 So, we have Silvia Aguilar-Seleni, Stalina Villarreal, John Plucker, his friends call him JP. You can decide what you are and call him accordingly. And Jen Hofford, together we are Antenna. Our bios are in the program and also there's extensive information on Ye Olde World Wide Web. So, we're just going to dive right in and start with Stalina. Estalinear the lost. We the archetype of translators. Hold on, I did this wrong. Which proves my point. All is lost. Hooray! Estalinear the lost. We the archetype of translators. Now with the arrows. Yeah, I'll do it. Take three. Estalinear the lost. We the archetype of translators. Exposition of characterization. Temperament. Motive. Source language and its linguistic style. Cultural persona, regional colloquialism, personal development, voice. Backstory, intervention through translation, paratext and content considerations, meaning and logos. Conflict of target language. Translation of plot and character, pathos influenced and ethos driven intersectionality between paradigms, interpretation of power shifts, or as my first translation professor would have summarized, duende, infinidad, epic, más, romantic, menos. Queer translator, hero, heroine, goes on a journey. Exposition of the unknown feminist erasure of I and transformation of we. Lengthy exploration, engagement with you and transtextuality. They until verb us. We verb success with both interpersonal and interpersonal recognition. Interruption, stranger, translator, hero, heroine, comes to town, pronoun, discombobulation. Interruption, critics reject foreign decisions and alien characteristics, none other. External context of thought clash, who, which, internal, contrast, exposition and argument, highlight or blur, where's the action? No rebuttal, climax or transition. Self-identification summoned by ghost buster. And I guess for my epic, I would say I did go on with my second translation instructor. I went on to a workshop and I, it was about, I went on an epic, about an epic, and during that epic, JP and Jen were my buddies in a conference when I met the one poet that I have chosen to translate. In my own journey, I actually didn't choose to be a translator or interpreter. My mentors chose for me. So, so when I was in fifth grade, my instructor, my teacher said that the only other Latina student she had taught was very gifted and talented like me, but that when she was 15, all she wanted to do was have little babies and, and so she didn't want that to happen to me. So on Saturday, she would go pick me up and take me to the Houston Zoo. And I'd have to use their glossary to be an interpreter. But my favorite part of that was going to the petting zoo so I could be with other kids and just play with the animals and the kids. Anyway, so, but then it just kept going. You know, I went, in one of my jobs, I was doing some research for some sociologists because they needed somebody bilingual. And it was in Roca en Español and I was having so much fun, but they were like, oh wait, this other professor needs you to interpret for us. And I was like, well, is that gonna, are you all gonna pay me? And they said yes. So I did it, but it was a religious professor, I mean, it was, it was a religious sociologist and she was interviewing Santeros and since I'm not Cuban or, or part of the Yoruba religion or Santera, I found that the micro politics were a big issue. The, the interviewees hated that I wasn't Cuban. They hated that I, I, that, you know, they feared that I would find out the secrets of the house. So, and, and what I saw is that they never made eye contact with me. They made eye contact with the person who was part of their religion, even though she didn't speak the same language. And so, in some, some of the conversations we've had about interpreting and, and translating in which the, the person who knows more languages is in power, I felt the opposite. I felt that even though I had the knowledge of the languages, I had lost power. And so again, I rejected the idea that this is what I would be. And then, and then again, in my, with my first translation professor, Zach Rogo, he, he gave me a poem, the first poem he gave me to translate was Octavio Paz. And he knew I did not like repetition. And, and so, but I, and I translated it differently each time because I did, and, and he said, no, you're not respecting the form. And so it was he, the one who suggested that I have the second instructor who was among the pal who's sitting in the back. And, and even though, you know, we all had different, I guess, non-epic or non-romantic experiences, we kind of understood each other. And that, and then that, and then I went on to find other translators. I did have, maybe not romantic interests with, but, you know, but poet crushes, I would call them. Okay, anti, oh, sorry, take two, or five, anti, tragic. Translator, anti-hero, heroine, I submit or share with us, rejection measured, micro or macro politics, revised, endurance revisited or revisted, failure, si se puede. Tragic translator, hero, heroine, flaw, strength equated as weakness, demise or surprise, without end, se equivoca la boca. And so, I think at that point on my own, I had taken advice from several translators and just tried to do it on my own and, and then I, it somehow, again, jobs just came my way and I tried them and I did things I wasn't supposed to do. And I did become sort of like the anti-hero of the, of translation, the anti-translator in a way. And, and I think also my, again, my first professor in translation knew that I, I had a, that somehow translation would help me, but that I had this resistance and somehow I had to go back in line, but then I had this, again, my tragic flaw. So I kept going and going and I think that's the thing that's kept me with my translator gang. Equals, strike through villain and strike through anti-villain. That's it, that's it, that's it. Unresolved or misunderstood experiment, failure can teach success. Or do we need a better role model? Countdown for upward mobility. Two, even place like odd. If intersectionality can coincide, diversity can exist through recognizing the proportion of intersectional powers. Dilemma, problem solution methods need extra, hmm. One, diversity is not two of the same, but one of a kind. Yet inclusion can fail if only one wins. Dialogue is needed for win-win. Breathe, listen, listen, respond and process. Speed modification, alterar the ease. Zero, a zero is still a number. Or does it mean non-existence, invention or convention? Human, can we take turns? Thank you. Okay, so I had to write it, I can't talk that well. Lost and found. Number one, lost. My name is Silvia Ilarcellini. I'm a fiction writer and I have translated one book of poetry for my MFA thesis. This is when you all say, hi Silvia. We're all in a support group because a Congress of Translator is a support group in its own way, right? We're all here to talk about our own struggles or achievements or failures on translation. I will tell you about how I got lost and then, while still lost, I found my way. I translated Jane a murder, a poetry book that tells a story of Jane Mixer. She was a student at the University of Michigan. On March 20, 1969, she got a ride from Unarvore to her parents' home in Muskegon. But she never got there. Her body was found lying on top of a grave of a cemetery the next day. She had been strangled and shot. Jane Mixer was the aunt of poet Maggie Nelson, the author of the book. Or could have been her aunt if she hadn't been killed, of course. The author explores Jane's murder through a collage of poetry, prose, documentary sources, including newspapers, true crime books, fragments of Jane's own diaries. Harris is like a quell that shows together these blocks with a thread of language and forms, such as LG Memoir Detective Story Essay. Harris is a conversation between the living and the dead. So how was I to translate such a hybrid book without losing its essence? Furthermore, how to translate this experience and make it available and relatable to a Spanish-speaker reader? Because Jane's story has all the trappings of the status quo of white America. College girl, University of Michigan. She studied in France. She had a boyfriend. She was going to graduate school in New York. Smart, pretty blonde girl who was killed, the hands of a serial killer. I read this book in 2009, which was the worst year for women in Mexico, especially in Ciudad Juarez. At least 3,000 fantasies happened that year. And then I have to say this, happened. Such an odd and faithful bear for such a naked, horrible truth. End of my parenthesis. I wanted to translate Jane a murder because of how poetry addresses a topic that has been only exposed as tabloid news. But was Jane's story similar to any of the 3,000 women in Juarez who have been killed? Translating it became about making it pertinent to a culture that has been exposed to a much more vicious violence. But violence in Mexico has seen numbers only. 3,000 women killed, 49 kids burning a daycare, 43 students disappear. So, so many people unaccounted in this drug war. It is a fact that Nelson's book is a construction of Jane, a portrait of a girl, a teen, a woman that makes a difference. And that is why I wanted to translate it. Maggie Nelson makes sure that Jane is not una más. She makes sure we see who Jane Mixer was. This intimate narrative achieves universal scope. So I wanted the Spanish reader to observe what happened to Jane and what still happens today in Latin America. It has been said that translators become almost co-authors. They too undergo a process just as tormenting as the authors. Translating what Nelson was saying sometimes was not enough. I had to become a writer. I had to become a writer translated what she meant to really render Jane Mixer. Isn't that what Borges used to say to his own translator? No escribas lo que digo, sino lo que quiero decir. So the only way of translating what she meant was to lose, to lose my Spanish, get lost in her poetics, and then find the language the book required. It is said that the, my second part is still lost. It is said that overall the most important key to translation is to find the voice. Who is telling, who is narrating, who is stating. So I had to acknowledge the fact that this book compiles a variety of voices and genders and translate all of them, trying not to raise the beauty and complexity of the book itself. So I have to give you an example. In one of the poems, Maggie Nelson writes, I am grateful that her three inch nail wasn't hammering to her head. I am grateful that her face wasn't beaten beyond recognition. I am grateful that her breath weren't corroded with acid. So first I had to go very literal. Estoy agradecida de que un clavo de tres pulgadas no fuera incrustado en su cabeza. Estoy agradecida de que su cara no fuera golpeada hasta lo irreconocible. Estoy agradecida de que sus pechos no fueran corroídos con ácido. Then I tried, agradezco. Agradezco que un clavo de tres pulgadas no fuera incrustado en su cabeza. Agradezco que su cara no fuera golpeada hasta lo irreconocible. Agradezco que sus pechos no fueran corroídos con ácido. I also tried using doigracias. But what was the best? Estoy agradecida, agradezco o doigracias. Which is the most polite way to thank that someone who has been strangled and shot had not undergone the worst tortures. Is it really a way? Furthermore, how can you translate this to a reader that has most likely heard about women who have been strangled, beaten beyond recognition, and whose skins have been corroded? In my translating of Jane and Murther, I was placed in a strength position, and at the same time in the position I needed to be. I was writing Jane to achieve the power of the original. It is not about getting it right, but rather about getting into it. Grow Jane Huffer once. For me, getting into it meant finding creative writing as an ally for translation. It was Walter Benjamin who said that the intention of the poet is a spontaneous primary graphic. That of the translator is derivative, ultimate, ideational. I guess that is the one advantage, the only advantage I have over the other is I knew where I had to land. There was a closure in her book. So I just had to find my way into it. Three, found or sort of. The first time, well, my first month of translating the book, I was working on this line that says, sunlight shot around the, etc. So in my first translation, I wrote, la luz del sol brillaba, because I was afraid of losing meaning. I was trying to be accurate. But in doing that, I completely miss a force of the original. It wasn't until I assumed the lost in translation that I could come up with la luz del sol disparaba alrededor de. I lost brillaba, but I lost it to be able to find disparaba. And that way, I created the blunt, honest language that Nelson poems required, or so I think. She has another poem that's called The Plan. In it, she says, she feared fury from her fox, a scene blunt as dead sticks. That phrase, a scene blunt as dead sticks, was easy or sort of easy to understand. But it was hard to recreate without alienating a future reader. I had to come up with the same domestic violence of the original, because una brutal escena como palos muertos would have not said anything to a Spanish reader. I re-grow then this verse addressing the emotion of the original. Temía la furia de sus viejos, una escenita cerrada de golpe con un portazo. That is what I wrote. I don't know if it works, but that's what I wrote. Margaret Sayers-Redden says that to varying degrees, a translator is composed of creative writer, scholar, archivist, not innovator, and often a large portion masochist. I did everything else, and especially the masochist part. I found the masochist in me when trying to address shaping the language for this book. And by shaping the language of this book, I shaped myself as an author and as a translator, I guess. What I learned about the process of translation in Jane and Murder is that the only way to talk about such a cold-blooded case was by grinding in cold blood. I was lost, then found. Hooray. Good afternoon, everyone. As Jen said, my name is John Plucker. And we, jointly, Jen and I are Antenna. And what we're going to do, just so that you can have a sense of what we're going to do during our section of the panel, first we're just going to do a brief slideshow that shows some of the work that Antenna has done over the last five years since Jen and I founded it. And then we're going to read you some excerpts from one of our manifestos, and then a more recent piece of writing that we're still working on. Antenna is a language justice and language experimentation collaborative. What is language justice? You may be wondering. JP and I are both literary translators. Hence our presence at ALTA. We're also both writers, DIY bookmakers. We curate installations. We do performance. And we're both interpreters, particularly in the social justice context. So language justice is the idea that everyone has the right to speak in the language in which they feel most comfortable. And it's a commitment to creating bilingual or multilingual spaces where no language will dominate over other languages. So there's a whole conceptual basis for thinking about that. And then a series of tools that we use to create those spaces. So that's part of what Antenna does. Yeah, and so we have some photos here of that work, the social justice interpreting work. And that was initially the impetus for beginning Antenna in 2010 to be able to work more strategically and intentionally together on using interpreting technologies to create multilingual spaces in the context of community movements and community organizations, primarily in the US, but also internationally. And we're part of a kind of wider informal network of folks that are doing this work across the US. And we can talk more about the history of language justice and that network, if that's interesting to you later. As experimental poets, one of the things that JP and I were most interested in, as experimental poets and cross-language practitioners, we were interested in exploring what it is about non-normative uses of language that are occasioned by experimental writing and or translating experimental writing, what those things might have to say to the kind of non-normative listening that creating well functioning dynamic bilingual or multilingual space entails. So we're interested in sort of the interplay between how we think and how we listen as poets and how we think and how we listen as people who inhabit more than one language or more than one cultural space, as well as the idea of using some of the platforms that we have, both as artists and as trained interpreters, to open spaces for other people's participation in certain kinds of contexts. And so what you're looking at on the screen is actually one of those contexts. So in 2012, we were invited to do an installation at Project Row Houses in Houston, which is an African-American art space founded about 20 years ago. And we did an installation in one of these row houses of books from the United States and from Latin America, primarily experimental writing by writers of color, feminist writers and queer authors with a large focus on translation. So there were books, cartoneras, there were books from all across the continent. So one of the other things that we do, so JP lives in Houston, I live in Los Angeles. So JP was the person who was most actively involved in Antena at Project Row Houses, although I spent a few weeks there toward the end of the installation. JP ran a read-write club or facilitated a read-write club where community members could come and read a book in that moment, you didn't have to do homework and then talk about it. Antena is also really interested in facilitating all kinds of workshops. We do workshops on language justice basics. We do workshops on interpreting techniques for bilingual folks and or social justice interpreting techniques for interpreters who don't normally work in community contexts. We've done a lot of creative writing workshops using the framework of cross-language practice as a generative tool for making creative writing projects. And a lot of the workshops we do and or programming that we've done is bilingual. So after Project Row Houses a couple of years later, we had another installation. Yeah, which was also in Houston at the Blaffer Art Museum, which is the university museum at the University of Houston. And there we had access to a larger set of resources. We were working with other funders and with the museum. And so we did a larger scale iteration of what we had done at Project Row Houses previously. So we worked with 11 artists and writers who did work at the intersections of the textual, and the political. And they contributed with pieces. So there was partially a curatorial aspect that Antenna was involved in. Yes, this is true. And so in the space we had those pieces developed by those artists and then also over 3,000 books, so many more books. We had trafficked books, friends, some of the people in the room may have helped us to traffic these books from Latin America into the US to get around shipping costs. And so we had all of these books and a very ambitious set of programming. So there all of our programming was bilingual. And so there was an encuentro that involved all of the 11 artists that was open to the public. There was this event that you're seeing here with La Colmena, Domestic Workers Collaborative in Houston, and bilingual conversation circles which Jen can tell you more about. Well, actually, I'm gonna backtrack a little bit and show you this image. One of the things we were able to do because we had more resources at the museum was build an Antenna mobile, which as you can see is a repurposed Mexican cargo trike that used to sell snacks on the east end of Houston. And it was retrofitted to become a mobile, a book mobile. So it was on display in the museum with some of the books from the exhibition and then also, that's not what I want, I want this. We would take it out onto the street at different events. The books were, as JP said, all small press independent publications organized by Press Project and alphabetical order by Press Project. There were little cards on the shelves that would say, for instance, Eloisa Cartonera, Buenos Aires, Argentina, or Ugly Duckling Press, Brooklyn, New York. So you got a real sense moving through the space of the incredible output of effort and labors of love that people do literally all over the Americas and all over the world to create literary community building through small press publications. We had over 2,000 books in this space and almost 200 small independent presses represented. So the bilingual conversation circles were something that we experimented with here, which was having interpreted spaces that were fully bilingual. This space, for example, is not bilingual and it is English dominant. We also sometimes do events like this one where we don't have interpretation and where we are not actually doing it bilingualy. Partially because it takes a lot of resources often to be able to have the interpretation and to be able to coordinate all of that. But we were able to do it here with conversation circles after the launch of a book by La Colmena that Stalina and I worked on in Houston with the women of La Colmena. They published a book of their writings after two years of writing workshops with us. And then in the museum we had conversation circles that were facilitated by the women of La Colmena where anyone could speak using the language in which they felt most comfortable. We also, through the installation, organized a number of different workshops. This was a workshop where we brought an artist from LA and an artist from Tijuana. I don't know why this image appears twice. These are some of the La Colmena books. We also have a small imprint called Libros Antenna Books where we publish almost exclusively, not exclusively, but almost exclusively bilingual books. Also, through the exhibit, we were able to put out five bilingual pamphlets which we have here for sale and or for perusal. And this is them on the screen and them in real life. And we're currently working on a new pamphlet project that we're gonna share a little bit from in a moment. And then finally, we have been experimenting with, one of our pamphlets is called a manifesto for interpretation as instigation. The pamphlets are three manifestos and two how-to guides, a manifesto for discomfortful writing, a manifesto for interpretation as instigation, a manifesto for ultra-translation, how to write more, which is a series of experimental writing exercises and how to build language justice. They're completely bilingual pamphlets. One of the things we think about a lot is the ways that we can use interpreting and or other cross-language techniques as a generative strategy for making poems. So this is an image of us. And we also, when we wrote a manifesto for discomfortful writing, wanted to challenge ourselves to engage in a discomfortful practice. And it's very discomfortful to be professionally trained as an interpreter and then engage in a performative process in public where you're purposefully creating an excess of language that doesn't follow and is impossible to interpret, but using interpreting plus improvisational techniques to make new poems. So we're continuing to experiment with forms that will get us out of our comfort zone and utilize some of the techniques that we use often in creating bilingual spaces. And I just say we're not gonna take up your time here to do this, but there's a video online that goes further into the Blaffer exhibit, and then there's also some videos online of us doing this poem generation experiment using interpretation as the generative strategy. So what we're gonna do now is, are we gonna sit down? Okay. We're gonna stand. Now we're gonna stand, which we were also doing before. It is www.antennaantenna.org. And if you Google antenna in our names, you will definitely find that website. So we wanted to share some thoughts about the new pamphlet that we are collaboratively writing, particularly because it is specifically about our positionality as literary translators, and perhaps that could maybe be of interest to some of you here at Alta. We wanted to start by reading some brief excerpts from our manifesto for ultra translation. Nothing is lost in translation. Everything was already lost long before we arrived. Translation is its own undoing, a feedback loop, a mobius strip or trip, an unwriting of the original, which is never the same as itself anyway, a writing of the unoriginal translation. Translation is an asymptote. No matter how close we try to get, there's always a space between the two bodies, and that is the space where we live, the space where we transpose or are transposed. Untranslatability is at the root of our practice. Moments of untranslatability lead directly to untranslation, under translation, over translation, an excess, X translation, a lack, a limit, an expressance, an impropriety, distranslation, retranslation, multi translation, a mistake, a conflict, an understanding of the potential in not understanding. An ultratranslation. Ultratranslation, an awareness or hum or breath. Not all translation is ultratranslation. Ultratranslation is moments within translation, a part of translation, parting it to expose the irreducible gaps. Ultratranslation bubbles up from translation, moves translation somewhere else, transposes it. Ultratranslation labors to translate the untranslatable and also to preserve it, not to reduce the irreducible, not to know but to acknowledge. Ultratranslation does not replace translation, nor does it seek to depose. They exist beside one another and concurrently, one feeding the other, two bodies with the negative space of relation between them, only in the geography of the margins, in the space between, only there. Ultratranslation is not translation unmoored from meaning, but translation that questions what and how meaning itself means. We are opposed to seamless translation as it seeks to stitch innumerable disparate words and ideas and divides together as if they had always been fused. We oppose ourselves to poses, positions of control or superiority. We want ultratranslation to untranslate the seams, to extra translate the gaps, to multi-translate the leaps, to infra-translate the porosities. We want the transfer and the untransferable, both. Who we choose to translate is political. How we choose to translate is political. The politics of translation make us ultra skeptical and ultra committed. Ultratranslation is built from radicalism, ultraism, anti-racism, anti-superiority, anti-assimilation. We recognize and respect words, details, and impulses that cannot be translated, a constant divide. Both translation and its riotous cousin ultratranslation provide tools for crossing or not crossing. Whether or not we cross, we need the tools. We recognize how translation has been used, is used, and might still be used as a tool of conquest, assimilation, or domestication. We're committed to creating translations that are rascinated in the cultures, dialogues, conflicts, battles, struggles, hierarchies, gossip of their communities of origin. We recognize this is a difficult, perhaps impossible task, and yet we have high hopes, impossible hopes, untranslatable hopes, ultratranslators bent on unsettling the empire of English. Ultratranslation is a process of working against languages that seek to dominate. At the most basic level, the message of translation, there is something being said elsewhere that is of crucial importance for us here, in this language, to hear. It is worth great effort to listen to that as something elsewhere. Ultratranslation would not bring something elsewhere into a dominant language, English, for instance, in a smooth, seductive, unproblematized way, as if to suggest that now we understand you. Ultratranslation nudges dominant languages away from dominance, toward the space between original and translation, into the space of the ultra. Working across languages is a conundrum, especially for those of us who speak and write in the language of empire. Our language perpetuates the invisibility of the other. Our language imposes the privilege of the same, yet we translate into our language. We translate into our language to rewrite our language. Ultratranslation has a way to clamber out of conundrum. Ultratranslation has a way of living restless and anarchic inside conundrum. And this is a great place to end from the manifesto because it ends on conundrum. And the piece that we're working on now is actually called dilemma. It uses a very different language, a very different strategy. It is not a manifesto. It is a continuation of this conundrum or dilemma. So the full title is dilemma. Notes on translation, complicity and resistance in the smog of white supremacy. And it starts with two quotes. The translation zone is a war zone. Emily Aptor. We were all conceived in the warring womb. Our memory lining radiated. We were all fed from the same placenta, empires placenta. We all need to be translators against the empire. Don Mice. We find ourselves as translators and writers inside a dilemma that is not entirely unfamiliar. It is, in fact, lost on this page. It is, in fact, uncomfortably familiar. The dilemma is large and shapeshifting, bound up with our histories as people and as practicing translators, as well as the history of translation practice more broadly. Tradutore traditore goes the cliche problem of translation, the translator as trader. This problem is traditionally seen as textual. The translator betrays the original by altering it while in transit to a different language, as if transit into difference could do anything else, or as if reading itself were not a kind of transit that betrays the original. But beyond our possible betrayal of the text and norms of language use, betrayals we welcome, what we set out to do now is to understand how translation might function as a tool for betraying colonialism. Yet possibly betrays us in the process, in both senses of the word, crosses our purposes, but also exposes us. We wanna think through this moment, our location, locations and subject or subjected positions and our decision making processes to parse the impossibilities of our work as translators as people bent on betraying colonial frameworks, decolonizing our thinking and our practice. We could say we got into this work as translators with naive and hopeful dreams, a means to co-create worlds we want to inhabit. We had large dreams, but now we have larger dilemmas, perilously insistent, hardly an escape route visible, and still our dreams persist. Not a dream of a common language, but a dream of an uncommon listening. We are inside this house of language, we are both of it and dreaming of extricating ourselves, participating in it and rejecting it, betraying it and allaying its anxious fears. This is a complicated dance and we want this writing to shimmy through these, our now well-worn steps. And we wanna think through the dilemma publicly. Specifically, we're concerned with how we make decisions about who to work for, when to work for them, under which conditions and why. We see ourselves as working for or put another way, engaging in a relationship of commodity and aesthetic effective exchange with, presses and institutions that publish our translations, whether or not we are paid money for our labor. We also see ourselves and sometimes realize we have failed to really see ourselves working toward larger, more overarching goals, a sort of literary political harmonics, decolonizing structures and practices outside ourselves and within ourselves, dismantling systems of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, creating contexts for radically altered listening and action, making space for joy and adventure. These goals extend beyond or underneath any single project we might do and can't be realized, but rather can only be in a process of realization alongside the work of many other thinkers, artists and activists. Where we position our translations and where and how they move is political. As you may have noticed in the manifesto we just read from, we said who we choose to translate is political, how we choose to translate is political. The life of the translation beyond the moment of its making is also political. We are thinking through the politics of the trafficking of our translations. Our work has taken place within contexts where it is all too easy for white dominated presses to use translations helpfully mediated by us as white privileged translators as a means to diversify their often blindingly white lists of publications. This is true for both large corporate publishers and museums and for small avant-garde publishers, though these contexts, events, critical differences. We'll stop there, although the pamphlet continues for approximately 25 more single spaced pages, which we will spare you. So just really briefly to summarize a couple of things and then we'll open for questions and conversation. As you could see or hear from our manifesto of ultra translation, we have done a lot of thinking both together and individually in our writing about our translation practice about the ways that at the level of the word or the line or the poem, we can use translation to unsettle the dominance of English or to disrupt conventional uses of language or to de-English English, to use a phrase that we said earlier. And that might be thought of maybe as a micro and I really loved Stalina's construction of micro politics and macro politics. So that's at the level of language, the texture of the language we use and now we've been called in some sense to think about it on the level of the macro. So what happens after all those decisions have been made in the translation, how are our translations functioning in this hyper racialized context, hyper gendered, hyper heteropatriarchal context of the United States social and cultural structures and specifically publishing structures where our translations move? Yeah, so I think, so as we were saying it continues on for about 25 pages and I think part of that was that this summer when we started writing on this we were particularly obsessed with issues that had come to the forefront or been made central not only within the world of poetry but then also within the wider United States and internationally in terms of Black Lives Matter or Ayotzinampa, a number of situations of violence and racial violence or racialized violences that we were attempting to think about and then specifically we were working in conjunction with one press where we were facing and thinking a lot and obsessing about and having conversations with folks from the press around those very issues and then we wanted to begin to kind of write about that but we also wanted to think about the kind of wider context and the wider situation, recognizing that this wasn't really specific to one press, it was something that we were facing across the board and not just with white dominated avant-garde presses but also facing these kinds of issues around white supremacy with a wide array of institutions whether that's from a Mexican foundation to the museum and the art world where we do a lot of work, better paid work than in the literary world and so in all of these contexts we were seeing similar issues arising and so we wanted to kind of think through it rather than feeling, think through it publicly and also kind of bring it to folks like yourselves who are also thinking about these issues to try and see if we could together move somewhere else. And in terms of, so this thinking for us which had been happening sort of subterraneously maybe in our minds came to the fore as JP was saying in the spring in relation to a project with a particular press that engendered particular problematics but as we began to think through it so sure one option is don't work with that press and that was something we considered but then we began to realize or to really like as we thought through it further and had conversation to think about the ways that that complicity with white supremacist structures actually goes way beyond the possible excision or amputation of one particular project or one particular press or one particular editor or whatever the thing, the issue, the proximate immediate cause of the dilemma might be so if we were imagining we're not gonna publish with press X because we feel like they participate in white supremacist structures we're gonna go with where are we gonna go? So this actually occasioned a sort of much larger unleashing of thinking about the issue of complicities with white supremacy maybe covert rather than overt complicity like with white supremacy but also with thinking about translation and particularly translation as practiced by people with white privilege regardless of what our actual ethnic backgrounds might be we both are people who move through the world with white privilege that we may or may not want let's just, I'll just say clearly I do not want the white privilege but it's there. To think about the ways that translation always entails a mediation of some kind of otherness or difference and sort of how that ways that we might be complicit with those larger structures beyond any one particular moment of engagement. Maybe that's the place to stop. There we go. So we've very intentionally left a lot of time for questions and for conversation so there's still 26 minutes so I actually, I'm gonna carry the mic around because I don't, I would like for people to hear what's said. Thank you so much. I have a question for Antena. I was wondering in terms of your sort of thinking through and practices that are aimed towards like decolonial efforts and language justice like how you're working through being sort of a partnership led by white privileged people. And also I was wondering like, you know, you two are sort of working together but for other like translators especially translating from Spanish in the room like what are some areas of exploration or development that you would wanna see like other people doing sort of from where they are? So there's a bunch of different directions to go with that question. One is we have found it really important to acknowledge our positionality and to say clearly like I'm a mixed race person who reads as white and both of those things are true about me, right? Like the fact that I have white privilege doesn't mean I'm not mixed race but the fact that I'm mixed race doesn't mean I don't have white privilege because white privilege is largely about perception not about the reality of what my body is made of or what my experience is made of. And so to sort of tease through those and JP is also a white privileged person who has a very, very complex background and contemporary lived experience that is much more multiracial. That doesn't necessarily show when we walk into a room. And so to be clear about talking about that when the context is appropriate. We don't lead with that when we walk into an interpreting job because that's not what we're there to do but then in our writing or our discourse around what we do that's a really important aspect. For me personally part of the reason I became an interpreter and a translator was to use the privileges I have as a person who's bilingual as a person who is educated slash overeducated as a person who feels comfortable speaking in public. When I go to a space to interpret or when we go to a space to interpret we're not taking up space as speakers. We're making a kind of communication possible that wouldn't have been possible without the presence of some interpreter. It wouldn't have to be us, right? But so in a sense I'm using the privileges that I've had to create a platform for the speech of others rather than privileging my own speech. And then I write about that practice in a way where like I also have some things to say. So I think just like finding a way to navigate that where you're acknowledging all the pieces and acknowledging the complexity and problematics of those pieces without becoming totally paralyzed by that acknowledgement. So I wanted to piggyback a little bit just just you know JP and I kind of knew each other we kind of sort of translated each other in many ways because we knew each other before we found out we were writers and we knew each other before we found out we were both into interpreting and translating. But you know I actually and I think I was always trying to translate my twin brother but he and I always had a very different personality and I mean you all are very sexy people to me but I see you all more like siblings so I can't, I just can't have the romantic thing with you. But um. Thanks for saying that publicly. Yeah, yeah. No well I mean y'all seem defended when I publicly, yeah you know when I publicly announced. Okay. So but you all kept describing each other kind of like twins when in terms of a forming antenna and I feel like I'm in a translation class with Roberto Tejada cause I had to find sort of my kind of twin. I don't think I think I'm a little bit too odd to have a real twin twin. Even though I do have a twin twin but we're not twin twin twins. But anyway, thank you. The question of what we would like to see. Sorry. Oh so what I was going to say was that as a Latina I feel I get stuck with these micro politics and that I'm being constantly being judged about who I translate and why I mean the reason why I translate Minerva Reynosa most is because there is a she's from Monterrey my dad is from Monterrey even though I was born in Yucatan he used his Monterrey linguistics and then I lived in Monterrey one year before we moved to the U.S. And like there's something about that Houston and Monterrey connection in which we had like I understood the micro politics of that language and then having that Houston to Monterrey sort of I guess drug trafficking and human trafficking there is also kind of a strange machismo that also influence language and then sort of this transcendence and transnationalism of canteen plus and other things but there were so many commonalities the reason why I mean I didn't want to have to explain it that's why because that's what I was talking about paratex but I felt like I understand the point that I chose to translate I understand her paratext and she understands my paratext and therefore I have an understanding of her text and she has an understanding of my text that I think is really unusual but I don't feel that way when I translate other writers and I've tried because people have asked hey can you translate this person can you translate that person and I even did something that I didn't know about the macro politics of translation until I heard JP and Jen talking about once I did translate from English to Spanish when a friend said oh we're gonna record these museum tours in Spanish but we only have $200 we'll either outsource it to India or do you want to do it and I said yes because I don't want India to do this museum tour I'll do it and so it was sort of this idea of how far can those micro politics go sometimes to know that Spanish gets translated like not even in Latin America and I mean I don't know much about the Latino population in India I do know that some live there in some go but at the same time I didn't get the impression that they were hiring Latinos to translate I was getting the impression that they were gonna get somebody else to translate into Spanish and that's how we get all those horrible mistranslations and so I feel like as a Latina I never had the space to do the macro politics that Jen and JP do I get stuck in these micro politics and so as a translator I get lost in these micro politics and I like that they can do the macro politics because I can't or maybe I can but I feel like I haven't been given the permission to because again I get stuck with this voicelessness that I get stuck in terms of my identity I don't know how you feel Celia No The second part of your question was about what kind of other work would we like to see or would we be excited to see or so I think it kind of builds off of this micro political macro political which is not a structure that I've thought of before but I'm liking it because I think one of the things that we as a kind of translator community are not doing in the United States and that it would be wonderful to see more efforts put towards this is to really nurture and develop and to fund translators of color in the United States that have a very different relationship to language and the languages that they would be translating potentially not necessarily, right? But I think specifically it comes out of this very different relationship to language and very different relationship to culture that comes from a translator who has these connections of family or ancestry to the other country or the other language and I think that on a linguistic level you would find we can find and we would see other decisions not necessarily but sometimes and I think that even if we just look around Alta and the kinds of communities that are formed around translation they tend to be predominantly white here and I think that's a conversation that we should have about why that happens especially in a country like the United States where there are huge communities of people from all around the world and so I think that's one place where we could see growth or other work. I just wanted to say one more thing and then we'll have another question but JP and I don't live in the same city so when we do language justice work about 90% of that work is local and it doesn't nobody has the resources hardly anybody has the resources dire interpreters in the first place they're not gonna be flying me from LA to Houston to work with JP that's just not gonna happen so we both work with local companeros and compañeras and have sought out people first of all I mean obviously you have to be an interpreter if you bilingual like all that stuff have to have experience but also people who have an understanding of language justice there are many many interpreters who don't think about language dominance and creating that kind of equity among languages in a space and we both work with collaborators very very close collaborators in our home cities who are Latino or Latina and in my case my main collaborator is from Mexico so she speaks perfect accented English you might think my English is accented because I'm from California but it's not and that's something we think about too is the politics of how she's received as an interpreter she's just as good an interpreter as I am her English is just as good as mine it just doesn't sound US American and so like to think about those kinds of politics as well and who we choose to ally ourselves with who we choose to work with. Other questions? So I just wanted to ask very simply on a practical level one is Antenna interested in expanding the group of people that they work with and how specifically if that's an interest that Antenna entertains how do you get more involved? We gave a talk in Brooklyn recently and someone asked us if we were global I'm gonna pretend I haven't answered that question I guess Antenna collaborates with many different people on specific projects and as you could probably tell from our description of our Bluffer art museum installation we use the platforms that are given to us and the resources that are given to us to open up space for ourselves and the audiences that we have access to to work with and be exposed to many many different other kinds of artists and thinkers and activists beyond ourselves so that's one way that many many people have been involved with specific Antenna projects which doesn't mean that they're like joining the collective and making every single decision with us the way JP and I do and as I was just explaining we both work locally with social justice interpreters who do language justice work in our hometowns and we're constantly looking for other people to work with on that level in terms of the local language justice work we don't necessarily have any plans for Antenna per se to grow beyond being a two-person collective although you never know what might happen in the future I mean I personally would be more excited if anyone feels inspired, irked, angered, furious, enraged, disgusted by what you see us doing and that inspires you to do your own thing go for it, andale andanamases, otra pregunta The person with the glasses has the question Hi, I just have a short thing I was in the presence of Gayatri Spivak who is the author of The Politics of Translation and at the end of her lecture I was basically asking her to give me permission to translate like I was like I'm Iraqi-American I really, all these writers want me to translate their work but I read The Politics of Translation and I don't know if I'm allowed because of my subjectivity and blah, blah, blah and she just, you know of course she didn't give me a straight answer but she was nice but she said something that really helped me and what you guys are talking about really helped me too she said complicity is not the same as sympathy and so I thought I'd say that and ask what you guys think about that Complicity is not the same as sympathy like we are all complicit in war crimes and imperialism and I'm an Iraqi-American I'm, you know, I'm always trapped in this kind of, you know, problem so I start like eventually you just kind of get tired of resisting like so you kind of have to obey sometimes, is that wrong? It is wrong to obey Yeah, you're telling it, this is a support group I knew it, I knew I had that idea You know what has happened to me with this book I'm not translating Gillian Flynn so I don't know who's gonna be interested in publishing Maggie Nelson in Spanish, right? So like today I was in this other panel about South America poets, women poets that are having, are being translated and it's interesting how this interest in translators and editors in the United States for South American not so known poets but it doesn't happen the way, all the way around, you know it's gonna be, I know it's gonna be very hard for me to get this book published because they don't find anything I mean they don't, I mean even though the power of the book is, you know, and the relevant of the book but because I think it's because of the experiences so they might have this idea of complicity but not necessarily sympathy for the topic of this book I don't know if that answers you Yeah And I wanna add that for me translation is not sympathy but empathy as much as possible Yeah So I wanted to answer, or talk to your question, not answer but I translated a book for a series that Gayatri Spivak and Hosama Boolala have which is called Theory in the World it's a series that was originally with Paul Grave McMillan but which is now with Seagull based out of Calcutta and the series is dedicated to translating theory from around the world, it kind of begins with this critique that primarily literature, literary artifacts are translated into English but that theory happening specifically they say in the third world it's not being translated and so the kind of raw material is translated but the theoretical frameworks are not so the theoretical frameworks of the West are applied to non-Western texts but vice versa it doesn't happen so they're attempting to kind of promulgate that and so I translated a book by Marta Lamas called Feminisms, a book from Mexico and as I did that and as I was working with Gayatri editing the text I also went back and read the Politics of Translation over and over again and then met, saw her speaking about it earlier in the year in Houston and there's one line, there's a kind of conversation in that article that I find endlessly generative she says that not as a requirement but as a recommendation all translator she recommends that before someone translates from a language they should prefer to have a difficult conversation in that language or to speak about intimate things in the language that you would translate from and she says she's not saying that you have to have that but that she's recommending it that's a really good thing and it's something that I've thought about a lot because I think it brings up this question of intimacy yeah, intimate, implicated, emotionally implicated, attached, all of these things that I think so often we don't talk about in translation and I'm not surprised that Gayatri didn't answer you directly but to me that article gives some license maybe you already answered this because I was thinking about Gayatri but I was also thinking more generally about cultural anthropology and processes of transference and counter-transference so even if I'm working with Amixteca Informant who is educated enough to do anthropology and theory and we're working together on something like taxi fares which would be really tremendous and that would achieve social justice this Wahakan Informant is still gonna be speaking to me and unable to speak as fully as she would like to perhaps to her own people because again we are as the colonialists the white privileged people controlling the discourse and she ends up being in between rather than really having a conversation with the people that she would like to represent I mean, a lot of people believe that the Bactinian myth of being able to speak for the other even if you are the other is a kind of impossible dream at the same time it should not discourage all these efforts of social justice in my opinion we didn't get to this part it was in the other 25 pages but one of the things that we are we are not proposing any solutions whatsoever although we might like to see some but one of the things we're proposing in our dilemma pamphlet is that rather than trying to fix, diversify, correct, rectify, help or otherwise prop up the existing utterly corrupted rotten, putrid, rancid white supremacist structures that it might actually be more generative to start again from scratch with white people not protagonizing whatever the effort may be how we get there? show me the way and I'm there can you repeat the question? no, no, no, no, I got the question I got the question I got the question yeah, so I actually there's a translation that's coming out next year from Le Figue Press called the book called Antigona Gonzales that I read from yesterday by a writer named Sara Oribe who's from northern Mexico from Tamalipas and I got an email last summer at some point from a graduate student at Iowa who might be there that was you, yeah, yeah, yeah I thought that, asking like how well, asking kind of like if there were other young, queer, resistant, marginalized authors and kind of how to find those authors that was you and that's Alta for you and I wrote back and I said look it's the result of the last it's the results of my life and the last 15 years of living and the results of going back and forth between northern Mexico and other places in Latin America for very personal and intimate reasons and for all of these kind of connections and all of these complications and difficulties and great experiences and horrible experiences and that kind of out of that I had a relationship with Sara that's been going on for the last 10 years and she has done a lot of books and when this book came along I read it and immediately knew it was I'm also a poet and it was doing things with poetry and with the word that I was trying to do and continue to try to do in my own work but it was doing something that I have great doubt I mean I could never have done it and but it also kind of did something that I knew I wanted to do in English and so it's that result of I mean it gets back to this intimacy question I think too that you're not kind of reading the best 25 in Spanish or the best 50 in French or the best and then from there or you know who's the best known in Brazil right now and then going and translating him because it will probably be a him and then right so it's about kind of how you're making those decisions and for me I've answered that with this kind of this particular history right that is my life but I think there are other ways to do that right but to really kind of reach out in a different kind of way or to do your work in a different way So another option or in addition to what JP is saying this which is really at heart about the politics of how we choose who we translate if you have a critique of the structures that valorize certain writers over others along lines of hierarchy that you don't believe in don't participate in those structures so find ways not to do that find independent presses that are gonna be excited about someone with a first book or maybe I mean I'm publishing a book with litmus press from a book that is not yet out in its home country and may never be out in it or it might actually come out in bilingual edition in both countries because of my relationship with that writer which comes from living as JP said so we have the power to subvert those structures not single-handedly and not entirely but in tiny ways in our lives and we can do that and the other thing we can do which I've tried to do maybe successfully maybe not is in instances when a more recognizably valorized writer for whatever reason is someone I'm translating or for instance I won two big translation prizes in the same year so then my name got much more known and so rather than moving toward I'm gonna translate some more big prize winning writers I'm now translating people that nobody has met very few people in the US have ever heard of and that's something that I can choose to do that and we all can choose to do that sure editors have power and sure presses have power but we can also start our own presses and make ethical politicized decisions about who's gonna be represented in those presses I see that there are other questions but I also see that it's five o'clock so you are set free if you want to be set free and you can stay if you wanna stay and you can buy pamphlets and books if you wanna do that do people wanna stay and talk more? Okay, cool, take your court thank you so, so, so much can you yell as you want to make it? I'm sorry, since you already asked the question could we confirm somebody else? Does someone have a question who didn't yet ask a question? I want to say that I'm now in a creative writing program in which there is one faculty member who is a woman and most of the students are women and so I do think that the power structures are not in place for women's voices to be heard in my opinion that's why we have to do the work I mean, look around us this is more of a mixed gender crowd and I do think that we could make a difference but the power structures are still there and so we have, I guess, what people call structural prejudices or institutional prejudices and that's harder to change What I'm pointing to is the fact that it is very male dominated so how does that fit into your picture I mean, you're basically, it's a worldwide problem, from a gender perspective it's a worldwide problematic, right? Yeah I know genders like going and digging here and here and they're finding authors but really the fact is in Latin American countries women are way less polished than men and all over the world and we find them online sometimes we find them in small books but it's hard to find them even though they're there you see them in Congress as you talk to them you have them on Facebook but if they're not published that way they're not accessible to translators so then we're not relying on editors but translators that sort of find those authors I don't know if that makes sense So yes, I would agree with everything that's been said it reflects a wider situation around misogyny and patriarchy that we mention but I think specifically in the dilemma we're thinking about white supremacy and I don't think that that means that we're excluding gender but I think, I mean this is something that I think more broadly I think that you can, there's specific moments and there's specific reasons to focus on a particular thing and in this essay we're thinking about that but that doesn't mean to the exclusion of other issues and in fact we mention them I also think we are very, very, very hesitant to seek to intervene in political contexts that are outside our own that doesn't mean that I or we might not have a critique of male dominated publishing structures in other places but I personally feel like my activist impulses can be most effective and also in some ways most appropriately contextualized if I'm directing them at communities in which I participate very actively and I right now live in the United States and my work traffics primarily in the United States that doesn't mean I don't see or think about things that happen elsewhere but I think also another way to think about things is what could I possibly do with my work that might nurture connections among writers elsewhere writers I translate that could then lead to other conversations that don't need to involve me which is again sort of a way of thinking about I don't need to be the protagonist how do I be a facilitator and then let something go so JP and I are wondering if there's one more question if there isn't that's great if there is that's great great thank you so, so much and thanks to the lovely panelists Thank you