“Vão/Vòng A Conversation with Katrina Dodson”

Madhu Kaza, 2017

Originally published in Asterix Journal

Editor’s Note: The excerpt(s) in this chapter is considered a transformative fair use. Please see the annotations section in How to Use this Book for an explanation of the author’s pedagogy on creating conversation within a text.

Hashtags

#translation, #identity, #ways of knowing, #journalistic, #belonging, #family, #outsider, #multilingual

Frame

ET: I was adamant about wanting to include one entry in the reader that very directly addressed translation and Diego Ubiera delivered with this interview of Katrina Dodson from a favorite journal. What is fascinating about this interview is that Madhu Kaza deliberately chooses to make the translator, Katrina Dodson, a real person. Dodson has a past and an identity and presents translation as a familiar part of life. Translation isn’t effectively done by machines and this interview reminds you why that is the case.

Excerpts

KD: I’ve thought a lot about how the Brazil-Vietnam connection is somewhat random[1], and yet I’m always noticing similarities in my experiences with both places. Both are tropical countries, much poorer than the U.S.[2], where a lot of life happens on the streets, in an informal economy. Both nations have a history of hardship and violence that somehow combines with an ability to maintain a certain lightheartedness through suffering and to enjoy just sitting on a stool and watching the world go by[3], something that Americans don’t seem to know how to do very well[4]. I suppose that could be said of a lot of tropical countries.

One convergence that I find more striking is an echo between the languages. Having studied Vietnamese unexpectedly gave me an instinctive understanding of Portuguese spelling and pronunciation, elements that often perplex foreigners. Both Portuguese and Vietnamese have a lot of nasal sounds, and both languages strongly favor open syllables[5]—you never end a word on a closed syllable in either language, even if you see a consonant. For example, “vão,” which can mean “they go” or “empty space” in Portuguese, sounds just like “vòng,” which means “round” or “circle” in Vietnamese. The phrase “đi vòng vòng,” means to go walking or cruising around, so I like to think of “vão/ vòng” as a place where the two languages I’m closest to intersect[6].

Imperialism makes for strange bedfellows[7], and it turns out that the romanized Vietnamese alphabet is derived from the Portuguese because the Portuguese missionaries who came to Vietnam from Macau and Goa in the early 1600s were the first to convert the language from Chinese script into Roman characters[8]. The French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes is credited with romanizing Vietnamese, but his 1651 dictionary drew heavily on work done by the Portuguese. So even though there are virtually no Vietnamese in Brazil, there is this unexpected linguistic connection.

In translating Clarice Lispector, I thought about her relationship to Portuguese as the child of immigrants who spoke with an accent and who brought other languages into the home—Yiddish and Hebrew. Lispector clearly dominates the Portuguese language in her writing yet makes these deliberate distortions that I feel must have started from having that window onto other languages that comes with being part of a diasporic community. Having to speak some Vietnamese with my relatives and listening to my mother talk on the phone in Vietnamese for hours definitely gave me a more imaginative relationship to English and to the givens of language in general than I otherwise would have had[9].

MHK: I think that’s something that’s not acknowledged widely enough: how access to multiple languages can enhance your imaginative capacities in your primary language.

Lastly, on a slightly different note, what are some works that you love that have come to you through translation?

KD: I can say with conviction that Ferrante Fever is forever for me, and I’ll say it five times fast. Elena Ferrante is responsible for making me want to learn Italian next, but I’m also a huge fan of her translator Ann Goldstein, who is now a friend. I discovered the creepy magic of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz through Danuta Borchardt’s intoxicating translations, especially Cosmos and Ferdyderke. The Senegalese-French writer Marie NDiaye is a more recent revelation. I was completely absorbed by her Self-Portrait in Green. I sometimes read books in French, when I’m not feeling lazy, but her translator Jordan Stump does a beautiful job, and it’s just a lot easier to get your hands on the translations in the U.S. Yoko Tawada is another writer I’m glad to be able to access through translation. Her The Bridegroom Was a Dog was translated from Japanese, and I’m about to start Memoirs of a Polar Bear, which she wrote in German and is translated by the highly respected Susan Bernofsky.

You may access the full text here on the Asterix Journal website.

 

Text Version

Wide Shots:

  • Take an inventory of the books and stories you recall reading. Were they translations and if so from what language? How did that influence or enhance your reading experience or your memory of it now?
  • What is a translator’s job? How is this different from interpretation? What values should guide how they translate? What do the values you identified say about what you think about language?
  • How have meaningless, chance, seemingly inconsequential decisions, or accidents affected you despite their objective unimportance?
  • Consider different languages you speak (and define this in whatever way fits your experience), what is possible in that language that isn’t in another? What are “specific resonances” or “particular feelings” you associate with speaking one language over another, especially when you move between languages?

Close Shots:

  • Look to the first paragraph of the above excerpt. What cultural nuances does Dodson overlook in making essentialist statements about what the U.S. is like? What tropical places are like?
  • The third paragraph states that “imperialism makes for strange bedfellows.” Where does the phrase “strange bedfellows” come from? How does that phrase cast imperialism (as accidental)?
  • In some ways, Dodson’s response to the last question in this interview is in conversation with an excerpt from Sofia Samatar’s “Skin Feeling” on world literature anthologies. Read the passage below and revisit the second excerpt above from Dodson. What are the tensions between accessing culture through translation and accessing culture through literary texts meant to be representative of a nation, people, history, etc.?

SAMATAR: As a graduate student in a seminar on world literature, I remember arguing that no one who took representation as a goal could ever come up  with an adequate model for creating anthologies. The classics of Western literature are admitted to these anthologies based on their perceived artistic or philosophical merit; meanwhile, works from Kenya, from India, from Jordan, from Vietnam, will be admitted to make the anthology “representative.” David Damrosch discusses these different logics: works of world literature may be chosen for stature and influence, he writes, or as “windows on the world.” I hate this. Homer is our epic artist, Dickens our realist artist, Ngũgĩ our Kenyan—or worse, our African—artist.

The other students and the professor argue that we ought to concentrate on representation “for now,” as anthologies of world literature are still so often skewed toward white male authors. I refuse to be satisfied with this. Although I can’t articulate it at the time, I’m beginning to sense the mechanics of visibility. The one who makes it into the anthology stands for all the others, rendering them unnecessary, redundant. The chosen work is a “window on the world,” transparent, impermeable, a barrier masquerading as a door.

 

Mid Shots

  • See “Translation Across and Within Languages” to explore and reflect on the choices translators make that one can bring to their own playfulness and flexibility with writing across and within languages.
  • See “Transculturation, Language and South-South Migration” to build knowledge on an understudied issue. This activity will help students understand some of the larger contexts around Dodson and Kaza’s interview on translation/interpretation as well as dive into a major question of the times. The activity ends with a writing reflection.

 

Possible Transitions

JS: Paired with Phuc Tran’s “Grammar and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive,” these texts give two different perspectives from Vietnamese Americans on both Vietnamese and English, and other languages. This also works well with Yiyun Li’s “To Speak is to Blunder” since both pieces explore what it means to inhabit—think and feel and dream within—languages.

DU: I would pair this text with Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” to have students reflect on Kaza’s insight that having access to multiple languages can “enhance imaginative capacities” in a primary language.  Anzaldua unapologetically writes through various registers to deliver what is now a classic text taught in all sorts of academic settings.  An interesting assignment would be to ask students to utilize all of the various registers they may command to write energetically and forcefully.  Jamila Lyiscott’s work could also be used in a similar way.

  1. JS: what do you think about Katrina's use of "random"? what does this adjective mean, particularly in the context of a connection like this? ↵
  2. ET: Why evoke the US here? ↵
  3. JS: Interesting to hear a kind of passive construction in referring to histories of hardship and violence. We have seen other examples in this reader of explicit accounts of colonialism, war, and displacement, so this stands out a bit. Is this what happens when trying to make comparisons across singular histories? Is this helpful to you as a reader? What questions does it raise? ↵
  4. ET: Is there truth to this? Is this too essentializing...too much of a generalization? ↵
  5. ET: Madhu Kaza had asked Katrina Dodson "have you found any resonances between your experiences of Brazilian Portuguese and Vietnamese?" Sound is resonant, but does resonance imply similarity? ↵
  6. JS: I find this delightful not only because there's ingenuity in this convergence but it introduces a bit more dynamism to the usual venn diagram visual we might think of when encountering these words and indeed when comparing two things. Vòng reminds us that it's about "cruising around" rather than static differences. What else can you think of through this unique conjunction? ↵
  7. JS: how does this phrase add on to the "random" in the first paragraph and/or the passive construction of histories of hardship and violence? ↵
  8. ET: Translating or transcribing isn't a transparent process as each language is a lens. What might be some of the unintended consequences of translating a language into the script of another? ↵
  9. ET: Here Dodson projects onto Lispector a similar "imaginative relationship" with language that comes from multilingualism. How does multilingualism provoke such playfulness? Do you think of translation as playful? ↵
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