 and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, professor at City University of New York, and here with me today is writer, translator, and pen translation committee co-chair, Lynn Miller-Lachman, another of the co-organizers of translating the future, the conference you are attending. Thank you, Esther, and thanks to all of you for joining us for week 19 of translating the future. Today's conversation on activist translation features Anton Hehr, translator from the Korean and member of the Translation Collective, Smoking Tigers, poet and translator Jen Hoffer, co-founder of the Language, Justice, and Experimentation Collaborative, Antenna Irae, and Sevinch Turkan, translator and scholar of cross-cultural studies. You can learn more about all of them by reading their full bios on the Center for the Humanities site. In Jen Hoffer's bio, you can also find links to activist organizations that she and Antenna Irae have worked with, organizations which are now addressing critical issues arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. One of these organizations, MyCielo.org, works with Indigenous women interpreters to end gender-based violence and provide language access rights, cultural preservation, and reproductive justice. Since March, MyCielo.org has made COVID-19 informational videos in a number of Indigenous languages in order to transmit potentially life-saving information across language barriers into marginalized communities that are greatly at risk from the pandemic. Another organization you'll find a link to in Jen's bio is California Rural Legal Assistance at CRLA.org. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, CRLA is defending the rights of the essential workers in 22 California rural counties. They are among the most unseen members of our society, those who harvest fruits and vegetables in the field, cook and deliver food, restock shelves, and clean homes and businesses. CRLA provides legal services and legal information to these high-risk low-wage workers who belong to the most exploited communities and are facing the loss of homes, wages, jobs, and access to health care. If you'd like to pay tribute to the work of the activist speaking today, a great way to do that would be to give whatever support you can to the crucial work of these two organizations. Transcending the future will continue in its current form for just one more week. And then, beginning September 22, the conference finale, or week 20, will feature four Gala evening events with speakers to include Damien Searles, Ava Chin, Emily Wilson, Maria Davina-Headley, Natalie Diaz, Ken Liu, Jennifer Croft, and a number of others. You can find out more on the Center for the Humanities website. We'll be back again on September 22 with the last, but certainly not the least, of our hour-long Tuesday conversations. This final one between Kate Briggs and Tracy K. Smith, moderated by Magdalena Edwards. Please join us for that at our regular hour of 1.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time next Tuesday. Translating the Future is convened by Penn America's Translation Committee, which advocates on behalf of literary translators working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers, and others with an interest in international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by myself and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translationresourcesatpen.org. If you have questions you'd like to ask today's speakers, please email your questions for Anton, Jen, and Savage to translatingthefuture2020atgmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. If you know anyone who is unable to join us for today's livestream, our recording, as always, will be available afterward on the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities sites. Before we turn it over to Jen, Anton, and Savage, we'd like to offer our utmost gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities, at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Penn America, and especially to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at HowlRound, who make this livestream possible. And now, over to you three. Hello, Anton, Jen. Hi, I'm so happy to be here with you and thank you so much to Esther and Tulane and for everyone who made this possible. Hello, everyone. I'm super happy to be here. I'm delighted to be here among yourself and with my gratitude to Esther, Ellen, and Alison. Okay, so I guess, yeah. So it was really funny when I got, when they proposed this to me, this talk to me, and then I found out who else was on the panel and I told my husband about it. I was like, oh, Jen, you know, antenna air, airy, does all this, and you know, Savage does all this, and then he looked at me and goes, are you sure that you're on the right panel? Because you're not, you're not exactly like, you know, out on the front, you know. That's what our loves are for, right, to induce maximum skepticism? Yes. And so I, and then I went back to the organizers and I asked, are you sure that you have the right person for this panel? And, and they assured me that, well, you can talk about these things. So, so these things are what I'm going to talk about. So for me, translation is activism is, is actually a very, a very, very important subject that I think about a lot. I feel that translation may be the purest form of advocacy and therefore activism, because if you think about it, what a translator does, you know, even if it's advocating for just one person or, you know, lending their voice for just one person, it's still a form of advocacy and a form of giving, well, giving a voice is so patronizing, lending your voice is also patronizing, allowing some, lending someone your platform, basically, of your language, that I feel is there's something very fundamentally activist about it. And connected to this idea is the idea that for translators, like our existence itself, that is, is being an activist, for example, in so many cases, we, we have to sort of, how do I say this? Like, for example, I'm gay in Asian. And so for me, the, the fact that I have this identity sort of gives me ways into emphasizing, empathize, emphasizing with, with certain groups and certain combinations and intersections, perhaps more than people who did not have these elements of the identity with me. There's also something that about translation, where I feel that we don't just convert languages from one language to another. We also implicitly teach our listening and reading audience how to see and feel the person or book we're interpreting or translating. There are sort of like cues, attitudes, respect that we give to our sources. And I feel that the audience and the reading public, they kind of, I noticed that they pick up on that kind of thing a lot. And of course, there's the other kind of translator for a very, you know, racist or whatnot, whatnot, who sort of like create a translation where you go, oh, this is sort of problematic. So in that, in that sense, an activist translator would be someone who is more aware of this kind of thing and would be able to overcome that kind of problem. For, I think the really big thing that I feel like maybe, maybe is not super duper activist in the classical sense that we understand the word. There's something very activist about, for me, what book that we choose to translate. Of course, we're commission things all the time, but for example, for Savinch, I think that really amazing book, The Stone Building and Other Places by Asla Erdogan. So when I read that book, and then I looked up like the background behind it, and I realized that, you know, we don't really hear a lot, but we don't really read a lot of books by women from Asia, for example, like it's, it's not, nowadays, there's there's a bit more, but more more on the Northeast Asian kind of like China, Korea, Japan kind of sphere and not so much. So, and I also noticed that Savinch teaches women writers in around the world. And you would think that this is a, this is a class that is offered, you know, everywhere. It's not offered everywhere. When I went to graduate school, I think we had one professor who taught women's writing, and she was, you know, she was hired like two years before I was a student. So it's, there's still a lot of like work in that sphere that needs to be done. And it has to be done with, with someone who has a kind of activist mindset. The other things, so I, so when I choose a work, sometimes I'll be like, oh, this is queer. So I'm going to promote more queer literature in Korea because I'm also a queer person. And Sang-young Park, who, who writes queer fiction, is a sort of example of a writer who was never published in English and who had not published his first book yet, but I kind of like thought, okay, I really need to translate this person and promote this person because no one else is going to do it except me. And then he became a huge hit in Korea. Now everyone wants to do him, but oh, not too bad, I got two in first. The other example I have is perhaps it's, there's a book called The Underground Village. It is written by a communist woman writer in the 1920s and 30s. And a lot because Korea is a South Korea where I live and where I'm from is a very McCarthyist to this day, a very McCarthyist society. Her work was heavily, heavily censored. And my translation of her work is really the, I think it's the first edition of her, of her work that was not censored by anti-communists, by anti-communist censors. And kudos to the publishers, very brave in publishing this because I kind of like pointed out to them that this might be a bit dangerous for you. And then they were like, wait, really? And I was like, oh, probably nothing's going to happen. I mean, after it was at the printers already, too late. Yeah. So yeah. And then they came back to me with like, oh, like, maybe you should put this line in as well. So I was like, oh, okay. So, so they're okay with it. So there's that kind of, so there's that kind of sensibility that was, that is censored that we can also kind of like bring out as translators. And these are sort of like the things that I thought of when we were, when I thought about translation as activism. The first, the first story in, in that book that Savinch translated The Stone Building and Other Places, I think it's called The Morning Visitor. I really feel like that book, that story sort of like perfectly encapsulates what it feels like to be a literary translator who has that kind of like activist mindset because there are all these people that just come up to the narrator or and tell them their terrible stories about their past. And the narrator doesn't necessarily want to listen to these stories. But at the same time, the narrator is the only person who can narrate these stories. So I feel like, yeah, that's basically what it feels like for a literary translator sometimes, like, sometimes you'll read a story and you think, oh, this is a really terrible story, like a terrifying story. And I'm not going to be the same after I listen to this story or translate the story. But who else is going to do it if I don't do it? And sometimes that's how I feel with some of my writers and some of the work that I translate. And so I feel like that story really is like a really, really, that's how it feels like to me. And yes, I take it away somehow. Thank you, Anton, for your kind words. I will really read that story with the point that you made just now. I never thought about it this way, very interesting, very interesting, but I can see how that can have that interpretation. So briefly to introduce myself, I translate across Turkish, Bulgarian, German, and English. You would probably ask, how come? No, I did not have to devote to the time and energy it takes to master four languages. I was born bilingual in Bulgaria to parents who identify themselves with Turkish ethnicity. So I grew up bilingual, speaking Bulgarian and Turkish at home. In 1989, at the end of the Cold War, my parents lost their citizenship. They were forced to leave the country. So we immigrated to Turkey. And after age 11, I grew up in Istanbul, where I attended college, where the language of education was English. And after that, I developed some intense interest in German. I went to Berlin and Munich to study. My first job was a conference interpreter in Strasbourg. And eventually, I completed a graduate degree here in the United States in comparative literature. And now I'm in Oberlin, Ohio, enjoying a visiting faculty position in the comparative literature department, where I teach translation workshops and courses in comparative literature. Now, what brings me to this panel? Anton, as you mentioned, I guess it is the translation of the stone building and other places. However, several years ago, if you ask me, would I identify myself as an activist translator? I would probably say no. I would probably sort of hesitate assuming the title translator that came to me much later. I was speaking about it as I translate. That was a safer space to occupy. When I began translating the stone building in 2016, really publishing that translation was not on my mind. I was mostly translating for very selfish reasons. I was curious about the process of translating. I was very much interested in Asla Erdogan's language, what she was doing with the Turkish language, how she was flexing that language to create those very bizarre, strange images that populated the pages of the book. I thought that would be quite a challenge for me to render in English. And basically, I didn't know where I was going with that translation. I also, as Anton mentioned, I was going to teach a women's world literature course in that fall. And I thought, well, if I can come up with a translation, I can share that with my students. Asla Erdogan was not available in English at that time. So basically, this is what was motivating my translation practice. Indeed, publication was not on my mind at all. The same year, August 2016, a date I will probably never forget. I was reading the news on the internet and I read that Asla Erdogan was arrested and imprisoned in Turkey. So that was quite shocking. That was a wake-up call. And of course, all this comes after July 2016, when the failed military coup took place in Turkey. And it's aftermath when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government began this very systematic crackdown on what they considered as dissent. Thousands of journalists, writers, academics, teachers, students were in prison just because of a tweet sometimes. They were intimidated. Some of them got very afraid. They left the country. And Asla Erdogan was one of those people who were imprisoned. She was arrested on the pretext of being a member of terrorist organization. And in the Turkish context, this basically means advocating for the rights of the Kurdish citizens. She remained in prison for about four months before even her trial began. So indeed, this was a wake-up call. I realized that maintaining a selfish translation in the drawer of my desk was a luxury I could not afford anymore. I realized that unless that became a public discourse, it was useless. And this is when I began writing to publishers inquiring about their interest in publishing this fabulous woman writer from Turkey. And there was no interest. Absolutely no interest. At the same time, I began writing to human rights organizations, Pan America Human Rights Watch. I ventured to write to international award committees talking about this writer, talking about her work, and stressing that she's in prison. Eventually, the stone building appeared on the shelves. That was 2018 and garnered some significant international awards, including Pan Translation Award. It was a finalist for Pan Translation Award. Such an honor for me. But the point here is that all this activity, before even the book appeared as a copy on the bookshelves, that brought a lot of attention to Asla Erdogan's case. It did put pressure on the Turkish government to release her from prison. It didn't look good on the government to keep this writer in prison while she was receiving all these awards in Europe. Eventually, they released her, but they kept a hold on her passport. She couldn't travel to one of her first award ceremonies, which I attended on her behalf. And I guess there is a lot to be said about the role of the translator in relation to this case. Before I let Jen introduce us to the good things she's doing, let me very briefly read from the Turkish so that you can hear the sound. And I will read a little bit from my translation, and then we can come back and convene here. I will share with your permission my PowerPoint so that you can see exactly what I'm reading. And here's the stone building in English. The facts are obvious, contradictory, coarse, and blailing. I leave the facts like a mound of giant stones to those who visit themselves in important matters. What interests me is the murmur among them, indistinct, obsessive. Digging through the rock pile of facts, I'm after a handful of truth, or what used to be called that. These days it doesn't have a name. Lured on by a flickering light. What if I were to dive deeper and deeper? If I could reach the bottom and make it back, I'm after a handful of sand. The song of the sand that slips through my fingers and disappears. Those who speak of the shadows speak the truth. Truth speaks through shadows. Today, I will speak of the stone building, the one that the narrative has avoided at all costs, or at least kept at a safe distance, looking out at it from behind words. Constructed long before I was born, it is five stories tall if we don't count the basement, and there are steps leading up to the entrance. One must write with the body, with the naked, defenseless body beneath the skin. Yet words only call out to other words. You take the letter L and F, a couple of vowels I and E, and you write life. The only key is not to confuse the order. You place a letter, and you turn the living clay into simple in-earth matter as the legend goes, like in the legend. Life, as I write it, belongs to those who can grab it with a deep sigh, not with a mere breath, like plucking your foot from its branch, a root from the earth. As for you, what's left is but an echo, like the hum of waves that you hear when you hold an empty shell to your ear. Life, a word imbibed and consumed down to its very marrow, the hum of a wave of quiet grief, an ocean full of waves. Ah, final word. Asla Arduan lives in Germany in exile since September 2017, when she was able finally to travel to receive a very prestigious and other award, the Erich Maria Remark award, the trial is pending. She was acquitted temporarily early this year. Although in July the accusations have been renewed, and the persecutors are asking for 16 years in prison. This is not a joke. Jen, it's your turn to share with us the good work you're doing. Thank you so much. I feel like I just want Sevinch to keep reading to me. So I feel really, really blessed to be in company with the two of you, and also I've been listening to as many of the recordings as I can from this series, and it just feels like an incredible privilege to be part of this larger company that was so artfully and beautifully curated. The last thing that you said, Sevinch, which is an update on the writer's current situation, which I really appreciate, makes me think about you're talking about one person and how many thousands of people are affected by the regime in Turkey or in so many places. I do a lot of very close work with refugee communities as an interpreter. I also have people in my extended chosen family who are asylum seekers or asylum receivers, and I think about the incredible reverberations when one person or one family is subjected to that kind of brutality and the effects of that, and then how many tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and just the incredible sort of magnification of the pain and trauma that occurs and how much, just how much there is to deal with how much that's in the air. The word Aide, Antena was originally conceived as Antena. It became Antena Aide because we have two sister collectives that are locally based in Los Angeles and Houston, where J.D. Pluker, who is my beloved collaborator and was actually supposed to be on this panel but couldn't be here today, so shout out to them. Please look for their work. It's amazing. When J.D. and I originally founded Antena, it was just the two of us in just one collective, and the aesthetic work that we do that's based in cross-language practice, which I'll talk about more in a moment, we think of as a kind of Aide, a kind of air that permeates everything we do, and I'm coming to you from Tongva land in California. I'm in Los Angeles where the air is extremely permeated at this moment by all kinds of particulate matter that comes from all kinds of places, and so that's both literal in my life and in many people's lives, and also figurative in terms of thinking about the air of harm and pain that we breathe and then the responsibility to repair, and so I wanted to start by actually joining something that I heard Anton say and something that I heard Savage say that really moved me. Anton, you kept apologizing for not being an activist enough, which maybe is the mark of an activist the same way as a poet. I've always been like, I'm not really a poet, which sort of links then to Savage you saying I prefer to say I translate rather than I am a translator, and I think what's important about both of those things other than just like let go of what our expectations are for ourselves and let's just be who we are and see how we can meet up and engage with one another is that what you ended up talking about Anton was having an activist mindset in everything you do as a translator versus some kind of like action that an activist is supposed to take and language I mean we are language workers that's what we do language touches everything we do and as does our approach to the collective responsibility and effort toward justice that touches everything we do so being an activist as I think of it is less about doing a particular action or putting my body or my efforts into particular kinds of spaces that are coded as activists that's important to do and some people have the capacity to do that and some people don't but it's more about a way of being and working and similarly to move towards saying I translate versus I am a translator is much more it keeps it verbal right it's more about what we do and how we do it and less about like I'm codifying who I am in the world so in relationship to the work of Athena Aidae and also the idea that language touches everything we do I wanted to start by sharing my screen and asking everyone so at the beginning and so when I do this let's see okay I actually can't see the zoom screen anymore so I'm going to ask Anton or 7th would one of you unmute and tell me that you can see what I'm showing on my screen because I can't tell if you can or not I'm hoping you great thank you so this is a project that antenna I did it's an experiment and participatory research called responder por favor you can access the slides at this the link that I have on the screen which was also mentioned in the beautiful introduction so what I'm inviting folks to do is to respond on one of the following pages by typing into the text boxes to the following questions I'm going to read them in English they appear in both English and Spanish on your screen where does language live in your body does the language you use belong to you or do you belong to it if you'd like describe what belonging means to you and I'm going to go back to the screen where you can access the slides um which languages do you use daily which languages do you see or hear daily note if you'd say you only use see or hear English ask yourself how many Englishes exist in your daily life imagine the ground you stand on as a body is that body made of words which ones and then finally what is one word you consider very much your own why so what I'm hoping is that some of you will actually access this website and right into these blank boxes that the arrows are pointing to and if you'd like to give us your name and email so we can catch up with you later we will do that um so you can access these slides anytime um and I wanted to start with that um to get out of my there we go um partly just to suggest um how anthena aidae is conceiving of language and cross language practice um I want to acknowledge that the work that JD and I do we work between Spanish and English which are both colonizing languages um and those questions about language and power and language and colonization function differently in different spaces so Spanish can be a colonizing language in Latin America and a colonized or marginalized language in the U.S. and I know that's true of many of the languages that we work between but um part of um I'm getting zoom bombed by cupcake the cat um part of our thinking is always about language dominance and how to unsettle not just the dominance of English in the U.S. American context or the world context because we know it exists there as well but also how to unsettle the dominance of dominant Englishes how can we access those other Englishes or those other Spanish's or those spaces the multiple spaces between languages that for us often manifest in Spanish but I know that there's that lish ending to many other languages my friends who are users of Chinese often talk about Chinglish um or I was talking to a Malaysian colleague recently who was talking to me about Singlish um or many other kinds of mixed languages and how do those activate our language and activate our thinking about language um I want to talk briefly about language justice which is the framework that we use in doing on the ground cross language work as interpreters and text translators and interpreter trainers and consultants with working with all kinds of groups from extremely grassroots community-based organizations to nonprofits both large and small to giant foundations city governments um county governments like all kinds of different organizations um some more flexible than others let's just say um but to think about language justice um that work that we do that's um might be considered more concrete or more typically activist in the sense that you were maybe gesturing toward Anton um the ways that that work informs our aesthetic work and vice versa so just to make sure that everyone is on the same page so to speak around the terms I'm using um when we think about language dominance we're also thinking about linguicism which is a term that I first encountered a couple of years ago um actually in work that I was doing in collaboration with California legal assistance which was mentioned at the top of the event um linguicism is discrimination or oppression based on language so it has all kinds of manifestations that we can think in terms of access to the justice system access to healthcare access to education and economic justice issues um and it's very clear I'm sure even just from that tiny laundry list that I just shared the ways that linguicism intersects with so many of the other isms that we um confront all of the time racism heterosexism um misogyny um and all kinds of other ableism there's a lot of links between language justice and disability justice um so the same way that we might say that racial justice is a response to racism language justice is a response to linguicism um as I said it's very connected to the disability justice movement we often think about the motto developed in the 70s by disability justice activists nothing about us without us and language justice at the root of language justice is the idea that those who are most impacted by any decision or any um situation have a right to participate in strategizing around how to approach that situation and the other heart of language justice is the idea that when we're able to use our own languages which are preserved and respected and everybody's language rights are respected we're able to bring our full selves into the spaces that we inhabit and the spaces where we work um so that entails um and language justice suggests a set of principles and a set of practices which I won't go into now because there isn't time but if you're interested I have a lot to say about it um as do it does everyone else who works with antenna los angeles antenna houston and antenna aire um but language justice at heart also entails a kind of radical listening where we are thinking differently about our relationship the relationship of self to other or self to world and I want to think back to something also that um you said Anton um you were talking about um the ways that your identity informs and actually both of you spoke really powerfully when you talked about your language background seven inches well you're talking about the ways that your identity informs the decisions you make as a translator um and that it's not only about um sort of converting languages or encountering the other in a kind of patronizing or patriarchal way as we know so many translators have approached work in the past in that way um and the kind of radical listening that's at the heart of language justice is really also about listening to the effect on us of the work that we do the effect on us of the encounter of an encounter with a language or something that people are saying or thinking about that's outside what we know so at the heart of language justice is also the idea that in order to be to participate fully in all of the spaces that we inhabit we need to be able to hear something different than what we can access only through our own languages that we need those things important crucial things are being said or written elsewhere that we need language workers like ourselves and language activists like ourselves to be able to access um in terms of the ways that experimental writing and translation informs social justice practice in vice versa i think you can probably see just from my even initial conceptualizing around how anthana aida approaches our cross-language work and we do all kinds of aesthetic practice that's based in this kind of betweenness and radical listening but the ways that when we're thinking about the kinds of brutalities and the kinds of harms that we are breathing in in the air all the time and how we can be most conscious and most responsible to attending to those and to healing from those and repairing those that that informs the way we practice artwork but also the kind of radical leaps and imaginative openings that literary work poetry for me especially experimental poetry but of course prose as well can offer can really inform the ways that we strategize on the ground social justice activism in terms of thinking completely outside the status quo frameworks that have been offered to us which very obviously are not what we need anymore so what else is out there and those of us who work between languages and cultures i think are uniquely positioned to approach the what else is out there question from a really revolutionary perspective so i was going to read a little bit from a couple of our pamphlets but i actually feel like it would be maybe more dynamic to just open it up to everyone and if it comes up that i'll read i will and if not that's also totally fine our pamphlets are available for free on our website so it's easy to access them if you want to so you should definitely read from the pamphlet please okay i could do that um so i'm going to read from two pamphlets this one is called a manifesto for discomfort writing um and as i said if you go to our website which is just um antenna antenna dot or g it's in my bio um you can access these for free and either Spanish or English anyone who wants to translate them into another language feel free um okay so i'm just going to read really briefly from this language and world are inseparable language and action are inseparable we use language to think about the world the world being language we turn our minds and bodies to the language we are using aware of the constant constraints and impositions of that language upon us the language being the world it's multiple and multiplicitous brutalities the perpetual brutalities of an unjust language the perpetual possibilities of justice in language skipping a bunch we have no patience for the divide between art practice and political practice we have endless patience for doing the hard imaginative and practical work of building a more humane and just world we are here to dismantle the master's house Audrey lord the master's house tools will never dismantle the master's house Yvonne Rayner you can dismantle the master's house using the master's tools if you expose the tools antenna aire the master's house began to collapse on its own long ago use any and all tools you can get your hands on and speed the process demolish the master's house carefully enough to recycle the building materials and make tiny houses for everybody with any leftover materials we'll make small books so this is our manifesto for discomfort writing which sort of outlines our practice around experimental writing and house building and book making and then we have a pamphlet called a manifesto for ultra translation these pamphlets are bilingual so you flip it and it's in Spanish let's see so I actually I had already marked to read this before I heard either of you speak but yeah I think you'll hear their resonances with some of what both of you said work across languages needs contextualization ultra translation attempts to contextualize from within the language within the syntax between and around the words the breath the utterance air and diaphragm contracting and relaxing ultra translation lures translators out of invisibility and onto the streets into the margins into the footnotes into annotation into activism into failure and into irrationality the intuitive a channeling the work might speak for itself but translation never does nor can it be spoken for by the translator or by anyone else rather translators speak for ourselves addressing questions of stance position and perspective replacing invisibility with transparency by writing notes toward an understanding of the tools and processes that made the translation toward an understanding of the ultra translators practice 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 ultra translation is built from radicalism ultra racism 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 ultra translation provide tools for crossing or not crossing whether or not we cross we need the tools great thank you so much for that Jen and and thanks to all three of you I we're actually already at 1245 and time to take questions I don't know if Lynn wants to come back on screen also but listening to the three of you actually I have a question that I'd like each of you to address if you could it's it's been a fascinating sort of large-scale tour of various almost peri-textual issues that have to do with changing the canon defending marginalized and imperiled individuals and communities those oppressed by governments resistance to linguicism which is this marvelous word that obviously needs to exist and that I had not heard before prior to today Jen so you've expanded my vocabulary and I very much appreciate that um but I'm very curious and I suspect that a lot of people in the audience are also very curious for examples of activism that you engage in within the verbal fabric of a specific translation you know a specific choice that you've made as the translator of literary text that was an activist choice be it with relation to pronouns or issues of gender a use of multilingualism of refusal to translate in certain contexts or other concerns that may have impacted the way that you chose to put particular words or particular sentences into English could you could you each respond with something very very specific in that sense I'd really be grateful Anton you want to start so um I guess I don't know how specific that I can get with this but with the uh there's a huge kind of debate between foreignization and domesticization and how in other words if I carry over the texture of the source text or the source language into the translation it may sound awkward or exotic and I think I used to believe I used to be completely anti-foreignization and now I'm not so sure now I feel like well now that I'm a little bit published than before um yeah there's there's fewer unfortunately that's the it's that's the case where um now that there's less pressure to uh to conform I guess so for so I find myself pushing back against edits more where sometimes yeah this would be very vague like awkward or like awkward is a very big red flag that um that I kind of like that I say oh so awkward for who is it awkward for you it's awkward for this imaginary um white reader in your mind so there there there are cases where I'm kind of like beginning to push back on that kind of thing more whereas if you see if you look at my earlier work more it's it's like there's I'm totally like always flattening things almost where kind of like sucks the the life of the language I think and I think that is a very big issue a very big uh sea change in in how translations are received now I think um Elena Ferrante's uh translator Engelstein I think she did a really great uh push towards um no I will I will convey the texture this is what it sounds like an Italian and you're just going to have to get used to it and everyone got used to it so I think that's a really great kind of tiny but gigantic form of activism uh within the texts it's interesting that you mentioned that because um Maureen Freely who translates Orhan Pamuk or he used to translate Orhan Pamuk has commented in an essay that Pamuk refused to allow her to use Turkish words in the translation including the names of foods you know like Turkish foods that everyone knows by the Turkish term she has to call like a borak a cheese pie or something like that you know so seven when you were translating did that issue of multilingualism arise for you or other issues within the fabric of the text um I think the example that I will give is sort of the the the the third person singular pronoun in Turkish um that is just the letter O which stands for he she is in English uh that pronoun is genderless so how do you translate especially the stone building the novella in this collection that is full of O so the narrator the voices that narrator hears huh and so I choose to alternate all these three pronouns he she and it and sort of what did I learn from this exercise I mean I guess the Turkish is the Turkish values ambiguity ambivalence the delay the deferral sort of an English forces you to be precise who is the person speaking tell me what is their gender and sort of that speaks a lot to how languages really form our understanding of the world and our worldview and we wake up to that is really during the the translating process sort of language differences come and wake us up uh from our sort of obliviousness so that is the the example that I give and Jen you yeah I want to offer two things first I want to offer a lineage it's very rare to be able to actually literally name who you learned a term from but I want to name that I learned the term linguicism from Elena Ulyash who is the language justice manager at California Royal Legal Assistance and we both learned it from someone whose name I'm sure I am going to mispronounce a Finnish linguist and scholar named Tove Skutnab Kangas I'm going to put her name into the chat which I know only those on the zoom can see but just so that I'm giving credit where credit is due and this Finnish scholar's work around linguism is really really amazing and I really recommend that folks continue it's just revolutionized my thinking about approaches to language to be able to name language oppression as its own thing and then interrelated to other forms of discrimination and oppression um so just to say um it may be me from whom you heard that term Esther but it is not only me sharing it with others um in terms so there's a particular term that I've been thinking about quite a lot um I'm uh about to publish uh with um a small press in New York Lipniz Press um translations of a queer Uruguayan writer named Virginia Lucas her book is called Ame Rika Tu Valor De Cambio or America A Me Rich A Your Exchange Value so you can immediately see the queerness and a kind of anti-capitalist um focus in the title and there's a poem that she has where she references a travesti this word um is kindred too but is not transvestite transgender tranny trans it's none of those things and all of those things it's specifically a Latin American term and what I ended up doing was writing using the word travesti and then writing a footnote I'm using a kind of radical um intervention technique in translating this book which um is a much longer story but Virginia uses footnotes in her own poems and so then I'm inserting my translator's notes into the poem translations as well um but that was an example where I couldn't find there is no English language equivalent and sometimes adjacency is great but in this instance because it's about an identity and a a kind of person who has a kind of way of moving through the world that's very particular it really felt like a travesty and I use the word travesty playfully on purpose in my translator's note to try to pin it down to a U.S.-based phrase I'm thinking about this word a lot because Antena Aire is doing a collaborative translation of an incredible Peruvian artist's work Giuseppe Campusano who has a book titled the Travesti Museo Museo Travesti del Peru the um Travesti Museum of Peru so now we have the opportunity to think about that word in the book title and as it sort of extends through this entire giant project I love that answer Jen because um I think that people have always viewed translation as a vehicle for expanding the language right for bringing in new words bringing in new and that that would also be a political kind of activism has not necessarily been understood at the same time so I like that you're combining the that very old traditional idea of translation as enrichment via new vocabulary with um this political sense in which you're in which you're taking it I think that Lynn has a question very quickly to the all that Sevinch was talking about the way that trans people in the U.S. are inviting us to think about the term they or trans and genderqueer gender nonconforming people are inviting us to think about they as a gender neutral pronoun I think I think of that as linked to other languages that have gender neutrality and the ways that trans existence can actually inform translation are super interesting to me thanks for letting me break in go ahead Lynn okay the question I have is another area of translation activism and that has to do with the publishing industry um as Sevinch's experience points out we don't often have the choice of what we translate or if we translate something we have to find a publisher that's willing to publish it and how do we deal with the fact that a lot of times the publishers that we deal with are investing in me are invested in maintaining the status quo that's a great question um uh great question and I do believe I mean I began by taking reservations with the title activist translator but really translating in the Anglo-American context is resisting that context sort of alienating us from reaching out to international literature sort of restricting our access to international literature and so translation translating comes with an activist edge you know it or not um uh so in my case reaching out to publishers was a disaster I felt like I'm beating a dead horse and this is not going to work but the fact that this was a woman writer didn't matter that she was a great writer absolutely not finally city lights from San Francisco sort of showed interest and I and I told I couldn't have imagined a better home for for the stone building um and and and why because this is a publisher with the history of publishing banned books uh publishing uh progressive politics um uh the history of the publisher goes back to beat generation in the united states they published several titles by Nam Chomsky and so doing a little research about the publisher helps there but I also I think Anton has a great initiative with the smoking tigers and that was a question that I sort of would like to build on and address to him in that seems like this is a initiative of solidarity Anton among these translators who translate from Korean and my question to you would be how do you need negotiate the US publishers um demands that they want to publish a specific text from Korean and then sort of wheeling into this your own agendas translator how do you negotiate that divide oh god good question how do we do it um so I feel like an interesting thing that smoking tigers is going to do next year well actually we did last year is uh but the books are coming out next year is that we kind of started uh Korean science fiction in publication so like there was there was no there were no published books uh of Korean literature Korean science fiction literature in translation and um basically we we all like I think four of us found like works that we really loved and we really pushed for for it and then we used everything in our arsenal um it was it was very uh like we were very lucky that leo decisions uh three-body problem became such a big hit around that time so for us um we are just so passionate about what about our authors and about the works that we want to push that I think um publishers uh do respond to that to uh to an extent they they see that like we basically that we are basically agents for some of these works um it is an uphill battle and uh Korean literature is helped by uh all these like fantastic um institutions neoliberal institutions Korean literature that's fun Korean literature in translation without which it would be very very very difficult to to um to enter into the system um which which is why it uh some people tell us that oh why don't you set up your own publishing house and we're like wow so we have to translate the books and publish Jen Jen publishes uh books as so I feel like uh like antennae from what I understand they're basically uh vertically integrated I'm sorry for using all these neoliberal terms but they're basically um vertically integrated where um like they have they have experience of every step of a publication process and I thought and I really wanted to ask Jen that question about like what what is that experience like of being a publisher because that is like such an incredibly proactive um banging your head repeatedly against the wall trying to make things happen kind of level of having to do something so I'm kind of like curious horrified and in awe of what you do so I just wanted to ask you uh about like what that experience is like for you well it's already 10 o'clock so maybe curious horrified and in awe is the note we have to add on but if you I was going to stand up and show you something sorry so when you say that we publish let me just be clear that this is a really good example of what we publish this is a cartonera book it's hand sewn um it's just Xerox copy on the inside it's a multilingual book that we did in collaboration with a few different amazing small presses including Codama Cartonera in Tijuana um and um just making sure I mentioned them all um and Travieso Press um uh Cartonera Santanera in Santana Kaia which is an amazing um Asian American and Asian diasporic um literary press um and Tiny Slender Press here in Los Angeles so when we say we publish we are making bilingual or multilingual DIY publications if you want the kind of support that um a city lights can offer don't come to Antenna Aida mostly what we're doing is documenting and making um sort of textured homemade um objects you can hold in the hand which also just in the pandemic like so it's so important to have that physicality um that we can share and trade and and share with the people that we care about so um we are hardly um a publishing company and I also would be horrified if we tried to be um and I have so much respect for those who do that labor of love and we do a lot of work in Antenna Aida to create platforms to uplift the work of folks who do small independent press labors of love to support the work of the writers that we translate and ourselves as translators and writers. Thank you so much Jen um that's inspiring uh you've all three been inspiring um but we do we are at the end of our hour so we have to say goodbye and before we do I just want to say that once again we'd like to thank our partners HowlRound, Penn America, the Center for the Humanities of the Graduate Center CUNY, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center also at CUNY and of course thanks most of all to today's wonderful speakers uh Anton, Jen, and Savage. We'll see everybody next Tuesday and oh a special tribute to Anton for whom I believe it is currently two a.m so he wins the late night awards all right time to say goodbye thanks everybody signing off now