The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism

Rebecca Gould, Kayvan Tahmasebian, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Kayvan Tahmasebian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351369831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business internazionale
• Index: Business

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse and ground-breaking overview of literary, cultural, and political translation across a range of activist contexts.

As the first extended collection to offer perspectives on translation and activism from a global perspective, this handbook includes case studies and histories of oppressed and marginalised people from over twenty different languages. The contributions will make visible the role of translation in promoting and enabling social change, in promoting equality, in fighting discrimination, in supporting human rights, and in challenging autocracy and injustice across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, East Asia, the US and Europe.

With a substantial introduction, thirty-one chapters, and an extensive bibliography, this Handbook is an indispensable resource for all activists, translators, students and researchers of translation and activism within translation and interpreting studies.

1

Introduction

Translation and activism in the time of the now

Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian

When we were mid-way through editing this volume, we received a message from one of the contributors. She was headed to prison in less than two weeks and asked us to hurry with our edits, since she did not know whether she would have access to electronic communication from within her prison cell, or whether she would be released before the book was published. She therefore asked us to make any requests as soon as possible. Her situation represented in acute form the pressures under which many of us—translators, activists, and academics concerned with the politics of language—labour.

The author, Ayşe Düzkan, is just one of the thousands of intellectuals, authors, academics, and translators, currently being persecuted by the Turkish state as political prisoners. While their ‘criminal’ acts of bravery deserve our commendation, their persecution by the Turkish government reminds us of high stakes of intellectual solidarity. Similar stories are told in this volume in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, Guatemalan, El Salvadoran, Syrian, and Sahrawi refugees, student protestors in Mexico and Taiwan, revolutionaries in Venezuela, Iran, Poland, and Italy, and prisoners in Morocco. Düzkan’s chapter, entitled ‘Written on the Heart, in Broken English,’ is a timely account of the capacity of translational activism to expand the horizons of our political commitments, in her case to transnational feminism and anti-imperial politics (Chapter 13). Düzkan’s message to us was a sobering reminder of just how much the theme of this book—the intersection of translation and activism—affects our daily lives. As an activist who has helped to change discourse in Turkey around feminism and Palestine, and who inspired a translator collective through her work on Ben Bir Feministim (I am a Feminist), Düzkan knows whereof she speaks. Like many contributors to this volume, from across Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and the Americas, her example reveals what can happen when translators conceive their agency in collective terms and when they conceptualise their activism in relation to their work as translators.

Our contributors work at the intersections of translation and activism in different ways. For some of the contributors to this volume, translational activism is a scholarly enterprise. For others, translational activism is a practice that can land—and which already has landed—them in prison. For others, translational activism lies at the heart of their anticolonial agenda (Bandia’s afterword provides an overview of this dimension). For yet others, translational activism refers to simple acts of translating with love, fidelity, and care. For all of us, readers, translators, and activists alike, the meaning and function of this intersection, along with the possibilities it opens, are unstable and subject to constant revision. This introduction reviews the chapters in this volume from the point of view of their interpretations of the concept of translational activism, after which we turn to questions of agency, temporality, and the precarious condition in which translational activism finds itself today. Activism, as we understand it, can take many forms. Although it necessarily has a public dimension, the public status of activism may not be visible to everyone. As Bandia decribes in his afterword, activism is ‘a form of opposition or resistance to power’ (515) that is premised on the agency of the subject. Given the central role played by agency in constituting what Walter Benjamin called the ‘task of the translator,’ in regards to language, the link between translation and activism is both intrinsic and necessary.

Four paradigms of translational activism

Across the many chapters that constitute this volume, four paradigms of the translator-activist can be identified: that of witness-bearer, of voice-giver, as vernacular mediator, and as revolutionary. The translator as witness-bearer is taken up in the chapters by El Guabli, and Hopkinson and Marsh, as well as in more personal terms, by Düzkan and Qasmiyeh. When the translator acts as witness-bearer, the boundary between author and translator is often rendered invisible. The particular kind of agency of the translator as witness-bearer often merges with that of the poet, including the poet who translates his own poems, as in Qasmiyeh’s chapter. It is no coincidence that Qasmiyeh, who in this volume reveals the impossibility of locating an origin for himself as a poet and as a refugee, is also a translator of his own verse from Arabic into English. Qasmiyeh’s chapter is distinguished by his inclusion of his own poems, meaning that his activism is manifested with respect to his own self. In contrast to this poetic approach, El Guabli documents how Moroccan writers became witness-bearers of their imprisonment during the Years of Lead under the Moroccan king Hassan II.

The second paradigm, of the translator-activist as a voice-giver, is explored in several of the chapters, particularly those by Fathi and Fani, who consider the crucial role of interpreters who help refugees from Central America navigate the asylum process within the United States. The translator-activist as a voice-giver puts into words the perspectives and experiences of oppressed and silenced peoples. Refugees and migrants feature frequently among those whose voices have been suppressed and whom the activist translator helps to make audible. In Fathi and Fani as throughout this volume, translators act in a capacity that exceeds the role typically assigned to them; they are transposers of words from one language to another. In order to be effective, an interpreter must acutely grasp the political context for the asylum seeker’s claim and be able to translate that context into the terms of the target culture. Interpreters must be familiar with the legal system through which refugees pursue their claim. Generalised knowledge of the refugee’s language is often not enough; the interpreter must be equipped with a nuanced understanding of the refugee’s specific dialect, in other words, their vernacular.

However, it is not only in the formal capacity of interpreter that translators give voice to those whose voices are marginalised within mainstream discourse. Writing about Palestinian and Sahrawi refugees in south-west Algeria respectively, Shwaikh and Qasmiyeh and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh show us what happens when the translator’s role as voice-giver is undervalued or ignored: Orientalisms of various kinds interfere, and stereotypes proliferate. The translator-interpreter’s role in this context is to dispel the myths and prejudices that accumulate through lack of first-hand contact with the represented subjects, particularly in contexts of war and other circumstances marked by grossly disproportionate distributions and abuses of power.

This brings us to the third paradigm into which the translational activisms represented in this volume are embedded: of the translator as renderer of so-called minor tongues, and of literary and non-literary vernaculars, into metropolitan languages, or in some cases as renderers of metropolitan languages into vernaculars. Irving, Higgins, Mehta, and Pal and Bhattacharjee each give us ample material for reflection on the translator’s contribution to the vernacularising process in Palestine, Ireland, Gujarat, and Bengal, respectively. Irving shows how translators act as mediators, making vernacular forms of Arabic accessible to the world. While Higgins showcases the role of vernacularisation—here understood as the right of people to speak and be spoken to in their native languages in court—in the context of oral interactions, Mehta and Pal and Bhattacharjee focus on the translator’s contribution to expanding the viability and accessibility of ‘minor’ languages. In these instances, as with the translator as witness-bearer, the translator-activist acts in the capacity of an artist, inventing new forms and generating new meanings from felicitous if unexpected linguistic juxtapositions.

The fourth paradigm of translational activism that emerges in this volume is that of the translator as a revolutionary. This role includes translators who are physically stationed on the barricades or their virtual equivalent (as with Chang), who pioneer new class alliances (as with Gao) or in more mediated senses, intellectuals who come to terms with the aftermath of revolution (as with Mehrgan), and who shape the climate of debate preceding it (as with Liu). Focusing on Syria amid the ongoing war, Bader Eddin (like Chang) takes us beyond the figure of the individual translator and introduces us to a case study involving translation as a collective act. Focusing on the translation of anonymous sprayed writing (which he distinguishes from ‘graffiti’) on the walls of wartime Aleppo, the modality of translation that is Bader Eddin’s subject helps us understand how translational activism works outside liberal conceptions of individual agency. In the case of both Chang and Bader Eddin, activist translation is a collective act that transpires on socal media.

The figure of the Syrian translator who works in a collective capacity, bearing witness to wartime atrocity, calls to mind Düzkan’s insistence in her chapter that ‘working collectively takes more time and is harder than working alone or in a hierarchy but the result is more powerful’ (219). It is not incidental that five of the chapters included in this volume are co-authored, in some cases by authors from different countries and geographies, who bring their varying knowledge and experience into conversation with each other. Such collaborations are political even when not intended as such. Having outlined the scope of what the contributors to this volume mean by ‘translation’ and ‘activism,’ let’s consider our own interpretation, as editors, of what makes a translation activist, and thereby reveal what we have learned about translation while collaborating on this work.

What makes a translation activist?

At the end of his chapter in this volume, Marais distinguishes between ‘agency’ and ‘activism.’ ‘While … translators can also be activists,’ he writes, and ‘particular contexts may call for activism by translators,’ it does not follow ‘that activism is the only form that agency can take. Translators are agents through their semiotic work even if they do not have a particular activist agenda’ (107). This distinction between agency and activism highlights the infinite capacity of the translator-interpreter to intervene in the political realm. At the same time, it leads us to reflect on the extent to which activist translation must be deliberate. As mediators between rulers and the public, akyeame (linguists) influenced Akan society, even when their role was primarily defined in relation to their service to the king. Analogously, in Mandate Palestine, informants, dragomans, and fixers disrupted conventional understandings of power in their society even when they served the colonial system (Chapter 7). Similarly, translators of Dalit memoirs in Bengali contribute to a political project by giving voice to oppressed minorities even when this plan is not explicitly articulated (Chapter 23). The importance of the agency/activism distinction lies in its positing the infinite potentiality of translator’s agency, that in turn extends our conception of activism beyond liberal notions of agency.

The fact that a translation is normally considered activist only when it consciously pursues a plan for social, political, or educational change suggests the limits of existing conceptions of activist translation. In contrast to existing models, we hold that translational activism should be evaluated and appreciated in terms different from accuracy or fidelity to the original. We consider a translation to be activist whenever and however it stirs readers and audiences to action. The goal of provoking the reader may stand in tension with—and even contradict—a literal rendering of words on the page. Equally, an activist agenda may motivate a translator to intervene with the meanings and tones of the original. Such interventions do not mean relinquishing the translational mandate; rather they represent translation’s reconfiguration. If there is a fidelity inhering in activist translation, it is to the ‘situation’ identified by Farhadpour in his essay ‘Thought/translation’ (which appears in English for the first time in this volume), which is intrinsically and irrevocably political. This situation is comprised of the socio-political contexts into which the translated text seeks to intervene.

Activist translators reconfigure the text alongside the context in which they write. This points to another important characteristic of activist translation: its timeliness. Translations can only be activist at certain times and within certain social circumstances. For example, Ali Shariʿati’s translation of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) into Persian in 1963 played a role in propagating anticolonial ideas in Iran with the purpose of toppling a colonialist-dependent political regime, leading to the 1979 revolution. Assessed in terms not merely of message but also, and more importantly, of impact, Shariʿati’s work could not sustain the ideological requirements generated by the reformist demands that emerged from Iranian society during the early 2000s, as documented in Mehrgan’s chapter in this volume.

Activist translation takes place in what Walter Benjamin calls Jetztzeit (the time of the now) in his ‘On the concept of history.’ In Benjamin, the moment of ‘now’ contains the possibility of revolution in contrast to the ruling class’s ‘homogeneous empty time’ (Benjamin 2003 [1968]: 396). Through their translations, activist translators intervene to redeem time in its revolutionary discontinuity, hence contributing to a history of the oppressed, a history that must be written in the future tense. Benjamin identifies a secret agreement between past and present generations. The past exists not only to give us lessons, but also to make it possible for activists to bring to fruition in the present what past generations failed to achieve in the past. Continuities across time make such fulfilment possible.¹

Mona Baker reveals the primary mechanism of counter-narratives in the time of the now when she describes how the translator participates in social change by ‘framing narratives’ (Baker 2006). On this view, the revolutionary potential of a text from times past is released and actualised in a translation that, in the process of rendering a temporal framework, recontextualises the original. Activist translation shows how translation relates to the original as to an ʿibrat (teaching or lesson in Arabic and Persian), changing the shape of its time and its place. Along with showcasing the empty structure of homogenous time, which can be endowed with any revolutionary or reactionary content, the concept of ʿibrat suggests that the very rendering-into of different temporal frameworks, whatever they may be, has a disruptive and liberating effect, which defines the work of translation.

Each chapter in this volume elaborates a lesson of resistance, dissidence, protest, reform, or overthrow instigated or sustained by translators who give voice to marginalised minority groups. They narrate stories of political change brought about through the agency of translators. The diverse backgrounds of the narrators of these stories, which include scholars and activists, speak to the practical orientation of activist translation, which acts rather than merely copying out words, sentences, and paragraphs into the target language. Having outlined our understanding of activist translation alongside the four paradigms through which it is activated, we will now briefly introduce each of the chapters to this volume, before inviting the reader to enter the multilingual and politically divergent universes they evoke. Having distinguished the chapters from each other according to their participation in the four paradigms of translational activism, the final section of this introduction focuses on empirical overlaps, on the view that such contexts are relevant for assessing the role of activism, and in order to emphasise contrasts as well as similarities.

Chapter overviews

Hopkinson and Marsh (Chapter 16) treat testimonio, in the form of commission reports, interviews with human rights activists, memoirs, and songs, as a genre of activism that resists the oblivion induced by genocides and related forms of oppression in Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela. They explore the ties of activism to memory, and document the challenges of translating the activist voice inherent to testimonial literature between the individual and the collective. Hopkinson and Marsh also reveal the translational core of testimonial songs as a translation of lived experiences across modalities—from experiences to words, from symbols to song. This chapter’s engagement with the disappeared in Argentina’s Dirty War (1976–1983), those murdered in the Mayan genocide, and suppressed during the Mexican Student Movement brings to light the ways in which activist artists and writers move between idea and praxis, translating the individual and the collective to and from each other.

When the original is an activist text, then its translation into another language, in another place and another time, has a birthright as an activist text as well. This situation describes Yang’s study of the translation of Marx f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1. Introduction: translation and activism in the time of the now
• PART I: Theorising translation and activism
• PART II: The interpreter as activist
• PART III: The translator as activist
• PART IV: Bearing witness
• PART V: Translation and human rights
• PART VI: Translating the vernacular
• PART VII: Translation, migration, refugees
• PART VIII: Translation and revolution
• Index