 Hello and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a translator from Spanish and French and professor at City University of New York, and I'm here with Allison Mark and Powell, who translates Japanese literature, works with the Penn America Translation Committee, and has been a driving force behind the conference that we are launching today. Thank you for joining us for the launch of our new weekly series for translating the future, which commemorates the first international conference on literary translation held in the United States, the world of translation, which was convened by the Penn American Center and the translation committee and took place exactly 50 years ago this week in New York City, our beloved wounded New York. We began planning this anniversary conference over two years ago, never ever imagining that circumstances would force us to transform what was to be a landmark in person gathering and celebration, and to reconceive it in the virtual space. Happily, the medium that we're all on now provides new opportunities, unbound by location or time zone. We're excited to kick off with a conversation between two renowned translators and scholars. David Bellows and Karen Emmerich. David is the former and Karen the current director of Princeton University's program in translation and intercultural communication. They'll be talking about what has changed and what hasn't in the world of literary translation over the past 50 years. David has written and translated a number of books, including the best selling. Is that a fish in your ear translation and the meaning of everything Karen's most recent book is literary translation and the making of originals. You can read their full bios on the Center for the humanities website. The weekly one hour conversations were launching today will continue throughout the summer and into the fall. Still, translating the future will be anchored to its originally planned dates in late September, when several marquee events will take place, including the symposium, a flight of Tokarchuk translators, featuring several of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarchuk translators into various languages, English, Japanese and Hindi, among others. We'll be here every Tuesday until then, and perhaps even beyond, having some of the most engaging and 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 130 for translating the uncertain present, a conversation between Madukaza and Lena Munzer, who will be joining us from Beirut. And please keep coming back every week. Check the Center for the Humanities site for updated event listings. This conversation will be followed by a Q&A. Please email your questions for David Fellows and Karen Emerick to translating the future 2020 at gmail.com. If you know anyone who was unable to join us for the live stream, a recording will be uploaded soon to the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities sites. Before we turn it over to David and Karen, we'd like to offer our sincere gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, to Frank Henschker, director of the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, to the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and to Penn America. And now here are a few words from Chip Raleigh, Penn America's Senior Director of Literary Programs and World Voices Festival. Thanks so much Allison, thanks so much Esther. It's an enormous privilege and honor to be asked to speak here today. Translation, as you know, plays a huge role in the work of Penn. It was after all a translation prize that saw the beginning of the Penn Literary Awards over 50 years ago. These, those are awards that have grown to include over 20 other categories, and that bestow way over $300,000 a year. And of course, translation itself is in the DNA of the World Voices Festival. I remember very, very well, I can't remember the year, but I remember very, very well meeting Esther Allen so many years ago now it must be over 10 maybe almost 15 years ago now. And international Penn meeting, it might have been in Bled, Slovenia, or some it was in some European Hamlet where we were having some meeting about something or other I don't. It might have been a Congress where we gathered together and at the time I was with Sydney Penn in Australia. And I remember very well hearing Esther talk about the enormous the really important work that Penn America was doing at that time to try to address what we've all become familiar with. Which is the low percentage of books that are published in the United States that are works that are translated from other languages. And one of the things that she mentioned that she was most proud of at the time was of course the World Voices Festival and Esther was one of the founders of the World Voices Festival along with Salman Rushdie, Mike Roberts and others at Penn America at the time. So it is quite literally the case that we would not have a World Voices Festival without the enthusiasm and support of people like Esther without the translation committee without the translators who translate all the works upon which the festival was predicated and the works that the festival shares every year. Like the translation conference plans are plans for the festival this year had the road pulled out from under them from by this very strange occurrence that we're all experiencing this coronavirus pandemic. We had to cancel we were to have our festival this past week and we canceled it. I think it was in mid-March we had to make that decision to cancel it and it meant about 150 writers who were due to appear in New York wouldn't be coming to see us. And so in its stead we pivoted to launch a stream of content which we launched last week during the week that the festival is supposed to take place, and we'll be rolling out content from from then until probably until the end of June so we've got a whole lot of things lined up including podcasts, interviews, videos, and we're most extraordinarily proud to be associated with this series of events that will be leading up to the 50th anniversary conference of translation conference, which of course Penn was an organization that had established that hosted so many years ago today. So, I wish you all a great first meeting of this conference I believe it is 50 years to the day. Since that conference took place all those many years ago I wish you great success with the translating the future programs. I'm looking forward to this discussion today with Karen and David, and I'm looking forward to all the discussions that continue weekly. This is September or however long you want to keep going. It's just a fantastic effort that you're making and I'm enormously proud to be associated with it, as we all are at Penn America. So, one of my eyes and on to Karen and David. Good afternoon everybody and thank you so much. Esther especially and the vast team behind you for inspiring and organizing and getting this project going. You've done so many things like this in the past so I'm not surprised but I'm still immensely grateful for your energy and ability to get people to do things. So, we're here Karen and I to talk about world translation over the last 50 years starting with this extraordinary conference that took place on May the 12th 1970. Now I mean, in the world before the virus conferences where they were tenor penny I mean we've all been to all sorts of conferences where we have made friends and networked and done various mildly useful things but actually not learned very much. But I think the pen world in translation world of translation conference of 50 years ago was a real exception to that routine. I mean it was a it was a blessing without shadow without blemish seems to have been a triumph and to have had long running and very beneficial consequences. And that really isn't true of many such gatherings it was quite extraordinary. And I think, just to measure the impact that that it's had. I would like us to listen to Isaac bash of a singer who addressed the conference then in his immutable inimitable accent and said some things that will actually when you think about it are quite extraordinary. If we could hear that clip Travis. Translation must become not not only an honorable profession, but I'm not. While I don't like blow the revolutions, I would love to see a translator's revolution. Translators are the ones who really should be liberated. In all of literature they have been the pariahs suffering the scorn of the critics and seldom hearing a good word. When the book was good, the author got all the credit and the translator nothing. When the book was bad, the blame was on the translator. Let this conference be the beginning of a rebellion where ink will instead of blood will be shed. Many a prophet has. Thank you. Isn't that wonderful a rebellion a revolt in which ink but not blood will be shed. To some considerable degree that revolution bloodless revolution has sort of happened. And I'm sure Karen is going to talk more about all that has changed. But to begin with I'd like to point out that based on the papers and the recordings of that conference that we've had access to an awful lot of things actually haven't changed and are still the same. I mean the conference drew together writers talking about their translators translators talking about their writers. They were still opinionating or actually doing more than opinionating about the differences between translating into English and translating into other languages, notably Russian and Polish and French in these papers. And then publishers talking about well, why they are the way they are. That's where least has changed as the various publishers who contributed to the conference pointed out in 1970. And as I guess any publisher could point out today. An insolvent publisher is not much use to a translator or an author. They do have to somehow survive financially and translations are not a very good way and not a reliable way to put it mildly of earning money. But financial pressures continue to weigh on the speed and quality and rate and range of what is brought from other languages into English, especially through the United States but also through Britain. I mean a number of things have changed. In 1970 there was still a kind of war of rights between Britain and America as to who got to commission the translators and claims are made that the British underpay their translation I'm sure they did actually. And also there were different arrangements for translators rights in the UK and the US. These have largely been overcome and the situation is very much more fluid between the two English language domains now than it was then. And also publishers have slowly but actually genuinely given more recognition to translators on title pages and catalog credits and so forth so some of those things have been achieved. But the general picture that publishing translations is a pretty difficult business. The translators mustn't expect too much from their publishers remains the same. That's true Karen. I feel like I need to be the voice of revolution here. And it's so one of the things that is so remarkable about so there's the recordings we've been given access to for the entire you know week long conference was really amazing to hear some of those voices and then the papers have been published collectively including I'm you know I'm not saying this for you for you David but for all of those who are listening who might not know, of course, there's a manifesto on translation that was written up at the same time that is published. And want there is a phrase in fact that that meant that posits translators as the proletarians of literature with nothing to lose but their chains. One of the things that's really remarkable to me about reading over this material is this sense of which I think many translators now might feel sort of content to make these kinds of claims for a, you know translators rights for the for themselves as opposed to a sort of more an ethical turn I guess in in recent years or in recent decades even to thinking about translation as a form as a as a mode of representation in some sense that you are, you're fighting for your rights so that you're fighting for someone else as well in some sense. I think when I was reading over the manifesto there are all of these demands that are being made that are quite sort of explicit demands, we need an index of translation similar to the annual books and print. We have that now you know we have the 3% translation database prizes a call for regional prizes for translations from the literatures of Asia Latin America France Germany Italy Spain and Scandinavia. And it's amazing what gets left off of that list first of all. But it's, it's also amazing to see that almost every sort of demand in the manifesto has now been met contact with publishers the rise of sort of small presses who are publishing mostly or exclusively literature and translation. Professors professorships of translation as another manifesto point, although trans I'm going to read a little chunk from this because it's really fascinating to me and then we'll return to this issue of publishers but although translations have been made since the beginning of recorded history and many of the best minds have been engaged in this appallingly difficult task. The translation has ever been established. This is a shocking state of affairs which should be remedied as soon as possible. Such professorships should properly be established in all the major universities. So that again, you know to echo David your well everything is the same and nothing is the same What happened, we do not have professorships at all the major universities, not by half or quarter, though other parts of the world are doing a bit better. I would say, but the real, the real sticking point that I think you're pointing to is this issue of the notion that there's a pie, right. And that translators and authors and publishers are all either working together or working against one another for a sort of finite amount of stuff that has to be shared. And that's something that I find is not necessarily the tone of the conversation now that there can be that for the proletarians of literature with nothing, nothing to lose for their chains to rise up as translators. There is a lot more sort of flexibility and fluidity between who is a writer and a translator and a publisher and people are all of those things and booksellers right there are so many people who are working together to write to sort of raise the the the way that translation is thought about in the world, not to mention readers and reviewers and you know professors as well. So, I don't know that all that's very true. I mean, over the last 50 years of course there has been a huge concentration in the major publishing houses in 1970 there were still many highly sized independent publishers, who've almost all now been gobbled up by the big groups, and the proliferation of really small houses often nonprofits often specializing in translation is like kind of the other side of that coin of the concentration. But those small houses that do a lot of translating now in the US and the UK are always on the on the very brink of financial viability. And interesting one thing you didn't mention is that the manifesto and several of the papers call for government subsidies for public money to support translation. And that has been forthcoming over the last 50 years from not from everywhere but from quite remarkable number of countries, the Scandinavians the Dutch, the Germans, now the Russians also the Turks, and the Koreans, all have their own funding to foster literary translation and to help to get works written in those languages into the international circuit or the international circulation of literature, primarily through subsidizing their translation initially into English, because English remains the real stumbling block the real limiting factor in that international circulation. Quite interesting in a couple of the publishers contributions and we're going to forget about the publishing minute but I do just want to say this because it is probably the measure of the distance we have traveled in 50 years, not just in translation, but the history in the world is how much the scouting for selection of commissioning of translations from other languages happened through specific individuals in publishing houses, people with international connections. In 1970, people with international backgrounds, the great figures of commissioning editors in the major American and British houses in those days, we're nearly all people who'd emigrated to the English speaking world from somewhere else, because of the course of world history, the Russian Revolution, the Second World War, and so forth. That generation has now disappeared, but it was their choices of those individuals who try to bring their cultures into English, who had a lasting and marked effect. Nowadays I think, obviously there are still many people with international backgrounds in publishing but it's not quite the same cohort of emigres that are key players in the selection of international literature that gets through to us. There are people more like you and me who just learn languages at school and who are in those sorts of positions because of education and taste and passion and so forth. So I think there has been a big change there. But the giants of the publishing of the postal era that speak in the conference in 1970, they really are almost mythical figures now, from Irving Howe, to Singer, to Rabassa, so forth. It's quite a remarkable collection of people. No it really is. And when I was, again, the sort of magic of getting to hear some of those voices as well. And I wonder, maybe we should just play that Rabassa, I don't know if Travis can, we should just bring it in and at least we can hear, you know, since you just mentioned his name. Maybe we can fold that in as well. Here is important in translation because it really lies at the base of all good writing. Writing is not truly a substitute for thought. It's a substitute for sound. We couch our thoughts in a language which is spoken. Else we would have to resort to the formulas of mathematical science, which are the true substitutes for thought. With the beauty of their own and which offer little in the way of oral feeling except in rare cases such as that of the remarkable Google. So when a person writes, he is speaking, when a person reads, he is listening. Writing is drifted away from this idea of direct expression because it has the advantage of being outside the inexorable flow of time. It's a flow which can be halted, reversed, and amended. Nevertheless what we appreciate in writing is much the same as what we look for in rhetoric. Although that poor word has suffered at late of late, first it meant freshman English and now it means intentionally hollow statements. Sound whether heard or imagined. Sound which can either enhance or detract from the meaning. The translator with a tin ear is as deadly as a tone deaf musician. It's really remarkable. So Esther had sent us this snippet also to think about this, the first perhaps appearance of the word Google, historically speaking, in this kind of context. But it's also amazing like listening to this and reading that piece made me think of again how much has changed in terms of sensitivity to all kinds of things including like is writing really a substitute for sound for people who don't have access to sound. For instance, and those access issues and so many of the things that this 1970 collection doesn't touch on issues of gender were ever present for me when I was reading and realizing how few women there were in the collection I think it's about 20% maybe issues of ethics again. Siri, you know this is a moment before Steiner before Susan bass net before getting Tory before Larry venuti who is one of the people who would have made, again this sort of call to action on the part of translators turned it into something that is actually about thinking of the translator, not exactly as a conduit for something from elsewhere but thinking more in turn less in terms of aesthetics and more in terms of the responsibility to represent. And then also the, the, the responsibility or the or the right to not be representative is a thing that I've been thinking about a lot just David you were there with the conversation with Josh Freeman, who translates weaker poetry and making the claim that well why should we go poetry have to be foot heavily annotated and footnoted and brought across as something anthropological as opposed to having the right to stand on the same aesthetic as other, as other poetries. And so that's you know what you were talking about these sort of great figures of post war publishing in the US and it's curious also to see both the really expansive cannon of works that they're talking about but also the quite sort of exclusive nature of some of the conversations that are being had. And so that makes me feel really great about being here 50 years later when we have so many more things on the table I think. Next, we do have more on the table and some of the things said in 1970, and some of the people saying them are not perhaps as crystal clear or as straightforward as they might seem. Clara Malho the former wife of the French Ministry of Culture gives a paper in that conference and it's printed in the volume called translation and complicity in which she pushes the line very strongly that to be a good translator you must somehow be in cahoots with your author that there must be this kind of close, almost symbiotic relationship between source and target between author and translator that is, well from some points of cloying and very excluding of translators who happen not to know the authors of their texts, or indeed to be translating them not because they are in love with them but actually interested in producing something worthwhile in English. I don't know how you felt about that issue of complicity because you know it's it's always a great privilege to be able to work with a living author. But the idea of complicity somehow I feel a little uneasy about. Yeah, and I mean this is you know, it's also coded as simpatico by some you know it's there there are many ways of thinking about that and for me again a sort of aesthetic focus on also on great works of literature is another thing that sort of goes throughout the conference, the assumption being that there are certain works that are worth translating and other other works that are not worth translating. And I think that you know, currently, both the idea of complicity and the idea of perhaps, you know, foreign literature being something that's going to make us better smarter brighter, more cultured cosmopolitan people isn't necessarily like there. You can think about the return translation, being there for all kinds of reasons and to learn I translate things, you know, that I think are reprehensible sometimes to give to my students because I think that those are voices that we need to know are out there. And so that too I think the idea of complicity feels like it's aligning itself with a certain kind of discussion of master piece in a way that. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I mean from my from my marginal experience as well I think those publishers that still do publish translations are still very much in the masterwork frame of mind that they wanted to be reassured before they commissioned a translation that what they're translating is really important and worth doing. And it derives from the same mental mental framework as we see in the 1970 conference. Effectively these are people who are making selections and wish wish to have prestige attributed to them for making that selection. I think it will be a long time before we're out of that particular mindset it's a very well entrenched one. And that that's why I say you know not that much has changed it. Lots of other things have changed, especially just simply the way we talk it's really interesting for people who are translators writers linguists to look back at this 1970 conference and see how people express themselves. Well, there is a rhetoric of specifying that we don't use anymore. I'm not sure we're any better but rhetoric that's out of view so always looks a little bit funny. Yeah. Can I just insert also one, because I feel like I've been saying things that may sound sort of critical like oh well this wasn't happening that wasn't happening. And of course it wasn't happening. That 1970 conference had to happen so that other conversations could take you know it's more a celebration of all of the things that that we're now talking about and thinking about and people who are being brought into the conversation and different kinds of voices and genres and high and low and you know all the rest. And I think it's just good to know that a lot of the sort of ensuing activism that has happened also is something that we we rose to the call for action. And all of the reading series and you know various ventures and all of the small publishers that are resisted being, you know, if big fish are eating a little fish then we need more minnows to turn into little fish right so that happened as well. And I think that this ongoing sort of proliferation of, you know, the reason we need the 50th anniversary conference is not just to say, you know, not just as a corrective or to say it wasn't it great that we did this when, but to celebrate just the wealth of stuff that's happening, and has been happening for the past five decades. I think maybe one of the most important ways in which we can both celebrate and reduplicate the 1970 conference is this. I do believe that it was the first time a large number of people involved in translating got together to talk to each other. So in translating is essentially fairly solitary activity, and translators have no special reason for meeting each other in the course of their business. It's a very pandemic proof thing to do actually. Sorry. But since that conference, there have been more conferences that have been more organizations have been more get togethers, and a real conversation, a whole world of conversations between translators about translating have sprung up flourished and multiplied and created not only translation studies and academic discipline, but how we want Michael almost a translation culture of translators talking about translation, and that's a tremendous thing that's been enlightening to me and also immensely supportive. It's also something that is called for in the manifesto. But there's a section on you know we need a translator conferences, and the altar being founded in 1978, I believe you know it's within a decade of this conference, and having yearly conferences, I think we're at number 43 now is the upcoming one. And then also I just wanted to know, you know, this, it's a, it's an American a US centric conversation that we're having, but there's the sort of parallel growth of translation studies as a discipline that happens also coming out of the conference that happened in 1978 and, and parallel conversations that are much more, you know the sort of academic side is quite different in the UK and the US I think. And the connections between the two fields are not always as sort of seamless as we might like. And I think it's interesting to know the growth, the sort of simultaneous growth in different parts of the world and again that's only Anglo centric and I think one of the things that we, if I can quote just for a second from Susan Bassman and David Johnson who who are writing about the growth of the field in the UK and in the EU. There's a kind of a, of a cultural contradiction here too and that despite the comparatively low percentage of texts that are translated into English. There should be so much written in that recalcitrant language about translation as a practice. So that's another thing you know one of the things that I'm really excited to see in the next stage of our journey as a translation as a community of translators is more translation of texts about translation from all kinds of languages into English and into English for us, you know, who are operating in this field and teaching in this field too. That's something that I really hope that hope will become central. What has been lost of course since 1970, and the lurks in the background mostly but on one occasion in the foreground of that 1970 conference is the USSR. Yes. Yeah, this is a huge change in the world for the people who were there. Because the USSR, amongst other things was a great translating place. It was a country, a state of over 100 languages with lots of reciprocal translations between them, dominated of course by Russia, but with a huge culture of translation of its own. And the paper by Mira Ginsberg, yes, Ginsberg towards the end, does mention where that began. It began in 1918 when Gorky persuaded Lenin to let him start this publishing house called World Literature, to bring into Russian, the great works of the Universal Canon, through which he was able to employ a lot of translators who because of their bourgeois backgrounds might otherwise have been shot. One of them was a woman who also appears in this volume, the Mata Hari of the East, called Mura Budberg. And she's there talking in this, but she was the Gorky secretary in the setting up of the World Literature Enterprise and the culture of translation into Russian. She was launched with that publishing house and then carried on by people like Tchaikovsky. It's really rather different from the things that we normally talk about in English and Western European languages and it still hasn't really been properly integrated. I suppose it won't be because it's now pretty much dead and all that activity and all that cultivation of translation has disappeared. But just to put it in a nutshell, in the Soviet Union, it was absolutely normal for a writer to be a translator and for a translator to be a writer. The movement back and forth was vastly more fluid. There was no real separation or distinction between who was a translator and who was a writer. Or we could just think that transitors are all writers, working with various forms of constraint, that writing is this umbrella term and we're doing a certain kind of. For us that is still a slogan and an aspiration, with which I agree entirely, in the Soviet Union, it was actually a reality in the way people were paid and treated and so forth. No, it really is amazing, you know, this is something that we've been having back and forth about over email to just thinking about the thoroughly Cold War setting of this conference that was taking place. And it's very difficult to think about our own historical moment. Now, I mean we need another 50 years to think about what our moment is what we would call it. And just listening to some of the audio. There were citizens at Columbia that were keeping people from be able some things were moved from this location to that location because people can get into their offices or the spaces where they were supposed to be held. And it kind of sort of shutting out, I think was happening, then the shutting in that's happening here but it has been really amazing to think about what the what this current I mean the fact that we're doing this, you know, live streamed maybe there's someone in their living room watching maybe not. And that the difference between you know how how we can talk and connect and the kinds of communities that we can form in each of these moments, and then all of the effort that you put into forming the community that is then, you know, made irrelevant by the fall of the iron curtain or or or. Yeah, yeah, time passes and things change. One of the things that hasn't changed a great deal and I don't know whether it ever will is one of the questions that were circulated on the the fire for this whole series for esters translating the future series of which genre get translated and which do not. Long fiction dominates dominated then in 1970 it dominates now. Don't you think. I mean you're asking someone who translates from Greek also where the primary, the things that have historically been translated, even from modern Greek have been poetry, because that's been the primary primary genre, or was the primary genre for quite some time. And I guess I'm not you know I would have to be a publisher I would have to have a bigger sort of a publisher or a bookseller or a reviewer to have a better understanding, or to have spent a lot more time with that translation database. It's probably true it's probably true. But it does mean I mean first of all it has to be something that can be written and has to be something that can be produced and sold right. I think that the proliferation of online places for people to be sharing work is changing this and making it. And also what we count when we think about the translations that are like is is fan translation subtitling, you know all of those things that are happening all the time and, and sort of arenas that we may not be paying attention to. I suppose he just shows what an old funny dirty I am in, obviously, you know what can be counted a books and so obviously when you count books you find most translations take the form of book length. Statistics can be very misleading. And it is very difficult to get a grip on all the other modes of transmission that now exist, as you say. Some wonderful ventures that were unimaginable in 1970 really have done something marvelous words without borders and others like it, make short fiction, which almost unpublishable as such accessible to large communities of readers and they're often the stepping to more substantial works and collections. I mean there used to be lots of newspapers and weekly magazines that would publish short stories but they've almost disappeared at least as commercial ventures now. So the web based magazines of translation are wonderful and also poetry gets translated not just from Greek. But also the, there are web web locations where poetry translation happens and happens very happily. It also occurs to me that the proliferation of streaming services for TV series TV dramas and theater has had a most curious effect because you can get them subtitled into a whole slew of languages, such that Norwegian detective series can be viewed in Slovakia and Argentina and Australia, and that that is translation and it's a most effective form of the creation of communities that are no longer bound by geography and no longer subject to the marketing rights of individual publishers or any particular TV station, so that obviously gets a bit scared because it seems to be all out of hand. How are you going to count it? How are you going to log it? How are you going to survey it? We started talking about money. But it's, but it, but it, but it really, it really, I mean, things are happening now in that involve language transfer and the movement of cultural production around the world to places where it wasn't intended for, much more intense than it was in 1970. At least we're now, you know, paying attention to it. I wonder, do you, I, I sort of put forward an idea for what I would like to have one tiny little thing that I would like to have more of. Is there something that you would like to see more of David? What do you want? What do you want the next 50 years to look like? I want everybody to stop publishing books. I can catch up and read all that I haven't read yet. I wonder if we, you know, because soon I think we're going to be taking some questions. I thought we could end by reading the last few sentences of this manifesto that is published along with the papers for the conference. So I have it here. Translators are faced with a choice. Either they can continue to do nothing to improve their lot, or they can join together to ensure that at long last they will receive their due. Between apathy and active engagement in a struggle for recognition between silence and the living voice. The world of translation is still largely undiscovered and unexplored. And the time has come to set the projects in order and to learn what can be done, what can and what cannot be done. And that is the end. It's really, I mean, yeah. It feels like it encapsulates this feeling of everything is the same and nothing is the same in some sense to bring that back. Thank you so much, Karen and David for for ending on that note. It's just really the perfect place I think to leap into our questions. It was a fascinating conversation. I think we could keep talking or keep listening to you for for quite a while but but I want to make sure we do have enough time for our questions and one of the first questions that came in was, do we need an updated Manifesto for 2020 and if so what should be on it and actually I can answer this one because we have a team, a group from the translators committee translation committee at pan America we have been working on updating the translators Manifesto and it's a fascinating project. And if anybody who's watching is interested we are we will be presenting a separate event on the manifesto through in the coming weeks so we will be addressing it in more detail. And if you're interested you can contact the translation committee if you go to pen.org, you can reach out to the translation committee and and get involved because at one point we get some back channel discussions of what it looks like to negotiate a manifesto. The whole time reading this one and then I'm really curious about what that looks like what that I want to be a fly on the wall in that room, or just a person in that room. I have a question that has come in on our Gmail link that people can send questions to which is translating the future 2020 at Gmail.com. And it relates back to Robossas use of the word Google and that really haunting clip where we, we hear him talking that's been one of the most amazing things about this wonderful conversation between the two of you that we've also included Robossas and Isaac Rousseff a singer we've heard them speak. And I want to clarify that the word Google spelled G O O G O L had been in existence as a mathematical term that was actually coined by a small child, sort of a charming story, but the book, the world of translation that resulted from these audio tapes that by the way you can explore on the Center for the humanities website the entire audio archive of the conference for all those who are listening can be explored and delved into on the Center for the humanities website. The transcription in the book Robossas word is spelled G O O G L E like the giant company and without the capital, without the capital, obviously, but it's the first time the word appears in that spelling at decades before the initial use of the term Google that comes up in the OED. So the question, the question David the question is Robossas mentioning of the term Google prompts the question of how you envision machine translation, such as Google Translate and others playing a role in the future of translation, what opportunities and challenges, does machine translation present as the technology improves. You want me to answer that. Yes. The first point about Robasta is that Google exists quite independently of the software company as a term from the English sport of cricket. So Google, a googly is to bowl a ball that bounces sideways. Okay, so Google is something very slide. That feels like entirely and keeping with translation. So translation is throwing throwing goodies. What is empty going to do. Well, what it already has done, I think, is make people much more aware of translation and translatability. I think it's provided a kind of a first taste of what a cross language communication can be like to many millions of people. And I don't think it is deluded many of them into thinking that what they're getting is a proper translation. So I think that it will improve the technology is good. I think it's most interesting because it appears to solve what until not long ago were considered totally intractable philosophical linguistic and intellectual issues like how you deduce meaning from and it does that to some degree with remarkable solutions to quite deep problems. It's not in any way going to invade or involve the field of literary translation. It might speed up or perhaps even make redundant a small number of poor translators who spend their time translating repetitive and boring documents, such as guarantee slips and terms of conditions and service, but that's really no great shakes. I don't personally think that it is going to reduce the need for translation in the proper sense, one bit, and I don't think that any of the engineers working on machine translation think that it will either. There, I'm not a missed. I have another. This one. Well, this is about technology but it's going to reflect back on on the history from the starting point of this live stream itself. Please comment on the impact of the internet on literary translation and in particular the role of social media in the increased visibility of the translator, especially translator as activist. The name translator women in translation and more. I don't know if either of you have thoughts on that or if you in your experience and for these decades. Do you want to take that or I mean I I feel like my career as a translator spans the shift of like tectonic plate shift of like being able to use the internet and not being able to use the internet for my translations and boy jeez I wish that I had always been the post because it's so much easier to do research I made mistakes in my first book that I am very ashamed of and I would not have made a Heather been an internet that was reliable in the place that I was living at the time. In terms of visibility I think it's had a huge I mean again like I didn't live in that world so I don't know you know what it was like to relate and try. I don't know what the communities were that were putting a conference like this together for instance and and trying to fight for for visibility and making these sort of claims for things right, but it seems to me that what I've witnessed in the past, you know, for years is the just proliferation of ability to to make one's work and to comment on one's work in places that aren't you know if you don't have a translator's note, you can write about it you can write about on social media you can write about it on, you know, in blogs you can write about it and material that is then appearing in all kinds of ways. So and women and translation all of these things start as like one person writes a thing and then it really takes on and it's good for booksellers and it's good for translators and it's good for women. And I think it's, yeah, I think it's been an amazing force for good in that very specific kind of a way. I don't know if anybody else wants to speak to that. I'm just glad to hear all of that, because I tend not not not not to spend too much time on the web and places like that, because it takes too much time, much of it. It rattles down into, you know, places to go. Yeah, I agree with the web enables people both to create communities of interested partners, and to express themselves in ways that really are not available in older and more established kinds of media. So it's great. I have a question that has come in from our cherished colleague Susan Bernofsky of Columbia University. And it's an intriguing question. What's the difference between a migrant and an emigre. And how is this difference relevant to our thinking about translation communities in the United States. So, this is a really long conversation Susan if you're still there. Let's talk about this, because this is a really really long and complicated I mean all of the answers that anybody would give to that to that question are political in nature right so the answer that I give may not be the answer that David gives I think that it's all a matter of terminology and semantics and people everybody is multi lingual people plural angle people and communities were translating all the time translators are people who translate period. And one of the things another if we can make a wish list, I would like to see more recognition of the different kinds of translating that are happening. And I think that interpreting and translation are not, you know, if we're thinking in terms of oral and written and whatever like all of the different media that we're working in, we're all doing all of those things right and we have to give all of those the visibility and sort of respect that they deserve and I think part of the impetus for for activists in this field is to not separate the social and the political from the aesthetic in that way and to try and join them all together I don't know that's like a very short answer but I concur with that entirely. I would just add that it's terribly complicated because there's also historical dimension languages. The vocabulary has has changed over the century anyway. So the difference between emigrant and migrant it depends when you're asking as to what the answer is but of course the answer is always social as well as political, but there is a historical shifting, shifting dimension of it as well. And basically that the more terms of that at least a dozen terms that are very fluid in that applications and are as it were. It's who's speaking or when and in which country, but I would just note that even Charlie Chaplin telling the story of a poor migrant to the United States on film in the 1930s calls the movie, not the immigrant but the emigrant. And there's, you know, point of change in the English language wouldn't say that now to talk about migrants. One, one interesting feature of this conversation I think it's going to come up in a later program in the series is the issue of mother tongue. What is the translator's mother tongue, which tongue, what is the concept of mother tongue what about people who don't essentially have a mother tongue, who grew up with these multi lingual environments and we are going to. We are currently putting together a discussion about that that will be one of the later events in this series. I'm getting so excited about all of these. Because even the ideology of the mother tongue like what does that even mean to think about. All right, there's, well there's, well, what, let's save that. What does that even mean because I think that that's we do have, we want to spend a considerable amount of time and since we have three minutes left. There's a somewhat long question but this is from someone who has been translating the Senegalese journalist Annette made and they're done via essentially kickstarted the feminist movement in Senegal she says and she's been thinking a lot about. Or I'm sorry I don't know who wrote this but the spit, spivax theory on translation, unless the translator has earned the right to become an intimate reader, she cannot surrender to the text cannot respond to the special call of the text. So here's the question. What do you think of the quote in terms of in earning the right to translate. So I think this kind of reflects back on what we were just discussing what does it look like for someone to earn the right to translate. And this person asking the question, especially for students like me who have studied the French language but have little experience in translation. I think so I teach that text. We just read it a few few months ago in my grad seminar. And I think one, one thing that I'm really excited by is how all the questions are from 2020 and not from 1970 right and are positioning us in a conversation that I think we really want to be having and I think spivak is really thinking about language learning there and about the need to language learning in its broadest sense right that you have to go in. And that there's a sort of element of surrender to something that is not yours necessarily. And I mean I have all kinds of very complicated feelings about thinking of translation as a right like who has the right to do it. And I can't, I mean I can't easily parse those. I don't think. And I think it depends on who and what and where and, you know, sensitivities to the positionality of all kinds of, of, of translator and author and text and language. That's a satisfactory answer I don't think for if somebody actually wants an answer to the question. We are. I mean, I know that we could continue to have this conversation but it seems like we are I can looking at the clock it's 229 so I would like to thank everyone who has participated in today's conversation and who made it happen. I'd like to thank David Bellows and Karen Amrick and my partner in my co host, Esther Allen, and Jamie Banks who is a fellow who has to help produce this as well as the group from the translation committee who is actively working on developing this. We'd like to 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 CUNY Segal Theater Center. And also, I'd like to add that if you're a translator who has been financially impacted by this crisis, consider applying to Penn's Writers Emergency Fund. Information about this can be found on penn.org. And one more thing we did get a number of questions about the manifesto that we were citing and the volume that resulted from the conference. That volume is called the World of Translation. It includes the manifesto. Yes, there it is. And it was edited by none other than Gregory Rebossa, whose voice we had a chance to hear earlier. And if you enjoyed this one hour session, but perhaps missed parts of it or you had a howling child in the background, things like that can happen when you're in your home. Please know that it has been recorded and it will be posted. The recording will be posted on both the HowlRound page and the Center for the Humanities site. So you'll find it there in a couple of days and you can share it around amongst your friends and let people know to come next week for our next program, same time, same station. And thank you everyone for being here, especially David and Karen for that wonderful conversation.