 Welcome, I'm Esther Allen, a professor at City University of New York and here with me is Allison Markin Powell, who translates Japanese literature and works with the Penn Translation Committee. She and I are co organizers of translating the future the conference you are attending. Thank you Esther, and thank you all for joining us for week 18 of translating the future. This conversation on Transiting Trauma features Ellen Elias Bursuk, translator and author of a book on her work at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, writer and editor Aaron Robertson, who translates from Italian, and Julia Sanchez, who translates from Portuguese, Spanish, French and Catalan. Our moderator, Queenie Sokadia, is a scholar of global human rights literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. You can learn more about all of our, all of today's highly accomplished speakers by reading their full bios on the Center for the Humanities. In her extraordinary 2016 essay, War in Translation, Lina Munzer, who participated in week two of this conference, describes her experience translating Syrian women's accounts of their lives under war and siege. Stories so harrowing that to translate them was itself a trauma. There is a violence in undoing someone's words and reconstituting them in a vocabulary foreign to them, a vocabulary of your own choosing. Lina Munzer writes, there is a violence to in the way you are for long moments, annihilated by the other, undone in return, neither the translator nor the text emerges from the act unscathed. Today's guests, believers in the powers of documentation, will talk about how they have risk that violence that annihilation by the trauma of the other to become part of an act of bearing witness. The expression is one of the pillars of pen America's mission. And I'd like to point out that the works that Aaron and Julia will be discussing today. Beyond Babylon by Ijiaba Shago and Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernandez were both awarded grants from the Penheim Translation Fund. It's so important to see works such as these supported by the publishing community here. As usual, please email your questions for Ellen, Aaron, Julia and Queenie to translating the future 2020 at gmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous, unless you know it in your email that you would like us to read your name. Translating the future will continue in its current form for one more week. Beginning September 22, the conference finale in week 20 will feature a number of evening events with speakers to include Kate Briggs, Tracy K Smith, Natalie Diaz, can you Jen for Croft, and a host of others. You can find out more on the Center for the Humanities website. We'll be back again on September 15 next week with week 19 of our hour long Tuesday events. Please join us then at noon Eastern Standard Time for a conversation on activist translation with Anton her zooming in from Seoul, JD Pluker and seven to come. 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 for an international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by Lynn Miller-Lachman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translation resources at penn.org. If you know anyone who was unable to join us for today's live stream, a recording will be available afterward on the Howl Round and Center for the Humanities sites. Before we turn it over to Queenie and the others, we'd like to offer our utmost gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the College of Library and Penn America and to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at Howl Round who make this live stream possible. And now, over to Queenie. Hi everyone. So before we begin, I'd just like to take a moment to thank all of you for tuning in to what I expect to be a very generous conversation today. Thanks to our participants, Ellen, Julia, and Erin for speaking with us today, and a big thank you to Allison and Esther as well as our sponsors for creating a space for us to have these rich hour-long conversations. So to kick off today's discussion, I'd like to ask you, Ellen, Erin, and Julia, to situate us with respect to your work. Can you tell us a little bit about your projects themselves and then also your journeys, be they intellectual, biographical or linguistic that led you to undertake this work of translating trauma. So Erin, why don't you start us off. Yeah, sure. So I am talking about Ijiaba Shago's novel, Beyond Babylon. Ijiaba is a Somali Italian writer. She's writing in Italian, and this is a novel that is set in multiple nations, so Italy, Argentina, Somalia, and Tunisia, and it's essentially about the legacies of Italian colonialism throughout all of these nations. And so the novel kind of tracks the stories of five characters. The two main protagonists are half sisters who go to Tunis to participate in an Arabic language program. So it's a novel about kind of intergenerational migration. It's about language learning and the actual process of translation. And in many ways that we'll probably talk about here, it is about the traumas that are sustained on both in individual and national scale. Julia, how about you? I'll be talking about Slash and Burn, which hasn't been published in English yet. I have a Spanish copy here. It's by Claudia Hernandez, who is a Salvadoran contemporary Salvadoran writer. This is her first novel. She's mostly written short stories until now. And it follows several characters. There's one sort of main woman that revolves around she is unnamed and she lives in an unnamed country. During a civil war and also in the aftermath of the war. And it also tells a story of her daughters and essentially how she's trying to bring up her daughters to have a respectable, well, not respectable, but just like a happy, not happy fulfilled something life. I'm trying to not project all these Western concepts of productivity to these people. And I remember speaking to Claudia a while ago, and she apparently had thought of it as a film she'd been interested in writing screenplays and had wanted to make a movie about this more in the vein of a documentary and it hadn't quite worked for her. So what we have is a very oral history of the of the Civil War period and the post war period of a place that would be assumed as El Salvador, but could be any other place in Latin America, where a proxy war was fought. Well, I lived in what was then Yugoslavia for a long time. I come from the States but I married there had my kids there worked as a community translator for a total of 17 years, and then why is it echoing all of a sudden. And then and then moved back to my local to my where I'm from which is Boston in 1990 and then the war broke out. And here I was. So, ever since then since really 1990 I've been translating people's writing about those wars that went on in, in what became all the successor countries after Yugoslavia broke up and. So, in terms of trauma and translation almost everything I've translated has had some resonance with that except the most recent writing or the very early things I did before the war began. And that shows for today this snowman by David Al-Bahari, which shows a glass of orange juice on the cover, and that's his one comfort as he's in this strange city and Kennedy clings to his glasses of orange juice that will somehow get him through the worst of times and, and it's an amazing book and probably of all the ones that I the novels that I've translated about war. It goes the most deeply into personal trauma and loss just directly into it just to end. And so I thought of it as as what to share with Julia and Aaron before and Queenie before we started and then just briefly the other thing that I've done that has to do with trauma and translation is I worked at the war crimes at the National Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for six years in the translation unit and then wrote a book about that and was able to survey my colleagues about their experiences of trauma and bias and all those things we talk about. And so that helped me articulate some of my own thinking about about translators and how they relate to those things. So much that's really fascinating. So personally, I've always kind of been interested in thinking about how we receive narratives of trauma, and then also how we transmit them forward, which is what each one of you seems to be doing through the act of translation. So I'm curious about how you position yourselves with respect to these texts that you were working with, as both individuals are receiving these narratives and then also stepping into the shoes of these writers to do this work of translation. So particularly thinking you're about the risk of appropriation that kind of attends this work of translation, but I'd also like to hear you speak more generally to any of the ethical dilemmas that you may have faced in kind of doing this work of translation and how you've worked through them. Julia. I spend a lot of time thinking about my position as a translator with respect to any text that I translate. It's very helpful to imagine the translator as a close reader rather than as a proxy for the author. Because at the end of the day, what you have to work with is the text that they have produced, you don't have the background information you don't have the research you don't have whatever context that they were in when they were working on that. So I found out, again, after translating this book from someone else who had met the author that she based this book on like a decade's worth of interviews. I don't have access to these interviews I don't know how she ended up bringing them together to create this narrative if there was one person whose story she followed or if the protagonist is actually a mix of all these different narratives. I was also hesitant to ask too much of the author because I know that she wrote this out in a during a period of exile she was born in 1974 so she would have ended the civil war in El Salvador started in 1979 and ended in 1992. So she would have been four years old to 15 to 16 I can't laugh, but something around that. And I didn't feel it was my place to make her bring up any possible trauma that she might have experienced. So as I said I think in an email I, I read around, I read around this book which is what I always try to do when there's a time for some of the vocabulary they has to do with like the gorillas. And some of the politics because there are very specific terms that have been used internationally, but otherwise I just sort of wrestled very closely with the, the information I had. I wanted to identify the mood of the writing like what it was trying to convey. Through its word choice that's it sits at this very interesting intersection between an oral mode and also, you know, this is going to sound obvious but prose like literature so the grammar is always correct but it's always very finely styled, and it feels like someone could be saying these things the whole time. So yeah I guess that's where I positioned myself. Don't know if that can take you. Yeah, that's really helpful to hear Aaron or Ellen, whoever things. Yeah. So this was a book that I translated in in 2017. And this was something like that I came to during college so it was my first translation project I had no kind of no plans of becoming an actual translator. I had learned of Ijiaba's nonfiction and in journalism and she wrote a lot about racism in in modern day Italy and kind of how, how you could trace that to a certain extent back to, you know, Italy is colonial projects in North Africa and the, the horn of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Libya. So one, one quality of this book, which, which focuses on five you know separate narratives is that you always have characters who are leaving a place and then reflecting on what it means to leave and to arrive. In 2016, one of the reasons I wanted to study abroad in Italy but but frankly, you know, anywhere was that I was still was still thinking of Michael Brown, and the start of the black lives matter movement in 2014. And I was trying to get a sense of my own place, like in this movement. What did I want to contribute. What did I think I could contribute. I didn't know the answer really. I was kind of inspired by, by James Baldwin, you know, who, who went to France, and was always kind of thinking about, Well, what does, what does the, you know, situation in Algiers have to say about what's happening in Harlem. I wondered what in Bologna or Rome or Florence, could I learn about what's happening in the US, you know, and so I encountered this book. I'm somewhat randomly in a library. I knew her name, like I said, but I didn't know much about her for fiction. I read this book, and I hear all these echoes of Toni Morrison in it, and she is very explicitly engaging with Toni Morrison. And so you have all this crosstalk across boundaries already across, you know, literary texts. And when I saw the ways in which she was engaging with with trauma itself with the use of the color red. Like in this book, I said, Well, that's my permission maybe that's, that's my way in, because it's Yaba is very conscious of the kind of, you know, African American literary tradition to and so I saw it, not as a way to to stake a claim on the text but to engage like in an actual conversation with the Java. And nowadays, I'm fortunate enough to actually talk to her about what's going on in Italy, what's going on here in the States. So that's how I came to her work. As far as I'm concerned, when I was leaving Yugoslavia in the late 80s I got in touch with David Al-Bahari because I was really interested in his distinctive postmodern approach to literature and I really liked his stories and I ended up translating the collection of them for Northwestern University Press in the early 90s, and then he moved to Canada in the about 93 or 94, and started writing, he left, I was right in the middle of the war going on and the war went on for the greatest intensity of the fighting was between 91 and 95 and so he left right in the middle of that and went to Canada as a writer in residence and various other capacities there and and when he first sent me snowman he wanted me to translate it and I read it. And I was so devastated by it, it was so painful and I was still so much in my own losses that came out of the war that it was very hard for me and I wrote back and said I just don't think I have the courage and the strength to translate this it's too hard and he went back and said oh try please try and when I sat down and started to my surprise which I hadn't even, it's not that I hadn't noticed it but it's so different when you start to translate you get so much deeper into a text that this whole novel is just completely full of this bizarre manic humor that he uses he kind of he builds the humor and the and the despair sort of running along in parallel dipping back and forth between them in this very intense very compelling way and that's I was only able to translate it because I sort of attached myself to the humor and the humor took me through it and and made it possible to face and deal with some of the other parts that were that were harder the sense of loss and and that to deal with in the novel. And and what I found in general in translating and I thought about a lot when I was reading Julius and Aaron's translations is that when a novel grapples directly with deeply traumatic subject matter. It's never superficial. It's always very intense and the intensity may manifest itself in all sorts of different ways but I find that no matter how difficult it is if I can connect to that intensity I can translate it. So that to respond to you. Yeah, that's really helpful to think about kind of narratives of trauma. Thank you. And kind of to pivot to thinking about the concept of translation more broadly and I think Aaron you touched on this a little bit in your response. I'm wondering about kind of translation across time and space right and how do you think. All of you right how do you think kind of trauma gets translated across generational and geographic boundaries in each of your texts but even beyond them. Do you think that trauma traumatic experiences are kind of so localized and specific that they kind of resist translation across context. So do you think that trauma can be translated in these ways. So Ellen can you. Oh yes I think so I mean I think any huge emotions come across I find when I'm translating that once a text becomes deeply emotional that it moves me along I don't obviously there's work to be done with with revising and thinking about holding the work of literature together but but the sort of moments the motor of the emotional content is is always. It all of us have experienced trauma one level or another we can recognize that even if it's what it was like when you started first grade I mean everybody has some kind of has some kind of experience like that I think it's. That's my anyway that's the way I. Yeah absolutely. Aaron can do you have any input on this yeah yeah of course so I'm like I said like this is a book that that that deals with multiple kind of man of the stations of colonial violence and so one one character like in the book her name is. Miranda and she is a poet from Argentina and her work is almost is is pretty much like all about the the kind of you know military. Dictatorship that Argentina experienced like in the 1970s. She is one of the lucky ones and she's able to actually leave the country relocate to Rome, but she's always thinking about Los. Those who are who are you know disappeared as a result, you know often of of state violence and so Miranda arrives in Italy this this country that has deep you know cultural historical ties to Argentina and what's what's fascinating. Like one thing that is not mentioned explicitly like in the text but is which kind of you know underwrites this whole project is that Mussolini you know saw saw Argentina as a possible. You know bastion of of fascism, like in South America right and so you have these ideologies that that really do you know transcend place and transcend time to and the characters throughout this book, they are constantly reflecting on the kind of scars. Mostly on that their mothers inherit because for four of the five like main characters are women, two daughters, their mothers and their father. And so, so families are kind of always reflecting on how their past has kind of informed their own, you know, messy interactions often and something that, you know, that that I think it's Java does, which Claudia does to translated so well by Julia because she really hones in on the, the kind of complicated relationship between mothers and daughters. Like at a certain point, you don't really forget about the wars, like in the violence but you, you have to focus on your own life and maintaining your own household right. And you can look at your scars, and you can blame them, but at the end of the day, your daughter needs needs you as a mother right, she doesn't want kind of this weight of, of, you know, history, bearing down on her so that, like that I think is one of the really interesting dynamics of both a job and and Claudia's novels. So, I think this applies less to snowman, though of course, the experience of that, you know, that post war, I mean, be possibly even shell shocked that the protagonist is experiencing when he goes to Canada, can apply to a lot of different European backgrounds, since Europe has been like carved up and in the last 150 years. I think there's a, there's a stronger connection between beyond Babylon and Slashenburn, in the sense that the two books. Beyond Babylon talks about colonialism and it's hard to find a nation on this planet that hasn't experienced some form of colonialism so like that, in a way, is a narrative that I don't like the expression travels well but it's one that is easy to relate to across borders. And so Slashenburn is, I've already said this but I'll repeat it, and that the characters are named there's only one place that's named that is Paris France and it looms like very large and the protagonist's imagination because during the civil war she gets pregnant and her child is taken from her and sold for the cause by some nuns to a family in France so right there you're already extending the web of the aftermath of this, this experience of war and then you also have characters who flee for that northern country that doesn't get named which is obviously the United States. And one of the reasons why I believe she doesn't name anyone is because it universalizes the experience more. The book was first published in Colombia and which is almost perfect because there's a similar experience of neighbors fighting each other and that ended much more recently. And also there's the sexual violence that a lot of the characters encounter from childhood onward and that is also sadly the kind of trauma that translates across humanity. I kept seeing so many parallels between beyond Babylon and Slashenburn because of this, you know passing down the story, the protagonist and Slashenburn tells her daughters about her experiences over and over to the point that the daughter's like, I'm sick of hearing about the war. But one of the things you learn at the end of the book is that for her the war never ended. She's still in a constant state of crisis even if it's quite muted. And can I add that, you know, what's so one part about Slashenburn, there's one line and I'm, you know, badly paraphrasing here but Claudia writes about names and she basically says that names are, you know, for the dead. So, so what's the point really right and this idea that naming makes it easier to kind of identify and you know fix one person almost one identity. But obviously, you sustain some horrible trauma that becomes troubled and that's something that you also see in snowman to you have this this really neurotic, you know, narrator, who constantly is like, I, I feel like I'm living multiple lives almost like there are multiple selves here. And he, you know, keep saying that, like here in Canada, I'm going to grow old, but, but I heard someone say that, and then, you know, few pages down. Once again, he says, I feel like I'm going to grow old, but he doesn't like really have a sense that it's just this one person saying this right. And so the way that that trauma, I think troubles a sense of location. And not only, you know, geographically and temporally but for the, like for the individual, it's hard to really take stock of yourself to kind of contain yourself in one one place in time. Also, there's an interesting connection between slash and burn and, and very striking connection between slash and burn and snowman which is that the lack of names I mean there isn't. He never even says worries he's surviving in he doesn't say what the protagonist doesn't give a name. The only name that's offered to us is a dog named Freddie and he then says that he always calls dogs Freddie so it doesn't even make specific that one dog. But, but again it's a universalizing moment as you said Julia that that that having having people are named by their categories like the professor of political science or the secretary or whatever and but never but never named and it's it's interesting. I just found that very interesting that comparison and also with with beyond Babylon. At the beginning, even though there are the five narrators I had to spend some time to sort of work out, and some of them have similar names and that got confusing Miriam and whatever all the different names so I was kind of working on on names there as well it was and also the geography is all three books are all about geography and again it's movement and people who are refugees or displaced and and and beyond Babylon's astonishing the way it moves among free continents and and and and then as you said between Paris and Salvador in the United States and in my case, the gets into this kind of a wrestling match with all these maps that he's hung on the wall and he's thinking about borders and drawing them in on the maps and it becomes this huge obsession with borders and geography and places and so. Absolutely. And also, I'm also kind of curious about what you think about the relationship between language and trauma, because so many people talk about how trauma is essentially unrepresentable, but we find the representations of trauma like proliferating all kinds of art right so how do you kind of make sense of this seeming paradox like, do you think that trauma, like what do you think other strategies writers often rely on to make kind of trauma, which is so under representable representable. Well, I can start. Yeah. And I, I kind of mentioned earlier that that one of the tools, a job uses to kind of, you know, trace the trace different manifestations, like of trauma is color so you know, in the beginning of the book, the one of the main characters describes her. As a child, she was in, in school, and the school janitor assaulted her. And as a result, I'm like over time she begins to use the ability to actually see colors right so at the start of the book. There's this, this really, you know, beautiful moving scene where the character is retracing her steps through Rome to kind of regain colors, but the only one that she can't get back is the color red. So throughout this this book she's constantly searching for it. And red is, is not only like there's the kind of, you know, the obvious like connotation of a blood like that is spilled, like as a result of war and violence, but one important thing to note about beyond Babylon in particular is, I'm kind of like, like Ellen was saying, the use of, the use of humor is like as a key component of the book, there are multiple sides to your experience is not only trauma so the color red in the book is not only your cue of some kind of pain here, but it's also so it's Yaba is very concerned with the body, this is a very kind of physical book so not only what what damage is done to it but how how it is a, you know, a conduit of pleasure and joy to and of kind of a self understanding. And so so soon after you have this scene like where she's lost where one of the characters has lost her colors. There's also this scene like where she's talking about her period right and, and this is something that comes up at multiple points throughout this book is trying to understand what this means to to her, you know, as a woman. And this is not like, I don't want to spoil the book but this the meaning of blood and pain and pleasure. They all kind of have, you know, similar visual cues. So that is one way that Ijiaba kind of moves around language to really capture what it means to to undergo these experiences. I'll enjoy it. Yeah. So the language and slash and burn is is very straightforward and not not often symbolic and it might be worth mentioning that the word trauma is never used at any point in the book, like, I'm assuming trauma and the assumption comes from one scene that's almost at the very end where the protagonists mother is dying and they've always had this tension over the daughter that the protagonists lost who is who's now in France and that relationship is never mended. And her mother is dying and she decides the protagonists again no names it makes it difficult to talk about but the protagonist decides to go find her mother's wedding ring that she'd taken off during the war. And she this is sort of a journey through all of these sites of trauma like all of these sites of actual physical battle. And that is the only moment when the language starts becoming a bit more metaphoric. Like she she goes to the site where there used to be a doctor who would who would give the women abortions because they didn't want women pregnant during the war they wanted them fighting and the doctor, when she when he found out that she was pregnant it was too late to do anything about it and he helped her bring this baby into the world and she always feels grateful and she imagines his body in the earth, feeding the trees. And she goes this protagonist goes through, you follow her throughout the book and at no point does she really talk about pain, or, you know, how it had affected her that she had almost been raped as a young girl. It's only at the very end when she's talking to one of her friends who had also fought in the war. I think the term is companion in battle is what I went for, where she doesn't have a mirror so that her friends serves as a mirror and she starts listing off every single one of her battle scars, and starts for my and like reminds her of the fact that she can, she can't hear anything very well because she had been very close to about to an explosive going off and reminds her that she wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. And she'd been so centered the project has been so centered on helping her daughters get ahead and recovering her lost daughter that she had completely blanked on any of the physical and emotional trauma that she herself and suffered throughout the war. But when I think of language specifically I'm always reminded of Paul Salon and the way that he sort of deconstructed the German and chose to write right in German to start and then deconstructed the language and did something on the level on the level of like the syllabic components of the words. So I guess it's not that trauma can't be expressed through language is just that you have to maybe shake up the container and yes. Well, it's interesting this question of language and particularly in snowman because just as he clings to glasses of oranges to salvage him and difficult situations he also clings to words and he, he writes about that I actually quickly found a place where I was thinking trap deception loss and quickly everything I saw became one of these words without resistance without effort. And then I remembered the Atlas, it appeared like a fourth word as Atlas at a moment when the others had replaced the world and then he anchors himself in the word Atlas, and it's like he's clinging to these words to save him. It's so in a way, he's showing us by doing that, what the trauma, what the wordless part of trauma is like that that he's reaching for words to pull him out of it. Yeah. Sorry, please. He's also obsessed with precision. At the very beginning the word precise is all over the place and then it sort of fades away and then you start getting back he's like craving precision wondering if precision is even possible anymore. And I think that has to also do with the loss of language. Yes. And, and this is true for, for many, you know, cultures and locations but the Italian language is, you know, it is a fundamental part of the way that Italians, you know, view themselves right and historically, it has been used in cases like there's a way to distinguish between who was Italian, and who was not Italian right. And so, if you go over to Italy now, actually like you, and like walk into a Black Lives Matter movement that is probably being led by a black Italian American, there are, are some efforts to kind of look at language to look at the Italian language and see, right, how do we, like, what words do we use to start talking about, you know, blackness, and about white privilege. How do we translate that right and these, these activists are looking to, to the Black Lives Matter movement here in the US to kind of see what, what terminology is being used and what's like what's incredible about Italian is that the word for race. When you use that, many people will think that you're talking about these, you know, laws that the fascists passed like in the 1930s to talk about, you know, Jewish people and the kind of, you know, prohibitions that were placed or that were imposed on Jews in Italy, because of Mussolini, like in the fascist, right. So now, in 2020, when you're talking about race in Italy, do you use RATSA or do you use like some other word to describe like what you're talking about right so the fact that language is often like it's, I mean, it holds, you know, decades and kind of centuries worth of meaning of connotations and experience. That is something that even today is being negotiated, not only within literature but like on the streets too. So since we're, I mean, we might just have time for one more question. But since we're talking so much about representation and I like some of you brought up, like for example, Aaron you talked about red or Ellen you talked about the glass of oranges. I'm just really interested in kind of asking you about the relationship between the visual and the textual and kind of to what extent does, you know, a discussion of trauma rely on images. And do you think trauma kind of needs to be expressed in a way that relies on the visual or do you think that it's even possible or either possible to like completely separate from the visual or that the visual offers something that the textual representation cannot offer. So kind of just thinking about the relationship between those two. Well, certainly the visual as it pertains to place is really important. I think that even if we don't know what the place is still that sense of place is very powerful in all three of these books. Yeah, not necessarily a country as place, but just the physical surrounding of the characters and that's a good question but I'm not sure that any one thing that would apply to all three of these beyond that. Well, one thing that I mentioned is the kind of the, the, you know, visual power of like images of a protest. The way that that that actually translates across time is fascinating so when I was working on beyond Babylon like I was aware of the scenes in Argentina where you had you know mothers and and grandmothers who would go to Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and they would protest the state violence against those who are lost against the disappeared right and there is something extremely potent about well nowadays to about you know the images of mothers protesting and the the kind of the violence that they are always forced to talk about right and so you see this image of of Argentinian mothers like in the 1970s going to the Plaza and you look at mothers today like in the States were losing you know their kids right that that like that image I think translates like really well and that's something that you see not only like in the US now but but all over the world so there is a way to communicate like two other people to other nations that you understand what tactics like they are using there's this this kind of you know visual grammar that is being shared across boundaries which I think is incredibly moving I think this is a half form thought but I wonder if I mean I wonder what what the purpose of I guess one question is what is the purpose of communicating the trauma. So in what way can the visual be more effective. Are we trying to get people to do something are we trying to get people to understand. If it's the latter, I keep thinking about a phrase and beyond Babylon where I can't remember which one of the characters that is it might be Mariam essentially talking about how you how these things can entirely be understood. Like if we if we're talking about you know literature as a creator of empathy maybe the empathy is only very superficial none of this will ever entirely be understood but we can pass down the knowledge. What literature can do is give people a glimpse of the interiority in a way that the visual can't. And especially now when the visual images are all over the place were saturated with images that may be the space of quiet interiority that literature provides can actually be a more effective way of communicating. I knew I knew about the civil war in El Salvador before I started translating this book because I'm South American and so I knew what the CIA got up to in Latin America, I made it a point to know about that. But I will never entirely understand what I translated not in a visceral way. I'm not sure that's an answer. Excellent. So thank you Ellen Aaron and Julia for the fascinating discussion, it was truly an honor and privilege for me to be able to moderate this conversation. And I think I'm going to hand it over to Allison and Esther who I see have appeared on the screen now. Thank you so much Queenie this was it this is just such an important conversation to be having right now and I can't think of other people who I would rather hear listen to right now to hear here talk about about these this topic and your work with it. So we do have some questions for you. I don't know and I think but I'm the first question actually comes in from Laura venue who herself wrote a really an excellent essay on the experience of transiting trauma, which was recently appeared on words without borders. And the question is, can the panelists discuss mechanisms of self care, as they translate these difficult texts, in terms of how their own mood or etc is affected by immersion in such dark themes and I think this is a really important question and this is also Lina Munzer, who's a essay, Esther in the introduction also sort of refers to that and that was sort of one of the inspirations for the work that we're doing and talking about this work that we're doing and that any of you have strategies for that. Nobody. Taking a break, telling somebody about it. Coming back to it. Taking a deep breath having a glass of wine. Many, many, many strategies. Were you even, I mean, were you aware of it, I guess, that's my question I mean what as you're translating it are you aware, aware even of how you yourself are sort of embodying the work that you're doing the descriptions, the witness, the testimony. Well, if you're crying, for example, that's a hint. But just physical tension I just sometimes I'll just like jump out of my chair and go to the laundry or something because I just need to do something to loosen up a little bit from the intensity of it. And then with beyond Babylon. So I, you know, what's, what's funny is that I can't exactly recall the, like all of the emotions that I felt, like when I first was was translating the book, partly because I was a college, you know, senior and I had a deadline. That was like I need to actually like do the work, but when I returned to it. There are really really harrowing scenes in the book that are that are like, I mean, of, you know, of awful things like that these characters experience but the reason that I love the book so much is that I know so the there are like multiple, you know, sections of the that switch between characters with the last, the last, you know, section, each time a character's thread is over, it is so I mean, it's so beautiful and often quite hopeful. So, knowing that these scenes are coming, it kind of makes the process a little easier, you know, because I know what end I'm translating tour. That's that won't be the case for all books and I have worked on on stories and books, where it's not the case. And to kind of take care of myself, I, you know, I'll translate a bit and then I'll put it away for maybe a week or two like do something else, and then I'll come back to it so. Yeah, I, I'm not very good at the self care I don't think I'm like the protagonist. I don't really notice what's wrong until my body feels very very heavy and I need more sleep than usual. But also this book. I also by stick my head in the sand. I mean, I just like get really deep into the words and I maybe just focus more on the, the, the materiality of the words and I do about the bigger picture that that sometimes helps, but this one. It felt long and laborious, but it didn't. It's, it's the kind of book that sort of simmers but doesn't boil over that much. During the pandemic I was translating a book that was truly harrowing, and my self care was to ask for like several extensions, away from it because it was. And I was translating a book another book about the trauma and I was like, Dan. I have a question actually specifically for Ellen because you've also had these experience of interpreting, which is interpreted I worked with interpreters but I worked on translation of documents not interpreting. But you've also written a lot about interpreting and and work with interpreting and I think that that must be a unique form of exposure to trauma because you're there, you know, with the person. Do you want to say anything about that. Well, it's interesting that you say that because at the war crimes tribunal where we worked we had 150 people in the language unit, half of them were interpreters, half of them were translators like me working on documentary translation for the document standard is evidence and lots of people have issues with trauma in that work. But we had a really great psychologist who was there to help people deal with these things and one of the things that he said, was that although interpreters are in the booth hearing everything live and speaking it they speak it to other people. So even though it's difficult they have the option of being heard and there's a direct communication between them and the people in the courtroom, whereas and this relates to something. Queenie had raised with us before before this with the secondary trauma translators just sit with a document, and then it just sits in you there's nowhere to go with it. And even at the tribunal there were confidentiality issues we weren't allowed to speak about the documents we are working on with anyone except I was in charge of revising documents and editing and proofreading and so forth that other people had translated go over to the translator put my arm around them and say well that was that was a rough one but but but there was no other way for us to deal with it and it does it is difficult to deal with. And it's certainly I think early on in the years of the tribunal when it was first starting and people were coming in with raw experience that hadn't had the benefit of some years between them and and the events that was also very difficult for the interpreters in the booth obviously. Yeah, I think this is an important issue for for translators I mean I'm, I guess one of the reasons that I thought Laura's question was important and this other question about interpreting to I mean I think because I, I myself happened to be working on a memoir that is traumatic and I'm finding you know and I'm working with the author and you know and this is her story and finding like that I need to like sort of think of it as a vortex that you know that there's a vortex of her, you know her trauma and her story and I can step into it, and then I can step out of it, when I need to sort of make dinner or walk the dog or something like that so that I'm not necessarily like carrying you know this trauma in my own body all the time. But I think there, there was another question that Esther like well the group when we were planning this conference this subject this topic was sort of always always something that we wanted to highlight and one of the things that came up as we were thinking about whom we might invite is like the idea of trauma, the gender with regard to trauma and testimony and thinking about it and there was a point at which we wanted to make sure that it wasn't all women telling women stories about trauma. And I'm not sure if this is really a fully formed question but I didn't know if any of you Queenie you included if you wanted to sort of respond because we can see we have men telling you're translating women's narratives and women to translating male narratives here and so I think. Would any of you have anything to speak to about gender and trauma. I think what drew me to slash and burn was the fact that it was a narrative of war told from the perspective of women, which I don't think is very common. In the background reading, I read, so fun, I like so which is the only woman they face of war, which is the only other thing that I could find that talked about how women also participate in these very violent spaces. No, if there's particular I mean there's there's the possibility of sexual violence that comes up several times I think those were the bits that I found most difficult to to translate, because I can relate more to the idea of sexual violence than I can relate to the idea of war. Fortunately or no. It also it felt very comforting to be in a space that was predominantly female, like that's mostly daughters, there are very few male characters, mostly they're, they're fleeting. And it somehow felt safer. And it's interesting that question because in the literatures that I work with. There were very few prominent women writers before this round of wars in the 1990s. Just a few cases of strong women writers and then suddenly in 1990 just as the war was breaking out a whole generation came forward and so I've been really translating those women mostly I didn't choose to bring their work to this just because this particular novel seems so well suited to the discussion but, but it is now none of them were actually like Julia's characters describing being in a war they were commentators, social cultural commentators, writing from a distance position but still women have been the most important voices that have come out of Bosnia Croatia Serbia I think in the last 20 years. It's interesting. Yeah, and, and I like, I never wanted to, to like, overstate my own role really like but I think in in translating it job was work. I've always viewed that as an active solidarity like which I, and it's because, you know, frankly, black women everywhere have been seen as an as an underclass the kind of last people to be considered in a kind of cultural too and even today, because of the kind of long, long legacy of, you know, of sexual violence against black women in Italy and also in the colonies. In the worst, the worst instances, you will have racist people come up to black Italian women and assume that they must be, you know, prostitutes from Nigeria right like it. And it's this kind of lack of imagination as to the key role that black women have played in Italy's history that like that is something that it's Java and other writers like her are always addressing and so I saw. There was a way that I could bring like these stories, you know, into English for a wider audience that I think was was my like small way of saying, I recognize like what you all are doing. I see it and I am so grateful for it. Thank you. I think we're out of time. This I wish we could honestly, I wish we could go on another hour this has been so fascinating. Thank you all so much and Queenie. Wonderful job. Thank you. Alison to honestly a final final thank you to our sponsors. We would once again like to thank our partners how round in America, the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Martin E Segal Theater Center. We'll be seeing you again next week and then for our big finale week of events so please keep watching. Thank you.