as the modern media. Thus, the popularity of Chinese food, reggae and US films around the world are all examples of transculturation. Transculturation has elements in common with intersemiotic translation, for it is not exclusively or even primarily a linguistic process. With respect to texts, transculturation is often a matter of transposing elements that constitute overcodings, such as the poetics, for- mal literary elements and genres of literary systems, as well as discourses, worldviews, and so forth. Obviously transculturation is an essential aspect of cultural interchange in cul- tures where more than one language and culture are in interface; indeed transculturation is operative in any postcolonial nation. One of the distinguishing aspects of transculturation, in contrast to either represen- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 tation or transmission, is that it entails the performance of specific forms or aspects of another culture. It is not sufficient that Chinese food be displayed nor defined nor described for transculturation to occur: the food must be eaten and enjoyed as well. At the same time, paradoxically, transculturation does not always involve representation; one can easily imagine a person receiving and incorporating into her life a cultural form with little 70 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 71 Maria Tymoczko or no sense that it originated in another cultural setting. That is, a cultural form can become completely naturalized in the receptor culture or transculturation can proceed in such a way as to obscure the point of origin of a specific cultural element. This aspect of easy interchange through transculturation is very common in places that bring together more than one cultural group; many things may be perceived as perfectly natural in a hybridized culture without people having a strong sense of their cultural point of origin. (pp. 26-29) translation / inaugural issue / 2011 71 

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Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 72 (World) Literature susan Bassnett From: “When is a Translation Not a Translation?” in Susan Bassnett & André Lefevere, Constructing Cultures. Essays on Literary translation (1998) Clevedon – Philadelphia – Toronto – Sydney – Johannesburg: Multilingual Matters. nce we start to consider the way in which both the terminology of translation and O the idea of authentic ‘original’ that exits somewhere beyond the text in front of us are used by writers, then the question of when a translation is or is not taking place becomes increasingly difficult to answer. It is probably more helpful to think of trans- lation not so much as a category in its own right, but rather as a set of textual practices with which the writer and reader collude. This suggests that literary studies, and discourse analy- sis in particular, need to look again at translation, for the investigation of translation as a set of textual practices has not received much attention. This is doubtless because we have been far too obsessed with binary oppositions within the translation model and have been too concerned with defining and redefining the relationship between translation and original. Even where the model of dominant original and subservient translation has been chal- lenged, the idea of some kind of hegemonic original still remains—either in the source lan- guage or target language. It is time to free ourselves from the constraints that the term ‘translation’ has placed upon us and recognise that we have immense problems in pinning down a term that continues to elude us. For whether we acknowledge it or not, we have been colluding with alternative notions of translation all our lives. (p. 39) davId daMROscH From: “Death in Translation” in Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (eds.) Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation (2005) Princeton – Oxford: Princeton University Press. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 o understand the workings of world literature we need more of a phenomenology T than an ontology of the work of art: a work manifests differently abroad than it does at home. (p. 394) […] 72 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 73 David Damrosch It shouldn’t be necessary to treat a for- David Damrosch is eign work with an uncomprehending sympa- Professor of English and Comparative thy in order to appreciate its excellence. It Literature at Harvard does no service to works of world literature to University. A past set them loose in some deracinated space, president of the whether the “great conversation” of a 1950s- American Comparative Literature Association, David Damrosch has style academic humanism or the “closed self- written widely on comparative and world referential loop” of recent poststructuralist literature. His books include The Narrative metafiction. Aesthetically as well as ethically, Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (1987), We a pure universalism of either variety is finally Scholars: Changing the Culture of the reductive, missing the real complexity of a University (1995), What Is World Literature? work, just as much as would an opposite (2003), The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh insistence that a work can only be read effec- (2007), and How to Read World Literature tively in the original language, inextricably (2009). He is the founding general editor of linked at all points to its local context. An the six-volume Longman Anthology of World informed reading of a work of world litera- Literature (2004), and of the six-volume Longman Anthology of British Literature (4th ture should keep both aspects in play togeth- ed. 2010), editor of Teaching World Literature er, recognizing that it brings us elements of a (2009), co-editor of The Princeton time and place different from our own, and at Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009), and co-editor of a recent collection, Xin the same time recognizing that these ele- Fang Xiang: Bi Jiao Wen Xue Yu Shi Jie Wen ments change in force as the book gets farther Xue Du Ben [New Directions: A Reader of from home. Comparative and World Literature] (Beijing U. P., 2010). He is presently writing a book […] called Comparing the Literatures: What Every [W]hen we read a work of world liter- Comparatist Needs to Know. ature we have a great deal of freedom in deciding what use we will make of such contextual understanding. This freedom can most readily be seen when we are reading a work from a distant time as well as place. To take the case of Dante, for instance, it seems to me trivializing to treat the Divine Comedy as an essential secular work, though various modern commentators have chosen to focus on Dante as “poet of the secular world,” in Erich Auerbach’s phrase. Auerbach went so far as to claim that Dante’s realism overwhelmed his theology “and destroyed it in the very process or realizing it” (Mimesis, 202). We can dispute such a claim on both historical and aesthet- ic grounds, taking seriously the idea that the Divine Comedy may actually have been a suc- cessful Christian poem. Even so, appreciating Dante’s profound religious vision does not require us to convert to Catholicism, or to take a stand on issues of Florentine politics, though both of these responses are ones that Dante might well have desired. A work of world literature has its fullest life, and its greatest power, when we can read it with a kind translation / inaugural issue / 2011 of a detached engagement, informed but not confined by a knowledge of what the work would likely mean in its original time and place, even as we adapt it to our present context and purposes. (pp. 394-395) 73 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 74 David Damrosch (World) Literature davId daMROscH From: “How American is World Literature?” (2009) The Comparatist, 33. t would be well worth while to undertake a comparative study of world literature as it I is construed in differing locations around the globe. Such a study could help scholars everywhere to think directly about the relations (whether symbiotic or hegemonic; whether unusually close or unusually disjointed) between their national tradition and their presentation of the wider plenum of world literature. A fuller sense of the range of possibil- ity might keep scholars from falling unwittingly into nationalistic patterns in the construal of global literary relations, such as the Gallicentrism so prominent in Pascale Casanova’s otherwise wide-ranging République mondiale des lettres. Perhaps in time only a third of the essays in the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, instead of the two-thirds or more, would center on India’s authors and linguistic traditions. American comparatists, on the other hand, seem clearly to be at the opposite end of the range of continuity/discontinuity. For too long, we have accepted a high degree of uprooted- ness and the internal exile in relation to our home culture. This orientation may have had a certain logic for the émigrés who taught us or our teachers, but it makes less and less sense for our field today—even for foreign-born scholars, as can be seen in the cross-cultural work of such comparatist Americanists as Wai Chee Dimock and Djelal Kadir. There are encouraging signs of a budding rapprochement between Amarican and comparative literary studies, seen for instance in a valuable recent collection edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007). It is symptomatic, though, that both editors are based in departments of English and American studies rather than com- parative literature. They and their contributors clearly see the benefits that can accrue to American studies by taking a comparative and global perspective; more departments of com- parative literature need to accept the converse realization, that a vital comparatism can best thrive in creative symbiosis with its home traditions as well as those of the wider world. A comparative study of different national approaches to world literature should also help us to do a better job construing the world’s literary traditions, whether to move beyond an overemphasis on a few literary great powers, as Werner Friederich urged, or to avoid pro- jecting liberal American multiculturalism outward, as Spivak fears that our courses (and pos- sibly some anthologies!) may do. Already in the early 1960s René Wellek commented, in a trenchant article on “American Literary Scholarship,” that “The selection of European writ- ers which have attracted the attention of modern critics in the United States is oddly nar- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 row and subject to the distortion of a very local and temporary perspective”. Such distortions can become endemic in any scholarly community that pays little attention to foreign tradi- tions, and this danger applies to patterns of construing world literature as much as individ- ual national traditions. The study of world literature in America has much to gain if it can become both more American and more wordly as well. (pp. 18-19) 74 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 75 Suzanne Jill Levine suzanne jIll levIne From: The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (first edition: 1991; 2009) Champaign – London – Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press. n 1932, in Las versiones homéricas, an essay that could be translated as “Some version of I Homer,” Jorge Luis Borges questioned the privileged status of the original books we call the Odyssey and the Iliad. Which interpretation of the original is the “original”? he asked; only a Greek from the tenth century B.C. (according to Borges) might be able to tell us. Borges prefigured here Michel Foucault’s challenge to the concept of authorship: What is an author? How can we determine intentionality? The only real difference between original and Suzanne Jill Levine is a leading translator of translation—Borges playfully specified—is Latin American that the translator’s referent is a visible text literature, and against which the translation can be judged; Professor at the University of California the original escapes this sceptical scrutiny in Santa Barbara where because its referent is unspoken, perhaps for- she directs a translation studies doctoral gotten, and probably embarrassingly banal. program. Her scholarly and critical works This meditation of translation contains include her award-winning literary biography Manuel Puig and the Spider the subversive seed of Borges’s poetics of Woman (FSG and Faber & Faber, 2000) and “reading as writing,” which he articulated fur- her groundbreaking book on the poetics of ther in 1939 in his perverse parable “Pierre translation The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (published Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” the piece in 1991 and reissued this year by Dalkey that George Steiner, in After Babel, considers Archive Press, along with her classic the summa of all translation theory. Here translations of novels by Manuel Puig). Aside from numerous volumes of Cervantes’s masterpiece becomes a tentative translations of Latin American fiction and web of propositions that change with each poetic works, she has regularly contributed new historical act of reading; each successive articles, reviews, essays, and translations of reading, rewriting, translating of a text enrich- prose and poetry to major anthologies and journals including the New Yorker. Her many es and ensures the original’s survival anew. honors include National Endowment for the Every work enters into a dialogue with other Arts and NEH fellowship and research texts, and with a context; texts are relation- grants, the first PEN USA West Prize for Literary Translation (1989), the PEN ships that of necessity evolve in other contexts. American Center Career Achievement award Borges has shown us how literary works (1996), and a Guggenheim Foundation already give us the theoretical models through fellowship. She has just completed a five translation / inaugural issue / 2011 volume project as general editor of the which we may interpret them: “Some Version works of Borges for Penguin Classics. of Homer” and “Pierre Menard” both prefig- ure reader-response and reception theories. These texts reveal not only the thin line between originals and their interpretations but the parallel and complementary nature of these inter- pretations. “Pierre Menard” in particular illuminates the related functions of translation, parody, and literary criticism. 75 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 76 Suzanne Jill Levine (World) Literature “Pierre Menard” is a stylized parody of the laborious bibliographic homage an obscure French provincial writer pays to his mentor Pierre Menard, an obscure French symbolist whose most fantastic project is his attempt to rewrite word-for-word, in the language of Cervantes, Don Quixote. Our vertigo upon reading this ficcion is infinite. To begin with, Don Quixote— often labeled the first modern novel—was born both as a parody (of the chivalresque novel) and a “translation”. The narrator suggests in an aside that the “original” is a found manuscript written by an Arab named Cide Hamete Benengeli (to wit, Sir Eggplant). That a French writer of the late nineteenth century would attempt to re-create (without plagiarizing) a seventeenth- century Spanish classic, and that an Argentine writer—Borges—would attempt to write Menard’s disciple’s homage, produces a mise en abîme. Menard’s faithful rendition of a sentence from the Quixote turns out as different as a parody, that is, an imitation with a critical differ- ence, because the same Spanish phrase becomes an affectation and takes on different, even opposite meanings, reinscribed in another linguistic and historical context. Borges’s Spanish “rendition” of a supposed French original (the invented disciple’s homage to the invented men- tor) is both a “translation” and a parody (about the parody/translation of a parody/translation) that makes us question the status of what appears to be an ever-elusive original. Indeed, where does the French end and the Spanish begin in this text? Here Borges conflates the modes of parody or satirical imitation and translation or imitation in another language, and also shows how they function as literary criticism with one important difference: Both translations and parodies attempt to repeat the discourse of the original; the critical essay uses another rhetoric. orges has proposed, essentially, a tentative status for the original as one of many pos- B sible versions. James Joyce, collaborative translator of the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” sec- tion of Finnegans Wake into Italian, was thinking along similar lines when he chose to call his original “work in progress”—which he continued to complete in the next stage— translation. Joyce “transelaborated” aspects of the original, which became more explicit in Italian. He took advantage of his relationship to what he experienced as the earthy musical- ity of the target language to invent a more slangy version, and different double, even triple puns. The poet laureate Robert Penn Warren once observed, Dante’s Inferno on his lap in the original Italian, that those outside of the language, like himself, could appreciate its musicality more than a native speaker—precisely because the outside reader would tend to focus more on (exotic) sound than sense. In a sacred vein Walter Benjamin privileges the original, radiating an infinity of ver- sions, over translation, one limited version among many, but he coincides with the profane Joyce in seeing the original “embodiment” as, in George Steiner’s words in Antigones, “an annunciation, however well wrought, of forms of being yet to come.” Steiner shows how Benjamin’s theory of “absolute translation and of the confluence of all secular tongues translation / inaugural issue / 2011 towards a mythical Ursprache, a primal source of perfect unison and facsimile” was inspired, in part, by Hölderlin’s journey to the source, seeking through his translations of Sophocles to bring forth “the ‘Oriental’ substratum and well-spring stifled in fifth century Greek art.” The bringing forth of a “substratum” is implied in the concept of subversion, in which translation betrays in the traditional traduttore, traditore sense but also because it makes evi- 76 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 77 Suzanne Jill Levine dent a version underneath that becomes explicit, a latent version implied in the original. In a sense this latent version is a subtext, a term borrowed from psychoanalytical theory, which Terry Eagleton has defined as A text running within a work, visible at certain “symptomatic” points of ambiguity, evasion or overem- phasis and which we as readers are able to “write” even if the novel itself does not. All literary texts contain one or more such sub-texts… which can be called the “unconscious” of the work. The work’s insights… deeply related to its blindness—that is does not say, and how it does not say it—may be as important as what it articulates; what seems absent, marginal or ambivalent about it may provide the central clue. Persuasive translations uncover subtexts, or underlying meanings, for, after all is said and done, translation’s first and final function is to relate meaning. (Sub)versions uthorized geniuses such as Borges, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, and A Vladimir Nabokov command an authority, unlike most translators, to re-create, to “sub- vert” the original—particularly their own. They offer an ideal model, nonetheless, for what literary translations should be: creation. Having collaborated with such polyglots as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Manuel Puig, I have been able to observe a symbiotic if not parasitic relationship between translation and original composition. Far from the traditional view of translators as servile, nameless scribes, the literary trans- lator can be considered a subversive scribe. Something is destroyed—the form of the origi- nal—but meaning is reproduced through another form. A translation in this light becomes a continuation of the original, which already always alters the reality it intends to re-create. But let’s take this argument beyond the cliché about what gets lost in translation— from reality to original, as well as from original to translation. The disruptive effect of books such as Tres tristes tigres and La traición de Rita Hayworth occurs through the violation of usage, through a resistance to language as useful or usual. Proper names become puns in Cabrera Infante’s books; the communicative function of spoken language is subverted when Puig and Cabrera Infante transform it, with all its grammatical violations, into writing. The translation of their “abuses”—a term Philip Lewis applies to creative translation—must also violate, and in doing so sustain, their comment about language, in ways that are not arbitrary but which make the reader aware of decisive linguistic or textual knots of signification. The translation of Cabrera Infante’s title La habana para un infante difunto into Infante’s Inferno translation / inaugural issue / 2011 offers a prime example of this both abusive and sustaining process. Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy-principal exemplars in this meditation on my work as a translator-see their originals already as translations of texts and traditions as well as of realities; each in his own way is a parodist, a creator-commentator. Dethroning language’s dominion over mean- ing, they have also in a sense dethroned the “author”. As collaborators or self-translators they are self-subverters. (pp. 4-8) 77 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17571

Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 78 Transdisciplinarity susan Bassnett From: “The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies” in Susan Bassnett & André Lefevere, Constructing Cultures. Essays on Literary translation (1998) Clevedon – Philadelphia – Toronto – Sydney – Johannesburg: Multilingual Matters. oth translation studies and cultural studies have come of age. Both interdisciplines B have entered a new internationalist phase, and have been moving for some time away from their more overtly parochial and Eurocentric beginnings, towards a more sophisticated investigation of the relationship between the local and the global. Both are now vast wide-ranging fields, within which there is no consensus, but neither are there rad- ical disagreements that threaten fragmentation or destruction from within. There are now clearly several areas that would lend themselves fruitfully to greater cooperation between practitioners of both interdisciplines. • There needs to be more investigation of the acculturation process that takes place between cultures and the way in which different cultures construct their image of writers and texts. • There needs to be more comparative study of the ways in which texts become cultur- al capital across cultural boundaries. • There needs to be greater investigation of what Venuti has called ‘the ethnocentric violence of translation’ and much more research into the politics of translating. • There needs to be a pooling of resources to extend research into intercultural train- ing and the implications of such training in today’s world. It is not accidental that the genre of travel literature is providing such a rich field of exploration by both translation studies and cultural studies practitioners, for this is the genre in which individual strategies employed by writers deliberately to construct images of other cultures for consumption by readers can be most clearly seen. In pointing out that none of us are able to comprehend fully the entirety of the com- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 plex network of signs that constitutes culture, Raymond Williams effectively freed us from the old myth of the definitive version of anything. His thesis also offers a way forward that invites a collaborative approach, for if the totality is denied the individual, then a combina- tion of individuals with different areas of expertise and different interests must surely be advantageous. Both cultural studies and translation studies have tended to move in the direction of the collaborative approach, with the establishment of research teams and 78 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 79 Lourens J. de Vries groups, and with more international networks and increased communication. What we can see from both cultural studies and translation studies today is that the moment of the iso- lated academic sitting in an ivory tower is over, and indeed in these multifaceted interdisci- plines, isolation is counterproductive. Translation is, after all, dialogic in its very nature, involving as it does more than one voice. The study of translation, like the study of culture, needs a plurality of voices. And, similarly, the study of culture always involves an examina- tion of the processes of encoding and decoding that comprise translation. (pp. 138-139) lOuRens j. de vRIes From: “Runny icky material moved into liquid from the wind blowing on it: linguistics as translation”. inguistics and translation theory used to have a somewhat asymmetrical relation- L ship, with the latter graciously emphasizing that she needed linguistics (along with other partners, to be sure) but with only very few linguists acknowledging that they needed translation theory or translation studies. In fact, there was a time that translation theory, especially in the field of Bible translation, was dominated by linguistics, with trans- lation theory almost becoming an applied subfield of linguistics. The truth is that linguis- tics very badly needs translation studies as an autonomous, independent discipline, espe- cially when translation studies embraces a broader, transdisciplinary perspective that sees translation as an instantiation of more general cognitive and cultural processes of the cre- ation, communication and transformation of meaning, within and across cultures. There are many reasons why linguistics needs translation studies. Here are the most impor- tant. First, translation studies can save linguistics from the follies of extreme universalism and extreme relativism. Second, linguistic description of the languages of the world crucial- ly involves translation, and it is very dangerous for linguists to leave that translation aspect of their work untheorized. Translation studies is a discipline predicated on difference, as is translation itself. The very act of translating emphasizes differences between people. But emphasizing differences is not innocent. And disciplines predicated on difference such as translation studies and cultural anthropology may have an uneasy relationship with this focus on difference. Modern anthropologists sometimes deal with this uneasiness by downplaying Otherness translation / inaugural issue / 2011 and by refusing to portray the people they study as Exotic Others. They have a history of colonial anthropology to come to terms with, an anthropology that emphasized Otherness and a West that never would meet the East. Translators and students of translation are pulled into opposite directions. There is fear to lose Otherness in translation, a fear to tame and domesticate the Other Culture in translation and at the same time the fear to lose the audience, the awareness that transla- 79 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 80 Lourens J. de Vries Transdisciplinarity tors are ‘doomed’ to communicate with audiences in the terms of those audiences. Even translators committed to conveying the very Otherness of the source text and source cul- ture have to do so in terms of Otherness that the audience can relate to, that is the paradox of exotization. The most exoticizing translations of the Bible invariably turned out to be monuments to the Zeitgeist, the spirit, ideologies and mentality of their time and place. For example, the German translation of the Hebrew Bible by Buber and Rosenzweig tried very hard to capture the Hebrew Otherness in the translation but it is a monument to German Lourens J. de Vries is Neo-Romanticism of the late nineteenth and Professor at the early twentieth century, more specifically a University of monument to German Neo-Romantic Amsterdam. His main interests are the study understanding of Hebrew Otherness. of Papuan and Translators become acutely aware of Austronesian languages two things at the same time: of linguistic and in functional, typological, and cultural otherness and difference, of gaps and anthropological frameworks, history and theory of Bible translation in the broader divides on the one hand, and of continuities, context of translation studies, linguistic bridges and overlap on the other hand. This aspects of (Bible) translation processes, specific sensitivity to both gaps and bridges, skopos theory and effective communication in Bible translations, and Bible translations to cultural continuity and discontinuity, in languages of Asia and Oceania. His recent should be celebrated as the heart of transla- publications are The Korowai of Irian Jaya. tion studies because one of the central and Their Language in its Cultural Context (Oxford lasting contributions of translation studies to University Press, 1997), A Short Grammar of Inanwatan, an Endangered Language of the the humanities is to be an antidote to the dis- Bird’s Head of Papua, Indonesia (Australian torting impact of ideologies of both univer- National University Press, 2004), “Areal salism and relativism. When linguistics was pragmatics of New Guinea: Thematization, distribution and recapitulative linkage in in the iron grip of naïve universalism, with Papuan languages” in Journal of Pragmatics ‘universal grammar’ and with ‘universal mean- 38 (2006), “Translation Functions and ings’ (mostly English words in capitals), it Interculturality” in Translation and Interculturality: Africa and the West, vol. 16 was among students of translation that the (2008), and “From clause conjoining to awareness of the incommensurability prob- clause chaining in the Dumut languages of lem, of limits to translatability and of the New Guinea” in Studies in Language Series very real, deep differences between languages (Peter Lang, 2010). and cultures was kept alive. And when the ideological pendulum swings back to rela- tivism and towards denials of very real cross-linguistic and cross-cultural continuities, it is in the field of translation that the awareness of such continuities remains alive. Translation is core business for any linguist. This insight was never totally lost in lin- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 guistics (e.g. Grace 1981: 36: “Translation is a sine qua non in the analysis of a new lan- guage”). But few linguists see the core role of translation in their work, let alone that they use the insights from translation studies to illuminate this core element. When linguists are aware of the central place of the translational element in their work and when they theo- rize that translational aspect, the quality of their work dramatically increases, for example 80 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 81 Lourens J. de Vries in increased focus on the emic, language-specific and unique meanings of simple construc- tions such as adnominal genitives or coordinated nouns that look deceptively similar and ‘universal’ under the guise of English translation equivalents (see Reesink 2008 for the role of translation in linguistics in relation to Pike’s notion of emic/etics). (pp. 1-2) […] inguists are often incredibly unreflective and naïve in providing glosses and transla- L tions; they should learn from translation studies to critically reflect on the skopos of their translations and on what is lost and gained in translation. Many linguists would look at the situation that the Atsugewi utterance wanted to describe, for example rotten tomatoes blowing into a pond, and then translate according to that denotation, with something like ‘rotten tomatoes blew into the water’. There is a very real danger that con- structions are classified and understood by linguists in terms of the English translation equivalents, for example Papuan thematic constructions that were classified as relative or adverbial clauses because they were translated in English with adverbial and/or relative clauses (De Vries 2005; 2006). English, the language of international grammar writing, is an enemy linguists rarely recognize as such. Just like Latin in the past, English easily becomes a channel through which grammars of other languages are forced to flow when linguists do not pay attention to the insights of students of translation. Linguistics is a form of translation with a very specific scholarly skopos: to translate the categories and distinctions of the lexicons and the grammars of the languages of the world in an English-based metalanguage with strong traces of an earlier Latin-based lin- guistic metalanguage, with categories such as ablative, switch reference, noun phrase, inalienable, animate, direct object and with English lexical glosses such as ‘move’, ‘hit’ and ‘black’. The grammatical terms such as ‘relative clause’ and ‘first person’, the lexical glosses such as ‘hit’ and ‘move’ and the translations of the utterances of the object language (‘runny icky material’) are all part of 'linguish' in the context of grammar writing, that is English as a linguistic metalanguage. This translational process of object language categories into metalanguage categories can only be done properly when linguists are constantly aware of the need to force their English-based metalanguage away from the categories and distinc- tions of English as a natural language. This is turn can only be done when the English- based linguistic metalanguage is transformed and sharpened by the study of as many lan- guages as possible, languages with different lexical and grammatical categories such as Atsugewi or Spanish. When I was a young linguist my discipline had almost absorbed translation theory, now that I am no longer all that young I find myself arguing that linguistics would improve dramatically if it could look at itself from the perspective of a broadly defined field of trans- translation / inaugural issue / 2011 disciplinary translation studies. Had it embraced the lessons of translation studies on the deep differences between languages and cultures, it would have been spared the unfruitful episode of pointless universalism. Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the temporary dominance of linguistics in translation theory was the reduction of translation to a ‘purely’ linguistic process, a process of words, phrases and sentences only; for a while this reduction 81 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 82 Patricia Willson Transdisciplinarity hid the true nature of interlingual translation as a social and cultural process that can only be understood in wider cognitive contexts of the creation and transformation of meaning in and across cultural boundaries. (pp. 3-4) patRIcIa wIllsOn “Translation as a metaphor in scientific discourse”. his still incipient research aims at exploring the metaphoric uses of translation to T account for transformations concomitant with a certain degree of invariance in the field of science and technique. It aims as well at inquiring into the possible connec- tions between such uses and metaphors of translation already studied in philosophy, anthro- pology, sociology, among other disciplines. The field explored insofar is molecular Patricia Willson has a degree in biochemistry biology, an avant-garde domain in scientific and is Professor discourse in the sixties and seventies. In 1961, (Translation / biochemists François Jacob and Jacques Comparative Literature) at El Colegio de México. Monod proposed a model to explain deoxyri- Between 1998 and 2010, bonucleic acid (DNA) duplication and protein she was Lecturer in Argentine Literature at synthesis in the cell. They used the terms code, University of Buenos Aires; between 2004 transcription and translation, and called messen- and 2010, she chaired the Permanent Seminar of Translation Studies at Instituto ger RNA (mRNA) the chain of ribonucleic de Enseñanza Superior en Lenguas Vivas, acid required as an intermediate in such dupli- Buenos Aires. She is also a translator and cation. The terminology shows that translation has translated, among other authors, Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Paul is ‘the scene of striking metaphorics’ not only in Sartre, Gustave Flaubert, Richard Rorty, the field of social sciences. In 1970, in his Le H.P. Lovecraft, Mark Twain, and Mary hasard et la nécessité, Monod analyzed the Shelley. She is currently translating Darwin’ s On the Origin of Species. She has implications of the discovery in the history of published La Constelación del Sur. sciences, and claimed that “the fundamental Traducciones y traducciones en la literatura biologic invariant is DNA”, and that «the argentina del siglo XX (Siglo XXI Editores, process of translation by which DNA dupli- 2004), and was awarded in Madrid the Panhispanic Prize for Specialized cates» is «uni-directional», and is, in this sense, Translation (2005). She is counted among a “Cartesian” and not a “Hegelian” process. In a the founding members of IATIS (Seoul 2004). famous statement that completed Francis translation / inaugural issue / 2011 Crick’s “central dogma of molecular biology” and has been often refuted since then (In 1970, Howard Temin demonstrated that genetic information in retroviruses is stocked in RNA and transcripted into DNA; in other words, the duplication occurs the other way around, due to the existence of reverse transcriptase, and proceeding through a ‘back translation’.), Monod maintained that it is unconceivable that DNA duplication occurs backwards. 82 Translation Inaugural 01.qxp:Layout 1 12/09/11 12.04 Pagina 83 Patricia Willson ollowing the model by Jacob and Monod, some mechanisms of gene expression have F been referred to by molecular biologists as ‘translational control’, ‘translational regu- lation’, ‘translation inhibition’, ‘translation masking’ and so forth. However, since the target of this research is not science itself but the ideas suggested by scientific discourse, the corpus to examine is also composed by texts where these ideas are supported, contested or invested with different or vaster implications. For instance, in Hermès III. La traduction, the philosopher of science Michel Serres refers to Monod’s claims and gives them a wider frame: he affirms that science is the set of invariant messages in every optimal translation situation; when this maximum is not attained, we are in one of the other cultural fields. According to Serres, translation goes across the most diverging fields, hence the interest in studying trans- lating processes, not in abstract, but in the concrete transformations they operate. translation / inaugural issue / 2011 83 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/15537

Translation: A commitment to transdisciplinary exploration T his is translation's first regular issue. After an encouraging start with the inaugural issue chat was sent out to readers in numerous countries around the globe, and af­ ter significant positive feedback, we look forward to this challenge to create a fresh, lively, and ongoing dialogue with our readers and authors-in both the journal's paper and online versions. The contents of this first issue are divided into four parts, the first of which pres­ ents the work of three young scholars-Antonia Carcelen-Estrada, Piotr Blumczynski, and Sergey Tyulenev. Carcelen-Estrada shows through the example of the translation of Don Quixote into the indigenous language Kichwa in Ecuador how translation can be part of a political and social project of resistance. The resulting translation, Tiyu Kijuti, is according to the author (she is one of the novel's two translators) a hybrid text, where 'hybridiry consciously attempts to depart from transculturation or mestizaje by making use of borrowings or appropriations local precisely to reveal their farcical performance of the native. The world of early modern imperial Spain is made obviously foreign by disguis­ ing it as native'. Blumczynski's article analyzes the translation of conversion narratives in Poland, demonstrating their broad relevance to the consideration of ideological and social aspects of translation at large. By comparing the translations of two English confessional texts published in the USA into Polish by the two different Polish religious communities, the dominant Catholic Church and the Evangelical community representing a very small minority, the author shows the complex and dynamic relationship between language, reli­ gion, and translation through a combined, multidimensional perspective. The third article in this first part, by Tyulenev, explores translation in comparison with conflict. The author claims that translation is a crossing phenomena and chat it 'should and can be theorized as more than just a verbum-centered crossing; only then will it be seen as an independent object, rather than a subsection of applied linguistics'. As a crossing phenomenon, transla­ tion is also a result of crossing, like other social crossing boundary phenomena, such as transgression and war. The author asks: "How is translation to be distinguished vis-a-vis other types of boundary crossing phenomena and other types of mediation?" The second part of this issue gathers together contributions from The Nida School's first Research Symposium char took place in New York City on September 14, 2011. E � E Gayarri Chakravorty Spivak and Anthony Pym were invited to give papers on the theme 5  Editorial 'Translation, Globalization, and Localization', and Sandra Bermann and Edwin Gentzler were challenged to respond. This thoughtful interchange resulted in an ex­ tremely interesting meeting, followed by lively debate. Here we present parts of what took place in NYC, through the edited transcript of Spivak's oral and written presentation, the summary of Pym's paper, and Gentzler's full response to both. On the Nida School's website (nsts.fusp.it) it will soon be possible to see videos of both the papers and interviews with some of the participants at the symposium. In the third part of issue one you will find articles of three members of the advisory board. Robert J. C. Young presents his rereading of Franz Fanon as cultural translation, both in the sense that the author's books have mainly been read and interpreted through translations, and in the sense chat Fanon's 'combat literature' both represents and enacts a total commitment to cultural translation as a strategy for subaltern empowerment. Young asks, 'If culture is itself a form of translation, and if both sides of a cultural translation constitute dynamic practices of struggle, how can we chink chem all together as a com­ mon process, or a particular kind of intervention?' Iain Chambers's Translating space is presented in its entirety, a portion of which appeared in the inaugural issue. In it, Cham­ bers considers cities as sites of cultural encounters, and as such, in perpetual translation. 'There is no one project, no single perspective chat is able to subordinate, discipline, edify, and translate space', Chambers maintains, because 'Space is re-articulated, transformed from a singular structure into a multilateral palimpsest that can be "written" up and over, again and again. Freed from their supposedly objective status, space and temporality are deviated from the unilateralism of "progress"; both are redistributed in a narrative yet to be cold.' The third part of this issue concludes with Babli Moitra Saraf's elaboration of a theme she previously set forth in translation's inaugural issue. 'The idea of translation as a linear operation needs to be interrogated', she states. 'Even the word "translation" muse be reviewed to consider chat interlingual translation may just be one of several translational practices. Its dominance in defining all aces of translation muse be examined and chal­ lenged'. With this document, Saraf challenges the perspectives on translation presented in the inaugural issue's introduction by Stefano Arduini and Siri Nergaard. I am hopeful chat her words are a start to a rich debate chat can be developed online: how and where can studies on translation meet when the 'translation question' is radically different in dif­ ferent parts of the world? The issue concludes with translation's interview with Susan Bassnett. What is print­ ed here is the transcript of our conversation in October 2011. Boch her and translation studies' main steps can be traced through her words, ending with important consider­ ations for the future: Which are the significant questions on translation today? Where does translation cake place? The video of the interview with Bassnett is already available online: http://translation.fusp.it/ interviews/ interview-w ich-susan-bassnett EE Let me welcome a new member of the editorial board, Babli Moitra Saraf. Passing from member of the advisory to the editorial board, she will more actively and directly enrich the journal by enlarging its geographical, linguistic, and cultural perspectives. Babli 6  Editorial succeeds Valerie Henitiuk, who has left the editorial board for other duties. We thank Valerie for her important contribution to the journal's initial steps. Welcome also to James Maxey, who is the journal's managing editor: without him neither the journal's paper ver­ sion nor the online journal would be possible. Some concluding remarks on the future issues: We will endeavor to include an in­ terview with a prominent person in different fields of research on translation in each issue. We believe in these personal encounters, and in their capacity to create through dialogue new ideas beyond disciplinary boundaries. Additional content is available to translation subscribers online, including reviews, news, debates, and comments. It is our hope that through the combination of these two forms of publication the journal will be both current and timely. The website offers quick availability, searchable content, and opportunities to interact while the paper version al­ lows for reflective and deep reading. Both formats shall always be transdisciplinary. E E 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17451

Across the Cross: Translation, Transgression, War 1 SER G EY TY U L E N EV Without a sigh he left to cross the brine, And traverse Paynim shores, and pass earth's central line. -Lord Byron, 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' ( I : XI) The Ever Divided World TI1e world is divided into marked and unmarked spaces. -Niklas Luhmann ( 1 998, 79) T he world, as we know it, does not exist in an undivided state-the world is al­ ways a combination of marked and unmarked parts. Even if an observer attempts to observe the world in its entirety, the world will inevitably be divided into the observed and the observer. In other words, the world should be presented as ever-crossed, that is, containing a cross. George Spencer Brown, the author of Laws of Form, defines cross as distinguishing between two sides of a cleft space (form), or between something and something else (1973, 1 , 6). Cross is a boundary between something that is indicated, and therefore marked, and all the rest-not indicated, not marked. Such cross- generating distinction lies at the basis of any observation understood at the highest degree of abstrac­ tion (not just optical), including observations in the cognitive and social realms (Spencer Brown 1973, v, xiii). Observation is understood as handling distinctions- differentiating between marked and unmarked phenomena. The boundary (cross), drawn as a result of distinguishing between the marked and unmarked and indicating the marked, separates a named value from all other values, ego from alter, and system (including social systems) from environment. There are different types of phenomena in the world understood as the space cleft by a cross into two sides. Some phenomena exist within one of che sides of the cleft space­ either inside or outside che cross; they do not cross che cross. Other phenomena, on the contrary, thrive on crossing the cross. In face, they exist because it is possible to cross cross- E E 1 I would like to express my gratefulness to Brenden Coetzee for his help in the preparation of this manuscript. 45 S e r g e y T y u le n e v es, and such crossing is their role in the world. One might say they live across the cross. The crossing phenomena (CPs) are responsible for the interaction between the marked and the unmarked sides. They make it possible to bring marked and unmarked items together, juxtapose chem, identify their convergences and divergences, and carry out all sorts of op­ erations of exchange between the internal and external sides of the cross. The Two Crosses of Translation T ranslation is one of such phenomena chat exist across the cross. In translation studies (T S), translation has been considered so far exclusively either on its own or in comparison with adjacent phenomena studied in the verbum-centered hu­ manities (among the most recent examples, see Merkle 2009). Even when translation is studied in combination with extra-verbal phenomena, the verbum-centrism still dominates the scholarly approach. For instance, in Baker (2006), it is verbum-centered translation chat is at the focus, it is translation in the context of conflict. H owever, it would also b e instruc­ tive to consider translation in compa rison with confli ct. One may wonder, on what basis? In what follows, I will suggest a basis. Moreover, I argue chat a broader conception of translation is long overdue and is in­ deed necessary, because a broader view would show translation in its natural social context, as a social phenomenon in connection with other similar social phenomena of a particular kind; this relationship so far has been outside the scope of consideration in TS. Besides, the narrower conception of translation predominant in TS is one of the reasons why TS still fails to draw a clear separating line (cross) between translation and the rest of the world. The connection of TS with its philological parents (literary studies and linguistics) is still stiflingly dominant among translation students, one of the main reasons, little doubt, be­ ing that the majority ofTS scholars come from verbum-centered educational backgrounds (notably, linguistics). As a resulr, no matter how hard TS tries to impress the scholarly world with its claim to be a full-fledged discipline, the umbilical cord is still there and still shows few signs of being severed. Until a clear-cut cross has been drawn between transla­ tion and non-translation, such a claim is not quite convincing for non-translation special­ ists. Indeed, such claims remind one of an adolescent's claim to be independent, while she or he is still under their parents' roof. The prevalent verbum-centered understanding of translation testifies to the absence of a clear cross between translation and other verbum­ centered phenomena, traditionally studied in linguistics and literary studies . Translation is a crossing phenomenon (CP), but it is also a resulr of crossing. Unless translation is clearly separated (crossed) from other ways of crossing the world, there is hard­ ly any possibility for it to rise to its claim as a scholarly discipline. Translation should and can be theorized as more than just a verbum-centered crossing; only then will it be seen as an independent object, rather than a subsection of applied linguistics. Yet, on the other hand, translation must have something chat separates it from other crossing phenomena. Only if E we find the exact position of the cross for translation, can we emancipate TS. W hen talking �� E about translation, one has, therefore, to see two crosses: ( 1 ) translation as a cross, as a CP, and (2) a cross between translation and all other (crossing or non-crossing) phenomena. 46  S e r g ey T y u l e n e v Cross is a convenient basis for categorization of translational phenomena. Translation is crossing of a particular type. In order to distinguish this particular type of crossing from any other crossing, it is, first, necessary to compare translation with other types of crossing. This is what I would like to undertake in the present paper. I will concentrate on social crossing phenomena (CPs), chat is, the phenomena chat ex­ ist across the crosses delineating boundaries of social systems. Translation will be compared with two other social CPs, which are also viewed as boundary phenomena-transgression and war. The goal is not to describe exhaustively either translation, or transgression, or war, but rather to juxtapose them in order to compare chem; at chat, the purport is to learn more about the first of the three. Therefore, when considering each ofthe three phenomena, I will keep turning from transgression and war to translation. In shore, in the present paper, I will attempt to draw a cross to separate translation as a cross from other social CPs-transgres­ sion and war, and thereby, hopefully, outline translation as a CP in a clearer way. Transgression and war were selected among many other CPs because there are available theoretical studies about them and also because they help to contextualize translation's social force or intensity, as well as put into perspective some other translation's social properties. Mediating Translation F irst, lee us consider translation itself. Sergey Tyulenev holds Translation is one of social mecha­ a PhD in linguistics and is a former lecturer in nisms enabling the social s ystem to translation and lexicography interact with the environment. Society can at the University of Moscow. be seen as a system, operationally closed In 2009 he completed a second PhD in translation from, yet i nteractionally open to the envi­ studies at the University of Ottawa. He has ronment; translation can be considered as been a postdoctoral fellow at the University the social s ystem's boundary phenomenon of Cambridge and at the University of the Free State I Bloemfontein, South Africa). His (Luhmann 1995, 197; Tyulenev 20 1 1). scholarly interests include the sociology of Translation is located on the boundaries of translation and the history of translation s ocial s ystems and subsystems. No social in Russia, in particular, the application interaction- be it non-verbal or verbal and, of Luhmann·s social systems theory to translation. He is the author of several in che latter case, both on the intra- or in­ monographs, the most recent one being terlingual levels-is possi ble without trans­ Applying Luhmann ta Translation Studies lation. Translation mediates between inter- 1201 1 ). He contributes regularly to journals and dictionaries and has published more acting parties; and it opens systems to their than twenty articles on translation theory, environments or closes i:hem by filtrating practice, and teaching methodology. His incoming and outgoing phenomena. personal website is www.tyulenev.org and his blog Translation Studies and Its Turns can Translation's mediation can be ex­ be found at www.translation.tyulenev.org. pressed by the formula A< > M < > B, where [email protected] A and B stand for interacting parties (e.g., a social system and its environment) and M is a mediator = translator; the arrows ' < ' and'> ' E E stand for interaction in both directions. Any interaction (or result thereof), which can be schematized with this formula, can be defined as translation. To distinguish between verbal 47 Sergey Tyulenev and extra-verbal translations, one has to introduce further criteria, yet there is no reason why predominantly studied verbal translation should be termed translation and extra-ver­ bal types of mediation should not. Including extra-verbal mediation into the category of translation is sometimes seen as a potential danger co che emancipated status of translation studies as a discipline. In fact, the opposite is true. Reluctance to include extra-verbal me­ diation is little less than bigotry of former linguists who feel uncomfortable in the open sea of interdisciplinaricy, but translation's natural habitat is there. We had better all overcome our hydrophobia and learn sailing or at least swimming. The relationship between verbal and extra-verbal translations is comparable to the difference between language and s emi­ otics, the latter including the former as its special case. Sooner or lacer, TS will inevitably come to the realization chat it has to deal with general principles of mediation, and therein lies its emancipation of literary studies and linguistics; also therein, the cross between TS and the rest of the world muse be drawn. Therefore, the time is ripe to study laws governing cranslacion-Proceus as a way of crossing the cross. There is only one place co draw a cross ofTS's emancipation; it is not between verbal and non-verbal mediation-the cross should be drawn along the line separating crossing the cross and all the rest. However, at this point, che question is bound co arise: How is translation to be distin­ guished vis-a-vis (1) other types of boundary crossing phenomena and (2) other types ofme­ diation? In the present paper, I will address the difference between translation and other types of boundary crossing aspect 1, while aspect 2 should be discussed separately elsewhere. A Cluster of Cross-Crossers T o be sure, translation is not the only social phenomenon chat exists across the cross. Therefore, in order to be better appreciated and properly distinguished from other boundary phenomena, CPs, translation should be compared with other CPs. There are a number of boundary phenomena that exist in modern society, e.g., trade, diplomacy, transgression, war, and all sorts of cultural interactions. All these CPs belong to different s ocial function(al) s ystems. Modern society in developed countries, i.e., politically and economically modernized countries, which participate in international and globalizing processes, can be described as function-based (Luhmann 1997; H abermas 1984, 153-197). Roughly, around che period of che Industrial Revolution, the basis ofintra- and inter-systemic interactions became funccion­ based. Previously, social interactions had been determined either by che relative autonomy and self-maintenance of social groups (tribe-like segmentation); or by the dynamics of the relationship between centre and periphery; or by the rank- and cla'ss-dominated logic. Differ­ ent types of social organization (segmentation; centre/ periphery; ranks) did not follow each other as if in single file. In some periods, some of chem coexisted, yet usually one of chem dominated. In modern society, interactions are predominantly determined by differences be­ tween subsystems having different social functions. Function subsystems are differentiated E E social operational systems, each of which specializes in handling a particular social problem � (Luhmann 1995, 299; Luhmann 2000, 138; Krause 1996, 34). Therefore, in modern society, we can distinguish between legal, military, educational, religious, and other subsystems. C 0 48  S e r g e y T y u l e n ev All function subsystems are independent from each other in the sense that their spe­ ·cialization makes it impossible for one ofthe subsystems to exercise full and unconditioned control over another/the others without being controlled by its own dependence on other subsystems for their 'services'. Contrary to widespread beliefs, even the political subsystem, which seems to be the most powerful and influential among the subsystems-a super­ subsyscem, one might say- cannot fully control che other subsystems . Policies can subdue the other subsystems for some time, as is the case in totalitarian states for example, yet this time inevitably runs out because the other subsystems exist according to their internal laws that cannot be determined from the outside. As a result, policies' supremacy gives way to economic laws (the economic order imposed b y totalitarianism collapses and new eco­ nomic patterns develop on the ashes of the overly centralized economy), to laws governing arts (underground art rebels against aesthetics foisted on it), etc. Function subsystems are operationally closed. Yet one subsystem may affect the behav­ iour of another, bur this happens only by way of irritations, which are external in relation to the internal operations of the subsystem. It is up to che subsystem whether to react to or ignore these outside irritations. Thus, being interaccionally open, subsystems are operationally closed and do not compromise their functional independence. Translation is an example of such function subsystem, being an interactionally open operational closure (Tyulenev 201 0). Not all boundary phenomena, however, constitute full-blown function subsystems; some may belong to other subsystems, sometimes to more than one. For instance, trade con­ tributes to the operations of the function subsystem of the economy; diplomacy facilitates functioning of the political subsystem on the international level or of other subsystems (cf. international cultural activities which involve arts); war is associated primarily with the mili­ tary subsystem bur also policies and the economy may be involved; espionage and intelligence services belong primarily to the subsystem ofpolicies, yet in the case ofeconomic spying their connection with the economy becomes predominant; cultural interactions are carried out primarily within the subsystem of art, yet in the case of what is termed 'soft power'. chat is, cultural diplomacy, culcural events fall under the jurisdiction of policies (Nye 2004). In order to decide which ofthe boundary phenomena constitute function subsystems and which do not, a closer look at che properties of function systems is needed. In the modern world, function subsystems become so independent ofrespective intrastate politi­ cal subsystems chat they go beyond geopolitical frontiers; the world merges into one global system, a world society (Luhmann 1990, 178). Internacional police (Interpol) is one such type of functional crossing of frontiers based on a particular type of systemic 'communica­ tive behaviour' (ibid.) in the modern global world society; Interpol belongs primarily to the legal function subsystem. Education is yet another function chat is exercised internationally. International news agencies are the internationally operating subsystem of mass media. All the above-listed boundary phenomena are, however, different from translation in chat they do not constitute subsystems; rather they are operations (among other possible operations) ofthis or that function subsystem. This can be shown if we apply five criteria in order to define function subsystems: function, efficacy, medium, code, and program (Krause 1 996, 37-38). To exist, all function subsystems have to have a specific social problem which E E the entire social system needs to cake care ofin order to ensure its smooth operation, whether for the sake of its internal communication or for the sake of its external interaction with the 49 S e r g e y T y u le n e v environment. The ability of a subsystem to tackle a particular problem on behalf of the entire system is efficacy of the subsystem. Thus, a problem that a system faces requires assigning the function of suggesting ways to handle this problem to a subsystem, which has the capac­ ity to produce a desired effect and thereby address the issue-in other words, to a subsystem that demonstrates the required efficacy. For instance, the legal subsystem regulates social life by suggesting discrimination of actions according to whether they comply with the existing laws; science supplies knowledge; religion meets spiritual needs; etc. Social-systemic codes are specific binary differences that allow ( sub) systems to differ­ entiate what is theirs and what is alien. Codes imply a cross-deft two-sided form with posi­ tive and negative values, or marked and unmarked spaces. Thus, for the economy, the code is payment/ non-payment; for religion, immanence/ transcendence; for science, truth/ false­ hood; etc. Interpol, international circulation of news by international news agencies, war, trade do not have any code of their own that would distinguish them as social subsystems. Interpol, for example, operates according to the code of the legal subsystem and observes the difference between the lawful and lawless, the legal and illegal; trade operates according to the code of the economy subsystem; war according to the code of the military subsystem. Translation, on the other hand, operates based on its own code, which cannot be reduced to any other function subsystem's code-mediated/non-mediated ( Tyulenev 20 10). While the code does not change within a subsystem, programs do. Programs are chro­ notopically sensitive. They thereby allow, 'assigning the correct code value' to different things under changing circumstances, according to the spirit of the age without forfeiting the sub­ system's operational identity (Luhmann 2000, 20 1 ) . Based on these five criteria, only transla­ tion, among the above-mentioned social crossing phenomena, can claim to be a subsystem. Transversal Transgression . . . (A]nd your children, which . . . had no knowledge between good and evil, they shall go in thither .. . -Deuteronomy 1 :39 (KJV) T ransgression is a special case of border crossing as compared to the above-men­ tioned boundary phenomena in that it is an operation, which may take place with­ in any function subsystem. Although meaning primarily transgression as represented by sexuality and its language, Michel Foucault sees this type of border crossing as a present-day replacement of another transgressive operation-profanation in religious discourse: 'Profanation in a world that no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred-is this not more or less what we may call transgression?' ( 1 994, 702 ; see also p. 75). According to Foucault, in the modern world lacking objects which could be desecrated, transgression provides division, which E E 2 1l1e article A Preface to Transgression' was translated by Donald F. Bourchard and Sherry Simon and slightly amended by James Faubion. 50  Sergey Tyulenev allows affirmation o f conventionally limited phenomena. Transgression is, therefore, inti­ mately connected with the limit, 'rhar narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage' (73). Transgression crosses and re-crosses the line of the limit. The limit is not uncrossable and at the same rime it is not an illusion-the limiting line is a real division in and of the world: that it is inevitably divided and must be divided because otherwise no part of the world would be definable: '. . . we cannot make an indication without drawing a distinction' (Spencer Brown 1 973, 1 ) . Foucault compare's transgression to a flash of lighr­ ning'in the night which . . . gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies' (Foucault 1 994, 74) . lmportanrly, Foucault theorizes transgression outside ethics, as neither ' bad' nor 'good; and defines the role of transgression as tracing'rhe flashing line that causes the limit to arise' (74 ). Transgression's function is 'simply an affirmation of division' and 'rhe resting of the limit' (74). 'The instantaneous play of the limit and of transgression' is thus cognitively indispensable, being 'the essential rest for a thought that centers on the 'o rigin' (75) . Bur what does the interplay of a limit and its transgression imply? Thanks to the fact of affirming division and demonstrating the limit by pointing to the limitlessness on the other side, the sides of the cross 'learn' something about each other and themselves. Transgression functions as a mechanism of breaking the circular internaliry of the sides of the divided world. In social-systemic terms, transgression is a way of overcoming the op­ erational closure of the transgressed system and a channel of the ( sub ) system's interactional openness to the other side of the crossed form. Such function of transgression, however, jeopardizes the integrity and the bliss of complacent ignorance of otherwise limited systems and may be seen as more or less seri­ ous crimes-and indeed they are seen as crimes, therefore Foucault has to emphasize that his consideration of transgression is beyond ethics ( 1 994, 74). In order to understand this aspect of rhe social role of transgression, it would be helpful to take into consideration what Emile Durkheim wrote about the social role of crime. He defined crime as normal ( 1 982, 32, 97- 107). Contrary to widely held beliefs which confuse the moral nature of crime and its social role, Durkheim considers crime from the sociological point of view not as pathology bur rather as normality, because crime is ( 1 ) universal, and (2) necessary, in that it plays an important social role. There is no society without crime (i.e., crime is univer­ sal); therefore, crime must be an indispensable component of the social. Crime ensures the evolution of society-of its morality and law (i.e., crime is necessary). Crime is 'an action which offends certain collective feelings which are especially strong and clear-cut' (Durk­ heim 1 982, 99). Crime breaks open the hermetic closure of the dominant social discourse by introducing something foreign. Yer crime supplies society with options for transforma­ tion and helps overcome rigidity and resentment towards change. Crime allows individual originality, which goes beyond moral principles of its age, and this is how crime participates in introducing new moral principles: Not only does [crime) imply chat the way co necessary changes remains open, but in certain cases it also directly prepares for these changes. [Hence, w)here crime exists, collective sentiments are nor only in the scare of plasticity necessary co assume a new form, bur sometimes it even contributes co E determining beforehand che shape they will cake on. Indeed, how often is it only an anticipation of E the morality co come, a progression cowards what will be! (Durkheim 1 982, 102) 51  S e r g e y T y u l e n ev Durkheim adduces an example of Socrates who was a criminal according to Athenian law, yet who, by his crime that was the independence of thought, prepared a way for a new Athenian morality and intellectual freedom. Recall that Foucault also vindicates transgression by putting it outside the realm of good and evil where it is seen as tantamount to demonism: Nothing is more alien to this experience than the demonic character who, true to his nature, 'denies everything'. Transgression opens onto a scintillating and constantly affirmed world, a world without shadow or twilight, without that serpentine 'no' that bites into fruits and lodges their contradictions at their core. It is the solar inversion of satanic denial. (1994, 75) Foucault himself was a prophet of the good land of transgression. Transgression lay at the core of his own method and scholarly mission: his own scholarly effort always negotiated between extremes, totalisations, centralizations, leveling his critique both against Marxism and against bourgeoisie, passing from level to level, crossing the thresholds, overcoming horizontal­ ity and verticality alike, preferring diagonal mobility, or, borrowing Felix Guattari's term, trans­ versality (Deleuze 1 986, 30, 32). Foucault was interested in creating'une theorie generale des productions' with Tanalyse des formations sociales' as its basic motivation and method (Fou­ cault 1969, 270; also Kremer-Marietti 1 974, 6). In other words, he was fascinated by tracing limits and boundaries in their malleability, when they were breaking, forming, and changing, rather than when they were already congealed; he was mesmerized by the abysses of ruptures rather than the plateaus of continuities. Being himself part of transversal transgression, Fou­ cault sought to unearth the fundamental function of transgression-affirmation in the divided world. Hence, transgression for him is neither negative nor positive and, mutatis mutandis, comparable to Durkheim's view of crime as an objectively necessary social phenomenon. This affirmation, as has been mentioned above, is inevitably related with continuous supply of the sides of a form with newness ( of learning more about the other sides and, therefore, about themselves). This newness introduces new elements, as does crime, according to Durkheim. Translation plays the same function in the evolution of social systems. Translation crosses the boundary thereby ( 1 ) affirming the limited inside of the cross against the un­ limited outside of the cross and (2) suggesting new ways of social evolution. Aspect ( 1 ) is at the basis of any translational act: translation always moves from one side of a cross into the other, from one (sub) system into another. Such trajectory of translation affirms one side against the other: a named value against all other values, the ego against the alter, and the system against the environment. Aspect (2) is not as self-evident. Social evolution can be seen as a three-stage process consisting of the stages of variation, selection, and stabilization. The social system has to compensate for the difference, which exists between itself and its environment. The envi­ ronment, which is always more complex than the system, sends signals to the system, or irritates the system, yet it is up to the system whether to accept or reject the signals. The signals suggest new elements or variations of phenomena already existing within the system or new phenomena. This is the stage of variation. Out of the suggested range of incoming E signals, the system selects some and rejects others. The stage of variation throws the system =� E out of its established order, yet upon the completion of the stage of selection, the system stabilizes its internal communication, which now includes new phenomena. 52  Sergey Tyulenev How does the system learn and make sense of the environment's signals? Translation as a boundary phenomenon plays a crucial role in this process. Translation enables the sys­ tem to see and understand che options on offer. Like transgression and crime, translation makes the system sensitive to the environment and keeps the system open to the possibility of evolution. First, translation provides options for rhe variation stage. A ll the options, sug­ gested by translation, boil down to a limited set. (1 ) Options may be borrowed exacrly as they exist in rhe environment, even without changing the source's code, as is the case in bor­ rowings of macaronic types of literary texts. Such ways of translating may be expressed as A= A. (2) Options may be changed in their form bur not in their content: A= A1 • This can be illustrated by trans literating translation when a foreign word is re- coded in the graphical form of the target language without any significant change in the content. (3) Equivalents may be found in the target system and they replace the incoming options: A=B. This is the most widely pracciced way of verbum-centered translation when words or phrases of the source language are replaced by target language 'equivalents'. (4) Mid- way between direct borrowing of what the environment offers and a replacement with something already exist­ ing in the system is when A is equalized with structures like'A 1 , (or) B'. Such is the case with glossing types of translation when both a borrowing from the environment and an equiva­ lent (or several equivalents) are provided. (5) Sometimes, phenomena of the environment and of the system are fused and hybrids result: A = A l / B. This can be exemplified by lexi­ ( cal hybrids, such as the English word oddments, where the Germanic root odd was joined with the Larin suffi x -ment. T his is how translation handles the incoming signals from the environment and passes chem on to the system for selection. Ac the stage of selection, translation's role is significancly more modest. The system decides which of the suggested options to accept and which should be rejected. Although translators may have a say in this process, they usually are asked for their opinion in an­ other capacity-as influential cultural or social figures, rather than as translators. When a particular option is accepted, translation's function is to conform to the re-negotiated social discourse. Ac this stage of stabilization, rranslacion adopts char of che above listed five options for each suggested phenomenon, which che system selected and adheres to char option, while, concurrencly, suggesting other ways of evolution by handling new signals coming from outside the system. As we see, fundamentally, translation plays rhe same part as transgression and crime do in crossing rhe established limit in order to affirm one side of rhe crossed form by com­ paring it with the other and suggesting new ways of social evolution. This closeness to transgression/ crime explains, among other things, why translation is often seen as unfaith­ fulness or a downright criminal activity (traduttore traditore). Yet the main difference as compared to transgression/ crime is that translation is not as consistencly radical as trans­ gression and crime are. We have seen that at the stage of stabilization in social evolution, translation conforms to, rather than breaks the established rules. Besides, transgression crosses 'incessantly' (Foucault 1 994, 73), while translation ~ crosses in order to bring a handful of options and then to adopt whichever option was ~ found acceptable by the home system. Occasionally, however, translation may be perceived as dangerous as transgression or even crime (cf, translators of the Bible into vernaculars in early modern Europe, such as William Tyndale or Marcin Luther). 53  S e r g ey T y u l e n e v Subduing War . . . [R]anged as infantry, And staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me . . . -Thomas Hardy, '1he Man He Killed' T ransgression is strong; crime is stronger still; bur war is by far the strongest of the boundary phenomena. War forces the system co become acutely, very often pain­ fully and tragically, sensitive co the environment (See Machiavelli 1965, 718). War is a locus not just of the system's contact, but rather the system's clash with the environment or, more precisely, with another system or other systems in the environment. Since rimes immemorial, war has shaped s ocieties, being at the same rime a product of social development. Fundamentally, war 'is a function of ambiguities in the state sys­ tem' caused by unequal distribution of resources and ensuing rivalry (Freedman 1994, 3). Social- systemically, wars may be seen as a result of che system's failure to curb conflicts, which, as we have seen in the cases of transgression 2nd crime, are necessary in order co en­ sure the system's flexibility and ability co evolve (GLU, 97). If the system manages to limit the effect of a conflict, the latter remains a transgression or crime. If however the scale of a conflict becomes unmanageable and the system fails to cope with it, warfare may result. The system ceases co exist as one unit and an internal (e.g., intrastate) war may break out. Interstate wars may be represented as either one complex system breaking into two or as two systems, originally in balanced interaction, yet at some point, the balance is disturbed and the systems' military forces cross the cross (frontier) and an interplay of offensives and defensives begins (Machiavelli 1975, vol. I, 381; Clausewitz 1832, VP). Allied systems may war against their common enemy/enemies; thus, two crosses are united (allied) under one common cross and che war is waged across this common cross with the enemy. 'If two or more scares combine against another, the result is still politically speaking a single war' (Clausewitz, in Freedman 1994, 212). The goal of war, thus, is to eliminate obstacles in either internal systemic communication or external intersyscemic interaction, whatever size or structural complexity these systems may assume, or increase che domain of the original communication and include a part of the environment (of the external side of the cross) to the system (co the internal side of the cross) (Machiavelli 1975, vol. I, 375). There is probably no better suiting discussion ofwar available than Carl von Clausewicz' magnum opus Vom Kriege ( On War). Although written (1806- 1830) and published (1832) roughly two centuries ago (Schossler 1991, 79-100) and all elements of warfare since then has drastically changed, 'no one, as yet, has written a book on the subject chat even remotely surpasses chat of Clausewicz' because his 'fundamental explanation and definition of war [ . . . ] has remained relevant' (Handel 1986, 2, 12; see also Freedman 1994, 7, 191-194). Therefore, I will draw my comparison of war with translation on Clausewicz' theory. �E E � 3 Hereinafter, in references to Clausewitz' On War, the Roman numeral stands for the number of the book cited; the Arabic for the section therein; and a letter, if any, after the Arabic numeral points to a subsection. 54  Sergey Tyu lenev Transgression is a s free a s lightning, bur not so is war. As seven cities 'warr'd for Homer dead' (Thomas Heywood, ' Heirarchie of the Blessed Angells'. 1635), so several subsystems lay claim to war. War is most commonly viewed as a purely military activ­ ity. Clausewitz, 'a true philosopher in uniform'. revolutionized the study of war-and his revolution is compared to Copernican revolution for its profundity and scale-in showing that politics provides the source and motivation of war; without politics, war turns into a senseless slaughter (Clausewitz 1 832, VIII, 6B; Handel 1 986, 7; Creveld 2000, 1 08, 1 1 2) . Other causes of warfare are known-notably, economic, religious, and ethnic; moreover, deeper motives are found (Stoessinger 2008; Machiavelli 1 975, vol. I, 378; Lebow 20 10). In social-systemic terms, these different combinations of military action with other social activities or psychological phenomena show strong intersystemic links, which develop be­ tween war and other phenomena, notably social subsystems. It is beyond my expertise and the purport of the present paper to discuss arguments as to which of the 'seven subsystems' has more legitimate rights to lay their claim to causing and motivating wars (see Lebow 20 1 0, 18). What is more important in light of comparing war and translation as two boundary phenomena is that both are volatile in their allegiances to social activities and (sub)systems, they easily form structural couplings with other social phenomena; at that, their structural couplings are stronger bonds than those of transgression which always contests and challenges the establishment, yet shuns any commitments. On the one hand, as Clausewitz put it, war has 'its own grammar: its own nature; on the other hand, its logic originates from parities ( 1 832, VIII, 6B: 'seine eigene Grammatik, aber nicht seine eigene Logik'). Moreover, this instrumental vision of war 'enabled Clausewitz to argue that war was morally neutral' (Creveld 2000, 1 1 2). Thus, war, like transgression, crime, and translation, which all, being neutral in themselves, exist beyond good and evil, is theorized as a neutral instrument of boundary crossing in the hands of politics. At the same time, politics is not a tyrant over war, for whatever political goal motivates warfare, the po­ litical will must be commensurate with the available military resources (Clausewitz 1832, I, 23). Clausewitz' contemporary, Baron deJornini, a military theorist who, like Clausewitz, found his material for analysis in Napoleonic warfare, viewed war as 'a great drama, [ . . . ] which cannot be reduced to mathematical calculations'. yet he also recognized that there was 'a small number of fundamental principles of war, which could not be deviated from without danger, and the application of which, on the contrary, has been in almost all times crowned with success' (cited in Freedman 1 994, 1 9 1 ) . In social-systemic terms, this state­ ment could be re-read as defining war as an operational closure which forms structural couplings with different phenomena of its environment. The same, mutatis mutandis, can be said about translation: on the one hand, transla­ tion operates according to its own 'grammar: that is, rules and principles of transformation of phenomena passing through it between the source and the target, yet the material for th'e transformation is supplied from outside translation. Without such outside provisions, neither war nor translation do not make sense, or, in Clausewitz own words, they become einsinn- und zweckloses Ding (a meaningless and purposeless thing, 1832, VIII, 6B). War and politics are described by Clausewitz as being interdependent; this is exactly how Luh­ E E mann understands the relationship between different function subsystems: politics perme­ ates ( durchziehen) military operations and exercises continuous influence on them, yet so 55 S e r g e y T y u l e n ev far as military force will allow (Clausewitz 1 832, I, 23). Such view of war supports the possibility of the social-systemic sovereignty of translation ( operational closure) and its existence in structural couplings with other social and psychological phenomena. In TS today, this equilibrium is infrequently upset and, as a result, translation's social syscemics is not recognized and translation is mistakenly seen to be ephemeral in the social space ( Wolf 2007, 1 14- 1 17). Clausewicz compares war with a duel on a larger scale ( einerweiterter Zweikampf, I, 2) . Thereby Clausewicz stresses che reciprocal nature (Wechselwirkung) of war ( 1 832, I, 3; 4; 5; 6; 8). Reciprocity is also an integral part of interpreting ( understood here as the oral form of translation). Yee the nature of war's reciprocity is, of course, quite different from chat of translation. First of all, war is a violent act aimed at subduing the opponent (Clausewitz 1 832, L 2) . Even when the aim is to avoid bloodshed as much as possible, the goal is victory and taking the high ground (see, for instance how such a goal is at rhe basis of Sun Tzu's principles of warfare which makes chem applicable to quire peaceful business transactions, as shown in Hawkins and Rajagopal 20054) . Translation is hardly ever as belligerent as war; even when it is faulty or biased, superficial and distorting, translation aims at enabling intersyscemic interaction. Yer another aspect, which is important for understanding such boundary phenomena as war and translation, is the balance of psychic and social phenomena. Clausewitz consid­ ers this aspect as a problem of friction. The problem boils down to the difference between an ideal warfare, an imaginary view ofabsolute war; vs. 'real war' -in other words, between the war, 'stripped of all practical considerations concerning time, place and intent; imagined, as it were,'srand[ing] up naked, so to speak' and the war as it is in the battlefield ( 1832, VIII, 2; I, 7; Creveld 2000, 1 09). The friction between the theory and practice of war is caused by a number of factors, yet what is pertinent for the present discussion, is the difference between the psychic and social dimensions of war. Troops are made up of individuals, each with his individual will, feelings, fears, etc. Yee for the success of a military operation, they all have to be united to act as one. 11ms, the difference between war in reality, complicated and confused, and war on paper is, among other things, the difference between individual psychic systems and a social unit of the entire army or any of its subdivisions. Arguably, a similar difference is observed in translation viewed as a sum total of all translational acts (in a particular place in a particular time) and each translation ace taken on its own. Clarity of what constitutes the psychology and sociology of translation has still nor been reached in present-day TS. Nor all translation students understand the difference and importance of viewing translation from the sociological perspective; many are strug­ gling with social-systemic approaches to the study of translation, such as Luhmann's theory of social systems. Yer, although there is no denying char each translator always has a cer­ tain degree of freedom of choice in his/her decisions, all translators are socialized human beings-they are produces of their upbringing and carriers of a particular social-systemic communication and, therefore, there is a fully legitimate ground for efforts to capture supra- E E See Creveld 2000, 1 14 - 1 15, on rhe difrerence between Oausewirz' vision of war and Chinese military 4 theory epitomized in Sun Tzu's treatise The Art of War. 56  S e r g e y T y u l e n ev psychic translational processes. Translation can be studied as a social phenomenon which means that it can be studied sociologically or, in Durkheim's terms, as a social fact, that is, a 'way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external con­ straint' (1 982, 59). Social fact is 'general over the whole of a given society whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations' (ibid., emphasis in original) . Translation's own existence, stripped of all individual manifestations, can well be studied. Translation manifests itself in a particular way in a particular chronotopic locus. It is this that allows us today to have translator education, according to the principle formulated by Machiavelli about warriors: 'Nature brings forth few valiant men; effort and training make plenty of them' (1965, 718) . Effort and training, or socialization of translational praxis, is what, among other things, turns translation from a psychological fact into a social fact. Conclusion A II three social phenomena, translation, transgression, and war, are boundary phe­ nomena. This is the basis, which allowed us to compare these otherwise quite different social activities. Although to cover all their similarities and differences would be 'mission impossible' for just one paper, I hope to have demonstrated the potential of such a systemic approach to translation when such comparisons can be made and, thanks to that, better understood. This also helps to draw a clearer distinction (cross) between translation and all other comparable social phenomena. Let us recapitulate and finalize the major findings of comparing translation with transgression and war. All the three cross the systemic cross and such crossing is the essence of their social functioning. Their fundamental source is social evolution and they are a product of social evolution (although war should be considered as an extreme and undesired case). Society needs to evolve and it does evolve. In the process of social development, established dis­ courses, norms, conventions, all of what makes a system a distinct social unit-all that is comprised in the term systemic communication-undergo transformations. What is the source of new options? It is the system's environment. Boundary phenomena are mecha­ nisms of how the system obtains new options from the environment. At that, all the boundary phenomena have different 'casks': translation directly sug­ gests new options; transgression probes the established boundary ; war aims at resolving problems of intrasystemic communication or intersysremic interaction. All the three cross boundaries (systemic boundaries, of which geographical-political state frontiers are only a special case!), thereby affirming the fact of the boundaries'. However, all the three analysed phenomena differ in the ratio of primary functions vs. secondary functions, or'by -products'. of crossing social-systemic boundaries. Translation is supposed primarily to facilitate the exchange of phenomena between interacting (sub)systems across boundaries. Naturally, such an exchange implies affirma­ tion of boundaries and, consequently, of sy stemic identities. Transgression, on the contrary, w primarily, affirms intrasystemic discourses (by challenging them and raking them to their E E limits). Transgression brings these intrasystemic discourses all the way to the point where they can be juxtaposed with the phenomena located beyond the boundary. Such juxtaposi- 57 Sergey Tyulenev tion necessarily generates a fresh appreciation of the juxtapos ed phenomena and, thereby, something new is brought into the system (new information about what is beyond the system's limit and how it is different from what is inside the system). However, the latter result of transgression is but a by-product of crossing the boundary, whereas in the case of translation, that was the primary objective. War also crosses the boundary, thereby affirming the existence of the boundary and opening the internal communication of the involved systems for one another's elements (e.g., soldiers of warring nations inevitably learn something new about people in the coun­ tries they pass), yet these two functions are only by-products of war as a boundary phe­ nomenon, the primary goal being an attempt to restore the integrity of the intrasystemic communication or intersystemic interaction or to enrich them (See Machiavelli 1975, vol. I, 375; vol. II, 101-102, note 6, 1). Such are governing principles of distinguishing between these boundary phenomena, all other of their differences and similarities are deductible from these principal ones. For example, all the three cross the systemic boundary, yet the intensity of crossing is different in all the three cases. In transgression, crossing is not more than a glance beyond the cross, at the other side, from the limited into the limitless. H ence, transgression's extremism is nothing to compare to the extremism of the boundary crossing as observed in war, yet it is stronger than the intensity of translation's boundary- crossing. Translation may be trans­ gressive ( when it couples with transgression and as.sumes some of its properties), yet the power of translation's transgression is perhaps the most modest among the three. Transla­ tion's main function is to provide new elements, and transgression may be called upon only in order to emphasize the importance of suggested options. Yet, rarely, translators go as far as to impose the translated options upon the system ( that is why we know those translators who were considered criminals for their translational audacity by name-they are excep­ tions that confirm the rule). On the contrary, the extremism of transgression is much stronger because transgres­ sion aims 'to release forces within language that will hurl us to the limits of our ordinary concepts and experiences and give us a (perhaps transforming) glimpse of radically new modes of thought' (Gutting 2005, 17; emphasis added). There is no guarantee, however, that transgression will bring us transformation-pe rhaps is an important word used by Gary Gutting here. After all, transgression's function is not so much to provide something from beyond, but to bring us to the beyond. But none of the two-translation or trans­ gression- can compare with war in the latter's intensity of crossing the boundary. War is a violent crossing aiming ar nothing less than subduing the other side of the cross (Machia­ velli 1965, 581, 653). But the constructive aspect of intersystemic boundary crossing is the strongest with translation. Finally, translation, as compared with transgression and war, acts as a mediator be­ tween the two interacting social units in chat it helps, even if only superficially, the interact­ ing social units to reach a better understanding of one another; whereas transgression and war act almost exclusively on behalf of the home system and do not mediate in the sense of E E facilitating the home system's better appreciation of the other side of the cross.  S e r g e y T y u l e n ev References Baker, Mona. 2006. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London and New York: Routledge. Clausewitz, Carl van. 1 832. Vom Kriege. Berlin: Diirnmlers Verlag. http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/ VomKriegel832/TOC.htm. Creveld, Martin Van. 2000. The Art of War: War a11d Milita,·y TI?ought. London: Collins. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Foucault. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Durkheim, Emile. 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method. Translated by W.D. Halls. Edited by Steven Lukes. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: 1he Macmillan Press Ltd. Foucault, Michel. 1969. Larcheologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. 1994. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Vol. 2 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1 954- 1 984. Edited by James D. Faubion and Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin Books. Freedman, Lawrence (cd.). 1994. War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. GLU: Baraldi, Von Claudio, Giancarlo Corsi, and Elena Esposito. 1997. Glossa,· zu Nik/as Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Gutting, Gary. 2005. Foucault. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habermas,Jiirgen. 1984. Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Vol. 1 of The Theory of Communicative Action. Translated by 1homas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. Handel, Michael I. (ed.). 1986. Clausewitz and Modern Strategy. London: Frank Cass. Hawkins, David E., and Shan Rajagopal. 2005. Sun Tzu and the Project Battleground: Creating Project Strategy from 'The Art of War' by Sun Tzu. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Krause, Dedef. 1996. Luhmann-Lexikon: eine Einjuhrung in das Gesamtwerk von Nik/as Luhmann. Stuttgart: Enke. Kremer-Marietti, Angele. 1974. Foucault et l'archeologie du savoir. Paris: Seghers. Lebow, Richard Ned. 20 1 0. Why Nations Fight: Past and Future Motives for War. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1990. Essays on Self- Reference. New York: Columbia University Press. 1995. Social Systems. Translated by John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1998. Observations on Modernity. Translated by William Whobrey. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2000. Art as a Social System. Translated by Eva M. Knodt. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1 965. The Chief Works and Others. Translated by Allan Gilbert. Vol. Two. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 1975. The Discourses of Niccolo Machiavelli. Translated by Leslie J. Walker. London and Boston: Rout­ ledge & Kegan Paul. Merkle, Denise ( ed.). 2009. Comparative Literature and Literary Translation Studies: Points of Convergence and E Divergence. TTR (XXII): 2. E � Nye,Joseph S., Jr. 2004. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs. 59 Sergey Tyulenev Schossler, Diecmar. 1991. Carl van Clausewitz. Hamburg: Rowohlc. Spencer Brown, George. 1 973. Laws of Form. Toronto / New York /and London: Bantam Books. Scoessinger, John G. 2008. Why Nations Go to War. Belmont, California: Thomson Wadsworth. Tyulenev, Sergey. 2010.'Is Translation an Aucopoietic System:" MonTI, (2): 345-37 1 . 20 1 1. Applying Luhmann to Translation Studies: Translation i n Society. New York and London: Roucledge. Wolf. Michaela. 2007. 'The Location of the ' Translation Field". ln Constructing a Sociology of Translation, edited by Michaela Wolf, and Alexandra Fukari, 1 09- 1 19. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. E E � 60 

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Rewriting Memory: A Postcolonial Translation of Don Quixote into Kichwa ANTONIA CARCELEN-ESTRADA Introduction B efore Spanish colonization, the Antonia Carcelen-Estrada northernmost part of the Tawant­ is finishing her PhD in Comparative Literature insuyu or Inka Empire was known at the University of as the Chinchaysuyu, today Ecuador. Three Massachusetts Amherst million indigenous people currently speak [UMassl. where she is Kichwa in Ecuador. Its speakers consider it an instructor for Social Thought and Political Economy. Her a language of communication between hu­ latest publications are ·covert and Overt man beings (runakuna), divinities (ayakuna/ Ideologies in the Translation of the Wycliffe achillikkuna), animals (wiwakuna), the ances­ Bible into Huao Terero· in Translation, Resistance, Activism [2011 J; 'Latin American tors (apukkuna), and Nature (Pachamama). H istoriography in Emerging Capitalism· in Thus, it serves as the language of initiation Ethnicity from Various Angles and Through into Andean epistemology. Its delicate, melo­ Varied Lenses: Yesterday's Today in Latin America [2011); and ·Tierra, riqueza, dious nature and the lack of words for insulcs cuerpos, diferencia· in Actas de/ I Congreso make it ideally suited for diplomatic commu­ Internacional de Literatura Comparada nication. Kichwa belongs to the IIB group in [2011 I. Carcelen-Estrada is a translator the Quechua linguistic family, and it is not and interpreter for the Translation Center at UMass, a member of Runapacha, and the same language as the one spoken in Peru a collaborator for the Migrants· National and Bolivia, chat is, Quechua I and Quechua Bureau of Ecuador [SENAMI) in Barcelona. Her research interests include postcolonial IIA/IIC respectively (Torero 1964, 451). literature, colonial and contemporary Latin Some differences between Kichwa America, translation studies, philosophy, and Quechua are chat che former only has cultural studies, art history, anthropology, three vowels, corresponding to the proto- and oral literature. [email protected] Quechua, while the latter has five ( Adelaar and Muysken 2004, 197), Ic lacks glottal sounds and draws upon phonemes from pre­ Colombian languages such as the Karanki's "cs" or "z" or the use of a labial "f" (Adelaar and Muysken 2004, 392-394). Kichwa has four variants: Northern, Central, Southern, and Amazonian dialeccs.1 �E E 1 Among Ecuadorian Kichwa dialects, there is semantic variation, but rhe dialectic differentiation mostly hap­ � pens at rhe level of allomorphs and varying morpho-phonologic processes ( Adelaar and Muysken 2004, 242). 9 Antonia Carcelen-Estrada These dialects are the result ofthe. hybridization ofQuechua with Karanki and Span­ ish, a result of long-term word borrowing (Gomez Rendon 2005: 42; 2008: 176) and an adoption of certain structural elements such as demonstratives shuk and kay (Fauchois 1988; Gomez Rendon 2007). Through conquest, colonialism, and nation building, Spanish s eeders imposed their language on native populations. As in many postcolonial situations, Kichwa was the van­ quished language of barbarity, while the colonial language narrated the conquered territory in a civilizing prose. In his essay "El proceso de la liceratura" (1928), Peruvian indigenist2 Jose Carlos Mariategui claims that "lo unico casi que sobrevive de! Tawantinsuyoes el in­ dio. La civilizacion ha perecido. No ha perecido la raza" (2008, 289).3 Since indigenous literature is moscly oral, mestizo writers have composed the nation, narrating the Indian in Spanish in the many moments of indigenist literature, from the first indigenist novel in re­ publican cimes,Juan Leon Mera's Cumanda (1879), through the social realist vanguard fic­ tion, Huasipungo by Jorge lcaza (1934) to the first magical realist novel by Angel Felicisimo Rojas, El Exodo de Yangana (1949). Although socially committed, these works use one-dimensional, stereotypical char­ acterizations of what it means to be indigenous: a state of being at odds with culture and civilization. Their plots focus mainly on the conflict among Indians, mestizos, and white populations, leaving our indigenous self-representations and the complex, multi-layered rela­ tionship between natives and non-indigenous peoples in the past five hundred years. Already in 1892, Catalan philologist Antonio Rubio i Lluch wrote to the most renowned architect of the Ecuadorian nacion,Juan Leon Mera, warning him that he could not speak for the Indian race, especially not in Spanish, and that a true indigenous poetry could only be expressed in Kichwa (Rubio 1893, 591-593). Rubio i Lluch advocated for a revitalizing of Catalan, while Leon Mera merely cook Kichwa tropes to strengthen a Latin American Spanish. By translating Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605/1615) into Kichwa, Ocavalo economist Lucia Rosero and I have attempted to provide (1) a fictional language in Kichwa; and (2) the linguistic tools for native writers to narrate themselves. The process of translation involves both a re-imagining of the nation and a rewriting of the language. We also hope to provide the first of a series of books in Kichwa chat can be used for bilingual education. Indeed, as a consequence ofthis project, we have already received an offer to translateJ. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) into Kichwa. No final arrangements have been made. In this paper, I study the historical connections between Spanish and Kichwa, evinc­ ing the imperial linguistic policies that led to the subjugation of the latter to the former. 2 The indigenisc movement was a vanguard pro-indian movement chat was particularly strong in the Andes and served as a nostalgic national rhetoric chat spoke for the folklorized Indians while claiming chat their civilization had been destroyed in the past. As a result, indigenists did not respect indigenous people as groups with a civilization of their own, but as people in need to be civilized and slowly assimilate in the mestizo nation. I use indigenist to refer to thinkers and writers from this movement and indigenous to refer to the cultural production emerging from the subaltern Kichwa. 3 The only remnant of the Tawantinsuyu is the Indian. Its civilization has perished. The race has not perished'. (Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.) 10  Antonia Carcelen-Estrada Through a historical overview o f this subjugation and its resistance, I show that the lin­ guistic and the social struggles of Kichwa people are interconnected. Thus, the people's liberation requires an expanded acceptance and use of the Kichwa language. I focus on the figure ofTransito Amaguafi.a, a Kichwa leader who spent a century-long life fighting for the valorization of her language and her culture, and for the incorporation of indigenous rights into the mestizo nation. After placing Kichwa in its historical context, I establish a dialogue between this language and Catalan, another language subjugated to Spanish through colo­ nialism and conquest. Catalan's revalorization began at the end of the nineteenth century; one of its first advocates corresponded with Ecuadorian intellectual Leon Mera discussing the issue of Kichwa. In Ecuador, however, Kichwa continued to be subdued, while Catalan began a steady and unprecedented renaissance. Then, I present a brief history of translation into Kichwa. Finally, following the Noucentisme Movement's strategies to revitalize Catalan, I propose a translation of Don Quixote into Kichwa as a possible seed for a linguistic and cultural movement of our own. The Linguistic Cross-Pollination between Spanish and Kichwa F rom 1492 until 1599, Spain slowly constituted itself as a nation through a process of imperialism at the time of the emergence of early modernity (Carcelen-Estrada 2011). From the Enlightenment on Western epistemology developed thanks to the emergence of its foundational sciences, namely history, geography, medicine, military development, and grammar. During the time of the Conquest, Kichwa, or Runa Shimi, was spoken as a language of cultural, ritual, and commercial exchange. Given its wide use, it is safe to conclude that this language had been introduced by the mindalaes or traders ( Gomez-Rendon 2008, 175), but was not imposed as a lingua franca by the Inka Empire ( Torero 2002, 93-105). Scholars know that Felipillo translated for Francisco Pizarro, and that he was a Guancavilca, evidence that Quechua was indeed spoken by people other than the Inka. It is possible that a bilingualism occurred, and that, over the centuries, Quechua creolized with local languages resulting in Kichwa, a language that today has about 70 per­ cent coincidence with modern Quechua (Sacha Rosero, personal communication), and 30 percent Spanish-derivate lexicon (Gomez Rendon 2005, 46). Inspired by Antonio de Nebrija's imperial views on grammar, the early colonial lin­ guistic policies adopted Quechua as an Andean lingua franca and Nahuad as the Me­ soamerican one (Oberem and Hartmann 1971; Leon-Portilla 2002; Rafael 1999). Al­ though the use of native languages as an evangelizing tool was not always the official policy ( Mannheim 1991, 64), scholars agree that Runa Shimi was spread through Catho­ lic missionaries for conversion purposes in the context of the Counter Reform ( Mignolo 2005, 15-22). Missionaries translated sacred texts and prepared grammars ( artes) and dictionaries (vocabularies), thus beginning the reduction of indigenous languages to a writ­ ten form ( Rafael 1993, 20). However, after the initial conquest consolidated into the form of a colony, this lingua franca was later supplanted by Spanish. The surviving indigenous E � E languages resisted the new linguistic imposition in the many corners of the conquered ter­ ritories, varying from Runa Shimi to Kiche to Tagalog to Vasque to Catalan. 11 Antonia Carcelen- Estrada As the colony strengthened, Runa Shimi increasingly acquired negative connotations becoming the Yanka Shimior, the 'useless' language, causing shame and rejection of the na­ tive language and culture. This continued to be the case after Ecuador became a republic. Runa Shimi was deeply repressed, except for a couple of punctual moments when presi­ dents, motivated by the rise of folkloristic studies and anthropology in Europe, compiled dictionaries and attempted Kichwa literacy programs.4 Bur the fact remained that Kichwa served as the language of the hacienda workers, as a vanquished language. In this regard, when thinking about the future of Kichwa as a language of knowledge, National Anthem writer Juan Leon Mera claimed that 'Las escuelas civilizan, y no veo la posibilidad de esta­ blecer escuelas en que se de la ensenanza en quichua. Contribuye, asimismo, a difundir la cultura el trato frecuentemente e intimo con genre ilustrada y la lectura de buenos libros, y esagente no habla quichuani hay en quichua libros buenos ni malos' (Leon Mera 1892, ix). 5 Indeed, bilingual education did not occur until the following century. During the twentieth century, indigenous people became better organized, and they slowly began to emerge as a social movement. In the 1920s, at the age of fourteen, one of its early leaders, Trinsito Amaguafla, began her work by forming peasant unions, organiz­ ing strikes, and mobilizing protests to the capital.6 'Mama Trinsito' founded the Federacion Ecuatoriana de Indios (FEI), initiated bilingual education, and incorporated the indigenous struggle to national politics through the Communist Party (Mino Grijalva 2009, 179; Rodas 2009, 43). After witnessing her father's torture and the miserable conditions under which her people lived, she took it upon herself to take revenge in the name of indigenous people, a revenge that was based on principles offriendship and love. Mama Trinsito remembers that, along with Dolores Cacuango and Luisa Gomez de la Torre, 'organizamos las escuelas para guaguas janchis en quichua y en espanol. Por eso me cogieron presa la primera vez. Para que no organice la escuela para los indios' ( Amaguafi. a in Mino Grij alva 2009, 96). 7 Trinsito spoke for the first time at a national level after she allied with President Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra during his second term (1944-1947). She addressed Congress with the following words: Yo he gricado en cascellano y luego en kichwa: que la ley sea justicia para codes, para blancos, para rices, para pobres. Que no pongan a un !ado al indio. Que sea igualico el trabajo para codos, que cengamos amiscad, que crabajemos carifi.osamence para vivir asi; comunisca es de la comunidad . . . No revoluci6n. (Amaguana in Mino Grijalva 2009, 180) 8 4 For example, in 1892 as che president of Ecuador, Luis Cordero Davila, wrote Diccionario Quichua­ Espaiiol, only published in 1904. He also wrote poetry in l(jchwa, for example, his famous poem " Rimini llakca" from 1875. 5 "Schools civilize, and I don't see the possibility of establishing schools with teachings in l(jchwa. Similarly, a frequent and intimate exchange with enlightened people and the reading of good books enables the dissemina­ tion of culture, and chat kind of people don't speak l(jcl1wa nor can l(jchwa have books, be it good or bad:' 6 Tr:insito is by no means the first to work for indigenous rights. Her mother was an activist as many women before her had done throughout the colony. I begin with her because she was the first co organize na­ tionally and around che issue of language and bilingual education. E 7 E " We organized the schools for children in l(jcl1wa and in Spanish. That's why chey took me prisoner the � first time. So chat I would not organize schools for Indians:· 8 "I have screamed in Spanish and then in Kichwa: chat the law may be the same for all, for whites, for 12  Antonia Carcelen- Estrada Mama Transito Amaguafia strove for a revalorizacion o fher culture through bilingual education in the frame of a larger goal, namely co preserve universal peace in an atmosphere of friendship and cooperation for j ustice among peoples. She was persecuted, tortured, imprisoned, isolated, and oscracized. The last time she was beaten while alone in her home on the Andean plateaus she was ninety-seven years old. She died four months short of her hundredth birthday. The next generation of indigenous leaders organized after the failure of the 1964 Agrar­ ian Reform. Some of its members began to study at the university, as was the case of linguist Luz Maria de la Torre Amaguafia, today a professor at U CLA. She remembers how difficulc it was co create a system ofwriting char departed from the alphabet systematized by the Summer Inscicure of Linguistics (SIL) linguists, recounting chat the SIL missionaries would say char 'K' was the letter of the devil, or chat mashi, a word today used as 'friend; had the communist connotation ofcomrade'.9 Bue most importantly, SIL linguists differentiated dialects from one community to the next, making it very difficulc to communicate among each ocher. 10 When the Indigenous Movement became the largest social movement in the conti­ nent in the 1990s, the policies of Kichwa writing and grammar had a decades-long history of rivalry between missionaries and native linguists (Hornberger 1 995, 199).11 In the con­ text of che' long night of the 500 years'. 1 2 and as a consequence of the massive mobilizations char paralyzed Ecuador for almost two months in 1990, the indigenous plight became vis­ ible continentally, motivating a positive revalorization of ancestral languages and cultures. Moreover, in 1992, Rigoberta Menchu won the Nobel Peace Prize and remains the only indigenous person to have done so.'Native' became increasingly fashionable and indigenous language use increased. In the context of Ecuador, the SIL was expelled from the country in 1 981 (Lara 2007, 1 86), leaving the linguistic authority to the native linguists. By the end of the 1990s, simultaneously fighting from linguistic and political fronts, the indigenous linguists finally had their unified Kichwa alphabet supported by official institutions . In particular, che D INEIB (National Board for Incercultural Bilingual Education), is now preparing and publishing didactic materials, dictionaries, and poetry books with the goal of spreading the use and learning of the Runa Shimi. The people using the language, however, continue to be confused by the various forms of writing. rich, for poor. That the Indian may not be put aside. 11,ac work may be the same for all, and may we have friend­ ship, work with affection co live like chis: communism is of che community. . . not revolution:· 9 Interview with Luz Maria de la Torre Amaguana, November 1, 2006, Northampton, MA. 1 ° For derailed information, see the Echnologue, where SIL classifies Kichwa in at lease nine variants. beep:/ /www.echnologue.com/ show_country.asp?name=ec " Peru does not yet have a unified Quechua. During che II Inter-American Indigenisc Congress in 1954 and again in 1985, linguists such as Nancy Hornberger have proposed systems of standardization, but the SIL has been instrumental in rejecting chem. In this sense, SIL prepares grammars, dictionaries, and books from the United States and opposes standardization (Hornberger 1995, 199). Nonetheless, Peru has a Qheswa Simi Hamut'ana Kuraq Suntur (Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua/Quechua Language High Academy), albeit one controlled by the SIL (Cerr6n-Palomino 1997, 63). �E 12 Zapacista Sub- commandant Marcos used this phrase to refer to the five hundred years of colonization E over indigenous populations in his speech on January 1, 1994, when taking over San Cristobal de !as Casas (in Estevez 2006). 13 Antonia Carcelen- Estrada Another linguist from the 1 970s generation, Ariruma Kowii, who received a BA in Political and S ocial S ciences from the Universidad Central de! Ecuador, today leads the ' Campana Nacional y Continental por la valoraci6n, uso y desarrollo de las culturas y len­ guas de! Abya-Yala'. 1 3 which provides the institutional frame for our translation of Don Quixote into Kichwa. Kowii, the coordinator of the Master's Degree Program on Indig­ enous Peoples at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador, has proved instrumental in achieving an institutional backing for today's unified Kichwa. H e is also one of the most recognized poets in the country. Oppressed Languages in Dialogue T he process of normalization and unification of Kichwa was not solely a Kichwa endeavor. It had, for example, the input of the Consorci de Normalizaci6 Lingiiistica de Catalunya (Catalan Institute of Linguistic Normalization), a wealthy institu­ tion that came into being as the result of the successful resistance of Catalan to Spanish. The Catalan resistance is best exemplified through the Noucentisme Movement, a bour­ geois cultural-political movement that began at the end of the nineteenth century (D'Ors 2000, 1 87). The first step was to create a newspaper, ' La Veu de Catalunya'. which ran from 1 899 to 1 936. Moreover, a large sector of the Catalan intellectual and political bourgeoisie started a political party called the L liga in 1 901 . The triumph of their conservative politics resulted in a rise of Catalan pride (Figuerola et al. 1 986, 1 3). One of the primary tools for their organization and success was the recovery and preservation of Catalan language. In 1 907, they published a dictionary (D' Ors 2000, 34). Noucentisme began to be labeled a movement after the death of writer Joan Maragall in 1 91 1 . In 1 91 8, Pompeu Fabra published a Catalan grammar, and a new generation of writ­ ers emerged, among themJosep Carner, Joan Fuster, and Eugeni D'Ors. The latter stopped writing in Catalan in 1 920 (Figuerola et al. 1 986, 1 1 ), but most continued relexifying and revalorizing the language. The main objective was to 'convert Catalan culture into a normal European culture, and it basically succeeded' (�mphasis added, my translation, 1 5). Fina Figuerola described this project as 'mitjas;ants la creaci6 d'un compleix sistema de signes linguistics i iconografics ( . . . ] establir pautes de comportament social tendents a possibili­ tar la viabilitat d'una acci6 reformista' (1 6): 14 'Filologs i lingiiistes, doncs, s'encarregarien de cisellar, codificar, estructurar i homogenei"tzar la llengua [ . . . ] B asta canviar el llenguatge per que can vii la realitat. I s'estableix una identitat magica entre l'un i l'a ltra, nous simbols, naves realitats' (emphasis added, 1 9). 15 13 "National and Continental Campaign for the valorization, use, and development of Abya-Yala's cul­ tures and languages." 14 'TI1rough the creation of a complex system of linguistic and iconographic signs [ . . . ] to establish guide­ lines of social behavior that would enable the viability of a reformist action'. 15 'Philologists and linguists, then, were in charge of compiling, codifying, structuring, and homogenising the language [ . . . ] In order to change realiry, it is enough to change the language. And a magical identity berween one and the other is established; new symbols, new realities'. 14  A n t o n i a Ca rce l e n - E strada The revitalization of the language also allowed for new social integration practices (Figuerola et al. 1986, 18), but with the Spanish Civil War, this language was confined to the domestic sphere. The Catalans, like the Kichwa, hold that 'en el origen de tots als grans pobles i tots les grans cultures hi trova la poesia, causa primordial del seu desvetllament, car no en va es l'eina indicada per a crear del no-res, per a enunciar el no dit' (ibid.).16 In the Kichwa tradition, poetry holds an important place given that the poets or Amautas were often at once philosophers and political leaders. Today, Kichwa people are writing poetry to develop their culture, an attempt to make it 'normal; in the national imagination of Ecuador. Ariruma Kowii is one Amauta who is both a laureate and politician, a cultural and a political leader. That is also the case of Auki Tituaii.a, the first indigenous candidate to have won town hall elections in Ecuador, whose policy aims at local autonomy. In 2002, his citizen- participation model received the ' Peace City' award by UNESCO, revealing the legacy that Transito Amaguaii.a left for the future Kichwa generations, a governance of friendship and peace. Thus, Kichwa is finally at the gateway to move from the domestic to the public spheres of Ecuadorian society. T here is another reason to use Noucentisme as a strategy for linguistic resistance to Spanish. As seen before, the first President of the Institute for Catalan Studies, Antonio Rubio i Lluch was corresponding with a foundational figure of the Ecuadorian Republic precisely about the role of Kichwa in the nation. Rubio i Lluch was the first to incorporate Catalan literature within the Spanish educational system in the nineteenth century. Thus, he believed in the capacity of the language to define and control ideas. Both Catalunya and Kichwa territories have suffered under five hundred years of Spanish imposition. Both languages have resisted and survived. Both peoples have worked from the site of language to rebuild a revalorized identity. But most importantly, both sites are connected by contem­ porary migration routes. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Catalans moved to Ecuador to escape from the persecution of anarchists. In 1925, Onofre Castells, one of these first wave Cata­ lan migrants, founded a soccer team in Guayaquil, Ecuador called 'Barcelona'. Catalan mi­ grants found in Guayaquil a port city where they could work in shipyard related activities as they had done back home. This first wave of Catalan migrants also organized unions in this city. Many organized workers were heartlessly massacred on November 15, 1922. After the Spanish Civil War, a second wave of migrants came trying to find a safe haven from Franco's persecution of Spanish minorities in the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, the separatist politics of Guayaquil are highly influenced by the Catalan intellectuals and activists that migrated to Ecuador during this period of time. During the 1960s, as a consequence of development policies, peasants were victims of the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the country, which promoted large migrations from the agricultural countryside to the manufacturing city. Some Kichwa Otavalo went be­ yond the city, into the world. The first Kichwa to migrate travelled only with their passports 16 0 E At the origin of all great peoples and all great cultures, there is poetry, primordial cause of its develop­ E ment, because not in vain, it is the appropriate tool to create from the no-nothingness, to enunciate what is not � said'. This statement echoes the words previously quoted that Rubio i Lluch wrote to Leon Mera in 1892. 15 A n t o n i a C a rc e l e n - E s t r a d a and without a vis'a. They had never known that people required visas to travel. Upon arrival to U.S. customs, the migration officers denied them entry and deported them to the Canary Islands. After this first host site, they relocated in Barcelona, where they now have an associa­ tion (Runapacha), a store, and a coffee shop (Acoma). Some Kichwa residents in Barcelona have received training by the Consorci and have become language teachers, using Catalan strat­ egies of linguistic survival that have proved successful, including translation. Translating texts into Kichwa enables the recovery and dissemination of Runa Shimi in Ecuador from the sire of the Diaspora. Although Noucentisme was conservative, classicist, and anti-vanguard, the Kichwa linguistic activists took away some significant strategies, while differing greatly from the contemporary Catalan nationalism. Translation play ed a significant role in the development of Noucentisme, as can be seen from the translation of Shakespeare into Catalan. Artur Masriera translated Hamlet (1 898), Salvador Vilaregut translated Julius Caesar (1907), Cebrii de Montoliu translated Macbeth (1907), andJosep Carner translated A Midsumme r Night's Dream (1908). Anf6s Par translated King Lear (19 1 2) and Magi Morera i Galicia translated Corio/anus (1 9 1 5). The translations most performed and best-known in Catalan are the twenty -seven play s that Josep Mada de Sagarra began translating in 1941, making him 'the' Catalan translator of Shakespeare. In ' El Parony del Racolli: The Translation of Shakespeare into Catalan' (1998), Helena Buffery has written on the implications of translating Shakespeare for the development of Noucentisme (1998). She concluded that these translations aimed at expanding the Catalan literary possibilities, endowing the language with a cultural value. She conceives the various translations as an excess of representation that can be best ex­ plained in the metaphor of a mouse trap that unveils the anxiety about the origin and originality of the Catalan people. The translations of Don Quixote have proven similarly instrumental in the rebirth of Catalan.The most known translation of Don Quixote was done by Antoni Bulbena i Tussell (1891). It was entitled L:enginy6s cavallier Don Quixot de La Mancha. Other translations include those by Jaume Pujol (1836), Antes Magi Pers i Ramona (1847), Francese Pelag i Briz (1868), Galera Vidal i de Valenciano (1873), and Joan Rosello (1905).17 Bulbena's edi­ tion reinforced the standardized Fabrian alphabet of Catalan, eliminated most Castilian­ isms, changed some names to Catalan phonology, and omitted chapters (Figuerola 1 986, 1 84) . Thus, his translation remains the most successful in the Catalan context. It was re­ published in 1 930, and again in 2003, commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of Cervantes's classic. The Catalan translations were intended to endow the language with an official stature, 18 and proved pivotal for the development of Noucentisme. Without these 17 ' La primera traducci6 de! Quixot al catala de que tenim constancia va ser datada entre 1836 i 1850, si be no va sortir a la llum fins al 1986, i es obra de! mallorqui Jaume Pujol, qui en un breu tractat gramatical, Observaciones sabre la ortografia mallorquina, va incloure la traducci6 de! capitol 1 2 de! primer llibrc de! Quixot corn un material didact' ( Bacardi and Estany 1999, 51).('1he first translation of Quixote into Catalan of which we have a record dates between 1836 and 1850, although it did not see the light until 1 986. It is the work of EE Mallorcan Jaume Pujol, who, in a brief grammar treatise, Observations on Mallorcan Spelling, included a transla­ � tion of chapter 12 of the first book of Quixote as didactic material'. ]. 18 This was the intention in the prologue of the first known translation into Catalan, by Jaume Pujol (ibid.). 16  Antonia Carcelen- Estrada translations o fDon Quixote, Catalan would have never gone from a n endangered language to the official language of the richest region in Spain. 19 TI1e translation ofDon Quixote into Kichwa comes in a context of its revalorization. The second generation Kichwa intellectuals residing in Barcelona are closely working with the Consorci to revive their endangered languages. In the fall of 201 0 and sponsored by the Ecuadorian National Secretary of Migration (SEN AMI), Runapacha began teaching Kichwa to their Diaspora and other interested students in Barcelona and Madrid, the main host cities to Kichwa migrants in Europe. Moreover, Runapacha's president, Sacha Rosero, was recently trained to recover ancestral languages in the Basque country, 20 another terri­ tory occupied by Spain, whose language also survived Spanish imposition. In the context of the 'Campana Nacional y Continental por la valoraci6n, uso y desarrollo de lasculturas y lenguas de! Abya-Yala; Runapacha is using new technologies to provide opportunities to use and learn Kichwa from any place in the world. TI1is organization is preparing a modern and simple grammar, an online trilingual dictionary (Kichwa-English-Spanish), a hundred quotidian conversations in an audio-visual format, a cultural website (otavalosonline.com), a language- based website (kichwa.net), and an online Kichwa campus to provide one- on­ one tutorials. The goal is to establish Kichwa in the official educational system, first in the Indigenous provinces such as Imbabura, and then in the entire Andean region. This educa­ tion requires texts . Like Noucentisme, translating Shakespeare and Don Quixote are central to the universalizing and officialization ofa language. In this sense, translating Don Quixo­ te is an entry point to be recognized as a legitimate language in the mainstream Spanish context. Translating Don Quixote is as important as translating Shakespeare or the Bible, completing the Eurocentric epistemological triad. It will ena,ble Kichwa cultural leaders to render their culture into the 'official' Ecuadorian culture. Kichwa and Translation I n 1920, Cris6logo Barron translated the New Testament into Quechua. In 1972, SIL missionaries localized the New Testament into Kichwa for Napo speakers. In 1978, Diosmanta Sumaj Willaycun a Runaspaj was translated by the United Bible Society of Peru. In 1986, the whole Bible was published in Bolivia by the Sociedad B1blica Boliviana (SBB). In Peru, the Bible was published again in Ayacucho in 1987. In Ecuador, the So­ ciedad Biblica de! Ecuador (SBE) published it in Kichwa in 1989. The following year, the Bible was published in Chimborazo and Canar. In 1 994, the SIL published another version in Otavalo, carried out among the Salasaca and published in 2007.2 1 19 To see the importance of this connection, the day of the book, which commemorated the death of Shakespeare and Cervantes on April 23, 16 1 6, is in Barcelona celebrated in conjunction with the Catalonian patron saint, Saint Jordi. 20 In June 20 1 1, Rosero received a graduate degree in 'Desarollo de las lenguas e identidades originarias' E at the University of Mondragon, Bilbao. E 21 For a list of Bible translation into any language, see www.findabible.net, an alliance of twenty-five international Bible agencies. 17 Antonia Carcelen- Estrada Th e Bible plays a great role in the Kichwa collective memory and in the graphicaliza­ cion process of an oral language into its written form. In terms of collective memory, in the sixteenth century, Priest Valverde gave the Bible co Acawallpa claiming chat it contained the word of God, co which, according co the legend, Acawallpa responded by holding the book co his ear and hearing nothing, thus throwing the imposter text to the ground. While his body was being dismembered and he was being put to death, his general and close friend, Kalikuchimak, yelled at the fire pit, ' PACHAKAMAK!' or the name of the great spirit, refusing to surrender co che apocryphal God crapped in the book, and recognizing his spirit as the legitimate one . Since the Renaissance, che Bible has always been che main entryway of an oral language into a written form. Therefore, by translating Don Quixote we also at­ tempt co provide an alcernacive avenue for written Kichwa, away from the Christian and into the secular realm. Th e first Kichwa grammar appeared in the sixteenth century in the context of the Conquest. In 1570, che first standardization of Kichwa as different from Quechua cook place in Quito (Obrerem and H artmann 1971, 676) . In 1582-1583, the Arte de la Lengua General was presented in the Third Council of Lima (Cerr6n-Palomino 1992, 1995; Go­ denzzi 1992; von Gleich 1994; and Gugenberger 1992). D iego de Torres Rubio compiled a Quechua grammar and dictionary char was first published in Seville in 1603. In 1616, he compiled an Aymara grammar, and in 1627 a Guarani equivalent (Winsor 1889, 279). Juan de Figueredo produced a vocabulario for the Chinchaysuyu (Ecuador today) and the best vocabulario was char of Diego Gonzalez H olguin published in 1586 and republished along with the grammar in 1607 (ibid.; Adelaar and Muysken 2004, 181). In che eighteenth century, the difference between Quechua and Kichwa had grown co che point char che 1725 catechism by Francisco Romero already used the impersonal -ri, and the subordination clause by using -kpi and -shpa as spoken today in Ecuadorian Kichwa. Thus, in 1 75 3, Nieto Polo's grammar clearly spoke of a Quechua from Quito as a separate language and char same year Jesuit Velasco published his Vocabulario de la lengua indica . In the nineteenth century, President Luis Cordero published his archaic grammar (1884) and his Vocabulario appeared in 1905. In contemporary times, Gary Parker (1963) and Alfredo Torero (1964) pioneered in Andean linguistics. Boch linguists compiled data of the different Quechua variants chat are spoken in five countries: E cuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. Be­ sides che Andean linguistic references, Robert Cooper's Language Planning and Social Change (1989) illustrates how language is used for the political and ideological agendas of priests, politicians, military officials, and nationalists. According co Cooper, the lin­ guistic planning has four main areas: (a) graphicalization, (b) standardization, (c) mod­ ernization, and (d) renovation. In Kichwa, the graphicalization has finally achieved an official alphabet, which goes hand in hand with a continuing process of standardization. The translation of Don Quixote into Kichwa attempts to expand the Kichwa lexicon and to modernize its use as a language of intellectual and cultural exchange, moving it from the domestic to the public sphere. It also attempts co solidify the use of the new standard­ E E ized alphabet chat continues to confuse many Kichwa speakers. Moreover, it attempts to provide students with a literary text for bilingual education schools and to invite writers, or Amautas, co explore writing beyond the field of poetry. 18  Antonia Carcelen- Estrada Tiyu Kijuti, our Translation T ranslating a text from the Spanish Golden Age into a historically subjugated lan­ guage such as Kichwa could be taken to be an imperial endeavor. Linguistic, for­ eignizing, functional theories seem inadequate because they focus on the possibili­ ties of linguistic transfer, the position of the translator in the transferring process, and the function the new text will have within the target audience. Yet, none of these theories looks at the metaphysical and therefore meta-linguistic struggle that takes place when a colonial language meets a subaltern language, a struggle that moves the focus from the transfer of linguistic meaning into an exercise of translation as impeding such transfer, making visible the historical haunting that inhabits subaltern languages. I therefore suggest that Alberto Moreira's concept of translation as betrayal might be helpful in articulating our underlying strategy; our postcolonial translation attempts to reproduce the principles ofTrinsito Am­ aguafla, namely a multicultural nation with bilingual education can succeed only if based on a principle of friendship and cooperation for a common good. Building from Derrida's notion that, after postmodernism, the possibility of friend­ ship is the last radical opening or 'thought of rupture and irruption' ( 1997, 293), Moreiras proposes that radical difference can only be possible through the 'betrayal' of translation. For Moreiras, a 'fulfilled translation cancels the crossing at the cost of the structural conver­ sion of subaltern negation into colonial discourse' (200 1 , 22). Accordingly, radical critical thinking must resist all processes of commodification-colonialism and neocolonialism included. Thus, the 'betrayal' of translation mimics a process of survival that prevents the alien from subsuming and expropriating the subaltern, while leaving an 'untranslatable ex­ cess' that stands as 'the first and last condition of critical thinking' (Moreiras 200 1 , 23). With friendship in mind, our betrayal in translation stands for another step in the long process of formation of an inclusive democracy, or a Derridian democracy to come. This translation comes as a Derridian event, a 'moment of reappropriation of the very conditions of experience' (200 1, 104), an appropriation of the most famous text ever writ­ ten in the colonial language. This translation as appropriation must simultaneously-and precisely through its own process of translating-prevent an expropriation of the 'local' culture, namely the commodification of the subaltern Kichwa experience. The Kichwa ex­ perience must remain an untranslatable excess, a radical difference that when facing the nation, the Kichwa reader sees subalternity rather than recognition. Respecting this excess and this difference constitutes the friendship that Amaguafla theorized throughout the twentieth century. In The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel ( 1 991), Chantal Zabus used the term 'relexification' to describe the phenomenon by which endangered languages in the African context borrow words from colonial lan­ guages in order to survive. On the other hand, 'nativization' describes, 'the writer's attempt at textualizing linguistic differentiation and at conveying African concepts, thought-patterns, ~ = and linguistic features through the ex-colonizers language' (Zabus 1991, 3 ) . This transla­ tion attempts to relexify the language by creating neologisms, recovering terms that have E �� E not being used for many centuries, or by nativizing in Zabus terms-or domesticating in C Venuti's terms-the borrowings from colonial Spanish. While we incorporate borrowings 0 19 A n t o n i a C a rc e l e n - E s t r a d a in our translation of Don Quixote, we also localize the text within a Kichwa cosmology or thought- pattern. Thus, at the moment of clioosing such borrowing or creating neologisms, we try to select the most localized correspondent while reinforcing the radical difference of the Kichwa people from their colonizers. A translation of a complex text such as Don Quixote, with all its intertextualities, cul­ turallyspecific references, and religious and political humor into a language chat is declared endangered by the UNESCO (Moseley 2010) cannot be carried out into 'pure Kichwa' and necessarily produces a hybrid text. Yet, this hybridicy consciously attempts to depart from transculcuration or mestizaje by making the use ofborrowings or appropriations local precise­ ly to reveal their farcical performance of the native. The world of early modern imperial Spain is made obviously foreign by disguising it as native. Our Tiyu Kij uti is then at once foreigniz­ ing and domesticating, relexified and nativized. It is, after all, a betrayal of translation. But what kind of hybrid text are we producing? To help better understand our posi­ tion, I suggest considering the postcolonial Achebe-Wa Thiong'o debate over the use of ancestral languages to write fiction might be helpful.22 Siding with Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, we have chosen to translate into Kichwa to provide a literary language chat could open the path to write fiction in the vernacular for and about the Kichwa people. T11is could move Kichwa literature beyond the lyrical and religious genres. As we have seen, however, Kichwa has been constantly repressed by Spanish, the c�lonial language, inevitably producing a text using what Paul Bandia identified as code-mixing in the African context (1996). While Bandia spoke of different languages used to recognize one group from another, thus creat­ ing a group identity through language, in postcolonial LatinAmerica, the language division is different. Although the setting of Don Quixote is domesticated, it necessarily remains foreign, unfamiliar to the Kichwa reader. Similarly, the characters are disguised in native clothing, but are engaged in activities such as war and fantasy reading char are completely foreign to the modern Kichwa. Like the Kichwa living in the margins of the nation, the Kichwa setting and characters are at the center, yet by being at the center, the reader feels a profound displacement, a radical misidentification with the characters. Yet, this absurd hybrid text produces an irony as rich as Cervantes's. The Kichwa reader can't stop laughing from the first line. This estranged feeling produced by travestying the most known character in modern fiction and then placing him in the Andes creates a sort of code- mixing within a single language. Kichwa readers identify their language of in­ timacy, yet identify it as foreign; they identify the intimate spaces of their chiriwrku, but see it invaded. Within a Kichwa on the making, Spanish does not appear as a distinct language. In fact, it does not appear at all. Yet, it is ever present in the form of a haunting. In Con­ tracting Colonialism (1993), Vicente Rafael described a process of remembering as haunt­ ing, living as embodying death people from the past, those who refuse to die and come into the narration of history as 'unreadable signs' (9-12). This translation, or may I say, the performance of a native Kijuti, expects to leave in the residues and excesses, an interlinear E E � 22 While Chinua Achebe opts to use English to reach a major audience, Ngugi wa Thiong'o decided to stick to the vernacular language to write for and about his people. 20  Antonia Carcelen- Estrada interference23 that reminds the group, i n this case the Kichwa, of their identity a s others to the nation, resisting linguistic domination. In terms of relexifi.cation and nativization, following Zabus's terminology, we created neologisms such as ayllukuna ( a repetition of family) for 'generation; hatun hatun ( really really big) for giant; umamuskuy ( dream-like images in rhe head) for 'fantasy; umayuyay (a reason in the head) for 'thought'. pukushka (blown away or very mature) for 'enchanted; wakl/ichina (receiving damage) for 'offense' or 'insult; and wakllichinata sumakyachina (turn damage into great wisdom) for 'undoing wrongs'. Other neologisms include 'insolent' (hap­ /la), 'arrogant' (apuskachak, pretending to be like a god), 'condition' (kawsan, a state of living), and strange (puchuy, different, a remainder) . We also revived words from the sixteenth cen­ tury that are no longer used, bur which could be understood in the context. For example, for the word defiance ( desafio ), we brought back a term that is no longer used, kakunamakiy ( to rub hands). While we create the new concepts, we record them in our online dictionary at www.kichwa.net. Besides creating words that narrate an unfamiliar reality, we tried to bring into the text a multiple temporaliry, where all the times of history are present in the history, a translation as haunting. For 'c rown' ( corona), we used the word for the Inka's headdress, maskapaycha. For empire we used the Inka word tawantinsuyu as in Trapisunta Tawantinsuyu (Trapi­ sonda Empire). For due/as y quebrantos, a typical dish of La Mancha with a connotation of violence (duel and suffering), we used yawarlukru, an Andean potato blood soup that also connotes the Barde ofYawarcocha ( 1487), where the Kayampis lost against the Inkas, and their blood tinted the lake with a bright red. When Cervantes fi. r st described Quijote, he used the phrase enjuto de rostro, or lean face, bony face. We translated this as nawi rumi, face of stone, with no meat, which, if the word order is reversed, one gets Ruminawi, which is the name of the general that led the resistance against the Spanish Conquistadors after Arahualpa had been killed. Moreover, we translated castle as pukara, an Inka type of for­ tress, and rubicund (reddish blonde) as pirakucha, a pre-Colombian transgender God that was associated with the conquistadors because of their whiteness, and a word still used to refer to the mestizos of the nation. In many other cases we selected words, whether neologisms or revived vocabulary, that made obvious the interlinear interference. 1he objective was to make visible the vio­ lence that enabled Spanish colonialism at the level of religion, education, and military force. In other words, these elements were culturally translated to render the haunting visible. For 'dagger' (adarga), we used the word for stick, while for 'sword' we created a neologism, kaspi­ makana, wooden weapons that are, of course, not used as such among the Kichwa people. For the 'priest'. we used tayta kura, instead of the keeper of the faith, iiiikamak, because the Spanish word for priest, cura, is often used. We left the word tayta to show that it is a fi.gure of respect. Yet, when transliterating his University, Siguenza, we chose Tiwintza, a place in the recent memory of indigenous and mestizo populations alike as symbol of our small victory in the grand scheme of our defeat against Peru, where half of the Ecuador- �E E 23 For interlinear translation and language as haunting, I am using Vicente Rafael's ideas presented at the 20 1 1 Nida School of Translation. 21 A n t o n i a C a rc e le n - E s t ra d a ian territory-all of it indigenous-was lost (wars in 1941, 1982, 1996). For Mahoma, or Mohammed, we decided to recognize his position as a prophet of God and not an impostor as Renaissance Christianity had done. Mukama Achillik transliterates the name and adds the capitalized word achillik as deity. When Quijote speaks of adventure, he usually means a violent encounter among knights or a fight against giants. Thus, for 'saga' or 'adventure; we used tinkuy, which is a form of public battle among music collectives during the Intiraymi, the summer solstice festival, the main celebration for Kichwa people today. Spanish colo­ nialism is revealed through the word choices we make. Finally, for names and places, we used a combination of transliterations and translation of words with a semantic content. In the case of transliteration, Feliciano de Silva became Pilisyanu di Si/pa; Aristotle, Aristutilis; Nicolas, Nikulas; Hercules, Irkulis; Anteon, A ntyun; Morgante, Murkanti; and Allende, Allinti. Among the translated names we have, for example, the Knight of the Ardent Sword, which became Rawranay Kaspikuchuna Kapak ( el caballero de la ardiente espada). We also combined translation or adaptation and transliteration, as in the case of Palmerin de lnglaterra (Inklatirramanta Palmirin), Amadis de Gaula (Kawlamanta Amadis), Bernardo del Carpio (Karpyumanta Pirnartu), Reinaldo de Montalban (Muntalpan­ manta Riynaltu), and Dulcinea del Toboso (Tupusumanta Mishkiku, mishki meaning sweet and rendered even sweeter with the diminutive ' ku' ). In all these cases of toponymy, we used the Kichwa postposition 'mama', similar to the German preposition 'von'. For Roncesvalles, we translated 'valley; and transliterated Ronces (Runsispampa) and for Roldan, the enchanted, we translated enchanted and transliterated the name (Pukushka Ruldan). In other cases, we used the Kichwa honorifics as in the case of Caballero del Febo (Kapak Pipu), don Galaor (Tayta Kalawr), and Cid Ruy Diaz (Tay ta Ruys Dyas). These honorifics or nobility tides were translated to honorifics in Kichwa of different levels of reverence that have resonance with lnka nobility. Tayta connotes more respect that Tiyu, and Kapak more than Tayta. For 'errant knight; we used Purina Kapak ( as in the walking gendeman). For 'maese' or 'master; we used ruranayuk (the one who can make). Conclusions I n conclusion, the postcolonial translation of Don Quixote de la Mancha into Kichwa is a project that is not only cultural and linguistic, but also political. Framed under an international campaign that has had echoes in the mainstream national media, translation participates in a movement that affects the perception that people have of the Kichwa language to the point that on October 12, 2011, 519 years after the arrival of Co­ lumbus, 49.2 percent of Ecuadorians responded that they considered it important for their children to learn Kichwa. 24 But these children need books. The success of our translation project is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that also in October 2011, we received an offer to translate Harry Potter into Kichwa and another to localize computer software. �E E 24 hrrp://www.releamazonas.com/index.php?oprion=com_poll&id=92%3Aiconsidera-imporranre-que­ sus-hijos-aprendan-quichua, accessed on October 13, 201 1. 22  Antonia Carcelen- Estrada The exchange in the Kichwa language in our social-network pages is ongoing and attempts to build spaces exclusively for the use of the Kichwa language. Ours is another step in a political battle that seeks an inclusive democracy, a democracy to come. When we shared our first chapter with Kichwa readers, the response was ambiguous. On the one hand, they loved to read such a famous text in their language, and they laughed while reading it. On the other hand, readers still revealed their position as subject to the Western episteme and wanted to respect the names of the greats in history, such as Aristotle and Don Quixote. Yet, these names are translated into English, French, and other languages. Then, why should we not localize them into Kichwa? When UCLA professor Luz Maria de la Torre Amaguafi.a read the text, her eyes filled with tears, illustrating the significance of this particular moment in the long history of the Kichwa battle for cultural recognition and for a real and meaningful bilingual education. This Quixote translation is therefore an event. Besides providing a text for bilingual education and working as a subversive political event, this text also provides an invitation for Kichwa writers to explore different genres, and maybe, just maybe, culminate in a successful cultural movement, similar to the Nou­ centisme movement that resulted in a fully bilingual territory, where the Catalan language and culture are not only respected, but honored. Let's not forget that Kichwa and Cata­ lan have parallel histories of survival, and the points of dialogue are not new. Kichwa and Catalan were placed together, precisely at the birth of the Noucentisme movement, but most political leaders lacked the respect or the interest to promote the Kichwa language and culture, preferring to speak for the Indians. Catalans developed their own literature, while in Ecuador at best had a few moments of indigenist Literature. But it does not have to be this way. This 'betrayal' of translation attempts to disrupt the hegemony of Spanish, while refusing to commodify the Kichwa experience. Finally, this project has no budget or financing. To date, this project is supported solely by the effort of Lucia Rosero and myself to realize our dream of friendship, commu­ nity, equality, and democracy. We 'meet' weekly, connected by new technologies and aided by new media, creating a text, enlarging our dictionary, deciding on strategies for the linguistic community, updating ourselves on events on both sides of the Atlantic, and keeping our­ selves informed about the current state of affairs in Ecuador. We would, however, consider partnering with organizations or insitutions of a similar mindset willing to collaborate or help fund this project that could take up to a decade. References Adelaar, Willem and Pierer Muysken. 2004. The Language of the Andes. Boston: Cambridge University Press. Bandia, Paul. 1996. 'Code-Switching and Code-Mixing in African Creative Writing: Some Insights for Trans­ lation Studies·. TTR 9 ( 1): 1 39- 1 54. Bacardi, Montserral and Imma Esrany. 1999. ' La mania cervantica. Les traduccions del Quixot al catala (1836- 50,- 1 906)'. Quaderns. Revista de traducci6 3: 49-59. E Buffery, Helena. 1998. 'El Parany del Ratoli: The Translation of Shakespeare into Catalan'.Journal of Catalan E Studies. http://www.uoc.edu/jocs/ 1 / translation/ translation.html#0 23 A n t o n i a C a rc e le n - E st r a d a Carcelen-Estrada, Antonia. 20 1 1. ' Latin American Historiography in Emerging Capitalism: Afro-Indigenous Palimpsests at the Birth of Spanish Modernity'. In Ethnicity frorn Various Angles and Through Varied Lenses: Yesterday · s Today in Latin Arnerica, edited by Leon Zamosc and Christine Hunefeldr. New York: Sussex Academic Press. Cerron-Palomino, Rodolfo. 1992.'Diversidad y unificacion lexica en el mundo andino'. In El quechua en debate: ideologia, norrnalizaci6n y ensenanza, edited by J. C. Godenzzi, 205-235, Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos ' Bartolome de !as Casas'. 1995. ' Tende'ncias actuales de la lingtiistica andina'. In Actas de fas segur1das jornadas de lingiiistica abori­ gen, edited by A. Fernandez Fernandez Garay and P. Viegas, 5 1 -77. Buenos Aires: UBA, Insriruto de Lingiiistica. 1997. ' Pasado y presente de! quechua'. Yachay Wasi 4: 49-64. Cooper, Robert. 1989. Language Planning and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cordero Davila, Luis. 1955. Diccionario Quichua-Espanol, Espanol-Quichua. Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecu­ atoriana. Cornejo Polar, Antonio. 1980. 'El indigenismo y !as literaturas heterogeneas: Su doble estatuto socio-cultural'. In Revista de Critica Latinoarnericana. 7 (8): 2 1 . D'Ors, Carlos. 2000. E l Noucentisrne: presupuestos ideol6gicos, csteticos y artisticos. Madrid: Ediciones Catedra. Dedenbach-Salazar Saenz, S. 1993. Una grarnatica colonial de/ quichua de/ Ecuador. Arte de la lengua general de/ Cusco llarnada Quichua. Bonner Amerikanistische Srudien, BAS 20/ I nstitute of American Studies, University of St. Andrews. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins. New York: Verso. Estevez, Carlos, dir. 2006. 'La larga noche de los 500 anos'. Television Espa11ola. http://www.dailymotion.com/ video/xzxql_la-larga-noche-de-los-500-anos_news. Fauchois, Anne. 1988. El quichua serrano frente a la cornunicaci6n rnoderna. Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala. Figuerola, Fina, er al., eds. 1986. El Noucentisrne: Selecci6 de textos literaris i critics. Barcelona: Columna Edi­ tions. Godenzzi,Juan Carlos. 1992.'El recurso lingiiistico del poder: coarradas ideologicas del castellano y el quechua'. In El quechua en debate: ideologia, norrnalizaci6n y ensenanza, edited by Julio Godenzzi, 5 1 -8 1 . Cuzco: Centro de Esrudios Regionales Andinos ' Bartolome de las Casas'. Gomez Rendon, Jorge. 2005. ' La media lengua de Imbabura'. In Encuentros y conj/ictos: bilingiiismo y contacto de lenguas en el rnundo andino, edited by Muysken et al., 39-57. Madrid: Vervuert Iberoamericana. 2007. 'Grammatical Borrowing in Imbabura Quichua (Ecuador)'. In Grammatical Borrowing in Cross­ Linguistic Perspective, edited by Matras, et al., 481-521. Berlin: Mounton de Gruyter. 2008. Typological and Social Constraints on Language Contact: Amerindian Languages in Contact with Spanish. Utrecht: Lot. Gugenberger, Eva. 1992. ' Problemas de codificacion del quechua en sucondicion de lengua dominada'. In El quechua en debate: ideologia, normalizaci6n y ensenanza, edited by Julio Godenzzi, 1 57- 1 77. Cuzco: Cen­ tro de Esrudios Regionales Andinos ' Bartolome de las Casas'. Hornberger, Nancy H. 1995. ' Five Vowels or Three: Linguistics and Politics in Quechua Language Planning in Peru'. In Power and Inequality in Language Education, edited J. W. Toolefson, 1 87-205. Cambridge: E E Cambridge University Press. � kaza, Jorge. ( 1934) 2008. Huasipungo. Quito: Coleccion Bicentenario, Minisrerio de Culrura. 24 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17449

 Translational Contestation of Religious Concepts: A Case of Conversion Narratives P I OT R B L U M C ZY N S K I Introduction T his study brings together three ar­ Piotr Blumczyriski is a eas: language, religion, and trans­ Lecturer in Translation at Queen·s University Belfast. lation; consequently, it deals with He holds an MA in English interlocking linguistic, religious, and transla­ and a PhD in linguistics. tional research questions. Broadly speaking, From 2006 to 2010 he was an Assistant Professor at the in the first area, it examines linguistic rep­ University of Wroctaw. His areas of interest resentations of a particular religious experi­ and research include ethnolinguistics ence and linguistic markers of confessional and cognitive semantics, ideological affiliation. In che second area, it focuses on and persuasive discourse, translation of religious texts, as well as translator and religious factors conducive to certain lin­ interpreter training. He is a member of the guistic phenomena and translational prac­ European Society for Translation Studies tices. In the third area, it explores the role of and serves on the Advisory Panel of the journal New Voices in Translation Studies. translation in the process of religious identi­ For over a decade, prior to his academic ty construction and contesration. Of course, career and then alongside it, he worked as considering che scope of this research and a free-lance translator and interpreter. [email protected] che corpus on which it draws, these claims muse be somewhat qualified and further contextualized. 'Language' shall hereafter be used predominantly (though not exclusively ) with reference co the semantic level; 'religion' shall mostly refer co the confessional distinctions between Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism; and 'translation' shall only consider the English- Polish interface. Despite these caveats, it is hoped char insights from this case study will have broad relevance co the consideration of ideological and social aspects of translation at large because the particular phenomena explored here are illustrative of tendencies found across various linguistic and confessional contexts. The corpus analyzed here includes two book-length autobiographical accounts of spiri­ tual progress ultimately involving a faith passage. Originally written in English, and published in the United States, che texts were subsequently translated into Polish and published in Po­ land. These four texts originated in four different communities positioned against one an­ other in terms of two parameters: language (S( ource) /T [argec]) and religion (E[vangelical]/ C[ atholic] ) . What the two source texts (S-E, S-C) have in common is the language and broad 27  P i o t r B l u m c z y r\ s k i cultural setting; what sets them apart is the ideological perspective involved in the direction and nature of the spiritual progress described. It is precisely this ideological or confessional perspective, however, char each of them shares with its translation, regardless of the linguistic and cultural differences which constitute in turn a shared background for the two target texts (T-E, T-C). This network of relationships can be represented thus: .. .. .. .. - -_-_.._..,:: .. .. .. - - - - .. - - - - .. - - - - - - - - - - .. - - .. - - - - - - - - .. ,- ,,i: .. ... - - - · · ·:-·• · · · · · •- .. � �=�:�!i� - -./-- - - - .- - - .- - - - - - -\- .-�:�:�= �i �- • Polish language - - · -"--,. • • T-E ' ,' T-C , ---.:.___Evan- �li ·. and culture .. - -f-, .. - .. .. ·c;;h� -,. - .. .. - ',,. .. ��l - - - -·� - - - .. - .. - .. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - .. - f � lic confessional : confessional -', - .. - English language, - - -:- - 5-E 5-C - Am erican culture - .. -\.......: -...... - ..- ..- .. - ;•':.. .. .. - - - - - - - - .. - - - - .. .. - .. .. - - - - - - - - - - .. - - .. ... - �'"..- ....--..--......-..-_-•• <-'- .. .. .. Figure 1 . Linguistic, culcural, and confessional dynamics of analyzed texts. This model sketches several lines of enquiry at the intersection of the three disciplines involved. (1) By focusing on the horizontal dimension (S-area; T- area) we might be able to determine the extent to which certain linguistic and conceptual patterns are shared within the respective languages and cultures, regardless of the confessional affiliation (from this perspective religion is viewed as a subcategory of culture). (2) By focusing on the vertical di­ mension (E-area; C-area) we might be able to reconstruct specific, conceptual, confessional frameworks shared across languages and cultures ( culture is viewed here as a subcategory of religion). (3) A combined, multidimensional perspective might help us to understand the complex and dynamic relationship between language, religion, and translation. In par­ ticular, such a perspective may provide insight into (a) the role of translation in pursuing ideological aims derived from religion across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and (b) the role of religious ideology in stimulating and shaping certain translational practices. As signaled above, the relationship between religion and culture is far from clear and its representation largely depends on one's research angle. For instance, in his book, Lan­ g uage, Mind, and Culture, Zolran Kovecses briefly defines culture as 'a large set of meanings shared by a group of people' (2006, 335). Yet this-provided a specific understanding of 'meanings' -may also serve as a general definition of religion or of a confessional tradition. Likewise, E. B. Taylor's anthropological definition of c ulture as, 'chat complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society' (Asad 1986/2009, 9) could be readily applied to an established religious system. Moreover, both religious culture and cultural religion are viable concepts, which demonstrate that the two spheres should rather be considered as overlapping, than as one engulfing the other. By exploring the linguistic and translational E aspects of both, this study may also further understanding of their interconnectedness. =� E The theoretical background for analyzing the linguistic data shall be provided by the cognitive paradigm, in particular by cognitive semantics as developed by Lakoff (1987) and 28  P i ot r B l u m c z y r\ s k i Kovecses (2006), complemented by critical linguistics specifically concerned with the point of view, as elaborated by Simpson ( 1 993). In line with chis approach, language will be viewed here, 'as representation, as a projection of positions and perspectives, as a way of communi­ cating attitudes and assumptions' (Simpson 1 993, 2). Such an understanding of language leads directly to the consideration of power relations both within and between social groups. Therefore, in discussing translational data, I will be drawing upon theoretical frameworks specific ally concerned with these phenomena; in particular, on narrative theory and its central notion of framing, recently introduced co translation studies by Baker (2006 and 201 0). Source Texts Ideological perspective and targeted readership T he two source texts analyzed here are Bartholomew F. Brewer's Pilgrimage from Rome (1 982), hereafter 'S-E; and Scott and Kimberly H ahn's Rome Sweet Home. OurJou rney to Catholicism (1 993), hereafter'S-C'. These cities alone reveal a com­ mon conceptual background but also a significant difference in perspective. In both in­ stances, the change in confessional affiliation and faith-based identity is conceptualized in terms of motion. Motion, of course, is a common conceptual metaphor of spiritual experi­ ence, found abundantly across a range of religious traditions. It is noteworthy, however, chat both rides have chosen the horizontal profiling of this motion, despite the strongly evaluative character of the vertical axis (purely spiritual improvement without a necessary external manifestation has often been conceptualized in terms of the upward movement, including rising, climbing [a mountain or a ladder] , ascending, elevation, etc.). As a result, the confessional and institutional aspects of the progress (rather than the spiritual ones) are foregrounded, especially against the common reference point, Rome. Boch tides rely on this meronymic representation of the Roman Catholic Church, viewed as either the source (S-E) or destination (S-C) in the shared S O U RC E - PAT H - GOAL schema. This distinction reveals a substantial difference between che two books-not just in their confessional alle­ giance but in che overall ideological perspective. The image-schema underlying the concept 'pilgrimage' foregrounds the destination (often metaphorically identified with purpose); by combining it instead with the source ('from Rome'), the ride of S-E violates the default salience of the structural elements of the schema, which results in a conceptual clash call­ ing for a non-standard (e.g., humorous or sarcastic) interpretation of the entire scenario, further reinforced by typographic means 1 • By contrast, the tide of S-C coherencly comple­ ments the image-schema activated by}ourney' with che destination ('co Catholicism'); this is congruent with the titular (and- because of che rhyming pattern-somewhat jocular) scenario of coming home, which also highlights the goal over the source. Summing up, the tide of each of these books, by foregrounding different elements of the scenario implicated �E E 1 The preposition 'from' on the cover and the title page of S-E is set in lowercase and a hand-written style font, while both PILGRIMAGE and ROME are set in uppercase, print-style font (see Figure 2). 29 P i o t r B l u m czyn s k i by the conceptual metaphor C H A N G E OF C O N F E S S I O N rs A PA SSAGE, announces a differ­ ent perspective of the respective narratives: S-E signals a backward-looking orientation and unspecified goal of the journey, whereas S- C is forward-looking, with an unspecified point of departure. Consequently, the two narratives become prototypes of an escape and homecoming, respectively. This perspective has clear implications for the function char may be attributed to each book as well as for their putative readership. Behind any published account of a cross- con­ fessional conversion is a strong ideological impulse and a definite, albeit not always explicit, evaluation of each of the faith communities involved. Even though the overall structure of these narratives (souRCE-PAT H -GOAL) may create an illusion chat the authors are guiding their readers through the same process of argumentation or experience that each of them had once found compelling, there is little doubt chat it is their current-and not previ­ ous- confessional affiliation chat defines the spectrum of their readership. Their narratives are organized chronologically bur cast in retrospective (the frequency of occurrence of the phrase ' little did I know' is quite striking, especially in S- C), which implicitly stresses their current confessional viewpoint. To their former faith communities the authors are often nothing less than apostates and traitors2; one may reasonably expect chat in chos e circles their testimony will be dismissed on ideological grounds as untrustworthy. This means that such narratives are in reality addressed to members of the destination faith community. Such a hypothesized profile of the target readership is immediately confirmed by even a casual glance at the books under analysis in terms of their paratexrual framing. S-E, adver­ tised on the front cover as, 'rhe true story of a Roman Catholic priest's search for truth; con­ tains several appendices, including, ' What the Church Doesn't Want You to Know About History' (Appendix A) and, ' Roman Catholic False Doctrine' (Appendix B). It also offers readers a glossary, providing explanations for terms such as breviary, cassock, confession, diocese, genuflection, Host, Mass, and sacrament. le is unlikely chat Catholic readers would either need the glossary or find the appendices particularly appealing (appalling, rather, considering their titles). S- C, on the other hand, features on the back cover several short recommendations from the Archbishops of New York and Philadelphia, the president of Franciscan University of Steubenville, and from the author of Evange lical Is Not Enough. The publisher's blurb praises the authors for, 'sharing. . . all about their conversion to the Catholic Church and the truth and splendor of the Catholic faith'. Similarly, it is unlikely that non-Catholic readers, particularly Evangelicals, would be either selected as strategic marketing targets or attracted by recommendations such as these. Interestingly, despite this very clear targeting of the audience, both books make nu­ merous attempts to uphold the illusion of engaging with their former faith communities, e.g., '0, how I wish that I could tell all my Catholic friends that . . . I would cry our to them that . . .' (S-E, 94); 'We also want to share this challenge with our non- Catholic broth­ ers and sisters in Christ' (S- C, 179). Considering the readership profile discussed above, however, it seems that when the authors appear to be making a case they are in fact trying E E Which they repeatedly emphasize in their narratives as evidence, on the one hand, of their own deter­ 2 mination in following their conscience, and, on the other hand, of the disingenuousness of their opponents. 30  P i o t r B l u mczyn s k i to convince those already convinced. I t becomes clear that the real function o f this type of pseudo-argumentative writing is to assert and foster the confessional identity of rhe group chat supports its publication (and, possibly, to provide arguments for use in proselytizing); a successful appeal to the former faith community co reconsider their doctrinal foundations would require a very different approach. This leads us to the problem of the linguistic rep­ resentation of confessional affiliation and the faith passage in particular. Semantics of capitalization I f we were to establish the confessional profile of each of the two source texts solely on the basis on their (para)linguistic properties, one of rhe most readily available sources of evidence would be the capitalization pattern. Sometimes there is no disagreement between S-E and S-C as regards the capitalization of expressions bearing confessional signifi­ cance. Regardless of differences in doctrinal positions both texts consistently capitalize terms such as Blessed Sacrament, Eucharist, God's Word, Host, Savior, Scripture and Virgin Mary, in accordance with American spelling conventions, assumed to be shared across the S-area, as prescribed in The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS). Quite often, however, confessional sympathies and doctrinal differences transpire at the orthographic level. This is particularly evident in S-C, whose doctrinal perspective is manifested in its consistent uppercase spelling of:'Pope' (without distinction between use for the office and as a tide, contrary to CMOS 8.25); ' Rosary' (both the object and the prayer, contrary to CMOS 8. 1 1 0) ; as well as 'Catholic Tradition' (vs. 'Protestant tradition'; ' Reformed tradition'), 'Holy Communion' ( vs. 'Presbyte­ rian communion'), and 'Catholic Faith' (vs. 'reformed Protestant faith'). The pattern becomes especially noticeable when we compare some descriptions of religious experience before and after the authors' conversion to Catholicism, as in the following example: ( la) (before] . . . I had chances to live our my faith in new ways (S-C, 1 0) (lb) ( after] . . . wept with joy to see me come into the fullness of the Faith (S-C, 163) The same tendency is illustrated by che capitalization of the noun, 'church' whenever referring to the Roman Catholic Church, not only when part of the formal name ( contrary to CMOS 8.97) : (2a) . . .Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church which he founded (S-C, xiii) (26) . . . a book I now believe to be filled with misrepresentations and lies about the Church-enti- tled Roman Catholicism (S-C, 6) while using lowercase spelling with reference to other denominations (and not just particular congregations) : (2c) . . . his ministry in the Presbyterian church (S-C, 1 ) (2d) . . . a unified witness o f all Christian churches (S-C, 27) ~ = (2e) . . . char the trial could end in the Episcopal church (S-C, 5 1 ) �E (2f) . . . I found the various Orthodox churches to be hopelessly divided among themselves (S-C, E 61). e 31 Piotr Blum czyn s k i The prevalence and regu larity of this pattern hardly allow us to consider the difference berween'faith' and'Faich' or'church' and'Church' as merely referential. It is also definitely evaluat­ ive. From the cognitive perspective, such confessionally sensitive capitalization may be explained semantically in terms oficonicity ('more form, more meaning'). Throughout S-C, among many churches, the Church stands out-even at the level oforthographic representation. B y contrast, S-E relies on ideologically motivated capitalization to a much lesser ex­ tent and generally follows the rules set out in The Chicago Manual of Style. It refers con­ sistencly co the 'Catholic church' but also to the 'Adventist church; ' Lutheran church; and co 'God's true church'; it distinguishes between 'che pope' and 'Pope Gregory VII' as well as 'a mass' and 'che High Mass'. Some traces of its doctrinal emphases may be found in the regular capitalization of personal pronouns referring to G od, as well as of certain nouns (e.g., ' Heaven; ' Hell'). Yet this does not seem to highlight any confessional distinctions. Im­ portancly, it does not indicate its confessional position by paralinguistic means, which could be achieved through casting some traditionally Catholic terms in lowercase. Such a practice, indeed, could hardly be considered symmetrical to the capitalization of selected confession­ ally-significant terms as observed in S-C. Capitalization of a word conventionally spelt in lowercase indicates a special understanding ofits meaning or its scope ofreference. Deliber­ ate de-capitalization of conventionally uppercase words, on the other hand, usually entails challenging not only their status but also the convention itself. Unconventional capitaliza­ tion is usually considered defective in stylistic terms- unexpected de-capitalization more readily arouses suspicion of pushing an ideological agenda. Behind this asymmetry, there is a broadly shared psychological basis: granting an unexpected award typically requires less explanation than administering unexpected punishment. Essentially contested conceptualizations T he face chat some concepts are shared across a linguistic and cultural background does not preclude ideologically based semantic or referential differentiation. Doc­ trinal and confessional differences, as we have seen, may be signaled by paralingui­ stic means, e.g., through violation of certain orthographic conventions. More often than not, however, linguistic markers of these differences are not so obvious and the use of common terms by various confessional groups creates an impression ofshared conceptual background. In this section, while still focusing on the S-area, we will explore how, in spite of common terminology used to describe the faith passage, the evangelical and Catholic perspectives rely on conflicting conceptualizations, and how these are manifested linguistically. One of such seemingly shared concepts is chat ofconversion, appearing in both narra­ tives in various linguistic forms. While the Merriam-Webster'.s Dictionary, 18th edition, defines it broadly in the religious sense as 'an experience associated with the definite and decisive adoption of a religion; each ofthe two authors stresses a different element ofthat definition and redefines the concept in the course ofthe narrative, both lexically and grammatically: in particular through E E various configurations of transitivity. Since'the transitivity model provides one means of investi­ gating how a reader's or listener's perception ofthe meaning ofa text is pushed in a particular di­ mension and how the linguistic structure of the text effectively encodes a particular'world-view' 32  P i ot r Bl u m c z yr\ s k i (Simpson 1993, 104), lee us examine in detail how these seemingly subcle linguistic operations affect the understanding of conversion advocated by each one of the two narratives. In S-E, the early occurrences of this concept profile external agency and the institu­ tional aspect, either through the passive voice ('suppose a soul were converted to Catholi­ cism on his deathbed' (S-E, 38] ) or the transitive use, additionally highlighted by inverted commas ('. . . our possible attempt to'convert' him' [S-E, 83 ] ). However, as the description of the faith passage advances, there is a definite shift towards the intransitive use (' I was still. . . unconverted' [S-E, 88] ), culminated in the statement: 'There was nothing sensational, dra­ matic, or highly emotional about my conversion' (S-E, 93). This demonstrates how S-E at first engages with the latter element of the general definition ('adoption of a religion') and moves towards the former experiential aspect in order to contrast in an evaluative manner the institutional and the personal dimension of this concept. An opposite process is to be observed in the S-C: while initially highlighting the experiential aspect ('I experienced the. . . power of God's grace in conversion' (S-C, 5]). It subs equently starts to indicate the destination ('my conversion to the Catholic Faith' [S-C, 127] ;"when evangelical Protestants convert to the Catholic Church' [S-C, 165] ) and stress the ecclesiastical admission ('If I convert . . . it won't be until 1990' [S-C, 76] ; 'why I do not go ahead and convert' (S-C, 111] ). As a result, the redefined understanding of'conversion' in each of the two books becomes conceptually equivalent to either an inner personal experience (S-E) or a public and of­ ficial admission to an ecclesiastical body (S-C)3 . It is regularly referred to in accordance with the preferred conceptualization, i.e., either as 'experiencing salvation' (S-E, 87); 'being born again' (S-E, 119); 'receiving Christ as my Lord and Savior' (S-E, 93), or as 'becoming Catholic' (S-C, 83, 89, 116, etc.); 'being received into the Church' (S-C, 162, 175); Joining the Church' (S-C, 90, 108, 116, etc.). It is obvious that each of the authors is aware of the alcernative conceptualization and attempts to 'correct' it through their narrative4 . There are many other examples of ideologically inspired differences in concept_ualiza­ tion in spite of apparent terminological convergence. 'Joining the Church; used profusely and emphatically in S -C as equivalent to 'converting, in S -E is conceived as a completely separate-and relatively insignificant-ace of acquiring denominational affiliation ('I joined the church and was baptized by the pastor' (S-E, 88] ; note the lowercase in 'church'). Likewise, 'receiving Christ: depending on the concessional affiliation, is understood either in metaphorical terms as a salvific act of commitment (S-E) or in metonymic terms as referring to the sacrament of the Eucharist (S-C). At other times the difference is predomi- 3 It is noteworthy that Rafael (1987) while discussing 'conversion to Christianiry' in the context of Ta­ galog colonial society quite unsurprisingly understands it in terms of confessional admission rather than inner spiritual experience, which corresponds to che Catholic view of the concepr. 4 This is particularly evident in the Foreword to S-C, introducing the 'story of their life and their con­ version' (vii)-this sequence alone iconically indicates the ecclesiastical understanding of conversion (which happened relatively late in their life). Even though the Foreword then appears to apply this word in a broader sense, almost in line with the evangelical view ('The only story even more dramatic than conversion to Christ's E Church is the initial conversion to Christ himself; ibid.), this impression is quickly dispelled: 'Bue these two E dramas-becoming a Christian and becoming a Catholic-are cwo sreps in the same process and in che same direction' (vii). 33 Piolr Blu mczynski nantly axiological: while S-E is strongly in favor of' biblical Christianity' as authentic and bowing before no earthly authority, S- C is j ust as critical of'Bible Christians; considering them theologically misguided in their rejection ofthe ecclesiastical tradition. Most dramati­ cally, perhaps, the titular Rome is either viewed as a sinister center of spiritual enslavement (S-E) or a glorious home of the family of faith (S- C). Let us relate the above observations to the general research questions posed earlier in this paper. We have seen that key religious terms are shared across a linguistic and cultural community only in a very general sense corresponding to a typical, context-independent dictionary definition incapable of elucidating ideologically-based distinctions. Despite us­ i ng common vocabulary, the respective confessional circles rely on significantly different conceptualizations. In this way, certain religious categories seem to be prototypical ex­ amples of what W. B. Gallie (1956) calls 'ess entially contested concepts'5. This is how he explains the dynamics behind them: (E]ach party recognizes the face chat its own use of it is contested by chose of other parties, and chat each party muse have at lease some appreciation of the different criteria in che light of which the other parties claim co be applying the concept in question. More simply, co use an essentially conte­ sted concept means co use it against other uses and co recognize chat one's own use of it has co be maintained against these other uses. Still more simply, co use an essentially contested concept means co use it both aggressively and defensively. (Gallic 1 956: 174) This is precisely what we see happening in and between the two source texts dis­ cussed here-and rhe faith communities they represent-as they systematically contest certain religious concepts such as 'church' or 'conversion' through a variety of means. Cogni­ tive linguists confirm that within linguistic and cultural communities alternative conceptu­ alizations are 'extremely common' (Lakoff 1987, 306) and that 'people in every culture are likely to contest many of their categories' (Kovecses 2006, 60). As we raise this problem to the interlingual and intercultural plane, there emerge a number of interesting questions. To what extent do these ideologically sensitive conceptualizations reach across linguistic and cultural boundaries? W hat role does translation play in rhis conrestarion? H ow are power relations between languages, cultures, and religions manifested in translation? Target Texts I t is rime to broaden rhe scope of this discussion by introducing the two target texts, Pielgrzymka z Rzymu (1994, no translator named), hereinafrer'T-E; and W domu na­ jlepiej (2009, translated by Mira Majdan), hereafter 'T-C'. In terms of rhe model pro­ posed in Figure 1, they will be considered both along the vertical axis, i.e., with reference to 5 Bourdieu makes a very similar point when he writes about rhe language used wirh reference co arr: 'The majority of notions which artists and critics use to define themselves or their adversaries are indeed weapons E E and stakes in rhe srruggle. . . These combative concepts gradually become technical caregorems . . .' ( 1987, 206). � Kovecses (2006) discusses a number of linguistic implications of essentially contested concepts using 'arr' as an example. 34  P iotr B l u m c z y r\ s k i their respective source texts, as well as in the horizontal dimension of their shared linguistic and cultural setting. As before, we will proceed from the most noticeable features to the less transparent ones. Judging a book by its cover B aker points out that 'processes of (re) framing can draw on practically any linguistic or non-linguistic resource to set up an interpretive context for the reader. . . This may include exploiting paralinguistic devices such as . . . typography' as well as ' visual re­ sources such as color, image and layout' (Baker 20 10, 1 20) . Paying no heed to the proverbial warning, I will argue that judging a published text by its formal properties-which is often possible even without knowing the language-may be highly revealing in several respects, including its espoused translation philosophy and the desired framing of the narrative. At this level, the two translations are indeed very different, as shown in Figure 2. PlffiRIMAGE ROM E W DOMU �6�{1 /Tl'lll ROME NAJLEPIEJ , .:!Bk· : ,\�,II·�- (- �� � ¥, •. . ::· :1 ;: /f ". 5-E T-E 5-C T-C Fi gure 2. Front covers of analysed texts. Images reproduced by permission. Save the language of publication, T-E seeks to imitate its source text in all imagin­ able aspects. The design of S-E has been meticulously replicated, from the pictures, fonts and colors on the front cover; to the right margin alignment of the three editorial blurbs (translated from the English) on the back cover; to the photographs placed throughout the book; to the page layout (including page header and footnoting) . Going to such lengths to produce an iconic representation of the source text, especially before the era of electronic publishing, does reveal a lot about the publisher's views regarding the status of the source text and the role of translation. It is hardly surprising to note that while the author of the cover photo is credited, the translator is not named. This imitative strategy is of course ap­ plied to the title, rendered literally from the English. T-C, on the other hand, does not try to resemble its source text in visual terms. The cover has a completely different design: instead of the Vatican against sky-blue background E (as in S-C), it features a dark lighthouse against the setting sun, which in combination with E the title, W domu najlepiej ( the punch line of the Polish proverb 'wsz�dzie dobrze, ale w 35 P i o t r B l u m c zyri s k i domu najlepiej' [lit.'it is good every where but best at home']), renders a n image much more universal and sy mbolically 6 richer than the geographically bound ' Rome sweet home' of the English book. As a result, rather than explicitly announce a conversion story, the tide re­ frames the narrative as one of universally relevant, proverbial homecoming. This reframing is pursued throughout: T-C reproduces none of the photographs found throughout S-C; it replaces the recommendations and endorsements on the back cover with its own editorial blurb; the subtitle only appears on the fifth page (not on the cover) ; it uses a different set of fonts. Needless to say, the translator is acknowledged in the center of the tide page. These observations alone give grounds to predictions regarding the linguistic prop­ erties of the two translations, correlated with their confessional profile. In the evangelical tradition, the source text and author is the ultimate authority, which is to be followed very closely. There is no recognition of differences in readership or in cultural and religious set­ ting; the Polish reader is practically identified with the American reader. The Catholic tra­ dition, by contrast, takes the source book as a sort of raw material to be shaped and mold­ ed-or, to use the metaphor preferred by narrative theory, reframed-as the translator and publisher see fit in order to appeal to the target readership. There is virtually no obligation to reproduce the formal features of the source text or endorse all decisions of its author. Paralinguistic evidence T he above predictions are largely confirmed by paralinguistic data. Against the back­ ground of Polish spelling conventions (Polanski 2006) and in particular those gov­ erning religious terminology (Przybylska and Przyczyna 2004), some patterns in both target texts may be observed, indicative of their ideological stance-though not neces- , sarily in the confessional sphere. Interestingly, the tendencies noted above in the source texts (see 2.2) are reversed in their translations. The non-conventional and irregular capitalization pattern found throughout T-E (e.g., Kosciof Katolicki, kosciof katolicki ['Catholic church']; Bib­ lijny ['biblical']) does not seem to indicate confessional emphases but is the result of a transla­ tor following the source text closely and, consequently, the American spelling and typographic conventions, frequently colliding with Polish ones7• T-C, on the other hand, in comparison , with its source text-which made extensive use of ideologically sensitive capitalization, often contrary to general American conventions-thoroughly complies with Polish spelling prin­ ciples, using the traditional uppercase for Kofriof ('church'), whether Catholic or Presby terian (however rare such occurrences are-see 3.3), and not capitalizing words and expressions such as tradycja ('Tradition' in S-C) or pefnia wiary ('fullness of the Faith' in S-C). In both cases, these patterns are more indicative of the perception of the role of translation (especially its overall orientation towards either the source text or the target reader) and the power rela- 6 The lighthouse, because of its function in navigation, is of course a powerful and fairly universal symbol of safety (especially amongst the perils of [sea) travel), homecoming, etc. 7 1l1is includes the consistent use of opening inverted commas placed in the upper line ('), typical of English texts, even though Polish typographical principles strongly prescribe the lower line variant (..) . 36  P i o t r B l u m c z y ri s k i tions between the two cultures than of a particular confessional affiliation. Contested concepts in translation W e have demonstrated above (2.3) that in inter-confessional discourse some religious notions and terms become essentially contested concepts. In the shared linguistic and cultural context of the source texts, this contestation was achieved by paralinguistic means (e.g., capitalization, inverted commas), by gradual redefinition (sometimes leaving some grammatical traces, e.g., transitivity patterns), and by developing evaluative connotations. Let us now examine how thes e concepts are contested and reframed across linguistic and cultural boundaries, in and through translation. At the heart of both faith passages described in the source texts is 'conversion'. The first problem involved in discussing the contestation of this concept by the target texts is in itself conceptual because its Polish equivalent, nawr6cenie, is not separately accounted for in the consulted dictionaries (Dubisz 2006; Dunaj 1999; Szymczak 1 978) except in the verbal form, nawr6cic. Even though the nominal derivative nawr6cenie does occur in Polish religious discourse and is occasionally defined in specialist publications (e.g., Chmielewski 200 2), the lack of a separate nominal entry in Polish dictionaries seems to indicate a degree of conceptual- and not just terminological-incommensurability between both languages and cultures involved. As Wierzbicka convincingly argues, 'rhe concept of religious experi­ ence, so characteristic of the English-language literature on religion, is often treated by this literature as universal' (20 10, 71) while in fact it is strongly Anglocentric' (2010, 72). Cons equently, an experiential understanding of conversion, embraced by the evangelical perspective, is far less likely in Polish than it is in English. This is confirmed by the standard dictionary definition of the verb nawr6cic. In addition to the primary, spatial sense drawn from the word's etymology (the unprefixed verb wr6cic means 'ro return' )8, the transitive form is defined as 'ro persuade somebody co change their confession' (or, more generally, 'their views') and the reflexive form as 'ro change one's confession' (or'views') (Dubisz 2006). In contrast to the definition of the religious sense of'conversion' in English (see 2.3), the Polish word puts a definite emphasis on the confessional aspect, with no indication of any previous or accompanying spiritual experience. Such an understanding of nawr6cenie, of course, is congruent with the conceptualization of religious 'conversion' as predomin.andy denominational accession, promoted by S-C. Moreover, against the etymological back­ ground it may be argued that nawr6cenie prototypically consists of a return to what is one's true home, possibly after going astray-note the tides of both S- C and T- C !-not unlike in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 1 5: 1 1 - 32). All this rips rhe conceptual scales of nawr6cenie in favor of the Catholic view and the translator of T-C takes full advantage of it. Sometimes, when 'conversion' could possibly E 8 The primary meaning of nawr6cii is divided into three sub-entries: ( l ) 'co cum cowards a previous place; � E co reappear'; (2) 'co direct someone or somebody or something co a previous position'; (3) 'co refer to what has been spoken of, thought of. etc'. (Dubisz 2006). ro ro 37 P i o t r B l u m c zy ri s k i be understood in the experiential and spiritual sense, T-C substitutes other concepts, e.g., poznanie ('knowing'); otherwise it not only translates 'conversion' as nawr6cenie but also quite regularly alternates it with zmiana wyznania ('change of confession') and przejscie na katolicyzm ('transfer to Catholicism')9. In fact, not only is 'conversion' in T-C given a clear direction and unmistakably confessional setting but also in several instances there is a re­ markable shift in agency : (3) . . . they came into the Church (S -C, 144; emphasis added)-zostali przyj�ci do Kosciola ('were received into the church') (T-C, 20 1 ; emphasis added) (4) . . . to become Catholic (S-C, 1 56; emphasis added)-zostac przyj�ta do Kosciol:a katolickiego ('to be received to the Catholic church') (T-C, 221; emphasis added). This change from the active to the passive voice creates a radically different construal of the scene, with the initiative and authority resting with the receiving church. Sometimes the shift is more subtle but no less suggestive: (5) . . . I decided to be received into the Church (S -C, 1 59)-zdecydowal:am si� prosic o przyj�cie do Kosciola katolickiego ('I decided to ask for being received to the Catholic church') (T-C, 221 ; emphasis added). In short, in its handling of the concept of'conversion'. T-C not only continues the con­ testation pursued by its source text bur also takes it to a new level of precision-though, as we have seen, it is partially aided by the semantic profile of the word nawr6cenie in Polish. This means chat the translator of T-E faces a more difficult task, and has to work, as it were, against the linguistic odds. Bound by the policy of closest possible adherence to the source text on all levels, he or she regularly translates all mentions of'conversion' by nawr6cenie, regardless of the contestation involved. This in several instances leads to forms and uses conceptually incongruent with the dictionary definition of nawr6cenie, as in the following example: (6) I was still. . . unconverted (S-E, 88) -nadal. . . nie byl:em nawr6cony ('still. . . I was not converted') (T-E, 1 16). The incongruence seems from the fact that changing one's confession is a singular and volitional act while the participial expression nie bye nawr6cony ('not to be converted') profiles both a stable state and external agency required to change it. As a result of this conceptual clash, the grammatical acceptability of this phrase is debatable, which creates an impression that T-E is forcing foreign (namely, English) morphosemantic patterns onto the Polish system. This in itself, of course, may be a method of engaging in conceptual contesta­ tion by invoking the witness of an authoritative source language and its conceptualization of the experience in question. Another important concept contested in translation is 'church'. In Polish the generic word kofriof-just like 'church' in English-is used in various confessional circles to desig­ nate (a) the body of believers, (b) a particular church community, or (c) a church building. E E 9 The latter expression is also offered in numerous instances throughout T-C as translation of 'to join the Catholic church' and 'to become Catholic'. 38  P i otr B l u m c z y n s k i Among some Protestant groups, however, it is customary co use the word zb6r ('congrega­ tion'), often self-referentially, in sense (b) and, by way of metonymy, (c). Zb6r, derived from the reflexive verb zbierac sir ('co gather'), profiles the non-hierarchical, i.e. congregacional organization of many Protestant churches-which has resulted in its exclusively Protes­ tant connotations-bur precisely because of this profile it clashes with the general, abstract sense (a). This distinction is applied effortlessly in T-E which correctly alternates between zb6r and kosciol when translacing'dmrch'. The translator ofT-C, however, is evidently unfa­ miliar with details of this differentiation and uses the term zb6r indiscriminately, enticed by its Protestant connotations, even when denominations are referred co in S-C ( e.g., 'main­ stream churches' is mistranslated as wiodqcych zbor6w ['leading congregations']). This only in part stems from ignorance; a more fundamental reason is revealed by a very sparing use of the word kosci6l in non-Catholic contexts throughout T-C. Indeed, it almost seems as if the designation Kosci6l prezbiterianski ('Presbyterian church') amounted co violating the semantic range of the word. 10 There is little doubt that the translator is here assuming the role of an ideological gatekeeper-co borrow Martha Cheung's evocative metaphor-who 'allows certain words, terms, phrases or expressions, as it were, get through the gate and keep out others' ( 1998: 266). This translational strategy is practically tantamount co the use of the adjective real in expressions such as 'a real man: 'real courage' or 'a real masterpiece' 1 1 ; as Bourdieu points out,'in all these examples, the word 'real' implicitly contrasts the case under consideration co all other cases in the same category, co which other speakers assign, al­ though unduly so ( that is, in a manner not 'really'justified) this same predicate' ( 1 987: 206). Consequently, kosci6l in T-C becomes a concept contested by linguistic means-much like in S-C by paralinguistic means (see 2.2)-and therefore chiefly reserved in referential terms co only one confessional community. At other times, conceptual contestation revealing confessional sympathies and doctrinal position may be introduced in translation where there was none in the source text. The name Mary in Polish has two variants: the archaic form Maryja ( three syllables, stress on the middle one) and the contemporary form Maria (two syllables, the first one stressed). Contrary co what one might expect, the difference between them is not stylistic but referential, with the former used exclusively of the Holy Virgin and only the latter used as a proper name. This is a prime example of how religion at times finds expression in the structures oflanguage. The Catholic doctrine insists on the linguistic recognition of the Virgin Mary's unique status; Protestants put her on a linguistically equal footing with all other Marys. Faced with this distinction, absent in English, the two translations make their doctrinal position-at least in terms of the Marian devotion-immediately clear, though at the expense of the credibility of the chronological unfolding of their narratives. 10 These reservations are reflected in popular dictionary definitions which typically assume the Catholic perspective as the cultural norm. For instance, Dubisz (2006) defines the collocation chodzic do kosciofa ('co go to church') as 'to be a [religiously) practicing person; to take part in the Holy Mass on a regular basis'. 1 1 Austin argues that, 'we should insist always on specifying with what 'real' is being concrasted-'not what' I shall have to show it is, in order to show it is'real': and then usually we find some specific, less fatal, word, appropriate to the particular case, to substitute for 'real' (1979, 88). 39  P i o t r B l u m c z y r\ s k i ( W hilst still a Roman Catholic priest, Brewer, i n the Polish translation, appears strangely irreverent toward Mary; H ahn, on the contrary, whilst still a Presbyterian minister, shows her rather unexpected reverence). Finally, certain concepts may be contested s omewhat unknowingly when one party fails to recognize what is of vital importance to the other party and effectively treads on its conceptual toes. This is apparently the case with the designation 'evangelical'. It is used profusely in S- C as a broad, non-confessional label for a fundamental branch of Prot­ estantism. T-C with remarkable consistency translates it as ewangelicki, which in Polish for historical reasons is exclusively reserved for the Lutheran church ( officially named KosciM Ewangelicko-Augsburski). The problem is further complicated by the fact that in the opinion of many fundamental Evangelicals in Poland, the Lutheran church is considered liberal and therefore not'evangelical' at all (in their understanding ofthe term, ofcourse­ here's yet another i nstance of an essentially contested concept). Instead, the preferred ad­ j ectives used by fundamentalists in s elf- descriptions are ewangeliczny ( which also recently has acquired s ome denominational connotations by appearing in official names of several churches and organizations) and ewangelikalny. By being grossly ignorant of the intricate dynamics of the Polish evangelical terminology, T-C confus es its readers by misrepre­ s enting the affiliation ofthe opposing faith community and effectively-though, perhaps, i nadvertently- challenges its identity. From the perspective of narrative theory, the translational phenomena discussed i n this s ection may b e viewed as cases o f framing b y labeling. Using a label 'pointing t o or identifying a key element or participant in the narrative; they s eek to provide 'an interpre­ tative frame that guides and constraints our response to the narrative in question' (Baker 2006, 122) . .In both accounts, conversion is clearly framed as progression from an inferior to a superior faith community. Conclusion H aving discussed some specific linguistic and translational phenomena at play in the four texts as well as in their contexts, let us now assume a broader perspective ofrelationships and tensions between the confessional and linguistic constituen­ cies emerging from the model proposed earlier (Figure 1). Though helpful in envisioning the general dynamics, this model may also suggest false symmetry and balance along both the horizontal and vertical axes. In reality, some balance only seems to hold across the S­ area, i.e., between the evangelical and Catholic communities in the United States, with both enjoying a strong identity but neither one dominating the other. This relative confessional equilibrium is reflected in a broad semantic and referential range of certain religious con­ cepts in English ( including 'church' and 'conversion') which are not tilted towards any par­ ticular confessional option within Christianity; rather, they are prone to contestation and negotiation in similar measure by all parties. As a result, each of the source texts examined �E E here is just as linguistically English, and just as culturally American as the other, notwith­ standing their respective confessional markers. The Polish religious context, in turn, is radically different, since the dominating posi- 40  P iot r B l u m c z y n s k i tion o f the Catholic Church is strongly reflected in the linguistic and cultural conventions. In this setting, the evangelical community, representing a very small minority, tends to view translation as a powerful tool of asserting and reinforcing its confessional identity. This is achieved through temporal and spatial framing which 'involves selecting a particular text and embedding it in a temporal and spatial context that accentuates the narrative it depicts and encourages us to establish links between it and current narratives that touch our lives' (Baker 2 006, 1 12). Through translation, of conversion narratives in particular, the minor­ ity group is able to build an identity link with a context in which its beliefs enjoy a strong and respectable position, effectively establishing itself, as it were, as a diplomatic post of a foreign empire. Such a perception has far-reaching consequences. It leads to a highly imita­ tive translation practice- since 'this type of embedding requires no further intervention in the text itself (Baker 2006, 1 12)-and, consequently, to elevating the status not only of the source text and author, but also of the source language and culture at the expense of the receiving community. When the two cultures and languages collide, preference is typically given to the foreign over the domestic, as illustrated by English conceptual models as well as linguistic and paralinguistic conventions repeatedly overriding Polish ones in T-E. One such clash is particularly dramatic. T-E, following closely its source text, uncritically repeats the historically absurd phrase ' Polish concentration camps' (T-E, 1 61 ) for which Western media are regularly taken to task by Polish diplomatic services! 111is strategy of identity reinforcement through translation is very costly in cultural terms and likely to result in an even stronger alienation of the minority group, which is often perceived by a majority of the target culture as willingly succumbing to, indeed, inviting, foreign imperialism. In societies dominated by one religious option, such a use of translation creates an inevitable tension between the religious and cultural aspects of the wider national identity. The same power dynamics are manifested in a markedly different character of the translation produced by and for a majority group. The dominant status of Catholicism in Poland and the resulting strong sense of religious and cultural identity are reflected in the authoritative and largely autonomous role of the translator (as well as editor and publisher) who does not feel the pressure to be bound by the linguistic and editorial properties of the source text. Instead, there is another kind of ideological pressure, often formalized through an official censorship process applying to Catholic publications (as is the case with T- C, bearing the imprimatur of the ecclesiastical authorities supervising the publisher), to pro­ mote a positive image of the faith community, which directly impacts the target text, either at the stage of translation or editorial adjustment. (For example, T-C rather conveniently omits the sentence, 'And it was the Catholics who could outdrink and outswear me before I became a Christian, so I knew how much help they needed' (S-C, 6]). The sense of the dominant position also finds expression in a rather ignorant-or arrogant, as the minor­ ity could argue-handling of certain concepts and distinctions vital for the marginalized group. In short, translating from a hegemonic position in the target culture contributes both to a further elevation of one's status and to a further marginalisation of one's oppo­ nents. This brings to mind the painfully realistic biblical principle: 'For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have E E will be taken from them' (Matthew 25:29, New International Version). Translation turns � out to be a powerful means of executing this principle. 41 P i o t r B l u m c z y r\ s k i Even though this study only examines two translations in detail, they are representa­ tive of a larger body of publications. H ere is yet another instance of asymmetry, for it is the minority group that has produced translations of a large number of conversion narratives 12• In view of its comparatively small overall publishing output, the decision to select these texts for translation reveals the importance attributed by Polish Evangelicals to apologetic writings upholding their religious identity. Polish Catholic publishers, on the other hand, have translated relatively little of foreign apologetic works-and the few translations have only been published very recently 1 3 • Considering the confessional distribution in Poland, the Catholic community historically did not need translation to preserve its sense of iden­ tity or spread its teaching, having no shortage of indigenous authors and writings. By con­ trast, the evangelical community in Poland historically has heavily relied on translation; until lately, books offered by evangelical publishers were almost exclusively translations. It hardly comes as a s urprise chat the linguistic, translational, and editorial tendencies identified above are correlated to some religious convictions held in the respective faith communities-in particular, to their doctrinal positions regarding the status of the Chris­ tian Scriptures. On the one hand, the fundamentalist evangelical insistence on the verbal inspiration of the Bible, and consequently on its inerrancy, naturally favors a very strong orientation toward the source text, a high view of the original author, and very low of the translator (often to the point of complete invisibility), as well as an imitative translation method. T he Catholic recognition of the vital role of the ecclesiastical tradition in doctrinal matters and especially in interpreting the Scripture, on the other hand, correlates with a far more flexible approach to the s ource text and a considerably greater degree of autonomy on the part of the translator-interpreter. Throughout this paper, I have sought to demonstrate chat an exploration into the dynamics of publication and translation of conversion narratives- which are a pseudo-per­ suasive (auto)biographical text-type centered around conceptual contestacion-requires a broad and inclusive research perspective. One must cake account of linguistic, cultural, re­ ligious, historical, social, and possibly a number of other factors-as well as the intricate and often entangled relationships between them. This inevitably leads to a reassessment of some traditional distinctions (for instance, between religion and culture or between the confessional and national identity), much in line with the idea of transdisciplinarity. Con­ sequently, this study may be thought of as offering an empirical case for a transdisciplinary approach to the study of translation. 12 For example: Richard Bennett and Martin Buckingham, Daleko od Rzymu ... blisko Boga, 1994 (origi­ nally published as Far From Rome Near to God); Esther Gulshan and Thelma Sangster, Rozdarta zasfona, 1995 (originally published as Torn veil); Rabi Maharaj, $mien: guru, no dare ( originally published as Death of a Guru); Stan Telchin, Zdradzony, 1985 ( originally published as Betrayed!); Louis Vogel, Moje swiadectwo, no dare ( origi­ nally published as Mein Zeugnis). E E 13 For example: Ronald A. Knox, Ukryty strumien, 2005 (originally published as The Hidden Stream); � Scott Halm, Przyczyny wiary: Jak rozumiec i wyjasniac wiar� katolickq ijak wyst�powac wjej obronie, 2009 ( origi­ nally published as Reasons to Believe: How to Understand, Explain, and Defend the Catholic Faith). 42  Piotr Blu mc z y n s k i Analyzed Texts Brewer, Bartholomew F. and Andrew F. Fuller 1982. Pilgrimage from Rome. Greenville: Bob Jones University Press Inc. [Cover photo by Rex G. Salmon] . 1993. Pielgrzyrnka z Rzyrnu. No translator named. Warszawa: Fundacja Chrzescijanskiej Kultury i Oswiaty [Cover photo by Rex G. Salmon]. Hahn, Scott and Kimberly Hahn. 1993. Rome Sweet Horne: Our Journey to Catholicism. San Francisco: Ignatius Press [Cover design by Riz Boncan Marsella]. 2009. W domu najlepiej. Translated by Mira Majdan. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Ksi�zy Marian6w MIC (Cover design by Cezary Urbanski]. References Asad, Talal. [ 1986] 2010. 'The Concept of Cultural Translation'. In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 1 -27. London and New York: Routledge. Austin, John L. 1979. Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baker, Mona. 2006. Translation and Conflict. A Narrative Account. London and New York: Routledge. 2010. ' Reframing Conflict in Translation'. In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 1 13- 129. London and New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987.'The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic'. The journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 46: 201 - 210. Cheung, Martha P. Y. 1998. ' Translation and Power: A Hong Kong case study'. Perspectives, 6 (2): 259-274. Chmielewski, Marek, ed. 2002. Leksykon duchowosci katolickiej. Lublin-Krak6w: Wydawnictwo,,M:' TI1e Chicago Manual ofStyle Online. 16th edition. http:/ /www.chicagomanualofsryle.org/home.hrml. Dubisz, Scanishw, ed. 2006. Uniwersalny siownik Jrzyka polskiego PWN. Warszawa: Polskie Wydawnicrwo Naukowe. Dunaj, Boguslaw, ed. 1999. Sfownik wspMczesnego Jrzyka polskiego. Warszawa: Wilga. Gallie, W. B. 1956. 'Essentially contested concepts'. The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 56: 167- 198. Kiivecses, Zolrin. 2006. Language, Mind, and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lakoff. George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. http://www.merriam-webster.com. Polanski, Edward, ed. 2006. Wielki sfownik ortograjiczny PWN. Warszawa: Wydawnicrwo Naukowe PWN. Przybylska, Renata and Wieslaw Przyczyna. 2004. Zasady pisowni sfownictwa religijnego. Tarn6w: Wydawnic- two BIBLOS. Rafael, Vicente L. 1987.'Confession, Conversion, and Reciprocity in Early Tagalog Colonial Society'. Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (2): 320-339. E E Simpson, Paul. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London and New York: Routledge. ;;; 43 P i o t r B l u m c z y ri s k i Szymczak, Mieczyslaw, ed. 1978. Srownikj�zyka polskiego 3 vols. Warszawa: Polskie Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Wierzbicka, Anna. 2010. Experience, Evidence, And Sense. The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. E E � 44 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17459

September 14, 201 1 Research Symposium ''Translation, Globalization, and Localization" T he intellectual context of the research symposium lies in the effort of modern translation studies to come to grips with a fundamental shift in our understanding of what constitutes trans lation and where translation locates itself in the vase range of human cogni­ tion and behavior. Long gone are rhe rimes when trans la­ tion amounted to a simple exchange of words and phrases across languages; long gone too is the always questionable perception that rranslarion limited itselfco literary or tech­ nical works. Today, translation embraces a full range of cognitive, behavioral, and social activities, so much so in fact that scholars now speak of crans larion as a rrans-discipline, ris­ ing above all academic and professional fields, belonging co none, but incubating and activating rhe transfer of know!- Anchony Pym edge and culture in areas as diverse as memory and migration, in behaviors as different as hospitality and bordering, in media as complicated as film and the internet, and in performances as varied as drama and music. From rhe laresr research, translation emerges as a powerful opportunity and form of intellectual, interper­ sonal, and cultural mediation in the course of which val­ ues, beliefs, norms, insricurional identities and social move­ ments along with forms of authority and power find new expression and move in multiple directions across bound­ aries �f language and media, time and space. The Nida S chool of Translation Studies, a program of the New York City-based Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship, invited Professor Anthony Pym (Tarragona) and University Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Columbia) as principal lecturers in the first of a new se­ E E ries of research symposia designed to raise public aware­ Gayarri Chakravorry Spivak ness of this emerging and dramatic profile chat translation � 61 " T r a n s la t i o n , G l o b a l i z a t i o n , a n d L o c a l i z a t i o n " is beginning to enjoy in rhe academy and the professions. The symposium met on S eptember 1 4, 201 1 , in New York City, at the College Board Building. Anthony Pym, speak­ ing on "Enculruration;' raised a fundamental question in translation studies, namely, H ow does modernity move? Three case studies, each designed to lift up an aspect of modernity's global and local movement, centered on the work of noted linguist and translation scholar Eugene A. Nida (after whom the Institute and S chool are named), on the picaresque novel Hajj i Baba, and on recent develop­ ments in the translation policy of rhe Vatican. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who lectured on "Gen­ der and Translation in the Global Utopia;• explored the double binds that inhabit the world of translation. She problematized clashing and contemporary notions of cul- Edwin Gentzler cure, calling them "a package of largely unacknowledged assumptions:' She challenged modern visions of utopia that want to create "level playing fields" and delivered a penetrating expose of them as false promises. On the topic of gender in translation and utopian thinking she positioned herself among those who understand that the "management of gender provides alibis for all kinds of activities:· Arching over all these double binds, Spivak asserted, is rhe hope chat we can check our arrogance and learn with humility to "cdebrate the possibility of meaning in a grounding medium char is meaning-less:• Professors Edwin Gentzler (UMass Amherst) and Sandra Bermann (Princeron) responded with detailed and thought-provoking proposals and counterproposals to the lectures of the two principals . Video records ofthe lectures, responses, and question and answer sessions will be available at nsts.fusp.ir. What follows is Spivak's revised version of both her written and oral lecture, a summary of Pym's lecture, and Gentzler's response to rhe two. Parts of Bermann's response will be included in translation's second issue, together with an in­ terview with both her and Spivak. The journal's website (rranslarion.fusp.it) will also publish interviews and select portions of rhe sessions. Sandra Bermann E E 62 

Unimi Open Journals

translation

https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/translation/article/view/17498

Scattered Speculations on Translation Studies G A Y AT R I C H A K RAVO R T Y S P I VA K What follows is the edited transcript of remarks made at the Translation Studies Research Symposium of the Nida School of Translation Studies in New York on September 1 4, 201 1 . I had a prepared speech for the occasion as well. The beginning of the speech is embedded towe1 rd the end of the remarks. I have taken the liberty of adding the rest of the speech at the end. I t is a great pleasure to be here. I like talking in the City. I live here. I am a New Yorker. Nobody is weird in New York. I am at home. It is here in my place of employment, a great university, chat I am engaged in the losing battle of real (as opposed to sellable) institutional change. Like Anthony Pym, I too am against boycott policies as a substitute for activism. I have repeatedly taken a stand against boycott policies. I chink what we have to recognize is chat there is a double bind at work here. Like in most things, if you wane not to be a follower of boycott policies, nothing changes. Bue at the same time you have to acknowledge chat the idea chat there are no national boundaries• within scholarship is simply false. The history of the difficulty with which scholars from the West Bank travel or some­ times do not travel to conferences is well known. I am a green card holder. My green card was stolen in Kosovo on che 20th of May, 2011. I am craveling now on a little stamp given to me by the H omeland Security Office. This little stamp is valid until June 12th, 2012. 1 This is not really something chat one can just ignore. When it is said chat boycott policies is the only policies for academics today I write internationally to say, 'Sorry, I can't be there'. Bue at che same time I chink it is necessary not co simply declare chat it does not put you in a minority of one. It puts you in a collectivity which ignores the double bind, transforms it into a binary opposition and goes either on this side or chat. We cannot simply say that boycotts are denying the freedom of scholars. That is to blame the victim. It is the usual way of breaking strikes: ' If nurses strike the patients are hurt. If teachers strike the students are hurt'. The real question- why is there a strike, or a boycocc?-is not asked. I gave a talk in Pees, Hungary, which called itself borderless. On the way, I lost my pass­ port for a few hours. Denmark couldn't give me anything. The Hungarian Consulate couldn't �E E � 1 I have now received a new green card.  ·· T r a n s l a t i o n , G l o b a l i z a t i o n , a n d L o e a l i za t i o n ·· give me anything. The Indians couldn't give me anything because I hadn't the passport. I was reminded of Phil Ochs's fantastic song-'I Declare the War Is Over'-composed during the anti-Vietnam war movement. When he sang it the first rime, this Texas boy, Phil Ochs, said: I'm now going to sing a futuristic song. And many years later, when Derrida started talking of politics in the mode ofto come' I thought about that half-educated boy from Texas, Phil Ochs, that it was his way of saying 'to come'-ir's a futuristic song. Gayatri Chakr.worty Spivak is TI1 is, then, is how one copes U n iversity Professor and founding member of the I nstitute for with double binds. Even as you Comparative Literatu re and Society at say there are no borders; even as Columbia U n iversity. Her translation you say 'I declare the war is over; with critical i ntroduction of Jacques Derrida·s De la grammatologie appeared the declarative is only in the mode in 1 976. Among her books are of 'to come'. I would suggest rhar In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics I 1 987; within the working of translation Routledge C lassics 20021. Selected Subaltern Studies (ed., 1 988), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, studies this is something that we Dialogues ( 1 990]. Outside in the Teaching Machine ( 1 993; might keep in mind. We are nor in Routledge C lassics 20031. Imaginary Maps (translation fact on a level playing field, first of with critical i ntroduction of three stories by Mahasweta all. Secondly, we are working with Devi, 1 9941. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present ( 1 999), Old Women translation studies as a discipline. (translation with critical i ntroduction of two stories by The first pages of Lawrence Venu­ Mahasweta Devi, 1 999]. Imperatives to Re-Imagine the ri's influential anthology tell us Planet I Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Plane/en (ed. Willi Goetschel, 1 999; 2d ed. forthcoming]. Chotti Munda that translation studies is now be­ and His Arrow (translation with critical i ntroduction of coming a discipline. That's where a novel by Ma hasweta Devi, 20021. Death of a Discipline critical scholars like me come in: (2003]. Other Asias (20051. An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (20 1 21 . Significant articles: on the question of disciplinariza­ "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiogra phy·· tion. ( 1 985]. ··can the Suba ltern Speak?"" ( 1 9881. "'The Politics I believe in disciplines. I of Tra nslation·· ( 1 992), ··Moving Devi" I 1 999]. ··Righting think disciplines construct you Wrong" (2003), ··Ethics and Politics i n Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching·· (20041. '"Translating epistemologically. Your sustained into English·· (2005]. ··Reth inking Com parativism" disciplinary production shows (201 DI. Activist in rural education _a nd feminist and you how to construct an object ecological social m ovements since 1 986. Spivak serves on translation·s advisory board. for knowledge. I am nor, therefore, simply against disciplines although, of course, I attend to Foucaulr's spectacular warnings. And I rake the challenge of interdisciplinariry seriously. It's an easy word, but in fact it's hardly ever done successfully. The moment, however, you disciplinarize something, the laws that start to work are not the substantive laws of the action that is the content of the disci­ pline-but the abstract laws of disciplinarization, which are institutional and old. I was in Kosovo because I used to run a little group that looked into the disciplinariza­ tion of preservation. I dissolved it because the seductions of personal or group accomplish­ ment were too great. Disciplinarization is a problem. I am not really in translation studies, women's studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies-those newish subdisciplines. I'm E not a translator. I happen to have translated stuff and written on translation when friends �� E have requested me to do so. I'm not really a player in translation studies. A philosopher only ever develops one idea. I'm not a philosopher, but if there is one  Gaya t r i C h a r k ravorty S p i v a k idea that has alway s occupied me it's the idea o f the necessity o f vanguards. I n the beginning I unfortunately mentioned the other end of vanguardism ( the subaltern), and, unfortunate­ ly, since every upwardly mobile sector of a dominated group wanted to claim subalternity, I 've never been able to shake that one off. But in fact what I was thinking about when I was y ounger was supplementing the vanguard, although I did not quite know it. This has in fact been my main thing right from the start. Therefore what I am looking at is how the translation vanguard legitimizes its powerful position by reversal. I have earned the right to see how American theory operates, from the inside. I've lived here over fifty years, I've taught here fulltime for forty -seven y ears. Yet my passport and my active participation in the civil society of my citizenship make me try at least to speak from that other side as well. More or less three semesters worth of teaching work is done every year by me in India. I'm part of an eighty -six percent majority there that is often violent in deed and/ or spirit.2 It is therefore hard for me to be treated only as a minority other culture when the benevolent translators are speaking. Yet to be a native informant is also not a good idea. Just on May 19 (2012)-a detail I offer at the time of revision-, the moderator for my lecture in Croatia chastised me because I did not offer a socialist analy sis of why, in spite of many parliamentary left parties, there was so much illiteracy and poverty in India; since Croatians knew nothing about India! Once again, I was being asked to be a native informant! The occasion was called'Subversive Festival'. But the subversion was local to the Balkans-in Europe. In the early 80s I left my passport in London and entered JFK without papers. The immigration officer sent me to her boss, who immediately gave me a temporary green card. I poured myself a glass of whiskey and called my mother. I said, 'Ma, the entire crowd of passengers is still waiting out there and I got in first without papers'. I used a Bengali prov­ erb: 'Ma, the lord of thought provides for the one who expects it' ve khay chini takey jogay chintamoni): My mother, a philosophical and ecumenical Hindu, a plain living, high think­ ing intellectual, quoted Psalm 23 back at me: 'The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want'. She said, to be precise, shadaprobhu amar palok amar obhab hoibey na. Shadaprob hu is a word absent from old or modern Bengali except as a translation of 'Lord' in the King James Bible. Readers of this essay will know that in the Hebrew Bible there is a tradition of substituting adonai for Yahweh. Sitting here in Bangladesh, I can't consult with my usual source if I am to make the deadline. It is unlikely that the mission­ aries translating the Bible into Bengali were aware of this. Shoda is a Sanskrit origin prefix roughly meaning 'always'. I believe it is an attempt to catch the sense of'almighty'. And now the word recedes into a marked enclave as Christianity becomes a largely ignored minority religion in Bengal. In some parts of India, there is murderous violence against Christians. 2 In a rich field of documentation, see at least Tapan Basu, et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of The Hindu Right (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993); Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Christophe Jaf­ frelot, Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Siddharth Varadarajan, Gu­ EE jarat: The Making of a Tragedy (New Delhi: Penguin Global, 2002). 65 ··Tra n s l a t i o n , Glob a l i z a t i o n , a n d Loc a l i z a t i o n ·· I believe West Bengal remains largely clear of this. I do not know what the equivalent of shodaprobhu would be in the other Indian languages. For my mother the word remained real and affectionately cumbersome, belonging to her childhood rather than her 1937 MA in Bengali literature. And, as I entered the US ahead of the line without papers, she said to me: shodaprobhu amar palok amar obhab hoibey na. My mother went the first few years to Christ Church School. The Indian Hindus were a tough nut to crack for the missionaries, especially the upper-caste Hindus, the collaborative Bengalis whom the East India Com­ pany encountered first when they became territorial. My parents were smart planners in putting us sisters in St. John's Diocesan Girls' High School. Diocesan made me, undoubtedly. It was not a convent school, where the teachers were mostly white nuns. We were not taught by upper-caste Hindus, upper-class Muslims. We were taught by Christian converts from the so-called low castes and aborigi­ nals, who were supposedly in India from before the arrival of the lndo-European speakers between five and eight thousand years ago. The church dealt well with these people, whom we caste- Hindus had treated like dogs. They were our teachers, and as such they were teaching upper-caste Hindus and upper-class Muslims. It was an altogether passionate kind of teaching. My role model was Miss Dass, a low caste surname, our principal. As the years go by, she becomes, more and more, my role model. I managed to forget all this in the first flush of PoCo in the 80s. I did write irrespon­ sibly about the Christianization of the Indians, not recognizing how complicated the situa­ tion was. I have just given you an example of how the caste-Hindus in my region have taken it in without really losing anything. I should also have thought of the pre-colonial 'Syrian' Christians in the South. It is like an invagination, the part becoming bigger than the whole. The situation determines which is which. Let me give you another example of the resources of my schooling. Because Miss Dass was much more interested in general ethics than in indoctrination (I chink), she used 'secu­ lar' prayers at morning assembly. One of them was 'Be Thou, oh Lord, above us co draw us up, beneath us co sustain us, before us to lead us, behind us to restrain us, round about us to protect us'. I was able last year to explain English conjunctions (in Bengali, of course) to one of che teachers in my rural schools through this prayer, surreptitiously adding a word for the Christians. This is not, strictly speaking, an example of gender and translation, the topic I had agreed to speak on. I include it to indicate a gendered exchange between what would now be called Dalit Christianity and a lapsed Brahmin girl, as also an act of subal­ tern translation. The vanguard must, of course, do its work of institutionalizing translation studies. The discipline must do its work. We are in a double bind with this necessary work. After all, something will have happened whatever you plan institutionally. That chat future will never be identical with what you're planning-and one hopes that it won't be identical with our limits-impels some of us to work seemingly against the grain. We're not against the grain. This is auto-critical from within. We are not to be seen in the binary opposition model. �E There are a few of us persistently to remind the vanguard that we cannot simply plan the E short haul with unassailable concepts. We' have to look toward a future remembering that the one who wins loses. We must continue co invoke the Braudelian texture of translation 66  G a y a t r i C h a r k ravorty S p i v a k events- events that not only escape the institutional performative in the nature of things, but must deliberately be excluded from the system, at best allowed in as politically correct anecdotal support. From here I began to read from my prepared pape r, ad-libbing freely. The paper title was 'Gender and Translation in the G lobal Utopia'. My sense of utopia comes from the root mean­ ing of the word-that it is a 'no place; a good place that we try to approximate, not achieve. The utopia proposed by globalization- and that's why I spoke critically about the borderless, nationless, stateless place where liberal humanists hang out- is a level playing.field. I think it is generally understood that this is afalse promise, especially since the impossibility inherent in all utopian thought is ignored by it; the world is run on the aim however to achieve it more or less disingenuously. I spoke recently to British students who had taken a stand against budget cuts-'Think locally, act locally; said I to them, 'that's all we can do. But you have to realize that the local is denned differently today. There is no difference between the local local and the glocal, and the global local and the local global and so on. Just act locally, but ask yourself again and again, ' Is this generalizable?' Who are you confronting? Remember you're talking about the British state when you say budget cuts. Who are you confronting? The state is in hock to a world trade denned in terms offinance capital. So, see ifyour demands are gener­ alizable following the vulgarized Spinozan model of singularity, always universalizable but never quite universal'. The students were distressed. And now they follow the Occupy Wall Streeters who have made an inchoate attempt to generalize, unable to make the opposite kinds of connections, with labor power in Wisconsin, for example, when developments beckon. There I spoke as member of a vanguard chat can only be placed within a binary opposition by chose who do not have ears developed by slow teaching to hear. The idea of cultural exchange and translation is also an ideological support for the false promise of globalization: a level playing fi.eld across which equal exchange can cake place. In order to make this false promise the sponsors of globalization emphasize that access to capital brings in and creates social productivity. Hence fundraising. They do not emphasize the fact chat such productivity muse be humanly mediated by decision-makers who are deeply trained in unconditional ethics. With the decline and fall in education in the humanities this group is extinct. I had written to the President of the University ofToronto when they were about to close the Comparative Literature department: 'Think of [ educa­ tion in the humanities] as epistemological and ethical healch care for che society at large'. In the absence of philosopher kings directing che global utopia, what is also and necessarily ignored is that for capital to work in a capitalise way there must be what used to be called prolecerianization and what today has been revised co subalcernization. I am just back from rural southern China. The one-room, one- teacher schools I know, where there was an ethical connection between the teachers and students, are being closed down as partially corporate-funded central schools are being established. Families are dis­ rupted. The number of students is significantly down. The rural teachers with whom I E E work there were openly talking about the death of socialism to me this time. Of course, we were speaking in my halting Chinese so they couldn't speak very complicatedly. But the 67  "Tra n s la t i o n . G lo b a l i z a t i o n . a n d Loca l i za t i o n " ethical impulse that can be nurtured with students who are in these primary schools with local teachers has been killed at the central schools, where all is speedy statisticalizable ra­ tional choice, value-adding that is globally recognized. Please remember that what used to be called proletarianization and has been revised to subalternization must work for capital to work in a capitalist way. In order to establish the same system of exchange all over the world the barriers between individual national economies and international capital have co be removed-the bottom line of globalization. This has an analogy with translation. We must look at what language we are translating into. I was recently at a European Cultural Congress in Wroclaw, Poland, where there were possibilities of translation into all kinds of languages, but of course not my mother tongue. It doesn't count. Only 270 million people speak it. That's not enough. It came into being from Sanskrit Creoles in the eleventh century. That's not enough. There's a great deal of lit­ erature there. That's not enough. It's my mother tongue. That's not enough. So think about how you decide. You cannot have all the languages of the world. Your principle has to be practical and political. And, what we, the in-house autocritical contrarians, say is impracti­ cal, in view of the future anterior. In order, then, to establish the same system of exchange all over the world- the bot­ tom line of globalization-the barriers between individual national economies and inter­ national capital have to be removed. When this happens states lose their individual and idiosyncratic constitutional particularities in history and become recoded as agents for managing the interests of global capital. This is also why translation flourishes within these nation states in different ways. In such a situation, when demand and supply begin to be­ come the organizing principles of running a state we come to realize that items such as clean water or H IV/AIDS research do not necessarily come up in terms of the demands of the global economy. These kinds of needs then begin to be supervised by a global collection of agencies that are separate from nation states. This group is often called the 'international civil s ociety; a more palliative description of what is also and still called non-governmental organizations s upported by the United Nations. Thus we can say that the structure of the utopianism of globalization brings forth restructured states aided by an international civil society and other instruments of world governance. In order to be realistic about this we should also speak of geopolitical interests and geomilicary interests, international criminal courts, where translation is necessary in rather a different protocol. But chat would take us too far afield for the moment. Let me now say s omething about today's Bible of humanism, the Universal Declara­ tion of Human Rights. The translation of that thing-it's been translated into many, many languages- is useless for chose who do not know the imperial languages. The way in which it is translated is inaccessible to the people whom the international civil society teaches self­ interest. They cannot understand a word of the document. What is actually happening is the creolization of English with which the copdown do- gooders are out of touch. Attend­ ing to creolization is a way of teaching on the ground translation which is different from what we teach at school where disciplinarization is obliged to follow the very tight rules of �E E disciplinarization as such in systems that go back, in most 'd emocratic' countries, to a post­ medieval European structure. It is well known that the management of gender provides alibis for all kinds of accivi- 68  Gaya t r i C h a r k ravorty S p i v a k ties-from military intervention to various kinds of platforms of action-where experience deeply embedded in cultural difference is translated into general equivalence. Often this happens because women are perceived to be a more malleable and fungible sector of soci­ ety-especially women below a certain income line. If in a global utopia, it is also imagined that sexual preference would be translated into the language of general affective equivalence, this exists on a separate plane. Already we can see that in order to establish the same system of exchange all over the globe, we are also obliged to establish the same system of gendering globally. How does translation enter here? To gather singularities into a system of equivalence is also called 'abstraction'. I have often argued that gender, or what many of us have been calling gender for the last forty years or so, is humankind's, or perhaps the most intelligent primates' first instrument of abstraction, as follows. Let us think of culture as a package of largely unacknowledged assumptions, loosely held by a loosely outlined group of people, mapping negotiations between the sacred and the profane, and the relationship between the sexes. To theorize in the abstract, as well as to translate, of course, we need a difference. However we philosophize sensible and intelligible, abstract and concrete etc., the first difference we perceive materially is sexual difference. It becomes our tool for abstraction, in many forms and shapes. On the level of the loosely held assumptions and presuppositions which English-speaking peoples have been calling 'culture' for two hundred years, change is incessant. But, as they change, these unwitting pre-suppositions become belief systems, organized suppositions. Rituals coalesce to match, support, and advance beliefs and suppositions. But these presuppositions also give us the wherewithal to change our world, to innovate and create. Most people believe, even ( or per­ haps particularly) when they are being cultural relativists, that creation and innovation is their own cultural secret, whereas 'others' are only determined by their cultures. This is the basis of translation theories in general. This habit is unavoidable and computed with the help of sexual difference sustained into 'gender'. But if we aspire to a global utopia, we must not only fight the habit of thinking creation and innovation are our own cultural secret, we must also shake the habit of thinking that our version of computing gender is the world's, and in face, must even ignore our own sense of gender unless we are specifically speaking of women and queers. Thought of as an instrument of abstraction, gender is in fact a position without iden­ tity (an insight coming to us via queer studies from David Halperin) (Halperin 1995, 62). Because, however it is sexualized in cultural practice, we can never think the abstracting instrumentality of gender fully. This broad discussion of gender in the general sense invites us to realize that gender is not just another word for women and that the (non-)place of the queer in the social division of labor is also contained within it. And yet, because gender, through the apparent immediacy to sexuality, is also thought to be the concrete as such ( with commonly shared problems by women), the international civil society finds it easiest to enter the supplement­ ing of globalization through gender. This is where translating becomes a word that loses its E E sense of transferring meanings or significations. A certain human-to-human unmediated affect-transfer is assumed as history is denied. 69  ·· T r a n s l a t i o n , G l o b a l i z a t i o n , a n d L o c a l i z a t i o n .. Yet it is possible chat gender(ing)-in-the-concrete is inaccessible to agential probing, mediated or unmediaced. I am assuming a distinction between agent (intention institutionally validated, most basically by che institution of reproductive heteronormativicy) and subject ( the mental world shored up by the metapsychological, beyond the grasp of mere reason). I should add chat I use 'mere reason' in Kane's sense, which I cannot elaborate here in the interest of time ( Kane [ 1793) 1996, 39-215). ( A rule of thumb: 'mere reason' is the version of reason that substitutes 'accountability' for responsibility; the connection with globalization and certain dominant translation theories are obvious.) Let me, then, repeat: it is possible that gender(ing)-in-the-concrete is inaccessible to agencial probing, mediated or unmediated, as follows. As I have argued elsewhere, the human infant grabs on to some one thing and then things (Spivak 1999, 17-30). This grabbing of an outside indistinguishable from an inside constitutes an inside, going back and forth and coding everything into a sign-system by the thing( s) grasped. One can certainly call this crude coding a 'translation'. but it is taking place ( if there is a place for such virtualicy) in infancy, between world and self ( chose two great Kancian 'as if ' -s), as part of the formation of a 'self '. In this never-ending weaving, vio­ lence translates into conscience and vice versa. From birch to death this 'natural' machine, programming the mind perhaps as genetic instructions program the body ( where does body stop and mind begin?) is partly metapsychological and therefore outside the grasp of the mind. In other words, where parental- sexual difference helps the infant constitute a world to self the self in, the work chat we are calling 'translating' is not even accessible to the infant's mind. So it is not much use for the kind of cultural interference chat NGO gender work engages in. For all of us 'nature' passes and re passes into 'culture'. in this work or shurrling site of violence: the violent production of the precarious subject of reparation and responsibility. To plot this weave, the worker, translating the incessant translating shuttle into that which is read, must have the most intimate knowledge of the rules of representa­ tion and permissible narratives which make up the substance of a culture, and must also become responsible and accountable to the writing/translating presupposed original. That is the space of language-learning, not the space of speedy gender-training in the interest of achieving utopia in globalization. This is why books such as Why Translation Studies Mat­ ters, published through the European Institute for Translation Studies, are of interest to me, and I hope my words resonate with their sense of mission ( Gile et al 2010). I have given above an account of how the 'self ' is formed, through sexual difference. Lee us move just a bit further in the infant's chronology and look at the infant acquiring language. There is a language we learn first, mixed with the pre-phenomenal, which stamps the metapsychological circuits of l ingual memory' ( Becker 1995, 12). The child invents a language, beginning by bestowing signification upon gendered parts of the parental bodies. The parents 'learn' this language. Because they speak a named language, the child's language gets inserted into the named language with a history before the child's birch, which will continue after its death. As the child begins to navigate this language it is beginning to ac­ EE cess the entire interior network of the language, all its possibility of articulations, for which � the best metaphor chat can be found is-especially in the age of compucers-'memory'. By comparison, 'cultural memory' is a crude concept of narrative re-memorization chat at- 70  Gayatri C h a rkravo rty S p iv a k tempts to privatize the historical record. Translation studies must imagine chat each language may be activated in this special way and make an effort co produce a simulacrum through the reflexivity of language as hab­ it. Walter Benjamin, like all male theorises, ignoring the play of gender in the constitution of language except through its use in the Adamic narrative, ignores therefore this aspect of the cask of the translator (Benjamin ( 1 923] 1 996, 253-63). Here we translate, not the content, but the very moves of languaging. We can provisionally locate this peculiar form of originary translation before translation on the way, finally, to institutionally recognizable translation, which often cakes refuge in the reduction co equivalence of a quantifiable sore. Mere reason. This is not to make an opposition between the natural spontaneity of che emergence of'my languaged place' and the artificial effortfulness of learning foreign languages. Rather is it to emphasize the metapsy chological and celecommunicacive nature of che subject's be­ ing encountered by the languaging of place. If we entertain the spontaneous/artificial op­ position, we will possibly value our own place over all others and thus defeat the ethical impulse so often ignored in competitive translation studies. Embracing another place as my creolized space may be a legitimation by reversal. We know now chat the hy brid is not an issue here. If, on the other hand, we recall the helplessness before history -our own and of the languaged place-in our acquisition of our first dwelling in language, we just may sense che challenge of producing a simulacrum, always recalling that this language too, depending on the subject's history, can inscribe lingual memory. In other words, a sense of metapsy ­ chological equivalence among languages, at the other end from quantification, rather than a comparison of historico-civilizational content alone. Etienne Balibar has suggested chat equivalence blurs difference, whereas equality requires chem (Balibar 20 10, 55-89). Pre­ cisely because civil �ar may be the allegoric name for an extreme form of untranslacabilicy, it is chat ' blurring' chat we need. There are two theories of literary translation: you add yourself to the original or, you efface yourself and let the text shine. I subscribe to the second. But I have said again and again chat translation is also the most intimate ace of reading. And to read is to pray co be haunted. A translator may be a ventriloquist, performing the contradiction, the counter­ resistance, which is at the heart of love. Does this promote cultural exchange? This for me is the site of a double bind, contradictory instructions coming at the same time: love the original/share the original; culture cannot/must be exchanged. How intimate is this 'intimate act of reading'? Long ago in Taiwan, my dear friend Ackbar Abbas had said that my take on reading was a 'critical intimacy' rather than a 'criti­ cal distance'. And now, another perceptive reader, Professor Deborah Madsen, has found in my idea of'suture (as translation)' a way into Derrida's sense that translation is an intimate embrace, an embrace chat is also something like a physical combat (Madsen forthcoming) . One prays t o b e haunted, Derrida asserts, because ' I cannot be in the other's place, in the head of the other'. In all reading, but more so in translation, we are dealing with ghosts, because'to translate is to lose che body. The most faithful translation is violent: one loses the body of the poem, which exists only in ( the 'original' language and once only ] ... translation is E E desired by the poet ... buc ... ; and here we enter the place of violence in love, 'love and violence'. And the language of the 'original; is itselfa bloody struggle with [ that very ] language, which 71 " T r a n s la t i o n , G l o b a l i z a t i o n , a n d L o c a l i z a t i o n " [it] deforms, transforms, which [it] assaults, and which [it] incises'. We have to inhabit the 'original' language against its own grain in order to translate ( Derrida 2005, 164-9). Following these thinkers, then, I come to the conclusion that the double bind of trans­ lation can best be welcomed in the world by teaching translation as an activism rather than merely a convenience. In other words, while the translated work will of course make material somewhat imperfectly accessible to the general reading public, we, in the academy, should primarily produce translators rather than translations. We can expand this anal­ ogy to the necessarily imperfect translations of the images of utopia. The translations, in a classroom, at the Center-are lovely byproducts. We produce critically annotated and introduced translations, fighting the publishers some. In other words, we have to have the courage of our convictions as we enter and continue in the translation trade. Our interna­ tional students' practical step of declaring a native language as 'foreign' cannot dictate our teaching of translating from or into a learned language. At the end of Benjamin's essay on 'The Task of the Translator: there is the mention of a meaning-less speech, 'pure speech; which makes translation possible. There is a famous scandal about the accepted English and French translation translating this as 'makes trans­ lation impossible'. In closing, I would like to invoke this intuition, which in Benjamin, to me unfortunately, cakes on the guise of the sacred. Bue this idea- that the possibility of the production of meaning is a system without meaning but with values that can be fi.lled with meaning-, is in today's informatics-which is rather far from the language of the Scripture. We will recall chat the distinction between meaning and value is already there in Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. 3 In this understanding, signification means to tum something into a sign-rather than co produce meaning-and make it possible for there to be meaning within established conven­ tions. This originary condition of possibility is what makes translation possible-that there can be meaning, not necessarily tied to singular systems. About sixty years ago, Jacques Lacan suggested that the unconscious is constituted like a conveyor belt, rolling out objects suscep­ tible to meaningfulness-for use in building the history of a subject, with imperfect reference to whatever one could call the real world ( Lacan 2007, 671-702). In these mysterious thickets the possibility of translation emerges, but only if, institutionally, the so-called foreign languages are taught with such care that, when the student is producing in it, s/he has forgotten the language which was rooted in the soul-roots which, Saussure, Lacan, information theory, and in his own way Benjamin, see as themselves produced, dare I say, as rhizomes without specifi.c ground? (Marx 1973, 147). It gives me pleasure to recall that Saussure was a student of Sanskrit who may have arrived at this sort of intuition through his reading of the fi.fth century B.C.E. Indian grammarian Bhartrihari's notion of sphota ( Matilal 1990). I have often said that globalization is like an island of signs in a sea of traces. A trace is not a sign. A sign-system promises meaning, a trace promises nothing, rather it simply 3 In this connection, Derrida also invokes the intuition of the transcendental but distances himself in the �E E end:'every poem says,'this is my body; .. and you know what comes next: passions, crucifixions, executions. Oth­ � ers would also say'-mark these words-'resurrections .. � For meaning and value, see Ferdinand de Saussure ( 1959, 1 1 1- 122). 72  G a y a t r i C h a r k ra v o r t y S p iv a k seems to suggest chat there was something here. I n this connection one inevitably chinks of the established patriarchal convention, still honored by most legal systems, char I, especially if I am recognizable as a man, am my father's sign and my mother's trace. W hat is impor­ tant for us within my argument is char, rather than theorize globalization as a general field of translation which in spite of all the empiricization of apparently impersonal mechanical translation, in fact privileges host or target, ceaselessly and indefinitely, we should learn to think chat the human subject in globalization is an island of languaging-unevenly under­ standing some languages and idioms with the 'first' language as monitor-within an entire field of traces, where 'understanding' follows no guarantee, bur where there is just a feeling that these words are meaningful, not just noise; an undoing of the barbaros. This may pro­ duce a new call for a different 'non-expressional' art, a different 's imulcaneous translation'. Global translating in the achievable utopia, on the other hand, ceaselessly transforms trace to sign, sign to data, undoing the placelessness of utopias. This arrogance is checked and situated, if we learn, with humility, to celebrate the possibility of meaning in a ground­ ing medium that is meaning-less. In the interview from which I have already quoted, given a few months before his death, Derrida puts it in a lovely, empirical way : 'there may be an allusion to a referent from [ the author's) life char is hidden or encrypted through numerous layers of hidden literary references . ... in a word, there will alway s be an excess chat is not of the order of meaning, char is not just another meaning'. If we claim a successful translation, a successful recoding into a general system of equivalence, we forget the ghostliness of ucopias, we betray gendering, our first instrument of translation. All attempts at fundraising are foiled by this, as Socrates knew. He could not 'dumb himself down' for the city fathers, the social engineers. The global contemporaneity that we now empirically supposedly have exists because the silicon chip allows us to travel on the web, and because other kinds of empirical travel are also possible. Actually this contemporaneity has always been a fact. Now that it is seem­ ingly empirically available to many, we have to change ourselves into chinking chat what­ ever is sy nchronic is modern. The different diachronies make it historically and politically uneven-this is the field within which translation must chink itself. All of rhe different diachronies make this sy nchrony a relief map. Within this difference, translation begins to work. We cannot just talk about others. We must persistently change ourselves. In 1 982 in Essex I had said char the conference' Europe and Its Others' should have as its title, ' Europe as an Other'. It was deemed inappropriate then. Thirty y ears went by, and then it was possible to give me a twenty -minute sloe on a panel called Alien Europe: Eu­ rope as an Other' in Wroclaw, Poland. What was the history char happened? Translation is deeply involved in this history and you have co thank the world. Bur y ou must listen co us when we, the in-house auto-critical contrarians, haltingly make our instructive mistakes. The practical short haul can be evaluated. Bur if one wants this not to be identical with the other side, then one does nor just put a plus in the place of the minus. What we say -impractical as it may sound, impossible as the tasks are-should be attended to so char you, the disciplinarians, know chat what y ou are doing has to be based E E on a grounding error: chat translation studies as a discipline is possible. You should inhabit char grounding error because if y ou don't-since everything is a double bind-you cannot 73  "Translation, Globalization, and Localization" begin. If you're living, you have to make that into a single bind so that you can make deci­ sions. But the difference between the real people ( the real activists, the real parents) and the unreal people is that the former know that the decision is going to have to be changed be­ cause it was too dependent on the circumstances given. Whereas the latter think that they were going to go forward but come instead to a moment of racism, as in the Millennium Goals: 'Hey we gave all these things to the African villagers and they don't know how to use them'. That unacknowledged racism then begins to fester until there's a situation worse rhan the one being originally corrected and human rights come to depend on enforcement. This is all very deeply connected with the impulse to translate. It's a good impulse to create Eu­ ropean institutions moving towards ' Europe's Others; and to create US institutions moving towards 'US's Others'. It's a fantastic thing and I certainly talk to deans and vice presidents in favor of these things. At rhe same rime, when you choose the others-we are talking now about the area studies disciplines that came in just after the Cold War because of national defense-there's also hierarchy. I am therefore not in translation studies, I teach reading, how to read in the most robust sense. And I repeat: translation is the most intimate act of reading. I remain a literalist, not because I think literalism is good, but because literalism is impossible. If you try to be literal, dynamic equivalence, which is a wonderful phrase, will come in anyway because no one is capable of being completely literal. Literalism between two languages is impossible and as I say, 'Translation begins with the violent act of killing the sound'. And yet, I'm a translator and root for translation. A postscript on proletarian and subaltern. The distinction was first made by Antonio Gramsci. As Frank Rosengarten, Gramsci's translator, pointed out in conversation, in the army, the definition of subaltern is 'chose who cake orders'. As soon as we look at this cat­ egory, rather than chose who are trashed within and by the logic of capital, we chink gender, we think the paperless, we think of those outside the system of equivalences, we chink of those with no social mobility who don't know that the welfare structures of the state are for the use of the citizen. I should tell you in closing that this final definition of the subaltern I wrote recencly for a second cousin, deeply involved in global capitalism, who happened to see a video where women workers gencly and with affection mocked me for my fixation on the subaltern. My cousin the capitalist didn't know what the word meant, as Lawrence Eagleburger, the 62nd US Secretary of State and Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Forum for International Policy, did not, in 1 998, know what was meant by 'New Social Movements; just as they were being co-opted into 'the international civil society'.4 Let us not permit our sanctioned ignorance, our unacknowledged ignor-ings, keep translation quarantined within the confines of an erripiricized utopia. 4 The UN initiated the move in 1994, by opening an 'NGO Forum' for the first time at the International EE Conference on Population and Development. Eagleburger, when questioned about new social movements at a � conference on ' Does America Have A Democratic Mission' at the University of Virginia on March 19-21, 1998, turned to the moderator (who happened to be Fareed Zakaria)and asked what was meant by the phrase. 74  G a y a t r i C h a r k r a vorty S p i v a k References Balibar, Etienne. 2010. La proposition de /'egaliberte. Essais politiques 1 989-2009. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Basu, Tapan, et al. 1993. Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of The Hindu Right. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Becker, Alcon. 1995. Beyond Translation: Essays Toward A Modern Philology. Ann Arbor: University of Michi­ gan Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1996. 'The Task of the Translacor; translated by Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, translated by Thomas Ducoir and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press. Ghassem-Fachandi, Parvis. 2012. Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India, Princecon: Princeron University Press. Gile, Daniel, Gyde Hansen, and Nike K. Pokorn (eds.). 2010. Why Translation Studies Matters. Amsterdam: Benjamin. Halperin, David. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press. Jaffrelor, Christophe. 2007. Hindu Nationalism: A Reader. Princecon: Princeton University Press. Kant, Immanuel. ( 1 793) 1996. 'Religion within rhe Boundaries of Mere Reason; translated by George di Gio­ vanni. In Religion and Rational Theology, edited by Allen W Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacan,Jacques. 2007.'Subversion of the Subject and rhe Dialectics of Desire'. In Ecrits, translated by Bruce Fink. New York: WW Norton. Madsen, Deborah. Forthcoming. 'The Making of (Native) Americans: Suturing and Citizenship in the Scene of Education'. parallax. Marx, Karl. 1973. Surveys from Exile, translated by David Fernbach (translation modified here by author). New York: Vintage. Marilal, Bimal Krishna. 1 990. The Word and the World: India's Contribution to the Study of Language. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1 959. Course in General Linguistics, translated by Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorry. 1999. 'Translation as Culture'. In Translating Cultures, edited by Isabel Carrera Suarez, er al. Oviedo: Dangaroo Press. Varadarajan, Siddharrh. 2002. Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy. New Delhi: Penguin Global. 75 � 

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