 Hi everyone. I hope you can see my screen. I'm Dr. Anandee Rao. I'm a lecturer in South Asian Studies here at SOAS and today my taster lecture for you is titled What Makes a Poem, a Queer South Asian Poem. I'm also the convener of the MA South Asian Area Studies and the MA South Asian Studies with Intensive Language. Today I want to think through with all of you the usefulness and limitations of South Asia and Queer as analytic categories and also what it means to read a text as a Queer South Asian text. This is how we're going to progress in the 20 minutes. The first is what is South Asia? Then, how do different writers who think about non-hetronormative love and desire in South Asia deploy the terms Queer and South Asia? Then we're going to focus on a poem by Asad Alvi called La Palsie de Mour and ask the question, can we read the poem as a Queer South Asian poem? So first, what is South Asia? Is it just a geographical category that encompasses these nation states? The second question that arises, is it another name for India or the Indian subcontinent? And here I would refer to the work of Amina Mohamadarive who in a special issue that addressed the idea of South Asia in her introduction she writes, quote, the central and asymmetrical presence of India in various domains including geography is such that India's neighbouring countries tend to perceive the category South Asia as deli centric, end quote. So sometimes South Asia comes to stand in for India like we don't want to say India but we say South Asia but we actually mean India. So what does that mean and what can we do to like de-center India's hegemony in South Asia? Then the third is, is South Asia a stable category? So Hasan Altaf writes, South Asia is quote, not static, an object to be passed from parent to child. It's something that we make, something that we create and modify and reshape and quote. So it's something like an imagined community to quote or to cite Benedict Anderson. And it's not something fixed but something that is imagined, something that we make, something that changes as borders change, as border shift but also as we change and as our perceptions of the region change. So now I'm going to look at three books and how they use the words, whether or not they've used the words queer and South Asia and what they use instead. So first we start from the year 2000 in this really great book edited by Ruth Vanita and Salim Kidwai titled Same Sex Love in India. So in the preface they write they use India instead of South Asia and that decision is arbitrary based on their limits and expertise. So one thing I want to highlight here is that there seems to be this changeability between India and South Asia like does it like it's almost arbitrary that they're using India instead of South Asia? So it could have been South Asia. And then the second part to do with queer is that they choose to use same sex love and they say that the text that they have chosen are homoerotically inclined and that queer in fact was too wide for our purposes. So queer encompasses so many different things for them and they really wanted to focus on homoerotically inclined texts. So I think here it's interesting that both queer and South Asia are not used and perhaps they're both too broad for the project at hand. Then we come to this great book, The Doubleness of Sexuality, Idioms of Same Sex Desire in Modern India by Akhil Katyal, a SOAS graduate. And as you can see the title uses modern India and not South Asia. But in the first chapter or the introduction Katyal writes that the book talks about gay and lesbian identity in the subcontinent. So again there is this conflation between India, Indian subcontinent and perhaps Indian subcontinent in South Asia. But for me what is very important about Katyal's work is that he talks about language and cultural idioms and that these idioms are often not in English but in vernacular languages. So he's looking at North India so you have not in like Hindi words for like friendship, play, love, habits, etc. through which same sex desire operates. So I think that's really important in Katyal's work. Then we come to 2020 and we have again this really important anthology called The World That Belongs to Us edited by Aditi Yangira, Akhil Katyal, the same Akhil Katyal from before. The subtitle here is an anthology of queer poetry from South Asia. So here we come, so we started in 2000 which was same sex love in India and now we're in 2020 and it's queer poetry from South Asia. So both queer and South Asia. And in their preface they write people live their lives through a maddeningly complex slew of names, identities, and gestures. Queer only pretends to signpost them all but it is precisely that a convenient pretence meant for book covers not for all its contents. So here queer becomes a signpost and perhaps queer is a signpost in the same way that South Asia is a signpost. So I want to think about the ways in which these two terms operate in similar ways. That's what I'm trying to do here. So now we'll talk, we'll move on swiftly and talk about this poem La Pulsine de More by Assad Alvi. The title is in French and it translates as Death Drive and it's from Freud. Some themes in this poem are queer death. In terms of form I want to highlight that it's multilingual and the repetition. And then that there are references to other authors. What in literary studies we call intertextuality. So there's references to Freud as I mentioned but also Virginia Woolf, Tennessee Williams, and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. So this is the poem. I'm going to read it out for you now. La Pulsine de More, Assad Alvi. Ab yaha koi nahi, koi nahi aega words. Curling up like rings of smoke, bathroom floor. Faiz playing on the radio. I have filled my pockets with stones. There is a river nearby, the Bisnu Mati. I'm in Kathmandu. It's 2016. I have run away from home after a history of violence and I broke up with the only boy who will ever love me every time he kissed my hips. My scars became flames. Ab yaha koi nahi, koi nahi aega. Yaha, this unvisited body. It is the impossibility of queer love, the scholars say, for whom the only future carved out is death. For example, Williams, Tennessee. It is 1983. He is discovered dead in his hotel room, a cigarette hanging loosely from the lips, a note addressed to Robert. On 1941, Virginia's body at the bottom of the river, the stone still in her pocket. Her love for Vita undeclared. Ab yaha koi nahi, koi nahi aega. I just want to mention, I forgot to mention, Assad Alvi is a writer based in Karachi and their work engages, as you can see, in queer studies, Sufism and translation. So there's one line in Urdu that is mentioned again and again or that is used again and again in the poem. Ab yaha koi nahi, koi nahi aega. This is from a poem called Tanhai, which is alternatively, alternatingly being translated as solitude and loneliness by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Now Faiz is an interesting figure. Normally he is called a Pakistani poet, but perhaps we can call him a South Asian poet because he was born in 1911 before Pakistan and India were birthed, I suppose, and before independence and partition, but he is known for his work on cosmopolitanism, lyric poetry and poetry of partition. Scholars like Amina Yakin and Amir Mufti have worked a lot on Faiz. Here I wanted to present to you seven translations of this one line to show you something about translation because translation is important both for Assad Alvi and for me. And to think about translation is iteration and translation is reiteration. So each of these translations, even though it's one line, one line that we might think is a very simple line, it has been translated in different ways. And reading this, reading this collectivity of translation tells us what each translator focuses on, like some focus on no one, some focuses on some focus on here, etc., some focus on return. And it's really interesting for me that there have been so many translations of this poem and this suggests both that the poem is perhaps very translatable, but also that the poem is untranslatable or it shows us like there's a fine line between what is translatable and what is untranslatable. So I want to leave you with that thought. So to come back to this poem, there are a few things I want to highlight. First in the blue, you can see the Urdu and the repetition of the Urdu from Faiz. However, it is in the English or Roman script with diacritical marks and not an Urdu. So again, we are thinking about who is the audience for this poem. The second is that Yaha is emphasized and Yaha is like here. But what is this here? At once, it is the geography and the geography of South Asia. You have a Pakistani poet writing about Kathmandu and the river Bismuthi. But at the same time, Yaha is in pink, this unvisited body. So the here is also the body and somewhere there is an overlapping of geography and body, and like bodyliness. The second is that you have Queer mentioned, but it's like the impossibility of Queer love, the scholars say. So clearly Alvi is aware of Queer scholarship and Queer studies. And then the third and the thing that I want to spend some time on is the references or intertextuality. So you have Tennessee Williams and Virginia Wolfe. And they are, they can be thought of as sort of being a part of a Queer Anglophone canon. And then you have Faiz Ahmad Faiz. So is by including these three figures, is Faiz Ahmad Faiz being included in a Queer canon? Alternatively, are Tennessee Williams and Virginia Wolfe being included in a South Asian canon, right? So how are these terms operating? And what is this, what is this doing for Queer and South Asian canon making and canon building? And by canon here, I just mean like really important and significant texts. So is this a Queer South Asian poem? So first, we have to ask ourselves, what is a Queer poem? And this is a question that Angiras and Katya also ask in their introduction. And I think they land on whether the poets think it's a Queer poem. And that is a fair interpretation. And I think that's one that I would go with. In the case of this poem, Alvi themselves uses Queer. So I think perhaps that puts it in this sort of category of Queer South Asian poem. But then we have this, these two questions that are really important for me. One is what work to the literary references do. Like I mentioned, you have Freud, Faiz, Virginia Wolfe and Tennessee Williams. How are they working together in making this a Queer South Asian poem? And then what are the cultural implications of reading this poem as a Queer South Asian poem? Or for using it to break down our understanding of these categories? So does this help expand categories of Queerness and categories of South Asia? Does it present us with a mode of reading, perhaps? So I want to end almost with leaving you with three questions that I'm not going to answer, that are questions for you to think about. One is how does this poem participate in and resist canon building? Second, what does it mean for the categories of Queer and South Asia? If we think of this poem as a Queer South Asian poem. And then third, our Queer and South Asia more about ways of reading. And finally, some takeaways for you. South Asia and Queer are perhaps similar in their fluidity, thinking about Queer South Asia as a way of reading, thinking about translation as interpretation and iteration and reiteration. And then perhaps the choice to not translate is as important as a choice to translate. So why does Alvi choose to not translate fares in the poem? I would be happy to take questions. And thank you very much for your time. I'm going to stop sharing my screen now and hand over the virtual floor to Justin. I think. Hi. And nice to meet you. We've never met for the first time here. Apologize for my lateness. I came to my office this morning to find that everything had been unplugged. So I had to plug everything in and it took me about half an hour. But thank you for that fascinating presentation. I missed the beginning, but I think I got some of the more substantial content at the end. And I hope that people who watch this will have questions and that the questions you've asked will make them think carefully about the material you have presented. Okay, right. It's my turn now. I've got my own PowerPoint teed up and I will try to get it going and share my screen also. And Anand, you can tell me if you can see it. Hold on. I think it is that one. Let me share. Okay. Can you see a PowerPoint? Yes. Okay. Right. So I'll introduce myself and my work at SOAS briefly before I begin the very brief mini lecture, which is titled, should we say Burma or Myanmar? My name is Justin Watkins and I'm a Professor of Burmese and Linguistics and I've been at SOAS nearly 30 years. And during that time, I've been teaching Burmese and occasionally Thai and also Khmer. And my interests and my research focus are on the languages and linguistics of Southeast Asia, principally mainland Southeast Asia, so former Indochina and Burma slash Myanmar. And I'm really, really passionate about the learning of languages by students who come to do their work at SOAS. I think one of my reflections on Anand's brief lecture is that without knowing the languages concerned, particularly in mixed texts and texts with references to many different languages and from multicultural social contexts, without knowing those languages ourselves, we're not in a good position to appreciate that work and think deeply about those problems. So those of you who are thinking of coming to SOAS, please lock in time and modules for learning languages during your time at SOAS. There are all sorts of opportunities that you won't get in other places. Right, so the background to this lecture is that there are in English two names for the country which has and is known as Burma and or Myanmar. And this is actually closely related to issues of translation and so maybe we can have some reflection on the angle that you take on these issues. But let me dive in first of all and give you some background. So the issue arises in Burmese, in the Burmese language, which is the main language of the country we are referring to and we'll have to refer to it carefully without using any name, otherwise we get tied up in knots. They are in the Burmese language and of course there are lots of other languages and ethnicities in Burma too but the main language of the country that people know more than any other language is Burmese, maybe 40 or 50 million speakers perhaps more. There are two ways of saying the same word and we can loosely refer to these two forms of the same word as formal, one in a formal register and one in an informal register. So the first is Myanmar pronounced Myanmar and I've deliberately focused on writing this in Burmese because the issues play out very differently in Burmese and in English and we need to keep the two separate otherwise again we get tied into knots. So in Burmese we have Myanmar a formal word and Burma an informal way of pronouncing saying the same word. So these are the same word with the same etymological history that are used in two ways. The formal register of the language is mainly used in writing and in speaking in formal contexts and the informal version of the word is used mostly in speech but also in many forms of writing less formal forms of writing. Okay and what do we mean by Myanmar or Burma okay and you'll remember that the longer one is Myanmar and the shorter one is Burma because obviously I'm not expecting people listening and watching to know the Burmese script but I want to emphasise that we're dealing in dealing with an issue in Burmese at this point. So on the one hand both terms Myanmar and Burma are used to refer to the country on the left of your screen there which is the nation-state called Myanmar or Burma. It has had many formal names in English and in Burmese over the years but these two words Myanmar and Burma are used to refer to that entity. The same word Myanmar and Burma is used to refer to the ethnic Burmese minority majority within that nation-state which has political borders drawn around it. So there is already a double meaning there is a this double word which itself has a double meaning both referring to the nation-state the yellow shape on the left and the sort of white space which could be I mean linguistic mapping is a complex issue but we can think of the majority of central the central part of this country we're referring to as being ethnically Myanmar, Burma speaking the Burmese language and you'll see from you get an impression from the map on the right of the mosaic and the tapestry of different ethnicities and languages and identities which are to be found in the country besides Myanmar slash Burma. Okay so you may be asking what does this crazy man mean when he's saying that Myanmar and Burma are the same word? Well it's normal in the Burmese language for the sounds mya and ber to switch places that's a normal thing to happen so we've got some more examples here the formal word for which is me the informal word for which is bear and Burmese is a language which does keep separate these two registers of the language the formal and the informal variety one used more in writing one used more in in speech and the two have diverged over the centuries and the second example I've got here is mea which is the name of a town in southern in the southern part of the country which is spelled mea but pronounced bae so if you're speaking about this town in formal context you might refer to it as mea but probably bae but its spelling is mea so mea and ber switch places in in this language that's a sort of sound and exchange which is normal so it's not that odd to posit mea and Burma as being the same word the first syllable mea has collapsed into a ber that's really what's happened um okay so where do we get the english word Burma from um it's derived from the informal um uh counterpart of the two the two names that we've been dealing with Burma which in Burmese is pronounced Burma which I've represented in um phonetic symbols at the top that's how you would write down Burma in the international phonetic alphabet um and the stress you'll hear is on the second syllable Burma and when in english attempts were made to write that sound down um using the conventions of english writing it was first spelled b-u-r-m-a-h so the uh vowel was spelled it spelled as uh like in um I don't know that seems the words like could or um the same same as the vowel in heard so that uh although that's usually a stressed vowel in english and the stressed final vowel r was represented as an a-h to sort of draw the stress make it feel like a long vowel um but english doesn't really like words with that and stress pattern I can get very boring about this my principal training is in phonetics that's the part of the branch of linguistics that I teach english likes words which have this um the stress principally on the first syllable and the second syllable is unstressed so once this word Burma was in english it took on the shapes of english words and it became pronounced as Burma instead of Burma and the h fell off at some point but it's still around for example in the name of Burma oil which was um a company originally found as the wrangling all company in 1886 so it goes back um to the 19th century the first um decades of contact um uh colonial contact between um britain and um the country that we're talking about which I won't name okay so Burma is um has um that history um and in english um and this sort of became convention during the decades when this country was um a colony of britain um Burma and Burma was used to refer to the entity on the left with boundaries drawn around it by um colonial powers um uh and boundaries with complex histories themselves all very interesting um but so the country was referred to in english as Burma and the adjective so english likes to have a noun and an adjective for countries we have france and french we have uh germany and german um and in for this country that pair became Burma and Burmese and a second adjective was used in english and this is we're now talking about issues of um english usage um a second adjective Burma was used when um referring to the ethnic majority of this country um so there were two adjectives Burmese to refer to the country and Burma to refer to the Burmese-speaking ethnic majority within that country so already english doing its thing with uh naming nothing to do with let's scoot back and remember that both words are used in Burmese or were used for both words for both meanings okay I hope I'm not laying it on too thick I just it gets very confusing right until 1989 so in 1989 um the country was in turmoil um in some ways similar um and as tragic um to the way the country is in turmoil now um and the people in charge who call themselves the state law and order restoration council and so um there were uh huge demonstrations riots and um killings of process processors in 1988 and in 1989 the state law and order restoration council was them uh battering down power over the country the military essentially um and they decided that they didn't want um the the way that the country was the country and its people were referred to in English to continue um as it had been so they decided that um Burma the English word Burma should be Myanmar reflecting the other word in Burmese that Burmese should also be Myanmar but that Burman referring to the ethnic majority within the country we're talking about should in English be referred to as Burma and so they made some new words in English so Myanmar and Burma um hadn't really existed as words in English before then um and they wanted them to be translated the Burmese words Myanmar and Burma to be translated in that way um and with the meanings then you see here okay and they introduced new spellings um for Burma so that Burma this time they put an r on the end to reflect the long stress vowel at the end Burma um and Myanmar they also put an r on the end then which creates problems of course you can speak a variety of English that pronounces r's at the end of syllables so um for example North Americans might say in Myanmar and Burma with a r which isn't there in Burmese okay but that's what the state law and and order restoration council decided um I've skipped ahead too much okay so in the new English usage that the state law and order restoration council wished to be adopted on English language maps and English language reference to the country they wanted the word Myanmar to refer to the whole country and Burma to refer to the Burmese ethnic majority within the country even though in Burmese um uh usage had not really been divided um so in a sense they were legislating about the way they wished English to use words which we use differently in Burmese okay and we've got some nice examples of how things have been before um the adaptation of expressions law um here are some bank notes um which themselves tell an interesting tale you'll see that this is a um 90 jack bank and not many currencies have had denominations of 90 printed and this is to do with um General Nguyen um who had uh stepped down in 1988 he his astrologer told him that his lucky number was nine um and to um um uh Burmese numerology is a powerful force in politics and um and in thinking and he believed that the currency would have more power if it was um in denominations of nine or divisions of nine or multiples of nine um and so for a while there was a blisteringly confusing array of bank notes um you could have um nine jack bank notes 15 jack bank notes for some reason 35 jack bank notes 45 jack bank notes um all sorts of numbers related or in some cases not related to nine however the point here on this um rather beautiful bank note um which reflects um the uh this is a Burmese peasant um working with water buffalo um looking happy in the uh socialist states that the Burmese military had been promoting in the in the 60s and 70s and 80s um and we'll see that in Burmese the country is referred to as Myanmar okay we've seen that spelling before here um Anandi can you see my pointer you can that's great okay so the um Myanmar we see here so which is the bank of the union of Myanmar which is translated on the on the other side of the right note in English is Union of Burma Bank okay so that's evidence that prior to the adaptation of expressions law in Burmese the Burmese word was translated officially in English as Burma on the bank notes issued by the state um and we rush forward after um much turmoil anguish and inflation to a 2016 bank note uh for 10 000 jack on which we see the central bank of Myanmar in Burmese and central bank of Myanmar in English so the English word the new English word Myanmar is the transfer of the state's translation on its bank notes of the Burmese word so that's the switch um and incidentally the arrival of the 10 000 jack bank note was very welcome inflation had been rampant um at various times um and until this bank note was issued which i think it was i think it appeared only in 2015 or 2016 the largest the largest denomination was a thousand jack so it was very it was a great relief to many people to have bank notes of 10 000 jack okay what is going on here so one assertion is that the state's law and order restoration council were had embarked on a process of decolonization with the adaptation of expressions law um and for example at the same time as renaming uh Myanmar and Burma in English the English translations of uh Myanmar and Burma uh reconfiguring that they on the English language map of the country they also changed the English language names um and in fact the Burmese language names of places that made um in their view avert reference um or indirect reference to um colonial uh history so there we've got examples of two towns so in before the adaptation of expressions or alan mute and mute means town in Burmese was a town named after um uh a major alan who demarcated the frontier line in 1854 after the um second angle of Burmese war and another town me mute so northeast of Mandalay which got um which has had been named after uh colonel james may in the fifth Bengal infantry um so those references to colonial officers were removed from the Burmese and English language maps and the towns became known as alan and respectively um Rangoon was renamed on the English language map as Yangon this is a slightly different issue there's nothing um directly decolonizing about about this change except that the English name Rangoon derives from the pronunciation of the name of that town in Arakanese which is a language spoken in the western uh western province of uh of the country um towards Bangladesh um which had been the language of first colonial context so it's a story that's a little bit similar to Peking becoming Beijing so Peking is um a representation of the name of that city in Cantonese backing um which got spelt as Peking in English and then that was revised to Beijing to reflect the pronunciation of the standardized form of Chinese so Beijing became um the preferred version from the Chinese perspective um and Yangon reflects the pronunciation of the name of that city in Burmese rather than Arakanese so in Arakanese it's Rangoon and in Burmese it's Yangon which got um spelt as Y-A-N-G-O-N um okay so that was going on the English language map of the country was having um uh place names with uh directly or indirectly colonial connections removed um but at the same time there was some recolonization going on so the Burmese army's project over the decades which is ongoing is trying to assert power over parts of the country which have never really wanted to be part of the country um principally around the edges where languages other than Burmese are spoken so at the same time as removing places like Alan Mew and Mi Mew from the map they also removed names on the English language map of the country which are in languages other than Burmese so a nice example of that is the capital of Arakan state the province to the to the west of the country towards um Rangoudish Akiab which is a Bengali place name was replaced by Situi which is Burmese name um Gengdong which is um a town on the other side of the country towards um the parts where Thailand, Laos and China sort of meet um the far eastern tip of the country Gengdong is in a language called Daikun which is related to Thai and to Shan one of the big languages spoken in the eastern side of the country and the Burmese way of pronoun pronouncing this name is Gengdong and so that Burmese pronunciation was shoehorned into an English spelling which is slightly clunky but that's what they decided on and so on English language maps of the country the adaptation of expressions law wanted Burmese language pronunciations to be reflected in English rather than place names in languages other than Burmese another example is Mulmain um which was re-spelled in English as Maolanyang where the Mon language is capital of Mon state in sort of southeast of the country towards Thailand Mon being replaced by Burmese so you could describe this as a Burmese linguistic land grab on the international English language map in a multilingual multi-ethnic area so the state law and order restoration council didn't want um people looking at English language maps of the country so people outside the country around the world to see representations of languages other than Burmese on those maps perhaps suggesting that they didn't want those languages other than Burmese to be shown to represent power and influence and status so quite insidious um you an analogy in Europe is the anglicization of the map of Ireland where Irish place names were either translated or clumsily re-spelled in English um and Irish Irish place names were removed in many cases and you end up with um complex situations there right so who is asking us to change in during the 1990s so in the years after the um extremely um violent events in the late 80s where the state law and the restoration council were going after people who um protested against them and disagreed with their um their um power grab of the country um so the generals who were behind the adaptation of expressions law were the people wanting English to use Myanmar so people who um either had to or um didn't mind aligning themselves with their values and their power um used Myanmar in the 1990s um whereas people who so here we've got a photo of some um national lead from for democracy protesters outside the um the Myanmar embassy in London and these people during the 1990s continued to call the country Burma and um they weren't very happy about um the violent power grabbing generals telling them um what to call the country in English so there was a double name for a while and of course as a scholar if you're going to write about this country you needed to choose one or the other so for a long time people refer to the country as Burma slash Myanmar which is um uh clunky but a way of trying to um not to upset both uh either side um and people who lived in the country were in English tended to use Myanmar more because they had to went over to officials or whatever and the English language usage of the use in English of Myanmar sort of took root um after the 1990s among people who live in or had close connections or close interest in the country whereas the rest of the world and indeed languages other than English didn't really feel obliged to to change their usage for quite a long time there was a there was a lag um so for example no one really persuaded the French to stop saying Burma or the Russians to say from saying Burma um they all carried on using um the words they'd always used because the adaptation of expression law was targeted were targeted English specifically as the international language which and the form of colonial language which makes some sense okay so this throws up some interesting translation problems um and it's actually interesting there's a translation theme in both our talks and Andy I hadn't really thought about these issues through the through the lens of translation but it really is a nice messy example so if we're going to use the the term Myanmar what adjective do we use English likes to have an adjective to um to match country names as we mentioned before so what do we do um do we just stick with the word Myanmar or people have had to go over the years of making up their own adjectives so I've seen in various places over the years nyamaris nyamaric nyamari all of them pretty ad hoc and clunky and unlikely to take root um so people tend to stick with Myanmar as an adjective but it doesn't really feel great in English whereas before with Burma Burma had as an anglicized form of the um uh the Burmese word Burma which had had time to bed into English it formed its own um English adjectives which had decades to establish themselves whereas all of a sudden we were um English was required to make an adjective um from the namya mark which didn't go so well um and other people thought you know what gives you the right to reach into my language and tell me what to say and actually I've on twitter there's been some furious debate about um the name of the city uh kiv um which in Russian is kiv and in Ukrainian is kiv and um given the events in Ukraine at the moment people are in English trying hard to name the capital of Ukraine in a Ukraine in the Ukrainian language where not the Russian way that's another talk it gets very complex but people are trying because they suddenly they don't want to be caught out using um the in English the name of a city which uh chimes with the language of the oppressor okay um and in English you know is a language like English allowed to have its own words for things well some people say yes you know don't tell me what to call your place um it's my language back off which is a complex issue given um the colonial power um and international reach of English but you know do we um I mean it's difficult to find um good comparators um we might say that for um places like Germany you know we it's a European country with um a history um which aligns in some ways with that of the English language so no if the German Germany suddenly said in English you've got to say Deutschland we don't want you saying Germany anymore that probably wouldn't go very well do we say Paris or Paris do we say China or Donghua do we say Peking or Beijing or Beijing what do we what do we do when people would like us to call places in their um country in English using a different word and of course each context is completely different Bombay and Mumbai is you know different again each of these um have uh you know they're not comparable situations or contexts okay so um this is a lady with a um a somewhat checkered history now but at the time when um these issues first came to the fore she was internationally recognized as something of a saint and she said you can call my country either Burma or Myanmar I'm accustomed to calling it Burma in English so she wasn't going to allow the generals to reach into her language her English language usage and mess around with it she said it's up to you because there's nothing in the constitution of our country that says we must use any term in particular and she said I didn't label 2016 which is about a year before things became rather different but we won't get into that issue a side topic I sometimes use this lecture um alongside um in a cultural studies uh lecture with um where I use a photograph of someone who I saw at a Halloween party in 2017 so October 2017 who had dressed up as Aung San Suu Kyi um uh stained with blood and carrying a dagger so that's how much her reputation changed in a short time anyway that's um we could talk all day about tragic events in Burma but we're not here to do that okay so then we say also that English has special reach it's colonial and international as mentioned before other languages have not been um persuaded to change their usage um sometimes in diplomatic contexts they have but casual usage casual naming of this country in here we've got French and theomania probably covers Spanish Italian and a few other romance languages in the third one is Thai which calls Burma Pama and Russian which called refers to the country as Burma um so again they're not really part of the same picture you can't transport this discussion into into other languages um a generation later has acceptance of the English name Burma done the generals work for them we tend to find um that people especially as I said before people who live in and work on or have close connections um or formal connections to the country will in English call the place Burma and um and they might use also if they're really involved in in the country you call the ethnic majority of the country Burma in English well that doesn't have um wide currency and it's probably not some most people have heard of Burma now not many people have heard of Burma as an English word um okay um so what risks do we take by working only in English if you're going to um understand the difference between Burma and Burma in English there's quite a lot of um thinking and reading and um understanding and listening to be done um and if we don't know how the words play out in Burmese in the Burmese language then um we risk uh misrepresenting ourselves and others um by using the wrong names um so if you're going to work on Burma and I try to carefully refer to the country as um alternating between Burma and Myanmar the other um because I think both are fine um and uh in Burmese if I'm speaking about the country in Burmese it doesn't matter there just is no difference apart from the formal informal difference so nuance is important um if we don't uh take the trouble if we're going to work on Burma, Myanmar or indeed um any other part of the world which isn't English speaking then if by working only in English we are um at risk of misrepresenting ourselves and others um how can we remain objective when we have to make obligatory linguistic choices so translators um and people naming places have to use one word and not another there you have to you can't um uh fudge everything you have to choose sometimes and remaining objective when we have to choose um is is very difficult so the um these tenuous um formulations like Burma slash Myanmar are precarious and uncomfortable and um messy and they don't last um and there are the people use them because they're forced to there's a nice example in Northern Ireland of Derry slash London Derry or London slash Derry there are various ways to play out where there is a political tension um and uh people feel uncomfortable using one form or another um but um in writing translation and translating and speaking we have to we have to make choices and we need to think carefully about what we're doing when we do that um and that is Jizu Dimani which is thank you in Burmese so that's the end of my presentation um and Laura over to you what happens now we've only got just a few minutes um left so probably time for one question if um somebody wants to ask anything via the Q&A if not I'm sure you're very welcome to get in touch via email um and to follow up the session has been recorded and so you'll be able to watch it back um and to refer to anything um that you might have missed and there's also lots more sessions coming up um over the course of the morning so everybody should have a timetable or a schedule that will um let them navigate it but we probably have to wrap up in the next um one to two minutes just to let the next sessions um kick off okay I can't see any questions in the Q&A box so unless anyone wants to um dive in with one that we can try to answer um in the next one or two minutes then um we can wrap up here but like I said oh here we are there's one um just popped into the chat in which is one more general question about the SOAS program which says does the course also cover Burmese language so I don't know if you want to answer that super quickly um before we end the session I wouldn't use the word cover most of the years that I've worked at SOAS um Burmese has been available whether it will be available in the future um is unclear that's all I can say I hope so Neil from and if you do you want to stay up to date then please do just check our website they refresh the list with all of the open modules and different course content so do stay up to date and if you need us to um clarify anything for you then we're very happy um to help I think unfortunately we might oh we do have another if we got another one oh here's a big question for one minute but I can ask it um what is the relationship between nationalism and translation how does our social location affect the choice of our translation I don't know if either of you want to attempt that in one minute this is definitely you uh it's a big question that it's difficult to answer in one minute um so my brief answer is that yes translation has been used in nationalist projects um and I think Justin's presentation showed a really good example perhaps of that in some ways um but also within um South Asia within India um often the ways in which Hindi is used and the ways in which translation projects happen into Hindi um are really interesting and worth exploring more um and you can do that if you come to Sawas great answer in one minute we could have spent an hour yes yes I could have given you an hour log on so but this is my one minute on so perfect thank you so much but I think we'll wrap up there just to um let everybody get into their next sessions but um do join us stay and we will also have a live chat coming up on the 13th of April if you want to hear more generally from Sawas so if you are applying and you are thinking about um coming to join us then do look out for that invitation in your emails but thank you very much and thank you to Amur academics for delivering the session thank you everybody thanks for listening thank you take care bye bye