 Hello and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a translator of Spanish and French and professor at the City University of New York and I'm here with Allison Mark and Powell who translates Japanese literature, works with the Penn Translation Committee and has been a driving force co-organizing translating the future, the conference that you're now attending. As you know, massive protests are taking place not only in the United States but across the globe in response to the racist murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmad Arbery and so many other black people and to the historical and ongoing political and economic systems that perpetuate this violence. For those who want to learn more about the thinking behind these protests, the Mina Reese Library at the City University of New York Graduate Center has prepared a list of anti-racism and Black Lives Matter resources available to all on the homepage of their website. First on that list is a short film called Geographies of Racial Capitalism which is about Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the renowned abolitionist geographer who directs the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center. I urge everyone who hasn't seen this film to watch it. I go down this path in order to think globally, Professor Gilmore says in the film, every problem, however particular and local, has an international dimension. It is the intercultural multilingual dimension of this thinking that translation, the kind of translation this conference supports is working to connect. Thank you Esther and thank you all for joining us for the fifth installment of our weekly series. A Manifesto for Our Time, a presentation of the work in progress to revise and update the Manifesto on Translation that was drafted by the Penn Translation Committee in 1969 and presented at the 1970 conference, The World of Translation, which our conference commemorates. Today we'll be joined by Elizabeth Lowe, Matthew Harrington and Larissa Kaiser, who are all part of the Manifesto Drafting Committee, who can read their full and glowing bios on the Center for the Humanities website. We are particularly grateful to the Breadlove Translators Conference for generously sponsoring today's conversation. We are thrilled to be a part of their dream loaf, launching today virtually since we cannot gather together in the mountains of Vermont. And we'll soon hear introductory remarks from the Director of Breadlove, Jennifer Cross. Two and a half years ago, when we began planning this 50th anniversary conference, we knew that we would seize the opportunity to rewrite the Manifesto on Translation. The Manifesto Drafting Committee, as well as the Conference Planning Committee, is made up of volunteers from the Penn Translation Committee, has been meeting regularly over the past years and months, updating the General Committee on our progress. The working draft of the Manifesto's Call for Action, which will be discussed today, in addition to the original Manifesto, can be viewed on both the Center for the Humanities page for this event, as well as on the HowlRound site, where this is live streaming. 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 conferences originally planned dates in late September, several larger scale events will happen. We'll be here every Tuesday until then with compelling conversations about the past, present, and future of literary translation and its place in the world where we now find ourselves. Please join us next Tuesday at 1.30 for Translating Plays and Playing with Translation, a conversation between Aya Ogawa and Jeremy Chiang about their multi-lingual playwriting work and translation. And please check the Center for the Humanities site for future events in the series. 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 today's panelist, Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translation resources at penn.org. Today's conversation will be followed by Q&A. Please email your questions for Elizabeth, Matt, and Larissa to translating the future 2020 at gmail.com. We'll keep the 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 livestream, our recording will be available afterward on the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities sites. Before we turn things over to Jennifer Grotz, we'd like to offer our sincere gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Penn America. Jennifer, over to you. I have been enthusiastically virtually attending this Translating the Future series since its launch five weeks ago, so I'm happy to be here with you today. And I've been asked to say a few opening words because originally this panel was scheduled to take place at the Breadloaf Translators Conference in Vermont. So much about our world has changed since we made those plans months ago. And as Allison and Esther began to address last week and began today, it's crucial to acknowledge that this conversation we're about to have is taking place while our country is still in the midst of a tremendous societal upheaval and protest against unchecked police brutality in the embedded systemic racism of the United States. Many of us spent the past weekend mourning, peacefully protesting, and honoring the memory of George Floyd, and of Breonna Taylor, and of Ahmad Arbery, and of too many others who should still be alive today. Many of us are taking opportunities to engage in the necessary practical ways to help in this moment, from donating to bail funds, calling our representatives, distributing food, water, and masks, protesting in the streets, and sharing reading lists. Many of us are coming to this conversation late and have some catching up to do. We at Breadloaf have as our mission to provide training and community to writers and translators. We know that writers and translators and communities such as ours can and must play an essential role in the exposure, examination, and resistance to anti-blackness. I would like to encourage Breadloafers all over the United States and beyond, and to anyone listening today, to continue to contribute in the ways that you can to the struggle of the present moment, by way of protesting and donating, but also by way of reading, writing, translating, and having the courage to have the difficult and uncomfortable discussions with each other about what we as individuals and what our institutions must do to dismantle systemic racism and anti-blackness. Finally, I also want to announce that our virtual version of the Breadloaf translators and environmental writers conferences is being launched today. As you know, the reckoning our country is having right now is also in the midst of a global pandemic and a climate and crisis. And as we also know, these problems are all deeply interconnected. We hope the virtual offerings that we will offer foster and sustain important conversation this week and beyond among writers, translators, and activists. These lectures, readings, and panels will be made live daily on our website and are entirely free. You were warmly invited to watch, discuss on social media, and help spread the word. Thank you. And with that, I will turn it over now to our panelists. On our website and our entirety free, you were warmly invited to watch, discuss on social media, and help spread the word. Hello. Good afternoon, everyone. I think we agreed that I would just start off with a few framing comments, and then we'll launch into our conversation. So it's really an honor to participate in this historic event, along with our hosts, Allison and Esther, and Jennifer Grotes from Breadloaf Middlebury College and my co-panelists, Larissa and Matt. I'll start off our discussion by giving you a brief background of our charge. Together, we'll discuss our work in progress and some of the issues we encountered, such as a discussion on the register and style of Manifesto. Following that introduction, we'll address three at five bullet points and that are now in the current call to action. And then the, of course, I have to mention that the call to action is not yet complete. Matt will address translation as creative writing and I will offer some thoughts on the responsibility of translators and Larissa will look at the responsibility of publishers. We look forward to your questions and to discussing those at the end of our presentation. Elizabeth, I'm just going to jump in real quick. I think one of us might have a bit of an echo happening right now. Before we keep going, it might make sense for us to just close any open windows. Right, I just saw that message. Thank you so much. Continue. Okay, great. So we started working together systematically as a volunteer subcommittee within the Penn Translation Committee in December of 2019. Little did we know at that time how much the world was going to shift under our feet in the coming months and that's been addressed in the introductory comments. Our charge was to analyze the original manifesto dated September 1969 and signed by Robert Payne, Chair of the at that time 19 member Penn Translation Committee. This document contained a call for action and sections on the rights of translators, translator conference, professorships in translation, prizes, publishers, translations from the Russian, untranslated work, untranslated work, index of translations, and a journal for translators. It was prefaced by resolution with nine urgent recommendations for the attention of translators and publishers. This Bill of Rights was presented by Robert Payne at the opening session of the World of Translation Conference on May 11th in 1970. While our profession has made great strides in the last 50 years, many pressing concerns of course remain. Our working group found a few things notably missing from the original, a recognition of translators as creative writers in their own right, an aesthetics of translation, a standard of ethics, and a call to action in the context of rural geopolitics, advocacy, and activism. We came up with a series of questions to consider and then we each volunteered to draft updates for each section. These included what is our mission, our timeline, were there a rata in the original version, what were the end goals, how will we seek review and comments from the larger community, and where will the new version live and how will it be disseminated. We discussed holding focus groups at Bredlov Kenyon College and Alta at the University of Arizona, among other venues, and then as the reality of the pandemic hit, the organizers of the 2020 conference moved swiftly to this online forum. So our work has been conducted mostly online, and now is the time where we can start to talk about that, how we processed our work, what was it like developing this kind of a project in the online environment, and what all of this led to. So Larissa and Matt. I think it's been a really interesting, I mean, this is the kind of work that in some ways really lends itself to a digital and a virtual environment, and I think it does have some major benefits. One of the things that we've talked about in smaller groups and as a larger drafting committee has just been trying to progressively bring in new voices, new eyes, new contributors to this project, and that's something that's still ongoing because we're still actually quite early in the drafting process. But being able to work online means that, for instance, we can connect with you, Elizabeth, in Gainesville, and we can connect with you, Matt, in Philadelphia, and not just be fully centered on the New York Translation Committee or community where the committee is. We have another committee member who's in Arizona, and I think it's really important to bring in all of those perspectives from different parts of the country. Yeah, I was just going to say it's been great to have something to do in the context of the quarantine where we're all getting together on a weekly basis and having a real practical channel into which to fit the work that we all do in the absence of anywhere to go. I think it's also, I mean it does actually, I think translators as a community are so disparate. We're working on different languages, different texts, we're all over the place. It's often seen as a quite solitary job, and so having one single document, this is such an enormous undertaking in some ways in such a staggering sort of responsibility. But to be able to look at this document together and get all these comments from people when they're able to work on it, or to do these little breakout sessions that some of us do, to work on specific areas, it really does foster a much stronger sense of, for me at least, it has fostered a real strong sense of translators as a community. I would agree with that, Larissa. Not only that, this has allowed, this opportunity has allowed many of us, as you said, working in different locations to be together on a regular basis and to discuss issues of common concern. And also, we come, each of us comes at this from a very different perspective based on what we've been doing in our careers and in our lives and our various experiences with languages and cultures. So it's really been a very productive process. And of course, as we stress, this is just a process that's in its beginnings. So we have tried to articulate a framework for talking about and drafting a new manifesto, but it's definitely a work in progress. Yeah, I mean, it's really been interesting just in terms of what kinds of issues we all sort of have a kind of broad agreement about, but we have different ways of talking about. And I think that that's been one of the real challenges that we've confronted is something like figuring out even what the register for this, for this document is. And I'm thinking in particular about, I think that we all have sort of agreed that something that's missing today is a more robust conceptual vocabulary to talk about what translation is and how it works. Like there's a tendency to talk about translation or a translation as if it were the source text, or there's reviews that seem to limit their commentary to sort of empty phrases like eloquently translated or inventive or meets the energy of the original. And so I think that was something we're all real can really concerned with about putting out there sort of this conceptual vocabulary. But how do we do that has been a big question without sacrificing complexity, while also maintaining a language that's really accessible for translators from all the different experiences of the diversity of experiences that Elizabeth is speaking to. Right. I mean, I think one of the things that has been really complicated is, I mean, we want this to speak to the largest number of translators possible, I mean, to the extent that we can. And that's part of why we need to continue to reach out to more translators working all over the place and with different kinds of experiences like you're saying. But like there's this, I think there's this minor tension between, you know, academic language and academic concepts for those of us who are working within academia, and then for those of us who are working outside of that and, you know, want to have sort of like a more colloquial conversation without losing the complexity. Also aesthetics like you said, Elizabeth, didn't figure anywhere in the first Manifesto. And so, you know, we want to make it beautiful, we want to talk about creativity and inventiveness to borrow the term you use, Matt. So, yeah. Yeah, we've also come a long way in terms of the richness of discourse that is used to talk about translation and translation studies. The language that was used 50 years ago was a very different kind of language to describe the translation process and even to inquire into the nature of translation. And that is one thing that has progressed in the last 50 years, is the discourse on translation. So we have to in some way be able to reflect that new conceptual universe, but without over making it overacademic. And so the question of register has been quite an issue with us. The other thing that we discussed, and Matt did some research on this, was what does a Manifesto sound like anyway? And how much of that tone and register should we be striving for and, you know, comparing it with the 1970 piece? Where do we want to be with this in terms of the language and tone that we use? Do you, either of you remember, just in terms of talking about the language, do either of you remember what was the phrase in the original, like too long translators have labored and it was it was this very there is this way that translators are framed in the original for good reason. But it's it's it's it's quite beleaguered, for lack of a better word at the moment. So the original call for action started this way. The time for has come the time has come for translators to come out into the open and to agree on a common course of action. For too long may have been the lost children in the enchanted forest of literature. Which is but also one of the things I really like about what we're doing in the original in this this rewriting is we're sort of reframing where we as translators are on a multitude of levels. I like we've thought really consciously about being, you know, direct in what our demands are and also talking in in terms of not just affirmations for the sake of affirming, but like what we have achieved where we where our places, but also what our responsibilities are to each other and to the greater literary community. And I personally really like that reframing of how we see ourselves. Exactly. So we we did the original manifesto had like well I listed those those different sections of the document, but then it also had those nine urgent recommendations. And at first we kind of came up with a similar list, but then decided it might be more useful to categorize them into groups. So we would have five, at least for now five categories. And then under that we would have separate bullet points. And so it was, I think that that brought us a little bit of clarity and of course that could change but basically the five bar translation is a form of writing translation must be sustainable as a likelihood translators have responsibilities. Publishers have responsibilities and institutions have responsibilities. And then under that we we came up with some bullet points which are still in progress. But we picked three of those bullet points to kind of focus on today. And one of them we were going to talk about translation is a form of creative writing or is creative writing. And then we were going to talk about the response one aspect or two of the responsibilities of translators and then the responsibilities of publishers. So I'm wondering Matt if you would like to take a stab at what we've been talking about with writers running with translation as creative writing or translation is creative writing. Yeah, I can jump in there. So I thought that I would just start doesn't make sense to just read the call. Yeah, sure, I think so. So it reads we call on everyone who engages with translation to acknowledge translation as a creative art in its own right. Translation must be understood as a specialized form of writing translators shape texts and social and cultural contexts based on aesthetic sensibilities and interpretations of their own that are inseparable from those contexts. And so I thought I could just sort of speak to this call and kind of break it down by way of example into three kind of categories. One is creative art in its own right. Another is translation as a specialized form of writing. And the final one is, you know, how is this occurring in social and cultural contexts? And obviously, all of those are interrelated. But I thought we could think quickly of a kind of example that's been really thought provoking for me recently, which is a review I read of Sophie Hughes's recent translation of Fernanda Melkor's Temporada de Orocanes or Hurricane Season by David Kurnick, who's actually a translator himself. And this was in public books recently. And so the novel is a crime novel of a kind set in a fictional Mexican state that bears resemblance to bear crews where Melkor is from. And Kurnick points us to a revealing example of how Hughes's translation choice is, inflect the novel's tone. So she takes the word, um, cacerón, or the, yeah, the, the noun cacerón, which could be for, for Kurnick, a large rambling house. And she translates that to a shitty dump of the house in quotes. So as a little exercise, I thought that we could just keep this example in mind as I, as I go through those, those three parts I mentioned. So first in, in thinking of translation as a creative art in its own right, I think that for us, in all of our conversations, that really comes out of the fact that we want to really think of translations as having lives of their own. So there's this tendency to sort of think of a translation as, you know, exactly the same as, as what it translates. But actually these take on new meanings translations do as they circulate in the culture and language of the, in the cultures and languages of the United States. So they're always connected to this prior text, but they also have this kind of autonomy from it. And that's really what makes it this sort of creative art in its own right. So translators have to be creative and inventive in puzzling out how aspects of the translation will resonate and be inflected in English. And I think this is sort of maybe it's like deceptively complex work, I think, I think you might both agree. And so it's not just sort of the words on the page, but it's also a narrative point of view, setting, character or style, all of these kinds of things. And all of those things have precedence and in the kind of fiction we read in the United States. So we have to sort of know how it's going to be in dialogue with that. And so I think, you know, the phrase, a shitty dump of the house is a sort of perfect example, because there's all these representations of Mexico and places in Mexico circulating out there, especially crime novels, and that immediately enters into dialogue there. So it's not to sort of dig its own views, but we can sort of think of her choice in that kind of context and ask questions about it and think about what kind of creative strategy she was employing there. Or even with poetry, you know, if we start thinking about the sonic quality of words or meter, it's not an innocent decision to choose iambic pentameter, for example. It's like it's not just aesthetic, it's also social and political because that meter was used to represent everyday speech and something like Shakespeare. So moving to translation as a specialized form of writing, this we really wanted to get into the call as the idea that, you know, everyone engaged with translation needs to have some sort of renewed awareness about everything that I've been mentioning, that these decisions require creativity and also interpretation. So a translator has to interpret the text they're translating based on their knowledge of another language and culture, but then they also do further interpretive work to write the text in English. But what becomes even more complex or specialized, I think, is that our work doesn't end there because our work also entails comparing two cultures. So we're comparing languages and cultures as we do this, and we're sort of framing for a reader the experience of another language and culture. And that means that we're not just readers of what we're translating, but we also have to be really astute readers of culture and literary traditions. We have to know what gets translated into English and why, how it gets translated, all of these sorts of things. And that really pushes us towards the social and cultural aspects, which is that, you know, as we may be able to tell, you know, with language out there that's representing, you know, foreign places, for example, as or places that are outside of the US as quote, shithole countries or something like this. And aesthetic decision to use any kind of phrase like that is immediately in dialogue with those kinds of representations. And so it has these, these sociocultural and political implications. So on that score, I think we're doing work that's almost sociological because we have to account for that kind of social impact. And so these choices aren't just personal, they're, they can sort of make us complacent or they can shake things up. And I think that, you know, coming back to the example, hurricane season is a really interesting example for me because with novels like American Dirt out there, it sort of raises the question of, you know, do we take characters humanity for granted from the beginning? Or are we more, as I think Melkor does, and and Kernick suggests it does, or are we more in the direction of American Dirt, which sort of could maybe be thought of as taking on the perverse task of convincing us of people's humanity in really adverse circumstances. So that's just a way to, I think, you know, open up all of the dimensions that are sort of involved and why we're calling on people to really think about this whole host of issues that are involved in doing this sort of specialized creative writing work. All of these calls actually overlap in some way. And the aesthetic portion is something that we consider in judging translations. In fact, I was on a jury recently for the 2020 Penn Translation Award. And we discussed this issue of domestic, domestication versus foreignization and how these are aesthetic choices to try to echo the original as strongly as possible in the receiving language. And oftentimes, that doesn't sit too well with the host audience, or with the host publishers. Oftentimes, that becomes a decision that could be a barrier to publication. And that's something I think that Larissa might have something to say about, you know, the openness of literary journals and publishers, too, that to the literature of unheard voices and voices that do not usually find expression in mainstream languages, such as English. I have the very good luck. And it pushes me as a translator all the time to work with authors who are writing in Icelandic who are quite weird and make very odd choices. And I think what I've been thinking about as you've been talking about all this mad is is this impulse that I have, which comes from a, you know, well-meaning place, but to sort of restructure or smooth out some of these very weird wordings because there's an odd word choice that is a compound word in Icelandic. And it's totally normal compound word. But the pieces of that word sort of indicate kind of direct meaning in a way that you won't get in English because we don't use that formation, or the word is just completely different. And so I just got done having a series of arguments about I think one, it was like at one tense in a first in the first sentence of a four page poem. And we argued about this for four hours. And it was great because I was trying to explain like, well, English works this way, this is how I would say it. And we were going through all these different examples. And when it comes down to it, it's actually okay that it's weird. And I don't need to, I don't need to pave that path for English readers. They'll get it, they'll work with the poem if they want to work with the poem, as long as I am honoring that weirdness basically. But it was an interesting moment for me when I realized that like as much as I love this work, and I'm spending all this time on this work because of these odd aesthetic choices, I am still inherently trying to package it in a way that will be more palatable or what I think will be more palatable for whatever audience it is I'm imagining. And, and I think it really, it, it, it does a disservice to readers, it does a disservice to American ideas of what artists is, is out there and what people are doing in other places. And, and this kind of taps into something that I'll talk about in a little bit with the, with the publisher call. But I think that we can, we can be a little bolder with what we think that people will, will receive and enjoy and be able to take aesthetically. And, and so I, I'm glad that we're hashing out all of these, these different implications in that in this particular call. So that kind of is a great segue into the call that I was supposed to comment a little bit on, which is translators have responsibilities and it comes in two parts. So the first is we call on translators to educate themselves and others to understand the cultural, social, political, and linguistic contexts in which they work, and how translation can impact asymmetrical power relations. And that one, that piece of that part of the call is particularly applicable to those of us who teach translation. And we address many of those things you were just talking about, you know, the importance of rendering weirdness when things are weird and the importance of the ear and in fact, Robosa Gregory Robosa in his address on May 11th to the 20 the 1970 conference talked about the ear in translation. And he was notorious for saying, you know, as we have to tune the tin ear and ward off tone deafness. And so that's, that's one thing we obviously try to do in translation classes and depth of linguistic knowledge is obviously a foundational skill. But also translators have the responsibility to educate themselves broadly in the social, political, and cultural context of the the source and the receiving texts. So this in turn implies a great, you know, fostering a sense of curiosity, intellectual curiosity, teaching our students to ask the right questions, honing their research skills. Research is an important part of translation, and acquiring the tools and resources to do the job well. So it's not uncommon to expect of translators some kind of background in linguistics area studies, specialized fields. And then I think finally, I would say that we try to help young translators become more self reflective about their practice, because what we have to do is learn to write about our practice. We have to write paratex, prefaces, introductions, pitches to publishers, we have to really articulate what we do, why we do it, what aesthetic choices we made, what political choices we have made in bringing these works forward. And this is whether or not we are doing, we are simply trying to pitch a translation on our own, or whether we've commissioned been commissioned to do a translation. I'd also like to just quickly say that educating younger translators is a way of bringing in more diversity into the translation world. And I think I see encouraging signs of that happening in our classrooms where younger translators of diverse ethnic and racial and national backgrounds are coming in and linguistic backgrounds are coming into the classes. And I find that very heartening and encouraging. Finally, in terms of the pedagogy of translation, having the good sense to recognize when we cannot take on a translation task when it really is not a good fit for us, and knowing when to hand it over to someone who can do a much better job. So learning a bit of humility is really important. And then the second part of that call is we challenge the tendency to assimilate texts from distinct cultural and historical contexts into a universalizing account of human experience. That's been quite a focus of of conversation for us. And I was wondering, Matt, Larissa, if you might like to just comment briefly on that. Well, actually, I mean, I was actually thinking as you were talking before Larissa about, you know, when Larissa and I met, we met at a workshop at Breadlope, actually. And I remember that you're working on this story where you were trying to account for in the choices you were making as a translator, the way that social media was represented. Was it in Icelandic context? Yeah, I think it was the use of Facebook, like the prominence of Facebook. Yeah, so I mean, something like that, you know, it seemed like the challenge you were confronting was how to render this in a way that wouldn't seem dated in a US context. But the way that it was being thought about or dealt with there, like, could risk seeming dated, even though really that's the way that they were talking about it there. So I think that that, you know, is a great example of how with something like the internet, even it can seem like we have this illusion of this universalized experience because we're all on, you know, this same network in a sense, but the way that social media is experienced in different places is completely different. So Victor Hugo wrote a preface to his son's translation of Shakespeare's works, and he said, when you offer a translation to a nation, that nation will almost always look on the translation as an act of violence itself against itself. Bourgeois taste tends to resist the universal spirit. To translate a foreign writer is to add to your own national poetry. Such a widening of the horizon does not please those who perform it, at least not in the beginning. The first reaction is one of rebellion. So in a way, you know, everything also leads back to political choices and aesthetic and political choices are very closely intertwined. But this resistance to universalization and suppressing, you know, that diversity of voice is something I feel we have really talked about in our manifesto drafting process. And we want to get away from this idea of Eurocentrism and representing the world in familiar ways. We want to de-familiarize the literary experience through translation. Well, I think, Matt, you have some really interesting things to say, or like brought up some interesting ideas related to who talked about tokenization, particularly in our little breakout sessions, and this idea that you have one, you know, in my case, Icelandic writer, and that Icelandic writer becomes representative of an entire literary history that, you know, spans back to the Vikings. And like, you, we, it's not even just that we are trying to suppress this difference without maybe even trying, but that we kind of, we pick and choose and then, and then that that's just enough. Like we have the, we have the one Peruvian author we don't need to, like as if like that's going to stand in for everything. And so these, these choices that we make an individual text are, I think, doubly important. Because if you get, if you are just genuinely going to get one Icelandic or one Ecuadorian or one Estonian author, you want that author to be that author, to be that specific author, not all authors that just sort of feeds into whatever ideas we have of these countries already. Yeah, right. I mean, we talked about sort of how important that is, especially because I think, you know, one continuity that we've identified between now and 1970 is that since there's, since, since translations make up such a small portion of the US book market, there's there's limited space by virtue of that for having a whole array of texts that represent a big literary tradition in a particular place. And so yeah, I think it does create that that feeling of a kind of double-weighted responsibility, but also the sense in which we need to transform the sort of publishing infrastructure in the United States to, to have more space for translation, so that, so that that kind of tokenization doesn't happen, that that's a component of it, that if we had more access to these things, we would have a sense of these, these literary traditions in their own context in a sense, as opposed to just one text, you know. And, which is a great segue to, to our last bullet point, which is, so the call that I, we can just dip into kind of quickly is, because I think we're running out of time for Q&A. We call on the American publishing community to radically alter its relationship with the translation community to support and nurture translators and translation opportunities as a means to collaboratively challenge the American literary industry and landscape. And I see this as having a lot of, a lot of pieces, but I think it's, I think it's a positive thing. I think, I think it's about completely changing our ideas of what the, like American readership is ready for, of what can publishers can do. There is, there is an immense amount of risk in economic risk in, in publishing in general, but particularly for small processes, many of which have already been doing this work for ages, but, but there is a lot of risk associated with the translation. A lot of times you don't know what you're getting entirely, you have maybe like a 10 or 20 page sample, you're sort of trusting a reader's report or a translator's report to say, yes, this is like, this is great, you should do this. It's in a language that maybe someone at the press doesn't speak. And you have to pay two people, you have to pay the translator, you have to pay the author, like there is risk involved. And I think part of what we're talking about with this particular call is for larger publishers especially that are in the position to, to sort of shift this landscape, to, to be bolder about the choices that they're making and to work, like collaboration is a big part of it, to, to see translators as, as resources, as experts, as partners in this process, because, you know, there's all of these people who have these brilliant ideas and, and awarenesses of these exciting things happening in other literary traditions. And, and like, why not tap into that? And why not ask these people and make yourself more open to that? And, and also in terms of just expanding the, the kinds of voices that were even that are even under consideration is just to, to nurture translators who are coming into translation, translators who are working class where who are poor translators working from rural areas to create these mentorships and industry sponsored training programs or residencies, things to really build up the community of translators so that we have access to this just broader more exciting field of literature and, and, and doing that together. And, and, and I don't know, looking at it as an opportunity instead of just thinking about, you know, the, the, the, you know, Americans will never read that, that's too, like, it just don't even, I don't believe that. So I think that this, this call is all about, about sort of harnessing the, the, the money and the resources that are there and filtering it towards translators who can then turn back around and be helpful to the industry and really invigorate it. Thank you so much for this engaging conversation. I know because I've been a part of this committee myself that, that we've only just scratched the surface of all the things that we can discuss in the manifesto and the call for action, but I think you've done a wonderful job and we have some really meaty questions to that I'm happy to bring to you. There's a little bit of overlap between some of them. So I'm going to, I'm going to read you the one of the first questions that came in is a very long question. It has multi parts. I'm just going to read the whole thing and then we can decide how we're going to dive into it. How do groups like Penn Translation and Alta advocate for literary translators and how could they do so more effectively? Yes, they both hold events, promote visibility and Penn has its wonderful grant program. But as far as professional advocacy goes, it seems that when a translator has a contract related question, they are these days referred to the author's guild for help. Where generally Penn has their model contract, but while American publishers are aware of it, many or even most ignore it stating that they have their own in-house contract. As far as writing for fighting for a livable wage for translators, it seems that ever since ATA Alta's last attempt, the oft pointed to antitrust proceedings in the 90s, no one is willing to move past the recommendation stage, which has proven to be easy enough for publishers to sidestep. What do you see the future holding for the literary translation profession as far as being recognized for acquiring legislative legitimacy and how can translation advocates best work to improve our lot when it comes to financial and contractual contractual situations. So there's a lot there. And I think many, I think we are grappling with all of these questions at the same time. And I myself because it's one of the most important all of the, all of the call, everything is interrelated as you've been discussing. And the one item that we didn't really bring that was not brought as a bullet point is the second item after translation as a form of writing is that translation must be sustainable as a livelihood. And I want to emphasize, I personally have emphasized this a lot because I am a working translator. I do not work, I'm not an academic. I support myself as a translator and I feel like this is one of the ways in which we can work towards diversifying our ranks. Because translation has for so long been seen as this sort of like a leisurely or, you know, avocation that many people don't necessarily expect to live off of. And so I think that if we're, you know, we're trying to, we're trying to have these calls, I just wanted to emphasize that they all sort of flow from each other. And they're all so interrelated. And I don't want to steal the, I want to leave this open to each of you to try and answer this, especially. I mean, in terms of the mechanics, like how to actually do this, I have a lot of broad ideas that I need to think more deeply about and do more reading about before I start waxing rapsotic on them. But I will say that on a personal level, I think we use translators need to be more transparent with one another. I think we also need to be particularly, I'm only observing this from the outside, but like I know, like the 10, 15 people who are translating from Icelandic into English, I know who's going to get a job if I don't get it. I know who gets asked before me. I know who gets asked after me. We give each other, you know, references. It's a much smaller thing. But if somebody within that community is working for free, then that hurts all of us. If somebody within that community is undercutting other people's rates, that hurts all of us. But the only way that we know that is if we're open with each other and say like, Hey, you know, like, you're doing that project out of the good of your heart, but like, I am doing the same project, and I need to pay my bills. So like, if you do it for free, like, we all kind of need to be acting as though we're in it together, I think. And I think that if, if somebody says, No, I won't do this because it's the pay is terrible. And then there's 50 other people who will do it. Then then that's, that's only hurting ourselves. So I think that that's one small way. I know that with like larger, like in Spanish, like how many people are working in Spanish, like I know that that has got to be incredibly hard. But there has to be a way for us to start these conversations internally and be more aware of how what we're doing as professionals is actually impacting the livelihoods of other people. So I also think that reaching broader audiences, and now we have this, this online technology to be able to do that and having more frequent discussions of this type would be very helpful. Yeah, I don't have as much to say about this one. I mean, just other than the fact that I think, you know, it really highlights a material aspect of this that, that Allison, you've been, you know, really pushing on throughout the process, you know, with your, with your knowledge of, of the publishing industry. Well, I'm going to read. I'm good. There's some of the questions that have come in. They are sort of overlapping. So Margaret Carson has written in and she says, I'd like to raise two timely and urgent issues, the lack of diversity among translators, literary translators in the US are predominantly white, the manifesto must address the need for increased diversity, what needs to change so this can happen. And I think that we have, we have been discussing this and this is one of our focuses for the call. And then I'm going to intersperse this with another question and then go back because Margaret has two part question. Another, another translator or viewer has written in saying, what are your thoughts on what role discussions of race should have in this manifesto? As we know, American literary translation skews disproportionately disproportionately white, which is especially puzzling, given which populations in this country tend to grow up in multilingual households. How is the issue of race relevant, both on the translator side, and on the side of the writers who are translated, many of whom may be considered people of color in the US, but not in their home context? I'm going to pause there and then we'll go back to Margaret's question because I think the second part of that question, does anyone want to take that? Because I have some. Would anyone like to start? Well, I just wanted to call attention to, there's a, one of our earlier convert, one of the interlocutors in our second week, Madukaza, she published, she edited a collection called Kitchen Table Translation, which really brought this to a lot of people's attention, the idea of who is learning which language is and who is authorized to become a literary translator. And I think that that really brought in a lot of different ways of thinking about it. And I see that that has, that came out, I believe in the summer of 17, 2017. And I feel like even in those three years, it has changed a lot of people's approaches. And I think we need more of that kind of introducing these kinds of concepts and ideas and people to rethink the channels in which people become literary translators. I mean, I think that's, that's part of what we, what we're pointing towards with like this idea of industry funded mentorships, and is sort of like opening those channels so that people can come through. I mean, translation programs, I, I went to a translation program in Iceland, which obviously has like a whole economic thing behind it. But like I paid $300 a semester to go to college or to get a master's degree. I know people here who are in like life crushing debt going into a translation program. So if we, if we broaden our, our, the idea of, of how people can become translators, how we're mentoring them and, and bringing them into it, we can, we can touch more people that way. I think in terms of, I obviously think that it's important that we have translators of color who are working. And also that white translators are really doing what they can to, to be cognizant of the choices that they're making when they're picking texts. Like I don't think that the burden is entirely upon translators of color to be bringing authors of color into English. I think that we all need to be thinking more about how we are making these choices. I mean, in terms of what I can do from Icelandic, like there aren't a lot of writers of color writing in Icelandic, but I can, I can be purposeful about the kinds of voices that I'm bringing out of, of Icelandic. If there are immigrant writers that I can be writing, I think that the other thing, something that Alice and you and I have talked about a little bit is, is working to facilitate translation the other direction. Not that I'm going to be translating Black authors into Icelandic because I just simply can't. But I can make, I can, I can talk about that with my Icelandic colleagues who are translating into Icelandic and facilitate those voices reaching a broader, more global audience as well. So I think that there are different ways that we can, that we can address this on, on personal and, and sort of infrastructural levels. I totally agree with that. I'm working on a project right now to translate Black Brazilian writers and feature them in a forthcoming issue of review that's going to be titled Digital Brazil. And the idea here is to show how these writers are using social media to publish their work because they are not given access to publishing through traditional publishing venues. And so, and I'm also trying to find young translators of color to translate those voices into English. So I agree that it's our responsibility to go out and promote writing and translations of writing by underrepresented voices. Okay, I'm going to jump back to the second part of Margaret's question. The call for action should be for publishers to support and respect translators. She's suggesting respect is the operating word here, not nurture. Respect for translators can be shown through contracts. For example, a translator's pay should not be made dependent on the publisher's success at receiving subsidies. Editing should be done with the translator's collaboration and consent. The call for action must also be a call for increased respect for translators by publishers. And I totally agree with Margaret. I think that has a much better word. Yeah, nothing to disagree with there. Yeah. I, I, I understand, I understand the hitch with nurture. I think when I, I drafted that phrase, that's mine. But when, when I, the idea behind that was specifically about emerging translators is that it can be very hard to break into the publishing industry. And if you don't have a lot of publications, particularly book publications to your name, which how are you supposed to get them until you find your way in? It can, it, giving to respect is, I mean, obviously I think that we should, should we should have that respect from the get go, but like, you have to get to the point where you can be respected. So I think like, you have to, like, there has to be some, for lack of a better word, I will think about it or we can think about it as a committee. But the, there has to be some nurturing. There has to be some support of these, of these emerging translators. Obviously, I agree that respect is a huge, huge part of it. And you need to be seen as an equal collaborator, not as just like a, we're not machines. So yes, I think respect should definitely feature as a, as a part of that call. Unfortunately, we're out of time and we, we didn't get to all of the questions. But I do want to reiterate that this is an ongoing process, this rewriting of the manifesto. And if you are watching this at any point live or in the archive, we are, and you're interested in being a part of it, right to translating the future 2020 at gmail.com. We would love for you to be a part of it. And we welcome your input. And in closing, I would just like to once again thank our partners, 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. Siegel Theater Center with special gratitude to Breadlove Translators Conference, which sponsors, sponsored today's conversation. So thank you to our panelists and to the drafting committee.