Translation is resistance
Translators ferry across the meaning, materiality, metaphysics, and all the magic that may be unknown in the mediums and conventions of their own tongue. The pull of the strange, the foreign, and the alien are necessary for acts of translation.
It is this essential element of unknowingness that animates the translator’s curiosity and challenges her intellectual mettle and ethical responsibility. Even when translators hail from — or belong to — the same culture as the original author, the art relies on the oppositional traction of difference.
Through opposition and abrasion, a creative translation allows for new meaning and nuance to emerge.
Noaki Sakai, a Japanese historian, and translator at Cornell University writes about the historical complexity of this process. The practices of translation, he says, are “always complicit with the building, transforming and disrupting of power differences.”
Translation is domination
Translation has, however, been a tool for domination in colonisation. La Malinche, for instance, acted as an intermediary and interpreter for the conquistador, Hernán Cortés, in the 16th-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire.
In this drawing by an unnamed Tlaxcalan artist c. 1550, La Malinche (far right) is acting as a translator between Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma II, the ninth ruler of the Aztec Empire.
Patyegarang was Australia’s first teacher of Aboriginal language, to early colonist, William Dawes, and crucial for the survival of the Gamaraigal language in Eora country. At 15, and as an initiated woman, she was Dawes’ intellectual equal, learning English from him and negotiating a relationship of mutual translation while holding on to her own cultural legacy.
In each of these cases, European imperialists learned how to survive the lands they were conquering through the processes of translation. Moreover, they used the same languages to fabricate the story of their own superior Western civilisation, at the cost of Indigenous cultures.
As translation theorist Tejaswini Niranjana explains, translation:
shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism.
The translation is not a neutral activity. It functions in a complex set of socio-political relations, where parties have vested interests in the production, dissemination, and reception of stories and texts.
Academics Sabine Fenton and Paul Moon have written about the deliberate mistranslation of the Treaty of Waitangi, a strategic example of colonial omissions and selections that achieved “the cession of Maori sovereignty to the Crown.”
One egregious interpolation was the replacement of the word mana (sovereignty) with kawanatanga (government), which misled and induced many Maori chiefs to sign the treaty.
In situations of conflict and war — and the displacements that result from them — translation again becomes a weapon privileging the powerful, as seen in the impenetrable bureaucratic paperwork, in the dominant language, governing asylum, and refugee seeker decisions.
In this charged context, the case of Gorman and Rijneveld becomes a lightning rod for addressing historical disempowerment and injustices.
Translation is diplomatic
In the absence of a level playing field for writers to have their voices heard in the global publishing market, there does need to be historical awareness and post-colonial sensitivity.
To Rijneveld’s credit, this sensitivity has been demonstrated. After stepping down as Gorman’s translator, they composed a poem:
never lost that resistance, that primal jostling with sorrow and joy, or given in to pulpit preaching, to the Word that says what is right or wrong, never been too lazy to stand up, to face up to all the bullies and fight pigeonholing with your fists raised, against those riots of not-knowing inside your head
Still, while representation is the moral imperative of the 21st century, it is my modest proposal that in the realm of literary translation, the pull of the unknown and the unfamiliar is one of the most important truisms: Rijneveld’s “riots of not-knowing.”
Already the world is losing a language every fortnight; as many as half of the world’s 7000 languages are expected to be extinct by the end of this century. Yet it has often been argued that linguistic diversity is an indicator of genetic diversity, the latter being critical to the survival of the species.
If humans only translate what is known within their own four walls, or what is familiar to them within the boundaries of their own imaginations, something essential is lost both to translation — and to the profligate tongues that proliferate our humanity.