 Hello, and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a professor at City University of New York, and my co-host today is Samantha Schnee, who many of you will recognize from our Week 9 program on what the future has brought to 21st century translation. Samantha is a prize-winning translator from the Spanish and founding editor of the indispensable web magazine, Words Without Borders. She's also a co-organizer of Translating the Future, the conference you are now attending. The humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is one of the worst on earth, made even more dire by the global pandemic. But it's been going on for so long, it barely makes the news. Venezuelans are slowly starving to death, with 90% of the country living below the poverty line, perilously short of food and losing weight. About 4.5 million Venezuelans out of a population of 32 million have fled, leading to a massive refugee crisis in neighboring countries. A situation as dire and prolonged as this one can lead to a phenomenon known as compassion exhaustion, in which the crisis itself is gradually accepted as a kind of norm. Doctors Without Borders has longed unvaluable work both inside Venezuela where they have recently established a COVID-19 clinic in Caracas and among Venezuelan refugees outside the country. One effective way to take action on behalf of Venezuela's desperate and beleaguered people is to support the work Doctors Without Borders is doing there. Words Without Borders, the website I helped to found, published a special issue on Venezuela in 2014 when the situation there was already catastrophic. In that issue, you'll find Standing Stones, a haunting poem by Maria Auxiliadora Alvarez, translated by Catherine Hammond. It begins, everything I want to tell you son is that you should go through suffering. If you come to its shore, if its shore comes to you, enter its night and let yourself sink. Its gulp may drink you down, its foam overwhelm you, let go, let yourself go. Everything I want to tell you son, on the other side of suffering another shore lies. You can read the rest of the poem and more wonderful work from Venezuela, including an interview with today's guest, Maria Jose Jimenez on Words Without Borders.org. Today's conversation in the 15th week of Translating the Future is the third and final installment in our mini series, Motherless Tongues, Multiple Belongings. We welcome writer and translator Janet Hong, who's joining us from Vancouver, Canada. Poet and translator Pierre Joïs, whose collection of the earlier poetry of Paul Celan will be published next month by Ferrara Strauss Giroux, and Maria Jose Jimenez, a writer and translator who is the current poet laureate of East Hampton, Massachusetts. You can find out more about these three wonderful people and their illustrious achievements on the Center for the Humanities website. As usual, a Q&A session will follow today's conversation. Please email your questions for Janet, Pierre, and Maria Jose to translatingthefuture2020atgmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. Translating the Future will continue in its current form through September. 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 the week's hour-long conversation. Please join us next Tuesday, August 25th, for Language as Polis with Latasha Diggs, Marianne Newman, and Madeline Cohen, and keep checking the Center for the Humanities site for future events. Translating the Future is convened by Penn America's Translation Committee, which advocates on behalf of literary translators working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers, and others with an interest in international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by Lynn Miller-Lachman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translation resources at penn.org. If you know anyone who is unable to join us for the live stream today, a recording will be available afterward on the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities sites. Before we turn it over to Janet Pierre and Maria Jose, we'd like to offer our utmost gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Penn America, and especially to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at HowlRound, who make this live stream possible. And now, Pierre, Janet, and Maria Jose, over to you. Thank you, Esther or Samantha, for that introduction. Thank you to everyone who's here today, and thank you especially to Pierre and Maria Jose. Really, I'm so honored to be in conversation with you. Since our topic is Motherless Tongues, I thought it'd be good to start by discussing how we've arrived at the languages that we live and work in, or as I'd like to say, how we've come into our linguistic baggage. In the spirit of transparency, when Allison Mark and Powell first invited me to be part of this round table, I was torn. Though I was super grateful for the invitation, I also felt incredibly uncomfortable talking about this topic because it surfaced so many anxieties for me around translation as an immigrant heritage translator and a person of color. All this to say, I'm actually very thankful for this opportunity because it forced me to do a lot of digging and inner work that I've been putting off for a long time. But before getting into the discomfort that I have to work through, that I'm currently working through, I'll begin by talking about my own linguistic baggage. I was born in Incheon, Korea, which is a city that borders Seoul, which makes Korean my mother tongue. When I was four, our family moved to Seattle and then to Vancouver, Canada, where I attended kindergarten. We moved back to Korea and I finished up kindergarten. I started attending elementary school there and at the age of seven, we immigrated to Canada for good. At the time of immigration, Korean was still my dominant language. I had not yet acquired English, which meant that I had to go through ESL and all that. But I very quickly assimilated. I lost my accent, became a Canadian citizen, and English became my dominant language. I continued to speak Korean at home, but I had stopped working at it by that point. I had stopped reading Korean books. So Korean basically stayed at a second grade level for me and it was sort of relegated to the language of childhood. In English though, it was my language of instruction. I could articulate more complicated thoughts in English. And though I'd always liked reading and I was always around books, it was actually in English that I fell in love with the active reading. I think the world of books became a haven for me. And it was also in English that I dreamed of becoming a writer one day. So I studied English in college. I started taking some creative writing courses. And I think it was maybe in my third year of college that I had this major realization that I didn't know anything about Korean literature or Korea's literary history. And that being part of my heritage, I felt like I needed to find out. So I took an elective Korean language course. And it was this course that actually changed the trajectory of my life. For the end of term project, we had to take a Korean short story and translate it into English. This was a project. My mom at the time, she was reading a collection of short stories newly published from Korea. And she loved it. And she recommended that I translate, I tried translating the title story of that collection. And it was through working on that story, translating that first story, that I realized I could combine two deeply personal things about my identity. The fact that I wanted to pursue creative writing and the fact that I was from elsewhere from Korea. So I finished that project. I submitted it. And my professor actually encouraged me to submit it to the Korea Times Modern Korean Literature Translation Contest. That's a mouthful. But I did. And to our utter shock, I ended up receiving the grand prize for that translation. And I have sort of been in translation ever since. So that's my journey in a nutshell. And just from our email exchanges alone, it seems our stories and experiences of our mother tongue and our stepmother tongues are quite different. So Pierre, would you like to go next? Sure. I am born by mistake in France. But 10 days later, I wound up in Luxembourg, the country I was raised in and my parents are from, which means that my mum, my mother tongue is Luxembourgish, which is a spoken language given as a dialect by most people. Education in Luxembourg is in French and in German. You learn German, your alphabet in German, your ABCs come in German. And then French comes in in a second school year as a foreign language. By the time sixth grade things switch around, everything has been in German content wise up till then. And this switches now and everything turns into French. Except at high school graduation, you write one essay on German literature in German. Meanwhile, I picked up Latin, of course. I had tried to learn Latin by learning the math by heart at seven when I didn't understand the word a bit to be a math boy, you know, to do that. An uncle brought me to Spain during the holidays always. So I began learning Spanish and took Spanish lessons also in high school. So I was really very confused in that sense of the multitude of languages. When I thought I wanted to become a poet, a writer, this becomes a very complex story for Luxembourg. You have to choose either German or French. Now the cultural history there is interesting and important in that depending on who were the last invaders, we tend to go with the other language. So the 19th century was mainly French invaders, so German was a favorite language. First World War and Second World War, we were invaded by the Germans. So French was more like language. At the same time, there is a class thing going on. People who went just to primary school and dropped out in high school, so if you want the working class, are much more familiar and easy with German because Luxembourgish as a language is a low German descendant. The bourgeoisie, the more literary, the upper classes is much more Francophile, goes to their holidays to France, they also go to Germany. We went to universities to different places of that order too. So there was really a complex language structure. When I thought of wanting to write, it became very complex because the first language I wrote in were actually little when I was a kid. I copied foreign language bits out of Kalmae, the German 19th century story writer, and they were in Mescalero, Apache, in Carmanchi, in Persian, everything. I made a secret language with this. What happens then, and I've written a fair amount of essays on this, is that the Mazatang was unwriteable. I never learned to write in Luxembourgish. It's only after World War II that to begin to standardize the code dialect made the dictionary. Now I get emails from friends in Luxembourgish, which I can't answer because I can't spell the language. I can read them, but I can't answer them. I haven't learned the spelling. So Mazatang problem immediately. And I written about this later on and said, well, why do we have, what is that Mazatang and Fatherland? Do we have to be in that Freudian mummy, daddy triangle, right? Isn't there a way out of that? Well, when I was 15, I went to England for the first time and fell in love with an English girl. So the M of Mazatang dropped off. It became other tongue, and then it became lover's tongue. And I said, why can't I write in the language to which I address myself, the person, the, you know, and so on. So to me, Mazatang became the lover's tongue rather. And I went to Paris to study bourgeois upbringing, French school, right? To do medicine, but I dropped out to become a poet because I had discovered American literature, American culture. My grandmother had a movie house and we saw all the movies in English because they were Belgian distributors and Belgium has two languages. They are Flemish and French. They couldn't dub the two sets of films. So what they did was they left it in the original language, but put two subtitles on in those two languages. But so I learned my American from John Wayne, which is very easy because he doesn't use many words. And high school. My town is also called Pattentown because General Patton was the one who liberated it during the Ringstatt offensive in the Second World. At the same time, he burned down my grandparents' house. So all the papers and books and my grandfather burned. So I learned some odd little thing. But we are very close friends to the American soldiers. My first trade in high school was buying used playboy copies from the soldiers and reselling them in high school, right? So we were continuously in this cultural match, listening to the radio, listening to the AFN American Field Network station, which gave American rock and jazz. So there was a very complex cultural situation. In Paris, I finally decided that, yes, I did not want to write in French or German. I didn't think the writing that I was reading at that time was that interesting. But what really had interested me because I found Ginsburg and Kerouac and the Beats was American literature. And then I found Ezra Pound. When I opened the contours, it said, oh, wow, if I want to be a poet, then I really have, I can't do that on weekends, as my father suggested, be a doctor and do this, you know, and said, so I dropped out, decided to write in English, came to America to go to college. The translating thing happens at the same time. The person who brought me to poetry in high school was Paul Céline. Somebody read the famous tortoise bouquet. When I moved to New York, I thought maybe I'll drop out. So I had three books, De la Grammatologie by Derridaire, that had come out that year, Foucault's Les Moïles shows and the latest Céline volume. In New York, I sent, I sent 10 pages of translation of the Foucault and the Derridaire to New York publishers. I'm still waiting to hear. But the next year, when I had to do a dissertation at Bard College, I translated the Céline. And that got me going so that Céline's word of translator is Fergen-dienst, fairy work, to fairy it over. And I felt that I brought Céline over. And as Esther was saying earlier, the last book is coming out next month. So it's 55 years that I have been translating them. While of course writing it, we can talk later. I think with Janet, we talked that the question of poetry being a poet and a translator and how those interact, how those work. But let me hand it over now to Maria Jose. Thank you, Pierre. Thank you, Janet. I think our journeys are very different, but I see some parallels, some finding out as you're describing your linguistic baggage. I like that way of describing it because it really feels like something I carry. And yeah, so my story is that I was born and raised in Venezuela and left 16 to study in the United States. And so English became this place that I was basically plunged into. I grew up very much in a monolingual culture. Not for the most part, but where I grew up. It was monolingual Spanish, but I always had an interest in languages. So I was always doing courses like self-taught courses in German and English and a little bit of French. And so I just had a natural interest and was also really good at it. But when I moved to the United States, I learned really quickly that I didn't speak English. I had a grammar base, but no ability to understand what people were saying in different accents and even less to speak it and feel comfortable in it. So I went through the whole ESL sequence of courses and then went to college and went into modern languages. So I studied French formally, French literature and Francophone literature and cultures and then ended up immigrating to Canada. And I landed on the West Coast in Vancouver and Victoria. And I began working as a translator, helping someone who was a translator and needed help. And all of a sudden I am helping to edit other people's translations. And very quickly I realized that my Spanish had stayed behind. My English being my language of instruction, I had, my Spanish had stayed, it was very solid, but it had stayed at high school level. And so I decided to go back to school and just take some courses in Spanish. By then I had decided to move to Montreal and all of a sudden began living in French for the first time as well. And also got to speak Spanish quite a bit, not just in class, but Montreal is very much a trilingual city where people speak English, French and something else. So Arabic and Spanish are the most common ones. And so I all of a sudden was functioning, living and functioning in all three languages and very much plunged into literary translation very quickly, because I met Hugh Hazleton, who became my mentor. And he's a poet and translator. And you know, here I was just thinking, oh, I just want to brush up on my Spanish and some academic writing. And all of a sudden this entire world opened up to get to know the community of Latino-Canadian writers, who I then, you know, became part of as I started actually sharing my work, thanks to one of the authors I met through one of my classes. And that completely changed everything, just living in a trilingual place, first of all. For the first time, I hadn't even lived in a bilingual place, because Western Canada's was mainly English. And here I was exploring all three languages. And they all sort of evened out. You know, Janet, you mentioned how English was your dominant language. And I felt very much that way throughout my entire adulthood, until recently, because I've been spending a lot of time in the Canaries, where the variety of Spanish I've spoken that is very similar or a lot closer to Venezuelan Spanish than Peninsula Spanish might be. And so I felt very much at home in the last couple of years, just being immersed in the language that I grew up with, with a very familiar feeling. And I also began writing a lot more in Spanish. I've been writing in English and Spanish and a little bit in French for many years, but especially since I've been spending time in the Canaries, it just concedes to open up and it's been very enjoyable. And in terms of translation, I translate between English and Spanish, and from the French into the other two. And let's see, what have I missed? I feel like language and writing and therefore translation have become as an immigrant or as a migrant, because I feel like I continue to go to new places and make myself at home or they make me feel at home. I feel like migration doesn't ever end when once you've left your motherland or your homeland. And so I feel like at least for me, I carry a deep sense of loss, but at the same time, I'm an incredible opportunity to gain from interacting with texts by other authors who I gravitate towards because they explore themes that are themes that also come up in my writing or things that I like to read about. Marie Jose, thank you for sharing your story. You know, what you just said about that sense of otherness that you carry, I think that's something that deeply resonates with me. And I've kind of been thinking about being a heritage translator, a person of color, being an immigrant, what kind of concerns of my experience and my bringing into translation. And maybe it's kind of related to the anxieties that surface for me when this subject first came to me. And I just want to actually read a quote that I've been sort of meditating on. And it's by Madhu Khaza from Kitchen Table Transition, which has really become my Bible. But she talks about the same anxieties that surface for her, how the discomfort with her discomfort with translation was connected to the trauma of integration. And I'll just read it here. Something went quiet in me when I was brought to the US from India as a child. Although I assimilated and lost my accent, a vital part of me got stopped at the border. My inner life remained untranslated. As an immigrant child, I felt an aura of illegitimacy about my claim to be an American. At times I lived with radical and insecurity. As an adult, when I translated from Telugu, my first language, which I'd learned to read in college, I experienced a repetition of the loss I felt as a child. And you kind of touched upon that, Maria Jose. And this is something I think about a lot. And I think Jean-Palier Heery in a New Yorker essay that she wrote about learning Italian, she wrote how her mother tongue is Bengali and living in a country where her language is considered foreign. She felt a continuous sense of estrangement her whole life. And in another essay she refers to she uses a word trespass, that she had this feeling of trespassing whenever she would read English books as a child. So I've been sort of thinking about, you know, what makes me unique as a translator of color? And I think it's kind of, it's like what you said, it's a strength and also a weakness. My sense, my abiding sense of otherness, which I haven't really been able to shake off. Like even my initial move to the U.S. and Canada, obviously, because I couldn't speak English at the time. But even when I was so young, my earliest memories actually reinforced the sense of otherness that I felt. And even when I moved back to Korea, even though there was no language barrier, I lived with the sense of otherness, of being different, being exposed to maybe a different culture, a different country at a young age. And then obviously the immigration back to Canada, going to ESL, even though I worked very hard at assimilation. It's that sense of otherness I haven't been able to shake throughout the years. And like I said, it's both bad and good. Bad because it makes me sometimes super insecure about English. And it makes me second guess myself all the time. I doubt myself. It kind of feeds into my almost obsessive perfectionist tendencies. I have to check everything to make sure I have this mastery over the language. But the good thing is that it gives me sort of a unique perspective that wouldn't have been available to me had I been an insider who just kind of takes the world as it is. But I feel like my position as like an outsider, it enables me to see certain things I wouldn't have seen. And also informs my selection of things to translate as well. Because of this abiding sense of otherness, I gravitate towards narratives that feature marginalized, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, broken and perfect people, the unremarkable, the odd even. This short story that I translated that always sticks with me. There's this features this female gymnast who can't perform her sport anymore because she goes through this major growth spurt, you know, these odd, odd characters. And I love stories like that where and I love authors who write about these kind of characters rather than characters who are accustomed to privilege and power. So yeah, even Pierre, you were talking about how you when you first moved to England, you dropped the M from your mother tongue and it became the other. So I see that even in your story, there's this preoccupation with otherness. Do you want to kind of talk about how that has informed your writing or your practice? Sure, I think for a long time, I have been completely involved early on probably with some anxieties and I'll read you a short poem about language anxieties because those anxieties enter the writing as much as anything else. But then I have a book of essays called the Nomad Poetics. And the nomadicity is not just traveling as we all have done and as we can do, but it's also that nomadicity of languages. And I have theorized the notion of betweenness that we are always between. One of my books is called Parzakh, which is the Arabic term for the afterlife for the betweenness as we travel through. And I think when we look closely at any given language, there is no such thing as a language that is, I know your anxiety, Janet, the purity, you want to learn that language perfectly. In fact, all languages are impure and the greatness of language is that it is alive as long as it can be enriched and is continuously being enriched by what writers do, what translators do, what the people, the kids on the block do, inventing the new languages. My Arabic translator sent me an email an hour ago saying, I absolutely have no idea what you're talking about in that expression that I'm using. And it was actually a street word I brought in and I'm going to have to write her a long explanation of what that term can be. And it is of course, untranslatable into Arabic because it is a kind of New York abbreviation of something that's not there. So, to me the multitude of languages and the traveling is a great delight. Now, I may also say probably that as a white male, I have a certain prerogative in terms of the way I've been able to move around the world, you know, relatively easily, but they're wonderful situations. I wind up one of my first gigs was in England, I was teaching English as a second language to American Latino officers at the Air Force Base at the American Air Force Base hired by the University of Maryland to do that. Who is I as a Luxembourg, I was the weirdness to wind up teaching, you know, the things. So, but I've always loved those, the craziness of those situations. All languages are also colonized. There is no pure language. Over the years, one has learned that there is no such a thing as a pure clean language. Languages are all mixtures, are all mestizo in a profound way. And that is what gives their richness, you know, American language is any number of languages spoken differently, used differently. And that is the pleasure of it. One would not want to hear some kind of standardized, pasteurized language, though as people who came into a foreign language, as you said, Janet, we are, our tendency would be to be careful. We don't want to be caught saying something wrongly in that given language. Let me read you that short little poem called Anguish, A Riddle, that all the languages are borrowed. But how then do I count them that do not belong to me? In the first one, I think. In the second one, I sink. The third is my rhetoric and the fourth, my west, and wagon its wheel at least traces these steps in harmonies of the tragic modalities before and after I sink. So, the think and the think is that old thing that you can still hear in my speech, THs in English after more than 50 years, I still mess up some times. So, that poem is about the THs. I am so fascinated noticing. Just hearing you both speak of, in a way, we come up with strategies, right, to exist in this in-betweenness that is speaking and other tongue. And I relate to both of your strategies or where you've come to. I was really, when you said, Janet, about the characters that you're drawn to in the work that you choose to translate. I actually, I share that, but I think I tend to gravitate towards work that is very rooted and embodied and uses language to explore this in-betweenness, but in a sense, looking at people and places deeply and creating a sense of intimacy with the world and with the body that is sort of inescapable. And that's been a bit my strategy as a writer and as a translator and just basically inhabiting this world where I'm always moving around and moving between language, like different linguistic spaces and different combinations of languages. And in a way, I have created or have chosen to see language and writing since I was little as a place of escape and as a place of where I could retreat to as a refuge. And I was always an avid reader. And I've noticed that even in my own writing, it's sort of this place that I can carry with me. It's a place that I can enter whenever and wherever I am. And the authors that I feel drawn to, especially the authors that I feel compelled to translate, often address the problem of displacement, the problem of being marginalized or being left out. And one of the ways that at least I sense them or I receive them exploring these issues is through actually creating more connections with specific things like the body or the land or plants or animals and going into these worlds and recreating something. And in a way, for me, my writing as part of my translation practice, because now they're really inseparable, has become a place of reconnection where for a long time I was translating other people's work as a way to avoid writing my own work because it felt like this impulse that once I started, I wasn't going to be able to stop. And that's actually what's happened, that I'm basically spending all my time either writing or translating. And I really can't stop. It's a problem. But one of the beautiful things that's happened is that now I'm translating my own work and not only translating my own work, which I wasn't able to do for a long time, is that now a lot of the poems come out in both languages at the same time. And I'm trying to catch up and writing as quickly as I can because I feel the other language, whether it's Spanish or English, I feel it as I'm writing coming out at the same time. And it's really frustrating sometimes. But you have to make it two poems. Can't you put both into one poem and make both languages mix up? I do that. I do that a little bit. Yeah. Sometimes a line will only want to be in one language or the other. But you know, I can read you an example, a recent example of a poem that came out in Spanish. This is maybe from a couple of months ago where I was in I was in Gran Canaria. And again, very, very rooted in the land and in the yes, very rooted in the land and in what was in front of me, the plants that I was touching, the dirt. And I'll read a little bit of the poem in Spanish. And then I'll read the whole poem in English. Oh, and this is this is part of a series that has become like all of my poems fall into this translation or prayer series now. And they always have a subtitle. This one is Traducción u Horación para la memoria. Hoy recordando un nuevo amigo cuyas ramas perfumaron mi tarde, mis manos, mi cabello. Me lanzé una nueva búsqueda. Le pregunté a mi madre la mejor manera de pegar palitos de un romero que quise propagar para olvidar, para compensar mi no saber. El haber fallado en tantas cosas. I'll read the English. I wrote this poem soon after George Floyd was killed. And this was a way that I found to to root my my anger and rage and sadness being so far away from what was happening here. So translation or prayer for remembrance. Today reminiscing about a new friend whose branches perfumed my afternoon, my hands, my hair. I launched into a new search. I asked my mother for the best way to root cuttings from a rosemary bush. I wanted to propagate to forget to make up for my unknowing all my failings. For example, attempting to root a tip from a fig tree I cut on a morning walk. I didn't know it's best to take a cane ripe with tender buds in another season on another moon. I don't think this cutting will survive. I don't think this cutting will survive the present crisis of fires, tremors and death. But knowing that in my absence, its hundred year old mother will still guard the gulch that young and old shrubs will watch over the sleeping grape vines, almond trees and tunas will no doubt lengthen my years. I will wax gracefully my memory swollen with new tongues, sweet with droplets, sirens and roots. With the fresh air, we breathed without a knee to the neck. Thank you. Thank you. Beautiful. Yeah, so that's just one example of a poem that felt really urgent and just came out in both languages. And I do think the authors I translate for inspire me in encouraging me to inhabit this in-betweenness. And I wonder if especially you, Janet, but both of you, whoever wants to go there, where your writing and translation meet and how you see that. And I know we could be here all day, but for sure. Well, something that you said, Maria Jose, about how even when you're writing now, or your transition practice and your writing practice, they're both sort of wanting your attention. They're both kind of, you feel their pressure. Like how did you get to that point where they're both there? Because I feel like I need some of that to like summon my writing because I feel like for me, when I'm working on doing a lot of translation, my writing is sort of it's hindered or it's almost damaging. It almost harms my writing if I'm doing a lot of translation. And I haven't been able to find that balance. So if you guys could speak to that, that would be amazing. I don't know. I was thinking in terms of what Maria Jose said in the relation between translation and writing and how we feel about it. I think what I have done or tried to do over the years is to annul the difference. And one way of that I could think I could come through it in a thinking way is to realize that all language is translation. That is, there is something before language, and whatever comes into language is translated from somewhere so that all language is translation, which means that all writing is translation. And that means that the kind of literary translation we're doing is only a sort of special unique case that you can also treat that way. Then, for example, if you're going into translation studies and you look, say, at how Uli Po translates, or an example of something I did, I translated Unica Zürn's poems, which are based, she takes a line by Henri Michaud, takes all the letters in the French line, and writes a German line out of those letters. So that's a poem. How do you translate that? I can doubly. I translate her line, and then I go and I take Michaud's line and use her method, using all the French letters in and make an English poem out of it. So then you have to. Now, there are 100 ways that Uli Po invented such matters. An old friend passed by now, but that Canadian, you may know, BP Nickel, BP wrote a lot around translation, did a lot of work in those areas. So I think an ongoing practice of transformative writing is always translation and always comes in that way. And that's what kind of permitted me to some extent to, to if not come to peace with the question of poet translator, you know, what comes first or so. No, they're both there continuously and they feed each other. The one good thing about translation is that if you don't have anything to write or the poem doesn't come, you can always translate. And I'll answer very quickly. For me, I remember a sort of before and after I was translating some work by a Montreal author, his name is Alejandro Saravia. I was translating his novel, and it was really painful. There was very heavy content, political violence, and I found it excruciating. And it was also very challenging. It's a multilingual novel. And, and I remember before that time, I tried to translate my own poems and I, it literally made me nauseous. And so I wrote and just put my stuff away. And, and then while I was translating this, this work, I felt like I really had an impulse to pay attention to what was coming out. That was my own, like my own thoughts, my own ideas that were not necessarily related to what I was, what I was translating, but something was calling for my attention. And I gave it space. So I always had a notebook next to me. And I would just jot down notes. And I also felt compelled to write to the characters in the novel. And then I started doing this thing where I would either write a poem or write a short prose piece addressing the characters in the pieces that I was translating. And that has been going on for a while. And a lot of new workouts come out that way. And it felt like at the beginning it felt more like a, like a cleanse, like a, like a space that I was creating to calm my nervous system down from, you know, both the intensity of the deadlines and of the content that I was, that I was treating. And, and then it just sort of became a, you know, second nature that I'm, I'm always giving my writing space. And now it's sort of unavoidable. I can't, I can't look away. So maybe that, that, that might work just, just, just opening a little bit of space and then just seeing what happens. Thank you. That's, this has been an incredible conversation. And I'm sorry that we're interrupting now. This extremely beautiful exchange between the three of you. But we do have some questions. And the first one is from Samantha herself. I wanted to ask each of you, if you think you have different personalities or perhaps identities in different languages, either as a writer or in your daily lives. And if so, do those differences reflect the personalities of the languages that you're living and working in? Do we have another hour? That's a great question. I feel that as a question for novelists, as a poet, that, that, that sense is, is relatively strange to me, or I don't have it, or I'm in the language in such a way where I don't think of a personality of my personality, where I'm more looking at the language. Does that make sense to Samantha? You know, I, that's all I can say. Ladies, pick it up. For me, I would say it's not so much an issue of identity or personality. I feel like I, in Spanish, I, I write in a more, like bodily way, like I'm just more into, like it is, you know, my mother tongue, my, the language of my heart. I am more directly in touch with my emotions. And I think not always better able to express by better able to access the impressions that something left that I, that are calling me to write. And in English, I get carried away playing with sound and rhythm and playing with the language itself. Whereas in Spanish, I might be more driven to pay attention to images and impressions and feeling and how the language, not so much how it feels in my mouth, but more the effect it's going to have or that I think I want it to have, even if I fail at it. And Janet? For me, I think because, as I mentioned before, my Korean state at a second grade level. And I never actually studied Korean after that. So when I, when I speak Korean, when I'm working with Korean, in some ways, I still feel like a child. And I take in the words and the sounds of the words almost like a child, it's kind of, it feels different at whereas English is my language of education of instruction. So I feel like I could articulate, you know, I could talk about literature, whereas in Korean, I mean, this is so funny as a translator that I can't talk about literature in Korean, but, but I think it sort of plays into even my translation and writing practice as well. As when I translate, I am in awe of the author's skills. And I get so absorbed and sort of pulled into that language. And there is a part of me that feels like I can never live up to, to what they're doing. So there is that that tension that is always at play. Maybe I will take Maria Jose's advice and go study some Korean finally, so that we can sort of the two languages kind of be dominant or to match. But, but yeah. We have another question that came in via Gmail. It's sort of a double barreled question. The first part is just for Janet, but I think it would be interesting to ask it of all three of you. The question is after winning the translation contest, Janet, how did you go about improving your translation skills? Did you take any classes or were you more self taught? And then the second part of the question is for all three of you. And that is how do you keep your finger on the pulse of the literary scene in all of your languages? So after I won that contest, I was sort of my professor was shocked. We were both in shock and I was sort of thrown into translation. I took some graduate seminars, but they were workshops in translation. So I didn't really formally study literary translation or translation studies. So I was in a few workshops. But I have to say it's sort of been my approach to translation has been kind of homespun. If I have questions about the texts, I often go to my mother and I ask her, what does this mean? I ask a lot of my Korean friends. I didn't mention this in my brief introduction, but I did do an MFA in creative writing. So I feel like as I worked and studied other people's writing, other writers that I admire, I think it sort of informs also my my transition practice and and kind of lets me see the possibilities of language. And what about the other two of you? Did you study translation formally? I did study later on. After after graduating from Bard, I got jobs translating into French, Perouac and others, but that was to make a living. Then when I was set up in London, in order to get some money from my father, I went back to the university and I did an MFA in translation studies, but on work that I had already translated. And 15, 20 years later, I did a doctorate at SUNY Binghamton on my Céline translations. I had already done the translation. I just added a volume to it. So it was always a mixture. Early on it was like trying to make a living. That was my early crazy idea that it could make a living as a literary translator, but I only wanted to translate poetry. I liked no way paying the rent that way. So, you know, so it came in that way. And I learned about it. I learned the theory a bit when I started teaching at the university at UAlbany and I offered the graduate course in translation. That's when I began looking more seriously at what had been written about it. But I had already worked with Jerry Waffenberg. We did those anthologies, the poems from Millennium Anthologies, or we were doing those at the same time. So the complexity of thinking about learning about and teaching it and doing it all were there simultaneously, really. And you, Marie-Jo? Yeah, for me. So when I went back to school, I went to Concordia University in Montreal. I took a couple of workshops. Well, one was more of introductory class, Introduction to Translation with Hugh Hazelton. That's where I met Hugh. And then I think there were maybe a couple of other workshops. And I just went right into it. I started doing independent studies. And then my projects for the classes would be translating short stories or poetry. And it was very natural for me. And Hugh said that I was very good at it. And so I just kept doing it. And then I did some formal studies in more professional translation at McGill. But that included some stylistic a couple of classes that had style that looked at style and stylistic differences between the languages that also helped me in my literary translation. And then I started an MA in translation studies at UMass Amherst when I moved here to Massachusetts. And but it was more focused on in theory. Or I, you know, I dropped out. I'm a proud grad school dropout. But the first courses, the first core courses that I took were born in theory. And I just wanted to translate. So I dropped out and just kept translating. So it's definitely like a lot more self taught. But I've had plenty of opportunity to confirm my, you know, where I'm going, either by people that I that I work with and definitely more recently, the last few years, I've been co-translating with a colleague and friend Anna Rosamund. And I feel like I'm becoming a worst translator now, because she's so good. You know, we're a really good team. But I because we have each other, I I'm basically like, I'm not completing my work. So but I'm learning a lot there too, as working with with a co-translator. And how about the other part of the question about keeping your finger on the pulse of all of these various different literary cultures that you're all inhabiting? My answer is very short. I don't. Anybody else? I tried to stay in touch with some of the people. I did a lot of work from North African literature because I've done there. I lived in Algeria for a number of years, translated. This to me was also a wonderful discovery because the French that I was translating from was a multi-language thing, you know, that had Arabic and Bill going through it. And I keep in touch with the friends there and so on and try to stay there to wear something that there's a problem, not so much for the translator, but for the people who read the translation. When we drop a beautiful poem or novel from a culture that nobody knows anything about, it falls into a strange place because we can't bring along all the necessary information to make it readable inside of a wider culture. And that's a very frustrating thing. One keeps reading. One keeps, I try to keep connected with the culture I'm translating from, but that is very difficult to carry over beyond the very limited specific text that I'm translating. Does that make sense? Yes. You have experiences of that order of, I want to bring Korean knowledge about this methods over, cross it and, you know, film, you know. As for me, I actually try to foster really good relationships with Korean publishers and also my Korean, the writers that I translate. And they sometimes tell me about a new book that's come out. And then they'll, I'll be the first one to know before anybody because they are in that scene. And sometimes publishers will also, I will just kind of follow their Instagram or their Twitter feeds and see what new books are coming out. And that's how I sort of stay connected. Okay. Do we have time for one more question? Last one. And this is also from Gmail. I wonder whether there isn't a new canon emerging of works based on the in between languages principles you three have been discussing. I know Janet mentioned Madukaza's anthology kitchen table translation. Are there other works you think of as key texts and inspirations that you would recommend? Read my Nomad Poetics and a couple, about three volumes of essays on translation I have. All my unpublished poetry. And I guess you also mentioned Junpa Lahiri. Yeah. And there was another writer that you brought up in our earlier conversations in addition to Junpa. I think it was from an anthology. It was the bilingual. I forget the title. It's about creativity. But I mean, there are so many writers who kind of work with different languages. Junpa Lahiri, whom I love. But there's also Yi and Li. She says wonderful things about translation and working in writing in her second language. You can find a lot of her essays online in the New Yorker. But you just have to do a search. And there are so many, so many texts. I would like to add Jerome Rothenberg's notion of total translation and his anthologies from Native American materials and so on are still, to me, very, very interesting. His translation of Navajo Hosong's, all that material, all that thinking through the richness of cultural traditions is very useful still to date. And that gives us a chance to close out this whole sort of mini-series of Beyond the Mother Tongue with the mention of the UCLA Professor Yasmin Gildiz, whose book literally called Beyond the Mother Tongue was the inspiration for Bruna Dante Slovato's panel, which has then in turn inspired our three talks of which, alas, this is the last because there's so much more to say on this subject. And you've been an absolutely gripping conversation between the three of you. But alas, we've run out of time, so we have to say goodbye. Before we do, I'd like to thank our partners, again, HowlRound, Penn America, the Center for the Humanities, the Graduate Center CUNY, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, and today, especially, we have to thank LTI Korea, which has provided some special support for today's program. And most of all, many thanks to my Joe Pierre and Janet for sharing this wonderful moment with us. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you for having me.