 Hello, and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a professor at City University of New York, and I'm here with Alison Mark and Powell, who translates Japanese literature, works with the Penn Translation Committee, and has been a driving force co-organizing Translating the Future, which is the conference you're now attending. Thank you, Esther. And thank you all for joining us for the eighth installment of our weekly program. Today is Queer Literature, Queer Legacy. We'll be listening to a conversation between Achi Obeja and Sean Bai. Achi is an author, poet, and translator based in California, and Sean is a translator of Polish literature based in New York. You can read their full and glittering bios on the Center for the Humanities site. Unfortunately, Liz Rose, the translator who organized this panel and who was meant to moderate it, is unable to be here today. But we do have these words of theirs to share. Let's take a moment to acknowledge that it's Pride Month, and there is important work happening right now in the U.S. toward black liberation, and queer liberation is interconnected with black liberation struggles. The Stonewall riots were led by queer and trans women of color, and it's essential to consider queer history, and the queer legacies that have created the context for the work we are doing, as LGBTQ writers translating queer literature. This series of weekly one hour conversations is the form that translating the future will continue to take throughout the summer and into the fall. During the conference's originally planned dates in late September, several larger scale events will happen. We'll be here every Tuesday until then with conversations about the past, present, and future of literary translation, and its place in the world where we find ourselves. Please join us next Tuesday at 1.30 for 21st century translation, What Has the Future Brought Us? We'll be joined by Gabriella Page-Fort of Amazon Crossing, Samantha Schnee of Words Without Borders, and Chad Post of Open Letter, as well as possibly one other participant. And we'll hear about the ways they've used data and technology to raise awareness and determine what and who gets translated. Please check the Center for the Humanities site for future events. Translating the Future is convened by Penn America's translation committee, which advocates on behalf of literary translators, working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers, and others with an interest in international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by Lynn Miller-Lachman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translation resources at penn.org. Today's conversation will be followed by a Q&A. Please email your questions for Sean Bai and Achi Obe has to translating the future 2020 at gmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. And if you know anyone who was unable to join us for the live stream, a recording will be available afterward on the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities site. Before we turn it over to Achi and Sean, we'd like to offer a sincere gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY, Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, Penn America, and also to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at HowlRound, who make this live stream possible. And now, over to you, Sean and Achi. Am I here yet? I can hear you, but I can't see you. You can hear me, you can't see me. Oh no, wait. There we go. This is live internet streaming here. Hi, Achi. Hi, Sean. Well, do you want to start with a reading? Yeah, why don't we start with a reading. All right, let's do that. You go first. Me first? Okay. I think, so I, I'm going to read something from a book that I have coming out in the spring, called Foucault in Warsaw by Remy Ryzinski, it's a translation of mine. And it's a book that takes the year that Michel Foucault spent as a diplomat in Warsaw in 1959-1960 as a starting point for an exploration of queer life in the city and in Poland in that era. And so I'm going to read, I thought I'd start with something outrageous. I'm going to read something about cruising. The cruising in Warsaw in this time happened often in public urinals, which the characters in this book refer to as mushrooms. So you're going to hear two different, two different real people. This is a nonfiction book talking about, talking about cruising in this period. Different methods of cruising. So queer life happened on a sort of trail, the mushroom on three crosses square, another one on Jeleniecka Street, and a third on Dombrowski. But they all wiped that out capitalism came and it was over. It's a story that's impossible to tell because it was, it was like a peacock of paradise or unicorn, or both. And they tell the story. I picked up this handsome guy on the street. I said something and he said something back and now we're walking along together and talking. I open with, you know, you're such an outgoing great guy I'd love to take you for a coffee. But he was sharp and goes, man, aren't you wasting your time on me, aren't you better off picking up some girl. And that opened my eyes that if somebody's on the ball and not interested, they'll say no. I also got this personal theory that every good looking guy in Warsaw must have had a brush with gayness because there were so many gays cruising in all kinds of situations, and the only way to avoid it was by being ugly. You get lots of different situations with cruising. One of my girlfriends did it where she pretended to be a TV director. She had a lot of nerve she go to the beer stand on Chiantoksha Street, and promised the boys a career in television, which put her in very high demand. And one rule never mess around with vodka. All my friends who died it was because of vodka. It's really dangerous if you're into trade, because you never knew why he kept meeting up with you. There were different methods of cruising. There was no buying site unseen you'd know right from the get go which was an advantage. That's why everyone liked hitting up the tea rooms. There were tons of urinals and so the queers would do a circuit of the mushrooms moving from one to the other. The metal barrier around them was high enough off the ground that you could count the legs underneath. The police would drive up and if they saw legs grouped together they'd storm in from both ends and hunting. They'd arrest one guy and the rest would get at all. What was the era was like. It was a terrible way to live first of all the police chasing after you pounding you with truncheons, you'd run away then get dragged to headquarters for interrogation. And second of all there was no normal way of meeting people and murders were the order of the day. Well I found it all incredibly exciting because come on, these were hardly everyday experiences to give you a little flavor of the time. Love that. Thank you. Yeah. What's the word in Polish that you chose to translate as queers. It's Chotka Chotki, which is related to the word for aunt or auntie. You know, like a like a relative like your father. It's actually a feminized word is yeah yeah yeah. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of that gender play in in this book there's a lot of men referring to one another as girlfriends or as her. And, you know, also, you know, gender bending in their actual everyday lives, you know, it's definitely, it's a picture of a time when when being a gay man and being very effeminate we're very closely related to one and right. And in fact it's one of the things that the characters in the book talk about reflecting on how gay life in Poland has changed that some of them even sort of lament the like masculinization of gay male culture in Poland. And I'm curious why use the word queers, which is a word I like a lot, but why use queers instead of something like girls, which is also used among gay men, a lot, especially of the the original word in Polish was feminized. Yeah. I do use girls in certain places and they do use Jeff China Jeff Chinky girls. The word that I translated as queers is like, I felt like it has that kind of specificity of queer in English, I felt like it's something that has kind of a bit of a bit of valence and is a bit of and can be a bit disparaging in certain contexts like I felt like it was a pretty close semantic fit but it was tricky I did wonder for a while whether just to keep it in Polish. That would have been an interesting. Yeah, it was something I thought a lot about with this book, I am. I sort of made a decision to do my best to root the way they spoke in English in in actual like sort of American gay male manners of speaking in the 50s and 60s and I did a whole lot of research with materials from that era and stuff so that I could really put my ear to that. But in the back of my head there was also this voice going well actually no they need they maybe they should sound Polish maybe they should be speaking some completely new type of English with lots of Polish words kind of intermixed with it. And I think I don't know. I think I'm a better mimic than, than anything. And so I think I was more comfortable trying to replicate a way of speaking that I was maybe more familiar with and that I could research rather than trying to invent something completely new, if that makes sense. I mean I'm still, I'm still very fascinated by the use of the word quit I don't want to keep like camera on this but it's because that my experience with the word is that when I was a kid. You know, like in the in the 60s, which is not that terribly far from 50s. It was a very mean word. It was, there was no positive connotation to that that I can recall. And it, there was a period of transformation with that word in English. I mean I remember being in college and that word, starting to become something that we use ironically, but still not positively, you know, it was in, you know, within the, the, the coven of lesbians. We, we would, you know, sort of mockingly refer to ourselves as being quiz the $3 bill or, you know, or, but it was, but it was very domestic and familiar and incitery. And only, I think later, like in the 90s during the AIDS crisis that I feel like that word. Got retaken and recharged and, you know, I think of it as very much as a 21st century word, even though I think it's roots are before that but I think it really sort of blossoms and flowers in this period. I also think it's really tricky to do stuff from other periods because ultimately your reader is still reading in this period. Yeah. So how far can you go, you know you mean you have to give them something to hold on to right. Yeah, and the, you know, the voices in this book. Again, it's a nonfiction book. And they're, he's interviewing people who today, the authors, you know, the book came out in Poland a few years ago and they're reflecting back on this period. And so they have, they have a somewhat old fashioned way of speaking and they're using old fashioned case slang in some cases and there was lots of stuff I had to look up or didn't know. But it isn't really authentic to that period per se, it's sort of like transformed, you know, through the years. I spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, my older gay friends that I have been the United States, you know, and people who grew up in, you're not quite the 50s, but maybe in the 60s and the early 70s and sort of the way that, you know, the way that they talk has changed but it's still inflected by older types of slang and so on and so on. Yeah, is it, what is it like with Spanish? I'm curious. There's also so many different Spanishes, right? That's just the thing, right? I mean, the thing about Spanish, I mean, I think there are two things that really sort of separate Spanish in a way. One is that there's this multiplicity of Spanish. You know, a word that you might use, you know, very, you know, happily in Havana will have a completely different meaning in Mexico City. You know, I remember I used to, I used to go out with this Cuban girl who stayed in Cuba. You know, we had a kind of this, you know, transnational relationship. And the first time she came to Chicago where I was living in where there are a lot of Mexicans and the Mexican community is sort of wonderfully present. And we were looking for something to eat and it was very late at night and we found this Mexican place and there's a huge neon sign outside that said tortas. And, you know, we all know, you know, we understand what the food is, but in Cuba that very much means like dike but in a really gritty way. So she insists that we take many photos under the neon sign that said tortas. So, so there's that part you know where you have to really think about, you know, who are these characters where they from what is the experience that, you know, sort of shapes them and forms them because then again, you know, that that can make a big difference and then obviously who's your reader. There's also the issue of the fact that Spanish is a very familiar language to English readers, you know, I'm like Eastern European languages where, you know, not a single word you said was anything that I recognize and again, you know, I spent 30 years of my life in the largest Polish population outside of Warsaw but you know, but you know, you people use Spanish words all the time in English without even thinking about the fact that they're using them so how you play with that is, is, you know, both it makes it easier in some ways, and also makes it harder in some ways. I also think that there's a fictional Spanglish, I think there's real Spanglish, and I think there's a fictional Spanglish. I think that the real Spanglish is again very regional, you know, the way people use Spanglish in New York is different from the way people use Spanglish in, in Miami and very different from the way people use Spanglish here in the Bay Area where I am now. But I think that there's a kind of a literary fictional Spanglish where characters use Spanish a great deal more than they do in real life, you know, I mean when I pick up a book and I see somebody saying No, senior, it's to the left. I got no way in hell does anybody really talk like that. You don't address people in Spanish who you know don't speak Spanish. And so that really complicates the notion of queerness because then it's like a sub language within a sub language within a sub language you know it's it all changes so very dramatically I find that queer speak if you want to call it that can be very different in the Caribbean from the continent from the southern cone. And then within those spaces, it's very different you know in Peru. When I was in Lima. I was completely blown away by the fact that drag queen seemed to have like their own language. It was so different from everything else and you know the dykes that I was hanging out with were almost as mystified and as left out of it as, as I was, which I was like, come on, but this is amazing, you know. So yeah, it's, it's, it's a different ballgame and you're also challenged I mean, you know with the gender issues. Yeah, Spanish that can really mess you up with a translation because sometimes very important obviously to avoid the gender markers, but sometimes the gender marker is the point of the exercise. And then you can't bring it into, into English in the way that it, it's really meant to be. Yeah, it's a struggle, but it's tremendous fun, obviously. Yeah, I mean it's similar with gender and Polish Polish is super heavily gendered it's really, it's really really difficult to get away from using gendered language in Polish. And it's interesting, I, in some of my research before doing this, I was looking up non binary language in Poland and gender neutral language and sort of like how did non binary people in Poland talk about these cells. And I was just finding these sites that were like just like articles in Polish, describing the debate about gender neutral pronouns in English, and then giving the English examples and saying these are how you use them in English, and then kind of not, and then just sort of saying like well we need to come up with our own solutions in Polish and then like not quite getting there. And I thought that was really interesting because I sort of, I think I was saying this the other day. I noticed this thing in Poland where it's almost like the center of gravity of the discussion around queerness is getting pulled towards an American Anglophone framework, you know where they're like quite familiar the queer community there seems to be quite familiar with the debates that we're in the United States, and are sort of exploring ways of applying those debates to their realities and their conditions but are maybe like not quite there yet necessarily. Yeah, you know I'm by no means an expert in Polish queer culture so I don't necessarily draw any conclusions from that but it's just sort of a head trip as a translator into English working with queer language from Polish where it sort of feels like I'm conscious of like potentially operating in this weird kind of loop, you know. This happens with Latin America to where a lot of the discussion is dominated by what's happening in the United States but I think that it might be different for us because there's a long history of the US presence in Latin America I mean there's a gigantic gap that falls on Latin America from the US and the struggle for the non binary thing actually is is is actually a real for me it's a real example of that. You know, I'm sure you're familiar with the term Latin X, which is the very sort of ubiquitous non binary Latino term that's being used in the US. And it's not a popular term in Latin America in Latin America it's very in fact it's a very problematic term because it's absolutely unpronounceable in Spanish. The X is barely present in, you know, regular ass Spanish never mind in this particular term. I've been a move, especially in Southern Cone, especially in places like Buenos Aires and Montevideo to move to, you know, the non binary, you know, instead of Latina or Latina Latina. And in fact, I think I mentioned this the other day too that the president of Argentina recently gave us a whole speech using the E instead of the X which was monumental really in a lot of ways. The problem with with also with the Latin X is that, you know, it comes from here it comes from the US, and it may be coming from Latinos in the US, but it's still the US. Yeah. And so it's it, you know, there's a sense of don't tell me what to do, you know, I mean we will figure this out on our own. Yes, this is a good point but dammit that you know it this is the thing that that you know we need to do by ourselves and also there. We don't want to let go the gender that the gender thing, I think especially among a lot of women who feel that, you know, lesbians have a history of invisibility. A history of invisibility not just in general but a history of invisibility within the queer community. And so that the, the a and the feminized gender forms are actually, you know, emphatic for them, you know, it's it becomes something that a holy different ball game. That's much closer to the trends that I see happening in Poland actually is that if there's any kind of change in the way that gender is being dealt with in Polish it's like a reassertion of the value of feminine endings like particularly for things like job titles and areas where the masculine was taken as neutral, and these kinds of things. There was one of the main women's magazines in Poland I remember did a sort of top 50 list of you know the most influential people in Poland, and making a point of using feminine endings on every single one of their titles you know even like your Prime Minister as I'm yet to call which you would never really say. But just like, you know, asserting the presence of women in in these roles. Yeah, so that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, the other thing that strikes me with Spanish is that the United States is of course also a Spanish speaking country and there's a huge amount of his Spanish on queer culture that happens in the United States, Latin American queer for in Spanish. So as a translator. How do you think about whether or not to tap into those ways of speaking that kind of language that's used those cultural references. It's, it's tricky. I mean, a lot of the stuff that I've translated actually originates in Latin America, like, and Cuba and in the Dominican Republic. And so what I've done, you know what what limited amount of stuff I've done that originates here has not necessarily been queer but it's also been that question arises what do you do with this Spanish that is, let's call it for lack of a better term native to the US, but makes no sense in the rest of Latin It happened a lot with Juno Diaz when I was translating him a lot of the Spanish that we read in his books is not anything that makes any grammatical or, you know, lexical sense in the rest of Latin America and so in some cases, you know, it depended what was going on We left it alone I left it alone. And in some cases it was imperative to to to make it make sense to the Spanish readers so we had to play with it we had to correct it if you want to call it that, or to, you know, at least make it less incorrect, you know, realign it in some ways so that the reader could ultimately understand I mean I think one of the differences might if he had been a queer writer, one of the ways that that might have played out differently was to sort of consider how much of that terminology was about queerness and how then important it was to keep it exactly that way. Yeah, whereas, I mean, you know, there's, there's a school of thought that you know the most important part of this whole translation is, you know, the reader the reader the reader they have to make sure that they, that they understand but there's also this. I think other school of thought which is, well you know you, you work together the reader and the writer and the translator you're all working together, and if you really want to get a flavor of what the writer is trying to say, you might just have to come over you might just have to surrender to not necessarily understanding this term in your own language but understanding it in terms of how it sounds in terms of how it feels in your mouth, in terms of, of, you know, the expression on your face after you say it, you know, like a lot of stuff in Spanish, especially in the Caribbean Spanish is in vowels. You know, and so your mouth is open, you know, wow. And so you have to, that's part of it that's part of translation to. It's it's funny it's it's this old foreignization versus domesticization. Absolutely. But it's like, but it's like taking queerness as the foreign part, which is another sort of head trip like I don't do is queerness far I mean I think this whole debate is nonsense. Anyway, you know, but it's like, I don't know I was like well in terms of audience right I definitely as I was translating this book. I was definitely translating it with a queer audience in mind and I was expecting that they were going to have certain queer cultural touchstones and that was sort of a conscious decision on my part I'm very happy to translate for queer people and pay no attention to what the states are going to think about it. Absolutely. You know, but you know I that's that's sort of a luxury that that I have I think in some ways and is maybe not always that I don't know Polish queerness is also not a million miles removed from American queerness. Right, you know it's still in a in a European Western continuum. I mean, you know conditions under communism, when this book is set were very different. The specifics, the specific history is different the kind of cultural dynamics are different, but the overall points of reference, I think are more or less the same because you were still. There was still this history of thinking of homosexuality as illness there was still this history of like Freudian analyses there was still the whole like 19th century structural homophobic like intellectual edifice that was just as operative in Poland as it, as it was in the United States so I didn't feel like I was explaining anything that was all too alien. And for Latin America that all that you just said applies beautifully to the southern cone, where there's a session with Freudian psychology where there's, you know this very sort of cosmopolitan, you know, arrogance about, you know, the intellectual superiority blah blah blah blah connections to Europe and we're really not Latin America blah blah blah blah blah. And the rest of the continent for a variety of reasons. Cuba also communist and has a really terrible queer history as a communist country with the labor camps and all the stuff in the 60s that the late 60s for about two years that were camps where where they just took away queer people, mostly men, mostly men, the women who were brought in were usually either caught, you know, in frugante or they were, you know, bull riders, very masculinized. So, and it's a history in which, you know, no one's ever apologized no one's ever taken responsibility for it. So it makes it makes it in a very strange way. So the whole country is vaguely obsessed with with homosexuality, and for example fears back the Cuban book Institute decided to put out its first ever anthology of a Cuban stories about gay people. Well, one of the things that just absolutely floored me was that the editors included a whole slew of stories by straight men. And I was like, excuse me. I just, I have just a little thing I want to talk about here. And they just didn't, they were like, no, no, no, no, everyone, you know, we all talk about it, you know, and of course, and I knew that, duh. But, you know, the obsession is very different because there's a whole lot of guilt around with these camps and around the way that anti gay policy played out in the 70s and 80s and those people are still alive those damaged people those people who were absolutely wrecked by the these terrible periods. On the other hand, you have, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot in the on the continent you have a lot of very isolated queer people, you know, in rural areas in places in small towns. I mean, it, you know, a lot of Latin America is still very, very, very rural. And, and you know the thing about something like queer language or queer culture is that you need community to make it. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean, somebody who's busy thinking he's the only queer in some little town in Paraguay is not saying girl. Right. Who's he saying it to. So it's, it's, you know, it's a very, you know, the story really whatever the story is really sort of demands it's its own sort of rules and its own sort of approach because, again, so vast. It's always so problematic, you know, so many dictatorships so many massacres so many, you know, you know, so many horrible histories really that where we're queerness is one more thing. Yeah, the thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then are you conscious of how your translation into English sort of feeds back into the country today. Absolutely. And also, you know, there's a question of how much do you explain. Yeah. You know, I mean, do you footnote. Do you do you have to say hey, you know, in case you don't know, you know, for those of you who have no you're going in history whatsoever. So yeah, you know you have to really make some important decisions along the way you know who's going to come to this book and why are they going to come to this book. And that was a really interesting question with a lot of Rita Indiana's work because she, she attracts a lot of people by virtue of being this very charismatic, you know, music rock star person that has nothing to do with literature but everybody who's queer right so she puts out a book oh my God I want to read it. You know, and yet, you know the book is based, and you know, all of her stuff eventually always goes back to the through your dictatorship in some way. And to, if not the dictatorship itself the inheritance from that dictatorship. So much of that. Do you. Do you have to backtrack to, to make people understand that this is a legacy that this is not. And that it's also not just her imagination that this is actually a real thing that happened this is actually a take off on history, not a take off on this wild crazy thing she thought up, you know, so it's those those are questions that are always sort of popping up and also because so much of course of the horrors of Latin America, regardless of how it's played out involves us intervention in some way and here we are feeding it back to American readers and so do you want to, how much do you want to implicate, you know, the reader in this and I mean, or educate you know there's a lot of play there I mean I know that there's the reader has its own demons, its own historical demons, or it does yeah I mean and it's interesting with in terms of Poland's queer history, I think, probably the single event that people are most aware of. In terms of queer history under communism was this big sort of secret police crackdown on gay people that happened in the 1980s, and that was called operation Hyacinth and the Polish secret police archives are are open now and they're one of the main sources for this book and the secret police were super interested in queer people, and part of what the book is about is how like queer life was kind of inadvertently extensively recorded by the secret police, you know, and so it turns out we know all about where people went and you know who they were and who knew who and so on and so on. So operation Hyacinth, the files have never been found. And so it's sort of stayed in and the rumor is that there were just huge amounts of material. So it was either, you know, the stuff is badly catalogued in the archive so maybe it's just been lost but maybe it was deliberately destroyed or something else going on, you know, so it's sort of a shadow in people's memory, but it was also around the period of solidarity, you know, in international terms it was around the period of the AIDS crisis so it's it's sort of like, it's sort of subsumed by these other things. One of the things I thought was wild translating this book speaking of dictatorships is that the secret police were interested in queer people mostly gay men admittedly, partly out of just this like usual thing about like homosexuality is a vice and sort of like prostitution and drug addiction and you have to stamp it out, you know, whatever else. But they also recognize the ways that queer people were building informal networks and informal institutions and informal communities to support one another. And they were afraid that those networks could be used as the framework for a political uprising at some point. It was sort of like this whole like underground infrastructure that under the wrong set of circumstances could be leveraged against the regime and of course in the totalitarian regime. Part of the point is that like all of society all of civil society all of these kinds of organizations all exist kind of within the framework of the party and end of the state. And so this was a framework that they didn't control. And it's crazy because it's, you know, it's just queer people trying to live their lives. And the government is convinced that it's that it's this political conspiracy that's trying to overthrow them and so they'll arrest people arbitrarily and interrogate them and torture them. I mean ultimately wouldn't that have been I mean I think marginal communities always create these networks that in some ways always begin just as a, as a way to communicate to be together you know the black church the gay bars you know, you know, and, and eventually, I mean you are a threat to the state especially to something like communism where individualism is is is very problematic. And yet queerness sort of demands that you step aside and apart I mean queerness demands that at some point you say okay I am different. Yeah. I mean, I mean, we don't, most of us the vast majority of us don't grow up in gay families so that we can look up and say oh yeah I'm just like mom, I'm just like my other mom. You know, I mean, you know, we, we, we, it demands that we not be a part of the collective that we recognize ourselves outside those, you know, definitions of society. And so that is inherently philosophically I think very very threatening. I think, you know, in terms of of Latin America there's a lot of that I think Cuba in particular is a is a very complicated place because pre revolution. Havana was a very sexually liberated wacko place. I mean, when they call it the, the, they used to call it the brothel of the Caribbean. And the thing about a brothel in that sense is that it isn't just heterosexual, you know, by definition, I mean you can do whatever and whatever. And so, you know, there was a tremendous in, in historical terms, there was a tremendous tolerance for gay presence like everybody knew somebody queer. You know, I mean, my, my, I haven't, you know, an uncle who went to medical school who, you know, talked very openly about how his study group had, you know, a couple gay men and they remain friends forever. And everybody was very open about, you know, the fact that these guys were gay. And it wasn't that my uncle was particularly liberal, or particularly tolerant I mean I'm sure that if he were alive and unfortunately he would probably voted for Trump last time around you know just because you know Cubans do that in Miami. So reflex. But, but, but there were ways of being tolerant there were also, I think. And not defined as such but sort of like, hey, you know, that's hot. It's the Caribbean. We're all doing it and whatever you know, I mean trying not to let us did it with chickens for God's sake. You know, and with treat, you know, so I think it's, it's a different kind of mentality. Anyway, I think we're running out of time so I was going to try to read one short piece. Yeah, yeah, I was going to say we should definitely close with another. Yeah, and I'm going to read it in English and I'm going to read it in Spanish. It's very short. This is actually from a book of poetry that beacon is as publishing next year and it's my work. And one of the, one of the challenges here for me was trying to decide how to present the fact that I sort of exist in both these languages, and that sometimes the languages interact and sometimes they don't. And, and, and sometimes the poems are very queer and sometimes they're not, but this one absolutely is. It's called the public place, and it's actually inspired by a lesbian poet named Olga Brumas, whom I have loved for a very long time. Anyway, here we go, the public place. I have been watching her for a long time. I've been watching this woman the small frame on the grass in a public place. I've been watching the long dark hair fall like a web on her shoulders the neck, the fine slender arms the way she senses I'm here watching her. I am a spy. I am exploring mouth open, the hard ribs of her body, the hips hidden in denim, the creases the creases, the muscles that stretch under dark blue team patches so tight. My tongue the ship rising with the storm of each movement. I'm inside her. I'm watching inside her from behind the brown iris I'm spying. I do not know her. I am her lover. I do not touch her. She rises she stands in the grass in the public place she is barefoot soft feet on a custom to be so naked those feet. The white feet moving away from the grass the public place, the imprint of her of her still fresh on the grass the public place, taking the intersection against the light with a vengeance, a dare and her white steps she is barefoot. I am her lover. I'm the woman she goes to going home. Thank you. That was really wonderful. So, where are we? Esther, are you there? Yes. Thank you. All of you else and Esther welcome back. What fantastic bookends to your conversation. The two reading. Beautiful. Beautiful. That was a really nice interview. Thank you. conversation, the two reading. That's beautiful. Beautiful. That was a really nice interview. All right. Well, we have Liz, who would have been moderating. We will still manage to send in some questions. And I'm going to read the first part she has. The question is for Sean. I'm going to read the first part. I'm going to read the first part. In considering the translation of the feminine, of the feminized word anti in Polish translated as queer. They're wondering if you considered using the word queen, or if the word queen appears at all in your translation of this text. The suggestion of queen obviously draws on American gay culture. I'm going to pause there and let you, if you want to respond to that first. Okay. Thank you. I sort of came across. Queen, maybe a little belatedly in my research process. And I think if I, if I'd started thinking about it earlier, maybe I might have considered it more strongly. I think queen. Would have accurately reflected a very strong division between feminine and masculine gay roles that existed in Poland at this time, and also in gay male culture in the United States in this sense. And I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's like a stronger evocation of the atmosphere in the, in the United States. I, I'm trying to remember if I actually did use the word queen at any point. In the translation. I can't quite remember. But yeah, it's, I mean, it's, it's, it's a tricky problem. And I, you know, I'm very conscious that it's a, it's a, it's, it's a very difficult question. I'm trying to understand it in my own way. In my way. And I'm not even, I can't remember exactly, but I'm not sure that I can translate it. It consistently one way or the other. I tried to. When I'm trying, particularly when I'm translating character voices, I try to be led by the voice. I try to have sort of a crystallized idea in my head of what this person or a person like this sounds like in English. And I try to let that image lead me in my translation. I know I'm not in a good mood to get into the original text or so on, but I was trying to keep these characters really rooted in, you know, people that I knew, people that I knew about people, you know, real people who, who I felt were sort of who reminded me in real life of the people I was reading about in the book. All right, which for both actually, and Shawn brings us back to thinking about how we might impose or not US queer culture on texts from other literary traditions. And related I wonder about interrogating this notion of authenticity. What is possible or not when we're considering authentic queer slang across languages cultures and decades. Perhaps we should let go of notions of authenticity since creating translations of queer texts for a different cultural context in a different language creates its own sense of authentic authenticity. Wondering how this relates to fictional spanglish shachi, the X ending used in Spanish in the US versus nine but non binary E which you spoke of, and more generally how we use language in different ways in different contexts. Wow, that is a loaded question. The question of authenticity is really tricky. I think it's a, I think it's a trap, and yet I also think it's something that we really can't get away from, because I know that, you know, if, if something doesn't sound authentic, whatever that is, you know it and it takes you out of whatever it is you're doing, you know, I remember years ago reading a book that I'm not going to mention the title of. That was, it was not a translation it was a, it was a was written by an American and white woman who lived for many years in Mexico, and she was writing from the point of view of a Mexican character and I must have been 100 pages into the book and very delighted with how well it seemed she was doing with that I thought wow this this might be like a book to teach, because she obviously researched it so well. And then there came along this little scene in which a character a little girl pulls and you know has to pee desperately and she goes into an alley, and she pulls down her panties and to pee, but she, the author chooses to refer to her panties, and this is a word that's only ever used to mean boys briefs, and it threw me out of the story so dramatically. It was interesting because you know here she had spent years in Mexico, she'd done her research, she, you know had managed to really gather things, and the way that sounded real authentic, if you will. And yet this one tiny authentic in authentic moment. Absolutely blew up the whole book for me. So, you know, how much of it is something that I mean I think we we need. Yes, authenticity is important. No authenticity is not important. Because, ultimately, we also have to create languages for some of this stuff you know. When, when I translated Juno Diaz, there was so much invention involved in that. You know, as you probably know he is prodigious with the use of the word fuck. I mean it's everywhere. And the interesting thing about fuck is that it's everything it's a noun it's a verb it's an adjective it's a command it's it's whatever you want it to be in it's the most flexible word in English. There is no such word in Spanish. What to do. You know, so we ended up I ended up coming up my reasoning being everybody in Latin America knows this word. Because everybody in Latin America goes to the movies. And when they go to the movies they watch American movies. So of course they know the word clock. And so I just spanglesized it I just made it fucking. And fuck. So this was invention. You know, it does that word actually exist in Spanish of course not. Not necessarily as ubiquitous as it appears in that particular text. Absolutely not. But it is true to the character that he was writing. You know, he uses that word that character so much so and to eliminate that word or to use the Spanish Spanish equivalent would have completely undermined. You know, his voice and I literally mean his voice not just meaning but his voice the rhythm, the sort of pounding the musicality the way I wanted to be real to that too. Because the thing about Juno as a writer is that he does that right he creates these soundscapes as much as he creates meaning and as much as he creates seen. I don't know if that answers you in any way with. I'm feeling good about that answer. I want to build on another question that Liz had asked in another context, where you both talked about the impact of US queer culture on your respective regions, Poland and Latin America. Liz was actually asking about the opposite as you translate Latin American texts for audiences in the US. Is there any sense in which that too can become an attempt to shape US queer culture through the impact of these other places and these other experiences. And has either of you seen it go in that direction as well. Well, I mean, do American readers actually in any way shape or form. Give a cultural dam about anybody else. I mean, you know, I'm not sure. I don't know. I mean, you know, obviously when you're translating from. You can see from Cuba from the Dominican Republic from, you know, Uruguay, whatever. You know, it's important to reflect some of that. Do I think about how this might influence American culture in some way. No, I never think about it because because here's the thing. I think, like I was saying earlier, we're already so in Latin America we're already so drenched in American culture. We're already such a very complicated place I mean there's nothing authentic about Latin America in the sense that we're fused we're constantly fused. You know, the Italian influence is phenomenal in Argentina it's non existent in Cuba. You know the the indigenous presence in Mexico is, is amazing and an extraordinary and it's absolutely, you know, non existent in, you know, the Dominican Republic, in terms of popular culture right. You know, we're, we're so different and, and, and we're, we're such a mix of things already that it's very hard to talk about authenticity. I think it's, it's, it's a very problematic term you know it like I love when people try to talk to say about authentic Cuban cuisine what the hell is authentic Cuban cuisine. You know, rice and beans don't make any sense on an island where it's 90% humidity, all the time and you have to spend six hours, you know, stirring those beans I mean you're going to die. So, um, I mean obviously I came from somewhere else you know I mean, you know, when, when we make to stone is, you know, that's not from there either, you know, I mean that came from Africa. You know, I, I, it, and the notions of, of who we are is also very perverse I mean I, the, the, here's an example that the Cuban capital building the capital building in Havana is the exact replica of the US capital building slightly smaller. Every Cuban on the planet will tell you ours came first. And historically, we know that's not true. And the whole explanation of it from the architects is that it's based on some French thing. I mean it's nuts. You know there are all these myths that we have about ourselves, in part because we're such a mix and we know very little about, you know, so much of the, of how we all got here or, or we don't want to talk about how we all got here because it involves rape and conquest. And it's funny that you mentioned the capital, it looks very different now because the Russians gilded the dome. Right away that resemblance. Pretty evocative, pretty evocative. And that adds a whole other thing, right. Oh, totally. I have four questions that have come in. Allison, do you want to. There's so far we have one short question and one rather long question so I'm going to go with the short one first in the hope of getting both of them in. This one is for Archie. How do you translate the food slang used in Spanish to refer to lesbians. That is very, very complicated. You know, I've only done that with poetry and so that gives me a whole lot more license to play. And also I keep a lot of it and in in Spanish, even though there might be English equivalents. You know, it. I mean, you can say Guava, but Guava is a better word, you know, it just feels differently in the mouth. It's a little bit longer. You know, and I think the orality, the oral aspect of language, the food and sex stuff and especially in the Caribbean. It's really tough, but it's also really fun. I think you can, you can use a lot of food terminology I think a lot of the. Like I said, I think a lot of the ingredients necessarily stay in Spanish for me, not because they're necessarily specifically understandable words, but because sound wise. It's more sense. You know, that I mean, I'm sorry, but subversive just is not the same as one that one. One that one sexy. So here's another question this one is from Jeffrey angles who was one of our conversationalist last week. And who translates and writes in Japanese. His question is Carol Dinshaw has pointed out the one of the reasons that we gay people translate is because we're reacting to the paucity of the archive of information about gay lives in the past, trying to mobilize more resources for our own personal well being and our fight against compulsory heteronormativity in choosing text for translation how much do you take these thoughts into consideration. To what degree are you consciously trying to heal yourself or the field of queer literature by trying to overcome the historical suppression of queer work. Great question. Yeah, I mean that was something I thought about very concretely with with this book, especially because it's nonfiction it is a historical book. And I'm not, I am not a queer historian but I'm also not mega aware of history books in English about pre Stonewall life behind the iron curtain. And so I felt like there was a gap and it was something that people would be interested in reading about regardless of whether they're interested in Poland. I mean, I, as far as choosing texts, I always say to people I don't choose the text the publisher chooses the texts, ultimately, you know, and, and I think with queer literature there's another dynamic which is that the amount of queer literature that's being produced in a given country is not you know it's not the same everywhere it's very dependent on what the political situation is in that country. Poland for a place that's pretty homophobic is do it does okay in terms of producing queer literature but it's not as though they're swimming in it, you know, and it's something that I'm always on the lookout for you know it's I try to pitch around but whether people are going to be interested over here or not I was very lucky that you know open letter was interested in publishing this book and it is something that I hope you know historians will get their hands on, as well as just ordinary readers. But I do in terms of my own healing that part I'm not I'm not so sure about at least not in the context of this book. I think that anything that D centers American queer history and queer experience and particularly white gay male American history and experience is good and is good for us and is good for all of us so. Yeah, I, you know, I never. I never think about the notion of healing through any of this stuff in part because I that presumes a condition that I don't embrace. And, and I, I am a big reader of history and a big lover of history and I, if I had life to do over again I think one of the things I would probably do is skip journalism and study history. I'm always drawn to it and, and my, my, my own personal work is always filled with historical stuff I'm always, especially the little weird stuff in history the the stuff that you, you know, that's always sort of fascinating. But, um, I think. I mean, I'm with Sean I mean usually the publisher chooses. Sometimes I very much want to do something I very much wanted to do and I will see us. I don't see Portela's work 100 bottles on the wall, which we ended up calling just 100 bottles I, I, I very much, you know, through that at the University of Texas and, you know, I thought it was a brilliant not just around issues of queerness but also in terms of sex in general and in terms of the Cuban Revolution and in terms of how people operate when they're in isolation and they're trapped and they're crowded and it's also very funny, very sad and tender book it's also very violent in some ways. And, you know, I, I'm drawn to the story. I'm drawn to language I'm drawn to, to how writers convey particular things, you know, I mean there's some writers who I think may have more interesting historical work to offer. But if the story itself doesn't rock me, if the language doesn't grab me and I tend to be less interested, you know, you know, right now if I if I had a choice of projects. I'm not the right translator for it but if I had a choice of projects I would, I would really want to do Carolina de Robertis cantoras, which is actually an English novel. But it's a, it's a, it's written in English, but it's about Uruguayan dykes, it takes place in Uruguay. She's Uruguayan, she wrote it about a time under dictatorship where these women had to create their own lives and figure out who they were in all these different ways. And it's a brave book. But I don't know Uruguayan Spanish, well enough to really pull it off. And it needs a translator who, who will love it in, in, you know, in, in its natural tongue, you know, but I mean, what an amazing book. And I wish in terms of queer literature right now that book just sings to me in all these very important ways. Maybe it will find its translator because maybe somebody out there in Europe. You're a quiet listeners. We are out of time. This was amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you for putting it together. Lastly, we'd like to thank our partners again how round Penn America, the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Martin E. Segal Theater Center. Thank you. We hope to see you next week. Bye.