Strolling in the Ruins - A Panel on Translation: Theory and Practice
There is an unspoken view which claims that literature belongs to canons, and canons to cultures. The act of translation is therefore rendered as a translation of one culture into another. When nation-states choose to become protectors and promoters of a specific linguistic and cultural tradition, language can become a vehicle of state-cultivated national culture. In such circumstances, when translation works explicitly as translation from one national culture into another, what happens to translation at the margins, borders and peripheries?
A recent Mandel panel, inspired by Professor Faith Smith’s book Strolling in the Ruins, examines this question in detail. The panel convened faculty members from the Department of English, the Department of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies, and the Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages & Literatures, to discuss translation at national boundaries.
Together the panel discussed a number of translation challenges from subjects that do not want legibility, to languages that lose their readers, and the persistent problem of allegories and concepts that are simply untranslatable.
Questioning National Literatures
Dr. Yuval Evri (NEJS) asked the audience to consider the career of Samir Naqqash, a Jewish Iraqi writer who was born in Iraq, raised in Israel, lived in India and England, and wrote in literary Arabic. The Arabic of Iraqi Jews in which Naqqash primarily wrote became obsolete by the turn of the Millennium. Naqqash is therefore widely viewed as a writer who wrote in a language that lost its readers.
Although an Israeli citizen, only one of his works was ever translated into Hebrew. Once Hebrew became the unofficial language of Israeli literature, Naqqash made it a point to write not only in Arabic, but also to incorporate Hindi and Persian elements into his works, through streams of consciousness and dialogue. Through his work, Naqqash pushed against the idea that language belongs to one national identity. Instead he wrote in a language not widely read, while creating multilingual streams of consciousness in his writings that help reveal dimensions of characters that monolingual novels leave unexplored.
National Borders and the Violence of Translation
Dr. Emilie Diouf (English) encouraged participants to consider the violence of translation at national borders, focusing on translation as a form of personal legibility. The audience considered the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers who simultaneously express vulnerability as political victims, and agency as claimants upon legal and political rights.
When seeking asylum, there is a need to translate oneself to a new culture, make oneself legible, within the space of a courtroom. As someone noted during the discussion, it’s the cultural translation of global political vulnerability “into suburban women’s reading groups.” Such translation might not always sit well with those individuals being translated, thus resulting in the idea of translating subjects who do not wish to be legible.
There is also a visual and sartorial dimension to such translation of individuals at national borders. In 1983, the president of Nigeria signed an immigration order that deported nearly two million Ghananians. According to Dr. Diouf, this led to a kind of ‘sartorial translation’ at the border. Refugees often placed their belongings in a nylon bag that became known as the Ghana-must-Go-Bag, a bag which is still associated with immigration and deportation over forty years later.
Untranslatability
Dr. Pu Wang is a scholar in the Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literatures, and is a translator of the works of Benjamin into Chinese. Translating Benjamin into Chinese often requires introducing words into a language for which there are no equivalent words to be found.
This is not a new problem, in the case of Chinese. Dr. Wang notes that Medieval and Early Modern Chinese was actually born from engagement with Japanese literary texts. Still, there is an open question as to what to do when a word is simply untranslatable.
The untranslatability problem arises because allegories, metaphors and concepts do not always exist across languages or linguistic conceptual schemes. ‘Untranslatability’ for example, is a word for which the concept exists in English (and German) but not in Chinese.