paired with “Vão/Vòng A Conversation with Katrina Dodson”

Inviting students to play with language as they consider the stakes of translation, the “pre-write” and “read and take note” portions of this activity could be used as an in-class workshop and reflection, while the “write and rewrite” portion could extend to writing outside of class.

Introduction

ET: Translation can feel like a foreign concept for monolingual people, while people who use and identify with many languages might not have thought with much intent about the role translation plays in meaning-making. Katrina Dodson and Madhu Kaza’s conversation revolves around individual identity, familial translation, and resonances across Portuguese and Vietnamese, but they speak less about the act of translating. The activities and readings gathered here work to provide that perspective so that you and your students might easily make the leap from the personal experience and the process of moving your ideas from one language to another (or even within one language, expressed otherwise). Perhaps it is a bit indulgent, but I find it hard to resist revisiting the tensions around translation I’ve experienced over the years. While translation is a linguistic process, it’s also an impactful experience of self and group.

1. I was raised bilingually in the US. My mother spoke only Icelandic to me until I was six years old. My father only speaks English. She would often call me “dugleg,” but that doesn’t translate directly to English. Google Translate calls in “hard-working,” but it means something like being very ambitious but also very contentious of the group. A part of my character doesn’t exist in English.
2. I visited my grandmother in Iceland in 2015, but my Icelandic was rather poor by that point. I understand a decent amount but struggle to speak much. My grandmother only speaks Icelandic, so the two of us sat in my uncle’s house and I’d type what I wanted to say to her in Google Translate and she would read it. She laughed and laughed and was a bit surprised to discover that I am funny. I wondered if Google Translate made me more or less funny.
3. I started learning French at 16 and got to be rather fluent by 19, but during my first trip to France when I was 17 I went to a comedy show by then incredibly famous Jamal Debbouze. The thing about comedy is you have to understand so much more than what the words mean. You have to have so much cultural knowledge and understand inflection. I didn’t yet, so I sat in the front row stone-faced for almost the entire show. I understood one joke and laughed as hard as I could, thinking it would likely be the only one I understood. Jamal pointed me out and said something about me, but I’ll never know what it was, but everyone laughed, so it must have been funny.
4. While in my MA program, I took a course on Francophone literature of West Africa where everything was in French: our discussions, the readings, the essays we had to write. I had taught myself French by reading novels one page at a time with a dictionary and grammar book, but in this context, I was frustrated by how even though my language level was solid at that point, the thinking felt anything but fluid. It took me three times longer to write in French and I struggled to know how someone would perceive what I wrote. I would ask native speakers about my tone since I felt tone-deaf in my own writing. I couldn’t understand myself.
5. While working on a film for a graduate course, I was gathering from found footage and discovered a video of myself in Iceland when I was six years old. My aunt was following me around my grandmother’s yard while asking me questions. I understood all but one line, but that one line bothered me. I had to call my mother to have her translate what six-year-old me was saying since I couldn’t understand myself.
6. One night I managed to dream in French. I felt victorious…that the language infiltrated my subconscious. Then I remembered how my mother, who has been in the US for over 40 years and speaks English fluently, still counts in Icelandic. Still writes her grocery lists in Icelandic lest my father correct her spelling. It made me wonder if one can ever fully habitate a language.

When you negotiate language, you’re also negotiating self, culture, power, meaning. There is no neutral use of language even if there is plenty of unintentional or thoughtless uses of language. With translation, you cannot avoid the balancing act all language expression is because you have to try to maintain meaning across languages. Then you see how delicate and multifaceted meaning is and how much and how little it has to do with the words we use to contain it. In that spirit, the activities that follow ask students to explore the concept of translation and how that reveals nuance even for monolingual speakers.

Guide

Pre Write: Versioning

Take the couplet below from Pablo Neruda’s poem “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines” that W.S. Merwin translated in 1969 as

This is all. In the distance, someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.^[1]

Rewrite the sentiment of these lines in at least five different ways. Share those rewrites with a classmate and discuss the impact of the different choices in those versions.

Read and Take Note: Contextualizing Translation

Moving from one language to another is no easy feat. Consider the two opening paragraphs of Paul Hund’s “The Peculiar Perils of Literary Translation” that appeared in Columbia Magazine. Pay attention to the challenges, risks, and rewards translators encounter. Think about the political, social, and cultural weight of their work.

In 1978, Gregory Rabassa ’54GSAS, famed translator of Gabriel García Márquez ’71HON, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa, was asked about a review in the Washington Post of a novel by the Guatemalan writer and Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias. Rabassa had translated the book from Spanish into English, and though the reviewer praised the richness of Asturias’s language, he never once mentioned Rabassa. It was as if the reader had absorbed the author’s words directly, without any mediator. Rabassa, who taught Spanish and Portuguese at Columbia from 1948 to 1969, wryly wondered aloud whether the reviewer even knew the book had been translated. “This would seem to be an additional argument,” Rabassa quipped, “for the placing of the translator’s name on the dust jacket of the book.”

At least since The Epic of Gilgamesh was translated from Sumerian into Akkadian four thousand years ago, translators have been unsung conduits of cultural, spiritual, and intellectual exchange. The verb “translate” is rooted in the Latin translatus, meaning “to bear across,” and indeed translators, living on the edges of two languages, must ferry meaning across a churning sea of possibilities. In doing this they have faced skepticism and worse. An early martyr of translation, the English scholar William Tyndale, was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536 for violating a papal decree against translating the Latin Bible into local languages, and in the sixteenth century, Italians angered by French translations of Dante, which they felt betrayed the poetry, hurled the phrase traduttore, traditore, or “translator, traitor” (a sentiment shared by many authors whose work has been shabbily translated — allusions disfigured, humor gone flat). Given the nuances and resonances of any two languages and the unachievable ideal of perfect lexical equivalence, writers from Voltaire to Virginia Woolf have decried the futility of translation, and the philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt declared it “impossible.” Science-fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin ’52GSAS, herself an amateur translator, called the act “entirely mysterious.”

Translation itself is first an interpretative process that must negotiate the limits and affordances of each language at play. If you are monolingual, that dynamic might feel unknown (though you certainly know how retellings within a language shift meaning as well, whether you’ve played that classic game of telephone or not). Regardless, translator Sophie Hughes’s short interactive essay “The Art of Translation” in the New York Times showcases her thinking around translating two sentences from Spanish to English in Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season and Alia Trabucco Zerán’s novel Clean in a sort of speak aloud. Take note of the many considerations she offers as she adjusts her translation. Alternatively, or in addition, take a look at Caroline Bergvall’s VIA, a collection of 48 translations of the opening tercet of Dante’s Inferno.

Reflect and Rewrite: Meaning Changing Over Versions

With your notes on Hund and Hughes (or Bergvall), outline several ways that translators make their work evident through their choices. How do the considerations translators have to make weigh in how you might now consider how you write even in your primary language? Dodson said, “access to multiple languages can enhance your imaginative capacities in your primary language.” What might you imagine otherwise in your primary language after considering the translation process? Take a paragraph or two to reflect on these questions. If you are feeling extra inspired, pull a paragraph from the last essay you wrote and reimagine HOW it conveys what it is saying by exercising your “imaginative capacities.”