 Hello and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a professor at 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 organizing translating the future, the conference that you are now attending. This year's celebration of Juneteenth seemed to resonate further and wider than ever before. Black Artists for Freedom, a collective of black workers in the culture industries, published a statement in which they call cultural institutions to break ties with the police, put their money where their mouths are, advocate for black people, get educated, and to imagine black freedom. On their website, some of the signatories also proclaim what form these imaginings will take. Mitchell S. Jackson, recent Coleman Center fellow and author of Survival Math writes, Black freedom is the space to imagine. It's a space to make mistakes and not have them define the rest of you. It's a sense of solidarity with the diaspora. It's a sense of belonging. It's a place of empowerment. Freedom is rarely given, it must be seized. Thank you Allison, and thank all of you for joining us for the seventh installment of our weekly program. Motherless Tongues, multiple belongings. In this first conversation, part of a mini series that will explore and explode the notion of the mother tongue. We'll hear from Monica de la Torre, Jeffrey Angles and Bruna Dantas Lobato. Monica works with and between languages. Jeffrey is a poet translator and professor whose poetry written in Japanese won the Yomi Uri Prize for literature in Japan. And Bruna is a Brazilian writer and translator whose panel, we're very grateful to her for this, at the 2019 altar conference served as inspiration for this mini series. This series of weekly one hour conversations is the form that transiting 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. And Bruna's next Tuesday at 130 for queer literature, queer legacies, looking forward toward the future of LGBTQ translation, a conversation between Achio Bejas and Sean by moderated by Elizabeth Rose and check the Center for the Humanities site for future events. Translating the future is convened by Pan 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-Lackman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translation resources at pen.org. Today's conversation will be followed by a Q&A. Please email your questions for Monica de la Torre, Jeffrey Angles, and Bruna Dantes Lobato to translatingthefuture2020atgmail.com. We'll keep your questions anonymous unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. And if you know anyone who is 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 Monica, Jeffrey, and Bruna, 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. Segal Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Pan America, and also to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at HowlRound, who are making this live stream possible. And now over to you guys. Thank you, Esther and Allison, for that introduction. And thanks to everyone for tuning in today. This topic is very dear to my heart, especially as someone who's come to English and eventually to translation as an immigrant. And there's often this assumption that one can only have one true language, which is the mother tongue and it's tied to a nation state, right, and it's where your citizenship might come from. But of course, that's often not true, especially as, you know, with global forces, colonialism, I mean, there's so much at play. Our bodies are, they're constantly in movement and our relationships are ever changing. So I would love to begin by hearing a little bit about your relationships to your languages and how you've arrived at the languages you have in that translation. So, Monica, if you could please begin. Thank you for your question, Bruna. And thank you, Allison, Esther, and everyone for being here. Well, it's interesting because I didn't tell my mother this was happening today. Because if I did, she'd be like, What do you mean motherless tongue? Because my mother actually is from is from whom I learned English. So my mother tongue is officially English. Although I did not grow up using my mother tongue, because my mother emigrated to Mexico to study Spanish actually fell in love with my father had me and my family, and got progressively more comfortable with Spanish as we were growing up. So even though maybe when I was born, she did speak English with me because she had just been there for a few years and wasn't that comfortable with it. We gradually kind of boycotted English at home in Mexico City, because we really did not like being seen in public speaking English with my mom and just spoke back in Spanish to her. Technically that is my mother tongue. I was schooled in a bilingual school in Mexico City where, you know, a lot of literature classes happen in English. It was a very good school in terms of its bilinguality and I would visit my mother's family often and had a kind of uncomfortable relationship with English but if I stayed here long enough I would progressively feel a little more comfortable with it but I never imagined I'd be writing an English. It only happened. It was an accident of life that I ended up coming to get an MFA. Not knowing it wasn't my plan. I was going to do something else but the opportunity arose and I came here and I thought, well, what do I do? Do I transit myself every week for workshop? Or do I just give it a try and see what happens? And I started working in English and hence reclaiming my mother tongue. Yeah. Wow, that's fascinating to hear. Yeah, but first of all before I answer the question I want to echo Monica's thanks to everybody here, to Esther, to Allison, to Pen, to Cooney, to the New York Public Library, howl around and everybody else. It's a real honor to be included in this series. So yeah, my interaction with Japanese started when I was 15 years old. I went to Japan as a high school exchange student. I was a boy that had really never been outside of the American Midwest. I think I had seen the ocean twice. I had only seen mountains once or twice in my life. And then suddenly I went to southern Japan in a town that was at the very, very, very end of the big island of Honshu. So it was surrounded on three sides by water. Mountains rising right out of the sea in these wonderful dramatic fashions. And so, like, I felt like I was really seeing the world for the first time. It was this huge jolt outside of my, my ordinary kind of mode of existence that that made me determined, okay, I'm going to learn this language and this is going to be, you know, my second language of expression. And, you know, for a long time I was one of these kind of nerdy, quiet kids that like to sit alone and read poetry and that sort of thing. I began to work on Japanese and eventually went to graduate school in Japanese. You know, I had been writing poetry of my own up until that point in English. But once I encountered graduate school I stopped because I discovered there was, I had naively assumed that that many of the great works that many of the great writers were being translated into English. However, as soon as I began to kind of really dive deeply into Japanese literature, I realized that if this is the field of Japanese literature, this tiny corner is how much we have in translation. You know, just the overwhelming majority of the writing that's happening is not being translated. And recently for an article that it was writing I did. I did a look through through 3% database to see you know how many things are being translated and I found out that there were five books of translation of poetry from Japanese translated in the best year that they have on record. So, you know, I mean that five books in a year that's that's hardly anything. When you consider that there are 14,000 books being published every month in Japan, 14,000. So, so it just, I just was so overwhelmed by how much literature there was that I began to turn to translations to pour all of my love for writing, all of my desire for that into translation. I did that for a number of years. And it was really in 2009 to 2011 when I was when I was living and working in Japan full time that that really I felt that, you know, and I was thinking in Japanese all the time. Everything was in Japanese that it really made sense to kind of sit down and start writing in Japanese again, or start writing in Japanese for the first time I done academic articles and so on in Japanese all along, all along the way but I hadn't actually done that kind of creative writing. But you know one of the wonderful things about doing translation is that it's a really kind of intense form of reading. Right. It's about the closest form of reading that you can possibly have. And so, and so it was in the course of like reading Japanese poets over the course of years that that you know I really felt like I was studying very intensely what people were doing with language, the silences that were in the language, the, you know, the particular modes of expression the choices of language and so on. And that very special form of reading, I think, naturally, sort of lends itself to writing if you're kind of a writerly personality. I pulled something off my wall that I wanted to show you. Maybe you can see in the back there's a bunch of things hanging on the wall. There's a little space up there that's now blank. And I pulled this off. This is a this is something that with the writer Takahashi Mutsuo had written some years ago when he was giving a lecture at the Kennedy Center and I was translating for him. He just wrote this as a little diagram, but he wrote the word Yomu, which in Japanese means to read. And then he also wrote the classical Japanese word for to compose poetry, which is also Yomu. The point was that is that, you know, these two words, even though they're, you know, different words they share an etymology in the classical Japanese language. You know, reading is a form of kind of composition, you know, within our minds within our own experiences and translation I think you know it's like one of the most beautiful places where we can see that. But you know it was really from that sort of equation of reading and composing that that led me one step further to actually writing in Japanese. Wow. I love that you'll call Japanese your second language of expression. I think my adopt that, you know, in thinking I definitely think about my languages that way too, especially as it's blurry which one is dominant my dominant language at this point they're both pretty close. But do you think that your relationship to these languages, maybe the proximity you have to them at this point and the sincere loyalty affects how you select the text you translate or what kinds of decisions you make on the page. I really like the fact that you use the word loyalty. It's something that we could spend a lot of time talking about like one's loyalty to a language right, because maybe I'm not going to be I will answer your question but before I answer I just want to say that what it makes me think about is this sense of a possible betrayal when you choose not to write in the language you were expected to write in right so in my case I would have been expected to write in Spanish and I did, and I still do but not to the degree of commitment that I, that I, that I bring to English. And so I think, I think that kind of tension is really productive. And it can't be easily forgotten. Right, like sometimes we, yeah, like what what choices are we making say when we choose to adopt the conventions like Jeffrey was talking about academic writing in Japanese right that is producing a body of knowledge that will be available to a readership and not to another readership or what kinds of imbalances might that produce or what kind of, yeah what what are the, what are the questions that accessibility and the lack of accessibility bring up are really interesting to me and that's something that I wrestle with. Now, your question about what to translate, I think, in terms of loyalties I think is really pertinent as well because what it conjures for me is an opportunity the opportunity that translation gives one to establish a lineage between once creative practice. And the body of work that you choose to read so closely and be so intimate with when we translate. So, one of the things that I was trying to do when I began translating a very long time ago, also out of the sense of like, what, how can it be that American poets and I'm encountering it and then my MFA program and everything have basically three frames of reference for poetry written in Spanish. It's either Octavio Paz, Federico García Lorca, Neruda and some like the really sophisticated people who read outside of that had also read Vallejo, and that was it. And so it was like, I need to do something about it so perhaps it was a bit hubristic you know to try to go like I'm going to rectify this and I'm going to translate all these women poets contemporary women poets will not be translated. I undertook another project that was actually really hubristic, and it was this neo baroque Mexican Spanish refugee poet, head out of the nice who at the time was incredibly difficult to translate, because all the work is super hyper referential like one call might have illusions that back in the pre Internet days will take you a really long time to figure out in order to translate but that's that's what I did that's what I did and I wanted to bring some of the richness of other forms of expression that were resistant to translation precisely because of their complexity. It was that particular type of neo baroque poetry that I thought needed to be brought into English, because precisely the fact that it was so complex was the thing that was making it not appealing to translator so doesn't translate well that was the issue. Wow, that's great. Yeah, I think about loyalty a ton because one of like a complete trader in more than one direction. Another one is because my relationship to the Portuguese language in my case is never going to be national. Right like I'm not tied to the entirety of the country, especially when the country so large and there are so many forms of existence that have nothing to do with me. So in many ways my ties to Portuguese are pretty regional. So I have like a little corner of the country that I'm interested in. And I don't know what kind of translator I would be if you know I had a completely different path. I think my curation process is now completely personal for some people maybe even contaminated which I love like I love a good unsanitized approach to this because now it's it's personal it's full of biases and interest and agendas. Jeffrey I'm sure you have a lot to say about this. I love the fact that almost as soon as we begin to talk about loyalty we begin to talk about betrayal that's something that's really lovely. You know, I think we spend so much time as what when we're kind of in translation mode, thinking about fidelity thinking about this kind of you know, sort of old tired notions that we thought through, you know a million times we're moving forward and forward in a lot of different ways. And of course like the desire to betray becomes stronger and stronger. I think that there is there is something to Monica's statement, you know that by by by you know kind of going out there and choosing particular texts, we are sort of betraying expectations, you know, I really am. One of the reasons that I that I'm interested in writing in Japanese and it's been so much fun is that is that it has betrayed expectations. Um, you know, when I was sitting down to write this book, the, the one that was mentioned in the introduction, but he's okay hand go sound. Um, I, you know, I specifically tried to think about you know what Japanese poets were doing, and try to figure out a kind of twist on that you know to try to figure out some sort of way to do what was happening differently. So, you know, in a way I'm sort of betraying expectations that would write in English, but I'm also trying to betray some of the expectations that exist in the Japanese language in order to open up a new space. You know, when, when I sat down, you know, I'm fascinated with people that sort of betray their own language and, and the wonderful things that happen. You know, if we look back over, you know, English, literary history, we see, you know, all kinds of people, you know, great great great writers, you know, who, who for whom English wasn't the first language, you know, Joseph Conrad, you know, what an interesting quirky stylist he is. You know, there's all sorts of, you know, people like writers from India who have two, three, four languages under their belts and they bring those things into the writing, you know, like Anita Desai or Salman Rushdie, you know, all you know bilingual writers. You know, nowadays we've got Ilya Kaminsky, Don Mice, you know, who are working in English, and, and, and bringing in I think some of the resonances and sounds of their particular language. Yoku Tawada, like who writes both in Japanese and German is like my hero. And I love the fact that she's, you know, she's able to do such quirky things in both of the languages in which she's working. So, you know, so, so betrayal is actually kind of, you know, is the point of departure for for creativity. But there's also, you know, at the same time that we're like we're constantly betraying things I think you know there's also certain kinds of loyalties that are formed in translation I totally agree with you Bruno like you're, I don't feel connected to every writer in Japan by any means. There are certain writers that I love certain writers with whom I feel connected and I want to bring those into English. You know, I like the fact that like, you know, there are there is in translation certain kinds of loyalties that exist, you know, across space, across time, you know, we can fall in love with writers that are dead. We can live in their skin, we can adopt their voice we can, we can, we can be shamans to transfer their, their voices into into a new, into a new world into a new form. So I love these kind of this kind of dual and often sort of conflicting betrayals and loyalties that are constantly at play. I mean, yeah, most households in the world are multilingual. And it is interesting to think about that there aren't enough people for multi legal households coming to translation. There is still I think a lot of pressure one to be to have a relationship with language that's one directional right you have one language and then you learn another versus. I mean I didn't necessarily I didn't choose to betray my mother tongue for example it was a global landscape that pushed me in a certain direction. So, and I think that's fairly common. So, I don't quite know if it is, you know, there's all this phenomenon of people writing in second languages versus it is the natural state for people to write in second languages. And this idea that you only work with one language is actually artificial. I could be luxury for a bit. Thank you. Yeah, because I'm thinking about how modern cultural populations and monolingual populations were engineered right they don't naturally exist. So they're socially engineered for example and like post Holocaust Germany or 18th century France, this desire to have a population be homogeneous is just focus. And I come from a multilingual family though I don't speak their languages. So there's that pressure to there's the constant loss so. Yeah, so I don't know maybe the natural state is already this cross pollination this constant. I like the word contamination because I guess it goes against the purism that sometimes I find in academia for translation being like this pristine thing. Yeah, and also I think a lot about how it is so common to for people's language of instruction, not to be the same as the language they speak at home, either because of colonialism or because like Latin or France, safe French in Russia or something those things are fairly common. And yet, I find that in the United States at least where I live, people are kind of shocked that I work with a second language, as if they've never heard of like this entire past. So how has it been like for you, you know as you're navigating these many currents. How has it been to make the choices you make both on the page but also about the taxi select, and then fight for what you're doing. I feel that you have to defend your allegiances or that it's natural to people accept it fully or not. Is this some kind of push and pull that you have to engage in. I'm just curious about. Yeah, I guess if how well received it is. Okay, we'll follow the order we've established. One of the things you said before you post a question which is this notion of imperialism colonialism doesn't it seem disingenuous that especially in terms of American imperialism right pushing English everywhere right consume pop music consume films consume media but don't speak our language. Don't speak it too well because if you do it's like, Oh, you know English so well how did you, how did you manage it. Well, I have grown up in Mexico where it is impossible not to hear English on a daily basis everywhere right. It's on, it's on cable TV it's on the radio everywhere. So that that just seems a bit disingenuous and I also think of something that David bellows writes about in. Is that a fish in your ear, and this notion that American or English speaking not necessarily American English speaking monolinguals are a tiny minority compared to people who speak English globally. So amongst all of us who speak English, yes the majority of us are bilingual, if not more, and the tiny bit of monolinguals, they are the ones resisting our use of English as a language for our expression, etc. So that's particularly interesting. One thing that informed the book that I use a lot of translation self translation on repetition 19. One of the things that informed it is varying approaches to translation I have, when I started off it was in the 90s, and people would really frown upon my translating into English. I was like, no, no, no, you can't translate into English translating to Spanish you can't what regardless of the mother tongue complication. The assumption was that it wasn't my mother tongue and even if it was, I grew up in Mexico I was schooled in Spanish, and therefore I should not translate into English. That I feel is changing dramatically. But another thing that I heard, and I would be very curious to hear if you've ever had any pushback in this regard, was that when I showed my translations to some people early on, they would say, Well, you know, there's, there's too many Latin words in this. It does it, it does it, you really want to produce a translation that should try to pass as the original. So whenever there's something that points that indicates to the reader that this might be a translation, get rid of it, avoid it. Use words, use Germanic words, use Anglo-Saxon words, you know, avoid Latin. And it was like, okay, I sort of believed it at the time because I was just like learning, I was learning translation, I was learning to write, I was learning so many things. And that turns out to be completely ideological, right. Where did that come from? I mean there was a time in which Anglo-Saxon like translations of the Bible were seen as vulgar. And Latinates were considered much more elegant and sophisticated. So, yeah, that's my take on your question. Wow, I love that. Would you read a few poems for us? Well, it's relevant to the whole conversation. Okay, so actually, yeah, so one of the sections of the book has 25 different translations of the same poem that I wrote in Spanish when I had just moved to the US. And the poem is called Equivalencias. So maybe I'll read the Spanish and then I'll read you one translation and then we'll go to Jeffrey and maybe you can circle around. So, Equivalencias. So for one of the translations, this was my political translation. I mean, a lot of them are political, but this one was in response to what was going on the summer I was embarking on this project. It was 2018. And that was when Trump implemented his zero tolerance policy that ended up producing children and cages, right? That's when it all began because of the status of the minors who ended up being separated from their families. And I was in Montalvo at a residency that, as it turns out, was founded by some was it had been the estate of a man who's senatorial reelection campaign in San Francisco. The motto for it was keep California white. So that says everything. I mean, he was involved with the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese, et cetera. So I was like, I felt very compelled to response and my response to that was to frame a translation as a one that would be obedient and only include Anglo-Saxon words with Anglo-Saxon roots to all the Latinates in this translation are eliminated. A beautiful wall is another translation. One, no din, a flash, a sip of a hot drink made from roasted and ground seeds found bitter after swallowing. A bottomless pit. Two fold roads, one path and shut eyes, I'm awake. Two looking glasses are how many. Two children have three. Three is oath is stillness, a chum, a foe. Three truths, three lives. Four times the speakers had nothing. Four and two are the same. Having asked five times why she'd stayed there. She set the bed on fire and left letting it burn. So the words that are eliminated are coffee, silence, peace, fire. Wow, very telling. I love that. Great. Wow, thank you. It's lovely to hear that. I've been reading, I've been reading your book Monica on the page. It's really nice to have a voice associated with it. Why don't I read a poem that's called on translation since it's so obviously about these kind of gaps between languages. I wrote it in Japanese, but then later on I did an English translation because so many people asked me what was in this book. Combined the two for reasons I hope are obvious. 真実に入るとそこにもう一人の私を見つけるその私は近発ではなくその私には黒紙がある. Going into the bedroom, I find another me already there, that me is not blonde, that me has black hair. 私がどうしてここにと聞くとその私はただ早く入れというずっと私を待ってたと生まれた瞬間から今まで. He asked me why I'm here. He simply tells me to get in that he has been waiting for me since the moment we were born. 私たちの使う言語は違うがなんとなくつじ合うらしい私は洋服を拭いでよくになると子供の頃について話し始める. We use different languages but somehow we communicate. I take off my clothes, lie down, tell them about my childhood. アイスクリームを通して泣いたとき靴を奥行きでなくして叱られたときおじいさんと枕投げをしたとき. 彼は頭を割り落として歩きがし、と日本語を語った後逃げとは良くなった。 私は見えない。 でも私は思い出を語ると違う人の記憶に聞こえてしまう。 私は僕たちの記憶が今まで嘘を考えた。 The bed I remember becomes a futon. The lakes I remember become seas. Sandals become zori. Lunchboxes become bento. Lunchboxes become bento. Our conversations slip by one another, never quite meeting in between. The two of me let out a silence and the room returns a silence. Fidgeting beneath the sheets, I take the hand of that other me and stare at the ceiling for some time. Yagatte, dakiai, eventually we embrace. Akanotanri no you ni aibu shiao ikko no kansenu jinkaku ni nareru you ni. Eventually we embrace, caressing like two strangers in the hopes of turning into one person, complete. Wow, Jeffrey, and have you experienced any pushback in your, you know, many experiences everywhere? Um, that's an interesting question. So when I, first of all, I should say that when I was writing the poems that went into this book, I was serializing them in a small Japanese journal. I had very nice responses from people who were reading the journal. Sometimes people would contact me on Twitter or whatever. But I didn't really think much about, like, sort of the political ramifications, you know, that, like, the sort of ramifications of me coming in from sort of English and a sort of imperial language and making a choice to write into Japanese. However, when this book was published, and much to my surprise, it won a huge literary prize in Japan. I couldn't believe it, you know. Suddenly then it did seem like the tenor of the conversation changed. There were quite a number of people that wrote, you know, oh, this award is going to Jeffrey because he's a foreigner writing in Japanese and that has some kind of political significance, you know, political significance regarding the importance of our language and so on. And so, you know, perhaps the judges wanted to give it to him for that reason. And so there was some resistance. I'll never forget one person who wrote on Twitter, you know, the kind of quirky oddness of his language, which I find completely unacceptable. This is a Japanese poetry. And that made me feel accomplished. I wanted to try to figure out a way to my own twist on Japanese. But I think overall, I should say that this response has been overwhelmingly positive so far. Good. Yeah, I mean, this idea that a text in translation shouldn't remind the reader of its foreignness is always bugging me. But I think it's pretty common in some countries have more tolerance towards foreigners than others. So you both, both of you have written about this multiplicity, this the experience of being in between. Tell me a little bit about the process of thinking through all of that and maybe some things you've discovered through the writing. Maybe Jeffrey can start now, because yeah, maybe Jeffrey, in an email you said that one of the things you were trying to do in Japanese is really explore the possibilities of Japanese and do things that you couldn't do in English. That would be, I'm super interested in that. Yeah, definitely. So what are those things? So my apologies if I seem to be stuttering here. There are a number of things that you can do because Japanese has three scripts. It has characters that are borrowed from China, Kanji. It has Hiragana, which is kind of like a cursive script for writing Japanese words. Takana, a script for writing foreign words. There's all sorts of possibility of bringing these three different types of scripts to exactly the same thing, but you can say it in different ways. Also too, there's a great richness in the history of the Japanese language. There's classical Japanese, Japanese of 100 years ago. There's Japanese of 1,000 years ago. There's all sorts of Japanese that Japanese is that can kind of be brought into play with one another. Something that I think domestic readers wouldn't expect the foreigner to be doing. It was interesting to play with those things. One more thing that's very interesting. In Japanese, it's possible to write a word using characters and then to put the reading beside it. In other words, you can give the meaning and you can give the pronunciation of the word separately, but simultaneously. I really enjoyed that fact. There's something we can't do in English. At least, I can't think of a clever way to do it. I like kind of the zure, the mismatch of sometimes when you would put a pronunciation on a word that you typically wouldn't see. I wrote a poem about the rivers in Ohio where I grew up and about how I lived in a place that was ostensibly monolingual. However, I was surrounded by place names in languages that had existed there far longer before the white people ever showed up. In the poem, I wrote the meanings of this place names and then the pronunciation of the place names right beside each other. When you see the word to refer to the river that runs through central Ohio, you could understand what that meant in the original language. There were fun things that were possible in Japanese that I couldn't really think about how to do in English. That was one of the things I really enjoyed exploring. What about you, Monika? Your experimentations in this book with multiple translations of this particular poem were incredibly fascinating to me. I just happened to read the New York Times review that picked and talked about your book, I think yesterday. Oh, it didn't. Well, it's just mentioned, but it doesn't really go into it. It doesn't go into it, but the fact that it took dimensions, you know, kind of multiplicity and sort of the spilling over of languages, kind of one of the characteristics of the book. Yeah, actually really interesting. Okay, we won't go into that, but it's like, no, no, no, because it relates to something that Bruno was saying. I mean, I think in that review, which is not, it reviews three books, Don Michae, Joiella Mazzuini, and Jenny Zhang. And it was really interesting because the writer is a, yeah, the critic is trying to reclaim messiness as something really cool. But I think when you're writing about people who are so expressly dealing with colonialism and Korea, I mean, to use those metaphors, I think they were used in a way that was kind of problematic, but I did appreciate the shout out. What can I say? So, well, one of the things I love about English that Spanish doesn't really offer is prepositional phrases. They blow my mind. I mean, what you can do, you can completely transform a verb with the preposition that comes next to it, right? I mean, there's just like endless ways in which you can resignify that verb with the prepositions. That's impossible in Spanish. I also love a concession. I like how technical it can be and what happens when you bring in languages from all these different fields of knowledge and exclusive practices and collage them all together in English. Something happens that I feel is a little harder to replicate in Spanish because Spanish already is kind of, I feel Spanish, even though most people think it's a very emotional language, I also find it kind of bureaucratic. It's a very bureaucratic language, very official. So when you bring things that are official sounding into literary discourse, they don't contrast as much, I think. But maybe if I can swerve the question a little bit. I love your poem on translation because it's really open-ended and it addresses both self-translation and translation. And if we focus on self-translation only, this idea that you might develop another persona in the other language is really beautiful. I would love to hear a little bit more about that and also Bruna. It's kind of like a cliche. People talk about it. It's the first, oh, do you feel like a different person when you speak another language? But something does transform us. I remember the experience of listening to my mother speak in English with her sisters when I was growing up. And I'd be like, I felt like my mother was possessed, like she wasn't my mother anymore. A ghost had taken over her and she became unrecognizable to me because this history that I didn't share with her was being spoken through the language. And so I just wonder what both of you think about this topic. Jeffrey, you can go first. Yeah, I specifically left that poem open-ended. The idea of the two selves sort of embracing one another, holding one another, being physically in proximity to one another, without that kind of contradiction ever being resolved. Thank you for picking up on that. You're my ideal reader, Monica. And I agree with you 100%. It does seem like there is some way in which we are transformed by a second language, even if we don't necessarily feel it from day to day. I don't feel like a different person when I'm speaking Japanese. I still feel like the same Jeffrey that's here speaking English with you right now. However, I realized that to the rest of the world outside, it doesn't necessarily look the same. I had a psychologist friend of mine come and visit me when I was in Japan one time. And I think she was the second day I was there. I got a telephone call or something, and I picked up the telephone and I started speaking Japanese. And she just pulled back physically. And she said afterward, I'm like, what was that reaction about? And she said, you look like a different person. Your body language changes. You're bowing into the telephone, and you're doing things that are Japanese. You don't look like the same person. I'm like, I don't. That was such a shock to me. And it made me think a lot. I mean, that was in my mind when I wrote this, that there is this kind of apparent slippage. Whether or not the person themselves feels it is a different question, I think. And certainly that's something relevant to translation as well. People are obsessed with the question of fidelity. And even though the places where we're not being faithful to a text are sometimes the most interesting, sometimes the most productive, sometimes the most creative, sometimes the most strikingly original. Yeah, I wanted to kind of problematize that sort of idea of fidelity and realize that the translation, potentially the other voice does sometimes have its own semi quasi-independence in life outside of the original. And that's what's really fascinating to me. I love the writer Yoko Tawada because she's written about that a lot, a lot. She's a German book called Accent Frei, Accent Free, which talks about how terrible it would be if nobody spoke languages without accents, how accents, how the inflections of other languages into a second language enrich massively the language. It's a wonderful essay. I think Susan Bernofsky might have translated it. But yeah, it's wonderful. Bruno, Monica? Yeah, that's such a tough question. I, of course, I am the same person, but I do feel different. I think because the language of my instruction was English, like all my higher education was in English, I feel smarter in English. I feel like I can speak more eloquently about stuff I care about. And then when I'm talking to my mom about feminism or something, I'm constantly grasping for language. I'm like, I don't, I didn't, I've never had this conversation in this context. But there's also, I think, something, I guess I take different risks in different languages for this reason. In English, I can take syntactical risks, risks with my diction. I can be the kind of person who is like spewing out academicisms. And in Portuguese, I take risks with my sense of humor, my sense of intimacy with people. I test boundaries maybe a little more. I can be a little bit more inappropriate, more freely. But yeah, like I also write about this idea that people perceive me differently in either language. And I think the fact that people perceive me differently, that changes me. In English, people see me as a foreigner. And that's always going to make me want to prove myself in a certain way. That's always going to want me to be, I don't know, to present myself in a certain light. And in Brazil, I am just a kid. I'm just me, like walking around. So it's a different kind of need that comes out of the language. And then I also write about some of the things that you've mentioned, Jeffrey, like my mother doesn't recognize me in English. And that's a particular kind of pain, a particular kind of situation. I write it about it all the time. That she's like, I, this is not the daughter I birthed. Like, who is this? What are these clothes? And yeah, I think it is, you know, so it is just a matter of being code switching all the time. And when you switch audiences, you have to switch the speech, whether you like it or not. Well, maybe now it's actually a good time to take some questions. Such a, such a skillful moderator you are, Bruna. Thank you. Just such a wonderful conversation. And we do have some questions. But since you've been talking about her, Jeffrey, this is a, as good a time as any to mention that we have arranged for later this in this conference, we will be speaking with Yoko Tawada and both of her translators, Margaret Mitzutani and Susan Bernofsky, as well as her editors and others who have helped bring her to English reading audiences. So we're very excited about that. Stay tuned. That will be posted on the Center for the Humanities site. But just a little teaser first. So one of the first questions that came in is you've all spoken about betraying languages, canons, expectations. Have you ever felt that your language has betrayed you? Here is she here from you? Monica, you want to go first? Well, I'm not sure. I don't think this question is going that. Yeah, I don't think it's about this in particular, but has, I think language betrays one sometimes when there's a lack of awareness of the history of certain terms. And as so, as playful as we want to be, right? And as experimental as we want to be, sometimes we also need to know what certain terms bring up in other people's minds, what histories, what they might be saying about certain privileges, what they might be saying about status, about class, etc. That it's not the language betrayed you is that you weren't aware of what you were actually saying. In other words, I am, I do firmly believe that it is highly possible that what you think you're doing is not what the language is doing, which is exactly what happened in the review in the New York Times that Jeffrey was talking about. You know, I think the author is saying one thing, but the language is saying something completely different. Even the illustration for that review is highly problematic, because it's, it's, it's, it's, it's China than tigers and stuff. And then like very abrasive language that have a history. And unfortunately, language is not just yours. So we're fortunately actually quite, yeah, it's fortunate that we can all actually use this tool to communicate with each other and, and, and, and supplement all these gaps in our, in our knowledge and experience. So yeah, not sure that's where the question wanted me to go, but that's what came to mind right now. Yeah, I that's a really complicated question to answer and a good one. I often feel like when I'm working in translation, some sense of betrayal, like that I'm disappointed that things don't work in English as well as I can possibly, you know, as they work in the original in Japanese. I do feel like sometimes my own language here that I'm using English as lets me down often. And also part of that actually is not actually the language letting me down part of it is sometimes reader expectations or editors expectations, you know, about how, how experimental I can be, how many Japanese language, how much Japanese words I can throw in to give one example. And I don't shamelessly self plug. The, I translated a book called The Book of the Dead, which was, which is a novel written by a, by a poet. And it's set in the year, it's set in the late 700s in old Japan. And it's written in a combination of, of this very experimental modernist Japanese, but with tons of classical Japanese vocabulary from 1200 years ago thrown in. How do you how like that kind of like multi layering of language, you know, within the original text, it was really difficult to figure out how to reproduce in English, where, you know, the English language has, of course, obviously the English language has a long history as well. But if I were to go back and try to find, you know, the, the earliest old English equivalents of words and throw them in where the, where the, where the, you know, the text was, where it was in the original, it would be completely unreadable text. You know, so like the things that I felt like I could do with English were so different than what I was seeing happening in the text that I didn't know what to do with it. And I struggled. This is actually the hardest thing that I've ever done this particular translation. So yeah, so part of that has to do with like the contours and, and also to how far I can push your ears. Yeah, I've definitely experienced both of these. I do have another instance of struggling with my language. I've even felt angry in my language, Portuguese, which is that I'm from, from a part of Brazil, the Northeast, which is, it is the poorest part of the country for colonialism reasons. If you, I love being a little preachy, I'm sorry, but this is my chance to push my agenda. If you read like open veins of Latin America, you will see how sugarcane plantations devastated that part of the country. And then, so now it's very poor. So the population is more uneducated, et cetera, for, because of circumstances. And it is known in Brazil, it's very low class. There's a lot of prejudice against that, a lot of xenophobia. If you go to the metropolis like São Paulo in Rio, if you sound like you're from the Northeast, there are a series of dialects that people from those places can have. I speak like that. I don't know any other Portuguese. I mean, I've studied other Portuguese's, but that's the way I speak. So whenever I meet Brazilians in the US or abroad in general, they're like, what do you talk like that? That's so funny. I've never heard anyone speak Portuguese that way. Whoa, it's real. So even with Brazilians, I suppose my compatriots, that kinship that I could have with languages lost, I sound like I have a thick accent, which I do. And I also have an accent in English. So all my languages are a little compromised. And because it is also a colonial language, when I say I'm in Portugal, I meet people from, you know, who speak Portuguese also. And they're like, whoa, your Portuguese is so good. How did you learn it? You taught me. I didn't really have much of a say. So now like that ship has sailed, literally. Yeah. So it doesn't feel like I own any of my languages. None of us own any of our languages, but I do think some people get to feel like they do. And I don't. I'm a little jealous. So can I ask you something real quick? Just Matt, and Clarice and the specters are of the star, right? So Macabre is also from the Northeast, right? Do you recognize, is Clarice and the specter writing her Portuguese in a way that you understand as your own? Oh, yeah, totally. No, I really, she really does. And I feel for Macabre so much, there's a line in that book I love, which is like, oh, you know, the dreams she has, only a poor girl from the Northeast think she could get these things. She really can't. And I'm like, yes, I know Macabre. Macabre is my soul, right? I am Macabre. Yeah. We have one more question from the audience. This one comes in from Germany. And I'll ask three of you. It's about your experiences with self translation. And the question is, could self translation be a solution to the problem of accessibility, which was discussed earlier? Self translation. Yeah. First of all, the fact that you've mentioned self translation, I just have to say that like, I've translated a lot of people along the way. And when I sat down to actually translate myself for the first time, it was the most disorienting, kind of upsetting experience that I've ever experienced in translation. I wasn't expecting that because after all, I sort of know what the author was thinking when he wrote it, right? You know, I thought it should be super easy. However, there was also I was confronted by the fact that like, well, like I didn't when I when the English came out, I didn't like it. And I'm like, well, hold on a second, I think I know the author, maybe I can ask him to change it, you know, like, you know, what the slippage between what is the original and the translation is so great that that I didn't know where when to stop editing. And and that was that that's never happened before. Like with the translation, I kind of reached a certain point where I feel like, oh, I've refined it as well as I can do, you know, and within certain boundaries. But it was like having the guardrail taken off of a really dangerous winding road. Like, do you know what I mean? Like I could I could drive right off the road if I wanted to. And that was that was something that was very strange for me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, although it's certainly I mean, one thing about translation, it does make the the text available in another language in a kind of a way that seems authoritative, I guess. So since the same person did it, whether or not that's a good thing or not, I don't know. I have to say, though, that like some other people when they translated my work into English, I love seeing it. It's fascinating to me. It's I love having the mirror kind of held up to me to to to to see to to show me what other people see in it. So I absolutely I completely agree with you. That mirror that that is the most beautiful thing, right? When you go like, oh, wow, it could be read this way. That's what I tried to do with myself, like have this poem and reflect it through all these different mirrors and see what I could learn about this poem. That I thought I knew everything about because it's not a difficult poem. I chose a deliberate deliberately very simple poem that still remains kind of mysterious to me as to how it came about or where it was going. But those 25 different translations say something totally different about it. I have never translated myself into Spanish, or maybe I did once one tiny little text. I'd never have done it. Maybe one day I would do it. But it feels like I already exhausted the the impetus to learn to circle around something that I did. So I it's like it just feels a little too solipsistic. And one of the things I love about translation is getting into the mind of someone else. And there's just so much to learn when when doing that. So I don't think I will self translate myself into Spanish. I do regret that I do not have a body of work in Spanish. That choice I made had repercussions. And so now I feel like I'm not really considered a Mexican poet, even though I am, because my body of work is primarily in English. But yeah, just the other thing that always plays out here is once you begin once you say, okay, maybe I'm going to try this and then you try it and then you realize, oh, I don't need to follow the choices I made two years ago or 10 years ago when I wrote this thing. What if I take it in a different direction? And then that for me always prevails. And then that thing that began as a self translation experiment then becomes a new work. And that's the energy that I prefer tapping into. So now I'm kind of, yeah. Just as one very quick follow up, I mean, I love the fact that sort of the dualism of original and copy, you know, gets gets completely distorted in the active self translation. I mean, I think that actually self translation teaches us a lot about the artificiality of those kind of kind of power relations that exist within the active translation, or that I should say the power relations that we constantly assume exist within the within the active translation. Wow. Unfortunately, we are out of time, but this has been such a wonderful conversation. And this is we are going to continue a form of this conversation in the coming months. So please come back. Thank you all for your participation today. And once again, we'd like to thank our partners HoweRound and 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. Thank you. And we hope to see you next week.