 Welcome! I'm Esther Allen, a professor at City University of New York, and I'm here with Allison Marken-Powell, who translates Japanese literature and works with the Penn translation community. She and I are co-organizers of Translating the Future. Thank you Esther, and thank you all for joining us for what was once, long ago, meant to be the kickoff event for an in-person conference this week, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the World of Translation, which in 1970 was billed as the first international conference on literary translation held in the United States. Instead, we're here for the finale week of Translating the Future, which, due to circumstances, were all very well aware of, ended up launching online four months ago on the actual anniversary of the May 1970 World of Translation Conference. At this evening's event, post-monolingual New York, we'll hear about several linguistic communities among the hundreds that together make up the city where this conference has been based. Like other city dwellers around the world, we New Yorkers are now wondering what the landscape of our city will look like once we're able to emerge and recover from the effects of these pandemic months. But we do know for certain that that landscape will be post-monolingual, because as this evening's speakers will confirm, it always has been. We are particularly grateful to the Princeton University program in Translation and Ethic Cultural Communication for generously sponsoring today's conversation, and we have long been fortunate to have, as one of the central partners in this conference, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. We will soon hear from Marks from the director, Salvatore Shibona, who will introduce tonight's speakers. Tonight's conversation will be followed by a Q and A. Please email your questions for Ava Chin, Jasmine Claude Narcisse, Lisandro Perez, and Damien Searles to Translating the Future 2020 at gmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. Translating the Future is convened by Penn America's Translation Committee, which advocates on behalf of literary translators, working to foster a wider understanding of their art, and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers, and others with an interest in international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by Lynn Miller-Lachman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translation resources at penn.org. If you know anyone who was unable to join us for today's live stream or any of the other conversations that have been part of this conference, recordings are available on the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities sites, as well as on Penn's archive. Before we turn it over to Salvatore, we'd like to offer our utmost and eternal gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Penn America, and also to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at HowlRound, who have made this live stream possible. And now, Salvatore. Hello, thank you to Esther and Allison for organizing this vital conference and also for your plucket reshaping it so briskly last spring into this virtual event. We at the Cullman Center are immensely proud to have cosponsored this whole series with Penn and the Center for the Humanities. I am the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Cullman Center. As some of you know, the Cullman Center selects 15 fellows a year for a nine month term. Our new fellows have just arrived. Fellows receive an office inside the New York Public Library, the big one at 42nd Street Fifth Avenue, intensive access to our collections, and a living stipend of $75,000 so they can focus exclusively on their work during their fellowship terms. The fellows are some of the best and most promising academics, independent scholars, poets, playwrights, journalists, dramatists, artists, and fiction writers at work today. We have also for a long time supported the work of translators with our fellowship, including a number of participants in Translating the Future, such as recently Damien Searles, Jennifer Croft, and Susan Bernofsky, as well as the non-translation work of other panelists here, including Evik Shin and Lisandro Perez. To those watching this from abroad, the Cullman Center welcomes applicants from accomplished scholars and writers from any country who have a need for the resources of the New York Public Library, home to the fourth largest library collection in the world. Now, I'm delighted to present our four panelists for this evening who will appear in the following order. First, Evik Shin, who teaches at CUNY and is the author of the MFK Fisher Book Award-winning Eating Wildly, and a forthcoming book about her family's sanctuary-long life in New York City's Chinatown. Josmy Claude Narcisse, who has taught throughout the CUNY system and works in the field of second language acquisition in French and Francophone literatures. Republications include Memoire d'Affam, in collaboration with Pierre-Réchard Narcisse, an account of interviews, research, and oral histories of and on Haitian women in history. Lisandro Perez, who teaches at John Jay College and whose most recent book in 2018 was the fulfillment of his Cullman Center research in 2004 and 2005, titled Sugar, Cigars and Revolution, the Making of Cuban New York, it won the 2018 Herbert H. Lehmann Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York History. And finally, Damien Searles, a translator of many books from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, and the winner of the Helen and Kurt Wolfe Translators Prize for his translation of Uwe Jonson's four-volume novel, Anniversaries, which Damien worked on during his Cullman Center fellowship in 2013 to 2014. Now, please welcome Ava Chen. Hi, everyone. I'm so glad to be here with you tonight. I'm going to be talking about my book, my latest book, which is about my family's experience under the Chinese Exclusion Act laws and how they landed here in New York City's Chinatown. So this, my book is, again, about the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act laws, which started in 1882 and lasted at least until 1943 but had lasting implications for the Chinese community in our nation, as well as implications, heavy implications for my family. I want to talk to you about the various languages that were present in New York City's Chinatown. When we say in English Chinese, this, of course, is a shorthand for many of the different languages and dialects of Chinese that were spoken back then as well as today. So if we can move on to slide number two, thank you. So the languages and the dialects that I'm talking about in the mid to late part of the 19th century in China originated from this particular region. It's called the Pearl River Delta area of China. You can see that it's not too far away from Macau and also Hong Kong. This is where some of the earliest immigrants from China came, worked on in the gold mines in the 1840s, and also worked on the railroad. If we take a look at the next slide, you can see on the left, there is a larger detail. You can see where the Pearl River Delta is. It's in the Southeast Asian region. The climate is very much like Southeast Asia. It's very tropical. At the time in which people were migrating in the mid to late 19th century, people were fleeing China because of civil war, drought and famine, the effects of imperialism and inter-ethnic warfare. Folks landed in places like the United States, largely on the west coast. And unfortunately, in by the 1880s, this was a decade of terror for Chinese. This was a period in time in which they were massacres, lynchings, wholesale rounding up of Chinese and pushing them out, what we were probably now called pogroms. And it was a very difficult time. So a number of very intrepid Chinese then jumped on the railroad and sought refuge. I should tell you, I guess that in this period of time, there was an economic depression. There was a fight for resources. European immigrants from the east coast and east coasters jumped on the railroad that Chinese helped to build, including my great-great-grandfather, went out west and found Chinese working there in jobs they thought should have belonged to them. So all of these forces together accumulated in this decade of terror for Chinese. So then Chinese go and make a reverse migration to places like New York City. Let's see. So if we can move on to the next slide. My family members were amongst some of those early refugees that came to New York in the 1880s and in the 1890s. Eventually, by 1915, we all wound up in the same tenement apartment building on the Corkwood foot of Mott Street. It is where my family has lived continuously for over 100 years. It is where I'm lucky enough to have my writing studio, and it is also where I'm happy to be speaking to you today. If we take a look at the next slide, I just want to talk to you about the various languages. So this is the 1920s census. The building, this is the census for the building. The building is already, it's about five years old at this point, and you can see, and it's kind of hard to see, but there are a variety of different languages that, native languages that people are speaking in the building. There's Chinese, there's Italian, there's Russian. If you, we don't have this right now, but if I was able to give you the other pages of the census for the building, you would also see Austrian, German being spoken, and maybe a tiny bit of English. In terms of the Chinese dialects that are being spoken, again, Chinese is just this blanket term for a number of different dialects that are coming from Guangdong province, right? What we used to call Canton, right, which is we call Guangzhou. The area around Guangzhou was like an area called, we call Samyap, which means like the three county area right around the city. A large number of Chinese came from that region, and they spoke a particular dialect of Cantonese. And then later on people from what we call the Samyap region, the four counties region where my family came from, from Tuai San, a lot of us, a lot of people spoke that dialect. And then there were people who were not Cantonese, but who were Hakka, and they spoke their dialect. If we move to the next slide, I just want to kind of show you an image of, well, I would say typical family, but I don't think we were that typical. I am using my family as a lens to investigate the time period. And this is the Doshan family, the mmm family. And this is my great grandparents on either side of the matriarch and patriarch who are their uncle and aunt. You can see that the uncle and aunt in the center of the frame are an interracial couple. It was second marriages for both of them. And when my great grandfather who's in the bow tie, wearing the bow tie on the left, first came to this country, he studied in, he went to prep school in New England. So his English language, his English language skills were impeccable, but he was originally from those villages in Toisan that I had shown you on the map. When he came and he lived with his aunt and uncle, of course, the aunt and uncle mainly spoke English at home, and in an effort not to ostracize or make the aunt feel like an outsider in her home, the lingua franca was English. On the right hand side, holding the baby is my great-grandmother. She was Hakka, but she was originally from Hong Kong. And she was a midwife trained by missionaries from the London Missionary Society. So she spoke Hakka and Cantonese, pure Cantonese from Hong Kong, but she also spoke, because Hong Kong was a British colony, she also spoke English. They are one of the few families in the building, certainly one of the few Chinese families in the majority Chinese building in the 1920s who spoke English at home. Let's see, if we can move to the next slide. One of the, Chinatown is a society that has a number of associations. And so these associations are grouped together in the variety of ways. You have family associations, village associations, work associations. And this particular building is the association for three families, including my Chin family. The associations were really important because during the exclusion period, Chinese people wholesale weren't allowed to come to the United States and legally emigrate. So when they landed and discovered this incredibly inhospitable environment, they needed to network with each other in all of their different ways. So an immigrant coming from our villages would have landed in New York, gone immediately to the family or the village association, found a bed, found a meal, and found an access to jobs and employment. In those these associations, they would have been speaking their village dialects. And maybe they would have been speaking Cantonese as well, because they would have known both. One of the things I was really fascinated by was this idea of what we call the generation poem. And if Travis, if we can move to the video number one, I just want to describe to you, and we don't, I'll tell you when to play in a second. I want to describe to you what a generational poem is. So in China, there is something called the generational poem, where the first two, there are two characters in your given name, right? Not your surname, but your first name. And one of those characters will be the same character for all of the folks in your generation. This includes your siblings. This also includes your neighbors in the in the town and anybody else who has your surname. Okay. And so that character, again, is the same for all of these different people of that generation. It is a poem that children learn by heart. I should also qualify that this is something that exists mainly for the men of the village. But in certain cases, I've known women who have also had this kind of naming convention. So I went back to China, to our villages, about in 2017, a Fulbright fellowship, and I interviewed different farmers from our villages to see, you know, what they knew about our family members. And I asked them to recite the generation poem. And so if we can listen to this first one. Can we just ask them to recite the generation poem? Yeah. He knows it by heart. Okay. Thank you. All right. So I'm just gonna wait. Okay. So it comes back. So this generation of poem is incredibly important, because it tells you where you are in the generations that came before you. And it also tells you your placement in terms of the future generations that will come after you. So an immigrant into the United States is always going to know his or her place, largely his, in terms of the history of the family, but also the history of the villages. And what that farmer was able to tell us was 20 generations. All right. Let's take a look at the next one. And this was from my grandfather's village. And you'll see that this farmer, he speaks really fast. So let's just listen to it. It's, it's very quick. That was very fast. Did you understand, he says? Okay. Great. Thank you. So let's see. If we can move back to the PowerPoint. Alison, if you wouldn't mind. So what's so important in addition to the history of the generational poem is that when you landed in New York and went to this village association, you would have gone, you would have given your name, and you would have recited the poem. And immediately, everybody would know, oh, yes, you're so and so, and you're my father's generation, or you're my generation, right? Even if we aren't totally really related to each other. Well, actually, even if you're not my brother, you're obviously related in a certain way, right? And so this helps the person to have a real context, right? For themselves. I will tell you that in the course of my research, one of the things I did was I joined the family association. This is very unusual because for many generations, it was only men that were allowed to be part of the family association. But we did it anyway, despite my lack of language skills. Today, the associations are still very multilingual. You will hear, twice on these being spoken, you will hear Cantonese and you will hear Mandarin, right? Very little English. And so it's very multilingual today. The same thing is true throughout Chinatown. I would say that, you know, we hear Fujianese in the Fujianese sections of Chinatown and you do hear a lot more Mandarin being spoken on the street, not necessarily in the in the Guangzhou. So let's see, okay, I just want to move on to the next slide. Okay, so one of the difficulties in working on this book has been how to address the multilingual nature of the community. And I've had to make decisions. Do I use, what kind of romanization do I use, right? It's an English language book. What kind of romanizations do I use? Do I use Pinyin? Pinyin was only developed in the 1950s. It works very well for Mandarin. Do I use Yutping or the Yale system, which works better for Cantonese? But since most of my speakers and most of the characters in the book were speaking twice on these, there's no standardization for twice on into English. I've also had to, you know, make decisions about whether to, you know, write using the dialect or using the official language of Mandarin. Now in 2018, two years ago when I had the happy privilege of being a Coleman fellow, I, this all kind of came to a head for me as a writer when I went to the Golden Spike reenactment. It was the 149th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, which my great-great-grandfather had worked in. And I was going to try to find other researchers, talk to other families who had had similar experiences, gather their stories. And I didn't expect to be very, oh, if we can move back, yeah. I didn't expect to be so moved by this officially sanctioned ceremony. But I was interviewed by a Salt Lake Tribune reporter. And she asked me about my great-great-grandfather, the railroad worker, and she asked me his name. Now I had to make a decision. Am I gonna use his name in Cantonese? In Cantonese, his name is Yunsun. In Mandarin, it's Yuanxin. In Tuaisinese, it's Yunflin. Now if I was going to be really smart about it, I would have used the Pinyin Mandarin version so that other researchers might be able to recognize his name if they saw it in, you know, a railroad role, right? But I thought about it. And I really thought about it a lot. And I thought if this project, if so much of this project is about naming the unnamed, right, writing this narrative that has largely been lost, right, or willfully lost in certain ways, if Cantonese as a language today, in China it certainly feels quite imperiled because of the forces of the official language, because the Chinese government really pushes Mandarin. I thought, you know, I'm just gonna say his name in his native language. I'm gonna say it in Tuaisang. So you can see at the bottom you have his name, Yunflin. So that's my end of my presentation. If you've moved to the next slide, if you like. And happy to, you know, hear from the other speakers, including Yasmin. Yasmin. Thank you so very much Eva. It's like I've been lost in your presentation so I know I have to kind of gear towards my own. I really would like to express my heartfelt thank you to Esther for her unexpected invitation to join this conversation today. It is indeed an unexpected, unexpected opportunity for me to revisit my personal experience of the Dispossession Only World New York we're talking about today. Not that my experience is in any way exceptional, but I think in fact it is its commonality, the fact that that makes it worthy of attention. In the sense that because it is such a common everyday experience, we tend to normalize it, to banalize it, and we know what this banalization leads to. It's some kind of invisibility. And invisibility is something that I think makes way to and sustain certain discourses that are like dominant discourse. For me it's that bridge dominant discourse. And this dominant discourse unfortunately they don't just stay there and be dominant discourse. They are often assimilated by weak links as we may call them in linguistic power dynamic. So because my decision to join this conversation was a little bit kind of late, I would like to bring that disclaimer that what I'm going to share with you today is not really research based. I wouldn't have enough time to kind of put the research together for that to be. It is simply my reflection and my understanding of my forever multi-lingual journey here in New York City and before New York in Haiti. So I am in no way prescriptive and I don't pretend to be speaking the name of what could be considered my community here in New York. In fact I may have at some point and I am going to have some very strong views on certain things and I will own them and I'm going to really ask for grace from you, from the public, from everybody because it is the this only genuine way I think I can speak about it for the moment. So it's going to be really from heart. So you're going to allow me to be personal for a moment. I never had the privilege to encounter the monolingual New York if that ever even existed. I'm not sure. In fact I never lived in a monolingual space period. I was born in Haiti in a Haitian family so really that was a bilingual family I may say. And where my mother's essential role seemed to be the strict enforcement of rules, principles, propriety about the usage of French and Creole by her children and our friends. And in fact I should rather say especially by us the girls because I realized but only when I get much older and the damages were already passed on that this whole catechism was more fluid for boys and men than it was for women. After that maybe we can talk about that if there were questions about it for more details. But later on when I reached the age of socialization outside of the house and this rule started being picked up by school and various other spaces I realized as well that my mother was in fact arming us for a society where the simple not so simple I would say linguistic performance would play as a major determining social identifier. So much naively at first but really very consciously as I was growing up linguistic performance became a social capital I got to take advantage of. And I would like to say that even though I don't want to sleep into generalization it is a very common common middle-class Haitian phenomenon like you navigating between French and Creole and the power dynamic and what that says what that doesn't say and when to switch when to start in one language and continue in the other it's a whole science in itself but in a way to breed that to you the middle-class families breed that to you at birth so you kind of know how to go there. So this long introduction to we'll back to the space we're living in now which is like the monolingual New York post monolingual New York pardon me I immediately loved that lens that invites us to liberate New York from the premises of his monolinguality a lens that precedes our presence as other in that space and the silence that opens opens it up and tells us like tell us how you feel New York and here I had this like very Davidian thing where feel was to fill in and also to feel like how I feel it so both girls are here but I don't know how to express that in the pronunciation not being not speaking English enough so we all agree that this monolingual New York is a fallacy it's a myth and I think it's interesting how within that myth we're going to enter into that myth and trace try to trace the multiplicity of that city instead and I would also say that I understand that I'm expecting to be speaking about the French New York I realized in my conversation in my exchange with Alison and Esther that French came up and never quail but my French New York Francophonie Bliges is tied to this vicious unavoidable French quail power dynamic I told you about I mentioned above so I won't say French I would say Francophone starting now and I say Francophone please I would like since I cannot I can only speak for my Haitian kind of stand when I say Francophone I ask that you hear from French and quail because for me the two of them like kind of always navigating on the same plane so I thought I would try to talk today about the power dynamic this this kind of vicious power dynamic and how it unfolds here for a middle-aged woman because I arrived in the United States pretty late a middle-aged woman arriving in New York with that power dynamic so I already had these two languages and of course in the meantime I studied English I studied Spanish I was translating in four languages and here I am coming into New York and that's where this personal lingual New York is going to be dumping to me in the form of a story that I call the story of loss and your mastery what do I mean by that when I moved here 20 years ago with my family my mother welcomed us in her home lucky me lucky us I would say she had immigrated here 18 years before I would say fled would be a better word but that's a whole and another and whole other story we cannot go in there and she has sweated water and blood to pave a golden path for us I worked in the United States with all my papers all my family with their papers and everything and a house waiting for me and you know everything you can imagine and I will be forever grateful for that but here I was in front of her of course she left I was in my late teen years and here I was in front of her and naturally the language that came to me to relate to her was French because in this in my bilingualism my mother was my French reference that's how I was supposed to speak to her and I'm part of this generation that would well use if I had spoken Korean to my mother when she was in Haiti she would look at me and ask me to speak up like would you express yourself and the the the the the the the famous phrase was exprimed what that means I speak because before we didn't know what she was talking you were talking about so I naturally started speaking French to her because that's what what it was and here she was laughing at me and calling me Frenchy and telling me how I forgot how like French was so precious for you and I said to myself wait in the 20 years we spent apart from each other because before she left I had left two years myself to go to college so I had left my my hometown to go to college and in the 20 years that we were like apart letters phone conversations wishes even jokes sometimes were in French so for me the language I speak with my mother is French but then and then also I studied linguistics so I started myself to realize that where to put my French and what my quail was and what my French was and I was translating as well so the imbalance that was in the language in the way that they had me speak them I had kind of arrived at some kind of plane even though it cannot be really equal but I had arrived at some kind of equilibrium between these but this equilibrium didn't touch my relationship with my mother through the language I was French so it was really strange and a shock for me now we were in this Haitian extended family my mother a brother my own family and I think like we were like almost eight of us and the the tongue the languages we spoke were French and queer English remained the foreign language even though I was in New York but inside the house English was the foreign was the the tongue of school the tongue of paperwork business the tongue that kept that keeps coming in the mail in a way I was at the tongue of power as well and then it occurred to me that my mother had to make space for English and to do that she just like put French aside so English became the language of power and English is was doing here in the United States what French was doing for her in Haiti so I said to myself what is it that is expecting from me now and I understood you in America you in New York here you speak queer in the house that's your intimate self and outside of the house you speak English I learned to recon with that with the fact that these expectations were actually the expectation for the diasporic Haitian communities community here and I want to suppose that the diversity that I I know from New York and I just heard Eva speaking and I understand that most likely that mice have been the case in maybe Chinese families at some point so I'm predicting that the diversity that we represent in New York is going to be can tell us about the multiplicity of the dramatic outcomes of this kind of problem so I don't really think like what happened to me was in any way something anything like original I discussed I tried to explain and try to bring up the possibility of alternatives you know all the alternatives to this binary corset um English quail or English French binary corset and it was unfootful because I think these discussions were touching to really entrenched fractures deeper wounds of the postcolonial Haitian social fabric I was from and it was almost impossible to kind of with just some new concept of some new explanation or some just a wish come up with any kind of change on that in 2001 two years probably um after I arrived here in the united states um in a stubborn attachment to my francophone Haiti or to my francophone self I decided to to with the support of my partner and a friend we decided to take over a male Haitian order bookstore that was operating from a friend's garage the dream goal was to modernize the the the bookstore to make it an online francophone bookstore to reach out to this culturally vibrant francophone community it was new york after all uh organized cultural events and so we did and it lasted 12 years um it was a Haitian book center um we held a Haitian book day every year in Queens in fact the six last years with the collaboration at your college with the collaboration of the modern language department I will be forever grateful for that um inviting Haitian authors from Haiti um Quebec France um organizing events where the community had to like meet with these authors furnishing books to public libraries in French and Creole uh in the united states but when I say we understand friends and family because at no point in the whole enterprise we could hire afford to hire anybody and the thing is that for 12 years I worked without a salary doing that we called it cultural activism I convinced myself that francophone literature and Haitian literature deserved it throughout the years I confirmed my true francophone identity in new york through this activity that was good 12 years um through my doctoral studies my enduring teaching of french and creole a big majority of it in the cune system and at the high school levels in my personal and intimate life in fact my my my joy now um is like my daughter speaks to me and to her father in a combination of because now she's an adult in the combination of creole in french and she went to this age where after college kids from immigrant families forego english inside the family and reclaim their like immigrant identity so and this is my my forever joy to see that the french and english french and creole she didn't want to speak in the house just came out like this and then this is what she speaks to me right now most of the time if anything that's me who wants to speak english to her right now because I need to kind of have some kind of everyday english in my life um so uh I I could confirm that francophone identity and have it because if there was one thing I wanted to not lose that was that um this complexity that was me um and uh as a form of conclusion here I wish I could claim and bring to the forefront a french new yorkese community that would you know gather all the francophones the multiple possible francophones of new york but I'm afraid it might be just another construct another fantasy because I didn't meet that community I would like to suggest that we are many french or francophone pods in new york as we are cultures and nationalities we cross paths at the alliance francaise rarely at the maison francaise of colombia and nyu sometimes and even then english kind of sometimes take over takes over and then we go after that to our families to our close ones and to our like own part um my possibly Haitian francophone community as switch french this is what I realized uh my Haitian francophone community in new york in new york has a switch french the old master to english a modern master I'd like to contend that there was and there is loss in the way in the process what the other french new york communities may have lost again is for them to find out and to share but I thought we could start a conversation from this story that is like mine I think I might have this going over my time and I'm going to um switch over to Lisandro um and that would come back to me if anything if there was the need to I'll I'll be more than happy to answer some questions thank you very much uh jasmine very interesting and I want to thank um ester alan I want to thank uh the staff that's put together allison uh this uh wonderful panel uh on post mongolingual new york um the um what I want to uh emphasize here today and what are we presenting here today is really based on the research that I did at the colman center and I once again thank the colman center after all these many years for the wonderful uh support there which was quite a few years ago and it took me quite a bit of time to finish this book um but it's what I'm going to say is really based on on the book that I wrote as a result of that of that fellowship and if we could start the uh the slide if you have that um so uh I put these up not because I'm hawking the books or anything like that but because again so you're aware that this is the title of my project also for the translators uh in the audience and in the panel and so forth uh it has been translated into Spanish but it circulates really only in cuba because it was uh published by cassara samedians so what I'm dealing with in this book um is actually the cuban community in new york in the 19th century um from what I believe is the beginning of it in 1823 until really uh the war um this the spanish cuban-american war 1898 um and uh what I want I'm actually a sociologist by training who's um um been daring enough to do history here but nevertheless I approach this like a sociologist so a lot of my uh information comes from the sort of census information that that Ava shared uh with us earlier uh looking at the census and so forth it actually was the largest community of latin americans east of the mississippi until about um 1886 when then another community of cubans and igor city took over its origins and the reason it became such a large community uh is because its origins was on what was called the sugar trade which was one of the important areas of trade between the us and the world um and which brought uh a lot of the almost all of the production of cuban sugar um during the period in which cuba experienced and started experiencing uh the uh a sugar boom or a sugar revolution shortly after the uh elimination of the production in some domain of course which after that point were Haiti which after that point was the world's largest producer of sugar this migration involved people coming back and forth there was a bridge built between Manhattan uh and and Havana uh in which brought over a lot of the uh of uh sugar traders a lot of the elite that own land and many of them came to study in came to study english came to study a new commercial uh sort of relations and the new commercial sort of um workings of the commercial system uh in the us and eventually that community uh started also becoming very political at politically active in the separative struggles uh that involved cuba starting at about the 1850s and starting of course with the annexationist movement which was the first manifestation of cuban separatism and a lot of that activism and that's part of what i have in my book it's actually based in new york right a lot of the leaders of the separatist movement from cuba uh started coming to new york as early as the 1820s as we'll see but really intensified in the 1850s and then when war breaks out in 1868 uh you have a tremendous number of cubans that are coming over many of whom had been in new york before many of them have been educated in new york but now they're coming more permanently because the situation was politically very difficult for them and this migration uh lasted until about 1880s and then of course we have the start again of the independence movement in 1895 now that's basically what the book covers or what the books cover when estra asked me to do this uh it's for the first time really that i started thinking about language that is it's not something that that came up in the course of my research it was in this community in many ways not an issue not an issue the way it is for example today uh in which there is this you know controversy over the use of languages and the attempt to impose some monolingual and english only types of standards uh the cubans that i researched back then it wasn't an issue so much and so it got me to thinking about whether or not if we go back this far 1820s 1830s 1840s 1850s essentially before the great immigration great european immigration whether we're talking about a pre monolingual new york right in which if we can talk about the great uh migration from europe and its large numbers that came in it's when perhaps the issue of language became contentious in the context of the pressure for assimilation right and the pressure for the groups to assimilate because the cubans i'm studying in the 1830s 1840s 1850s didn't think that was a problem for them they could merely go on with their spanish and also as we'll see with their english so uh there wasn't a trend at that time towards imposing a certain posing english for a certain hegemony of english and i think again that started happening with the press pressure for assimilation later on and certainly english uh was not vested with any degree of superiority uh among those who came from cuba has probably happened with other groups so let me if we go to the next slide one of the first individuals that i try that i uh that i talk about in my book was father felix zarelli morales who arrived in new york in december of 1823 uh and uh he thought he was going to be here only for very little amount of time but he ended up he ended up spending the next 30 years of his life here because he was not able to return to cuba the spanish actually had a death sentence on him and when he first came in uh one of the things he wrote in his diary was the following about english and he said the whistling sound of english rings in my ears like impertinent flies making it hard to write comfortably in spanish so for varela actually english was you know a sort of an annoyance one week after varela arrived in 1823 another uh cuban writer cuban port figure next slide please uh arrived and he was the poet jose maria heredia who became known uh even in us for his ode to niagara uh to niagara falls and he was a little bit even though he had this tremendous admiration for the united states he had absolutely none for the english language and this is what he writes uh also when he came to new york my soul becomes oppressed and i even want to die when i realize that my only hope rests in living the rest of my life among these people hearing their horrible language a language that is all anomalies and i can hardly understand how such a great people has convinced itself to use such excreable gibberish so that that was the view of english it certainly wasn't the case that that these um arrivals felt uh that uh english was something uh to be aspired to necessary but nevertheless right varela who stayed for the next 30 years in new york did learn english very well and in fact most of those who followed varela in the in the cuban community in new york were bilingual many of them had actually studied uh in uh the united states before arriving as as students uh and bilingualism i think became a norm and it became really a strategy there were two things that in the political activism of the cuban community uh they wanted to do one was to present the cause of an independent cuba before the us and certainly the annexationists were not in favor of independence but again they had to convince people in the us to annex cuba later on when we get into the independence movement uh various uh political groups and political activists in the cuban community in new york wanted the united states to support the independence movement so there was an audience that obviously had to be addressed in english right but at the same time they have their community to address and more importantly cuba so there was what one uh what rodrigo lasso calls and in fact his book on this uh he's a uh a literature person here in the u.s and in west what rodrigo lasso calls his book writing to cuba right so the notion that that since they had freedom here of be able to publish and and to and to publish what they what they could and what they couldn't be and on behalf of cuban independence that they were going to write to cuba and to their compatriots so this was part of sort of the separatist movement right on the one hand writing to americans writing to the u.s government writing to the us press and that had to be done in english and on the other hand writing essentially to their compatriots and to cuba and that was a bilingual enterprise right and a lot of the uh spanish publications essentially were small newspapers that sometimes so many of them were short-lived the earliest one uh appeared in 1846-47 and it was called La Verdad the truth and it was a newspaper published by elites sugar holders many of whom and slave owners who uh wanted uh to essentially annex cuba to the u.s because they felt that this was in many ways the best way to save slavery and they had a newspaper and that newspaper was published in spanish and it was published parts of it was also published in english um i think that the best uh example of a effort in english uh to reach an american audience next slide please uh was this publication in 1873 which appeared after the 1868 war and it's called as you can see the book of blood and it's published in new york first in 1871 and then in 1873 it is a book documenting atrocities by the spanish against uh the cubas who had risen up for independence in 1868 and it contains a very documented list of people imprisoned of people deported of people executed right and this was published in two editions in new york and i think this was uh again a tremendous um a tremendous work of propaganda if you will uh that the cuba community did uh in english right the most effective uh spokespersons uh for cuban independence and i'm talking about particularly linguistically uh most effective uh were these two individuals if i could uh have the next slide please uh i'm sorry let's go let's go to the next one uh if we couldn't and maybe come back to that one yes these two individuals uh they were arrived in the 1868 1870 period to new york as youngsters and they were raised in new york gonzález actually a college a graduate of city college and both of these were very articulate uh exponents of the u.s. um essentially um supporting the independence movement of 1895 right um and i guess i go so i guess i actually got his law degree i believe from NYU he's a his undergraduate degree from city college and fidel pierra was a man who prided himself in trying as much as possible to place articles in cuban public in in u.s. publications in english in an attempt to um uh get the u.s. interested in uh the cause of cuba this was by the way something that happened after jose marti and i'll get to marti later died in 1895 because jose marti always will never believe that it was a good business that it was a good idea to get the u.s. interested in the cause of cuba and of course he was in that sense absolutely right but when he dies the his party in new york falls into the hands of individuals like ozalo de casada fidel pierra tomas extra palma individuals who actively lobbied for u.s. support for the independence movement if not entry into the into the uh into the war and of course that happened right eventually that happened the press in new york had a great deal to do with it and many of these individuals who were uh communicating in english right uh to the press and to the public in the united states had a great deal to do with that and again a lot of cuban particularly cuban nationalist historians felt that this had been a with hindsight um a mistake marti saw it with foresight right but uh with hindsight the idea of interesting the u.s. and this was a mistake could we go now back to the other slide please i'm sorry i went out of sequence here so i i cannot fail to mention in talking about language that what is widely regarded as the cuban novel of the 19th century was actually written and published in new york and it was called cecilia valdes o la loma del angelo it was written by sirilo bellaverde which with a lot of help many people believe from his wife uh emilia casanova uh it was finished written in harlem uh in fact uh i have the census form uh eva where they lived when he wrote this and it is the the cuban novel of the 19th century in the sense that it is a broad novel about costumbres about customs and so forth there's a great deal about racial exploitation uh gender exploitation in the movie i'm sorry in the movie it was made into a movie actually uh but in this in this novel and uh and one of the things that's interesting about it is that it is not an immigrant novel that is the novel doesn't pass through new york right the novel could have just as easily been written uh in uh in uh in cuba and maybe that's one reason why it becomes such an iconic uh piece of literature so if we jump ahead two to the next one and i want to finish of course with jose marty and i'm sure ester alan who is uh you know marty's principal translator i would appreciate this because marty uh actually did become bilingual well uh at least enough to earn his living partly in new york uh from translations and and making translations and uh he arrived in 1880 and of course he organized in the latter years the independence movement and he goes to cuba in 1895 and he uh and he's killed of course uh when when he returns to cuba in the midst of the war uh we have another vision for marty here also of english because marty realized very early that if he was going to make a living in new york he needed to know english right which again he did he learned and he did translation so here's what he writes to a friend in 1882 he's just arrived uh two years before he had arrived and he a friend of his writes sort of asking you know do you think i'll be able to make a living in new york and this is marty's quote which is one of my favorite quotes and very little known he says and again all of these are my translations um that i'm doing from spanish and and here's what marty wrote you are interested in knowing whether you can find a way to make a living in new york in my judgment that depends solely on things i assume you master first of all the language of this land right and he says your determination you must summon all your determination to enter the herd in which the workers of this city live but it is a herd of kings so he was uh he was confirmed new yorker in that so i i appreciate very much this invitation because they got me thinking about these different language issues uh something i hadn't thought about in the many years i was working on this research and how essentially language and particularly bilingualism had its function in in in the cuban community that i have been studying so i'd like to turn it over then uh to danian uh uh who is uh who's uh going to uh continue with the panel danian thank you um this is also fascinating i'm here as kind of the outlier in the panel although maybe the inlier in the conference as a whole since i'm here as a as a translator um i'm mostly so that means they're they're two of me in my presentation i'm going to talk a little bit about the book that salvatore mentioned which is uh a great artifact of post monolingual new york and then just a little bit about my experience and try and leave some time for questions i think my time's almost up right now but i will try and keep it brief um so the book uh that salvatore mentioned is called anniversaries by a german writer a major young german writer of the 60s named uva johnson like johnson in fact when he lived in um england he said just call me charlie because no one can pronounce uva so you can call him charlie johnson but he's uva johnson and um he wrote a novel about a 34 year old german uh woman named gazina and her german daughter marie living on the upper west side in new york city um having emigrated in 1961 um and the uh the book takes place from 1967 to 1968 um here it is both volumes it's long because there's uh it takes place over a year and each day of that year is a chapter so that adds up to a lot of chapters um and it's a it's the it's really i think arguably the great new york novel certainly in the conversation with james ball wins another country and any other pinnacle new york novel you want to name and it was written in german mostly by a german writer um the the story is about these immigrants but the fact that they're two different generations as the main character creates this very rich and vibrant um novelistic situation when they came over marie the daughter was three and a half so by this point in the book marie is ten she is definitely more american than german while her mother is definitely more german than american and that plays out on the language level in terms of slang and accents and when they choose to speak to each other in german versus english all of which is in the book um it plays out on the sort of social or moral level where um gazina the mother sort of shocked by some casual racist comment that the daughter brings home while at the same time gazina is telling marie stories about her childhood in nazi germany so they both are really looking at these other um cultural experiences from different positions and yet there they are living in new york so it's um it's a great novel of the kind of acculturation experience as well as multilingual new york experience um i did think that i should read a little bit um the thing about the the book is that it's so uh mostly so granular it's so rich in the experiences of being in new york of how you fold the new york times to read it standing up in a crowded subway on your commute or the line of mourners going blocks and blocks through midtown leading to st patrick's cathedral after rfk's assassination or um you know this the sunset over the hudson all of these new york experiences that of course it's impossible to really capture in any reading much less a really abbreviated one there there is one sort of early in the book very early in volume one a sort of panoramic multilingual new york passage that i thought i would just read so that he's one of the presenters here um this is a flashback from 1967 to 1961 when they've just shown up in the country and are looking for an apartment and marie doesn't speak english yet and so the she is gizina the mother would she have stayed in this country if not for the apartment by the river probably not so skipping down on her first trip to new york gizina had ridden the number five bus down riverside drive the inside edge of a wide artificial landscape that starts with a promenade along the river then continues as you move inland with a multi-lane divided expressway and practically horticultural on ramp loops then a spacious hilly park 50 blocks long with monuments playground sports fields sunbathing lawns and beat and bench lined paths for strolling only then comes the actual street bordering the park curved in numerous places rising gently over graceful nulls and hills stretching out slender exit fingers toward apartment buildings behind farther green islands a rarity in manhattan a showpiece of the gardener's art and a street with views of trees the water a landscape back then gizina had hoped to someday live in one of these towering fortresses of prosperity richly ornamented in oriental italian egyptian in any case magnificent style she thought she could never afford it broadway where it crosses 96th street is a marketplace of mostly small buildings with lots of foot traffic to the irish bar the drug store on the southwest corner the restaurant across the street at the newsstand now as then meaning 1967 like 1961 scruffy men stand leaning against the buildings thieves and fences drunks crazies many of african descent jobless sick some begging this broadway is polyglot with accents from every continent confusingly tackling american english as you walk along you can hear spanish from portorico and cuba caribbean french japanese chinese yiddish russian various vernaculars of the illegal and again and again german as it was spoken 30 years ago in east prussia berlin frankonia saxony hessa the child heard a high bosomed matron wearing an old-fashioned dress with a large flower pattern and ribbons harangue in german a short downcast man in a black hat creeping alongside her and she stood there forgetting all else and noticed gizina's tugging hand only after a while it was a whitish gray morning with lots of people on the street moving carefully through air thick with moisture and the intersection promised a memory of idli on many mornings to come and it goes on a bit and then she of course gets the apartment where they live for the course of the novel on a 96th and riverside drive um so that's the new york that this german writer who uh was living in new york for two years um and then writing about new york for the rest of his life to finish the book was experiencing and um i want to just bring up one more place that the book covers as a as a transition so this is the part of riverside park that um that our main characters can see out their window the morning is cool bright and dry in the park this playground sprinkled with white light is a part of gizina's earliest days in new york here's where marie brought her in contact with her first neighbors this morning she's sitting on one of the benches around the edge of the arena and looking down at the half-naked children running in circles in the taut intersecting jets of water from the three sprinklers um a bit later we get the playground across from our building surrounded without and watched over within by tall old trees is an is a large enclosure on several levels starting with a big flat area at the north end full of slides seasaws sandboxes and fenced in groups of swings and bordered by mostly broken green benches this zone opens out into a circular space surrounded by high walls and in it a concentric area ringed by a metal fence at a break in the wall on the southern edge steps lead up to a terrace of benches picnic tables and an attendance hut that looks like a little castle followed by more steps up to the highest level some 15 feet above the playground so the reason i wanted to read those little blips among the oceanic immensity of all the other moments in the novel um has to do with my own experience i grew up in what seems to be monolingual new york i didn't speak other languages at home my parents didn't either um and i grew up three blocks away from where from the apartment where gazina lived and that playground that um uvee anson just described is the park that i went to every day as a kid for years and years um and i mean my whole childhood is that park and um many years later i discovered that this great german writer had written a gigantic novel about my neighborhood and years after that i read it and years after that i translated it and so it turns out that my monolingual new york wasn't monolingual along um one of the things that was so um intellectually interesting about translating this book is how it raised these questions of translation what is it i'm doing if i'm trying to bring into english dialogue that supposedly took place in english that a novelist is writing in german or descriptions of places that could not be more um local to me in in the sort of translation studies or translation theory world people very often talk about there being these two different places and the translator brings a text into english or else you know makes it still seem foreign and sort of pulls an assumed local monolingual monocultural reader towards more cultural diversity so they're these two different places and translation is moving from one to the other but but what was moving where when i'm translating this description of my childhood playground um and that made me think you know as a translator or um as the multilingual person i became after childhood if i'm sitting on one of those park benches reading a book in german i'm not going anywhere i'm not carrying anything anywhere i'm just experiencing something different the same way i would if i'm reading anything um if i'm reading something in english it's giving me new perspectives it's describing things in a way that i may not have known or else it's giving me back my own perspective in a very um homogenous way that could be true of something i'm reading in another language too i'm not going anywhere i'm just in a space where um there are various kinds of information or experience i have access to and various kinds that i don't and so i started to see my role as a translator just as reorienting like who has access to what um as opposed to this idea of bringing something somewhere i'm writing a book called the the philosophy of translation and i really um increasingly came to to to feel that that every space is a polylingual hybrid somehow non-homogenous space no matter how much we want to imagine these two separate polls you know a classics professor translating play-doh you know nobody's bicultural in english and classical greek and yet that professor studied greek at university there were universities for let's say him to go to um greek was taught there greek was valued there are editions of play-doh in greek that he has access to there's a community of other readers and reviewers that also speak greek the the greek isn't from mars it's part of the complicated multilingual nature of the culture in the same way that you know this german perspective on new york um was sort of there all along it was just waiting for me to find it and then now that i've translated it it's there for other um members of the new york community to have access to so that was the perspective that i wanted to bring to the panel and and let me stop there so we have a little time but um thank you so much for bringing me together with these uh fascinating actually multilingual new yorkers i you know if we had actually orchestrated it so that all of your remarks sort of you know connected with each other and interwoven i don't think we could have done a better job i have to say we didn't actually orchestrate that but um the themes that you all brought out were so resonant with each other um and and i want to thank you as it turns out we don't really have any questions from the audience i think that the gmail account has gone silent because everyone is in awe of your brilliance your collective brilliance but i wondered if we might dedicate the last few minutes of the program to your uh questions or observations about what each other has said um jasmine you'll need to unmute yourself you're still mute for the moment um so would would any of you like to address a question or two to the others well let me let me this was something that i was going to communicate later to to ava and um and it shows a bit how all of these things these are not silos right these are uh even in time and they're not even in time so i said they're not ethically silos because one of the things that i do have in my book is that i found a fair number of um the chinese uh laborers who are going to cuba starting in 1847 under contract labor arrangements who by a decree of 1860 if their contract was not renewed had to leave cuba and the quickest way to get out of cuba uh was on a ship to new york because that's where the ship traffic was and i found in the census right uh again our friend the census a number of uh individuals who were working as uh domestic servants in the homes of um um wealthy cubans in new york who had brought their domestic servants over and some of them in fact were in fact born in china and i seen passenger manifests uh which have from cuba arriving in new york uh sometimes as many as 12 13 14 men with spanish first names born in china who said they indicated they were on their way to china and i've always wondered if many in many ways they never made it to china but actually stayed in new york and that was one way in which the chinese community in new york grew perhaps not very significantly but uh that's something that i haven't followed up on but it might be something that the ava might have run into i don't know certainly as a food writer ava you have a lot to say about that well and two blocks away from from that description was the cuban chinese restaurant of course that you know i grew up around the corner from and i remember at some point it hitting me like why is there a cuban chinese restaurant and and now i'll find out the answer close by the way recently yes sad sadly um so so i haven't researched um the uh the cuban chinese um migration patterns but i do know that my great-grandfather there were a lot of um chinese living in cuba even today there's a there are small china towns um in cuba and um in havana and uh i know that my um great-grandfather the one in the family portrait sitting with the bow tie on the left um from his chinese exclusion act file did indeed go to um visit havana um i don't it was i believe to do business and uh but i don't i haven't really researched or i don't know a great deal about it but thank you lesandro for for mentioning it because it's it's sort of been on my radar and it's one of the other things that i need to to look up sounds like another book project um if i if i if i have time i would like to ask a question to that to damian actually you just said something very interesting uh you're the only a person in a panel who said i kind of was raised in emerald england new york like for you um that existed there was such thing that existed and of course i think i read somewhere that you not only are trans from german but you also worked in on i mean many other languages uh if i if i understand now my question to you because um we are speaking about the languages like if they were all equal my languages myself are like on planes that are very different from one another and that's why i call about i talk about power dynamic and i don't think the power dynamic changed when we immigrate from our place to the place that it will break it in with us do you think your personal lingual new york the one you were raised with is the same as the personal lingual i mean the monolingual new york the same is the same as the one they're claiming right now and the one we're trying to kind of undo that is a very good sharp question you know because not only are we talking about the you know the language it's possible to be monolingual it with in in new york but english is the is a world dominant language so if you just look in terms of whether you're talking literary translation or technology you know or whatever else clearly english is not in the same position as any other as any other language certainly that as most other languages there are other global languages but i think the case is still pretty convincingly made that english is you know even more dominant than the other global languages um and so could i could i be in the perspective that i'm describing if it wasn't english if i was raised monolingually in some other community in some other language would i then be able to attain this sort of utopian multilingualism that i was kind of gesturing towards when i said like oh new york was multilingual all along there are these you know there are these icons of german literature describing my park where i'm playing handball at age eight and when i made it was just the wall i played handball but now it turns out that it exists in this kind of rich multilingual post monolingual space um but your question puts even more sharply you know um i assume you mean that the the monolingual new york being advocated for today in the sort of political context of banishes bad and immigrants are bad and dark-skinned people are bad and everything that isn't you know hegemonic white english republican america is bad um um and you know i guess i guess what i'd have to say is that the when i talk about growing up in monolingual new york i mean that kind of in quotation marks because in my perspective now it wasn't monolingual back then it never is it was always sort of porous and open to these other languages and cultures the way my example of the greek professor you know he's not in a non greek speaking culture people aren't walking around on the streets speaking ancient greek but ancient greek has penetrated that culture and infused it and affects it in various ways and so you know my current understanding of how culture works is that there are no monolingual cultures and so when i talk about i grew up in monolingual new york i mean that kind of as shorthand i didn't speak any other languages but even though i didn't know it at the time it wasn't rigidly monolingual so that i guess is my um you know perhaps self-serving but also kind of intellectually honest take on my understanding of being monolingual not matching the kind of current political much more aggressive and reductionist understanding of it um that's the best i could do on the spot for that really tough question but what do you i mean can you tell me what you think me yeah yeah about well i i don't want to i really don't want to thank something it's just that i i found out while myself was trying to reflect on my own experience and while i was um hearing each one of you passionately enough i found out that it's interesting how we kind of trying to we did we pulled the languages out of their i would say nest and we tried to see if we can speak about them but it's so we we stay in the formal um in the formal aspect of it but i think what is nourishing the dynamic between these languages is something like i wish we had another hour to kind of go into how these languages are actually living right now because you know german and chinese and spanish are not living in the same way french and quill and i don't know whatever japanese whatever other language is living and then i think the vibrancy of what we're saying right now i kind of feel so much life and we don't have time really to tap into it i i i i don't want to be too political but it's just that for me there was a deep political aspect of it that we cannot just like lifted a little part of and there was so much to be said i was just curious that's it i'm very grateful to you for being political chasmin because this was exactly the idea of this program um there's a there's a false narrative uh you know that has been implemented nationwide uh in a certain way and i think everything that all of you have said is such a valuable corrective to that utterly false narrative um which must be corrected at every moment um you know about who the people of this country are um and i do wish we had at least another hour if not two or three to continue unfortunately we've already run over time and also this is the by far the richest evening of our conference because we have another event at eight p.m with maria davna speaking of the ancient world davian with maria davna headley and emily wilson who will be discussing their respective translations of uh homer and bale wolf so we do have to conclude you've all been absolutely wonderful i think that this is going to be an extraordinary resource for teachers the recording of this which will live on for many years no doubt and um thank you all so much thank you thank you this has been wonderful you're a great group elison do you want to read us out with our thanks to our sponsors yes of course once again we'd like to thank our partners howl round pen america the center for the humanities at the graduate center cuny the colman center for scholars and writers at the new york public library and the martin e seagull theater center and to the princeton university program in translation and intercultural communication for their support of this evening's event thank you all thank you good night and see you on the columbia university site in about 20 minutes bye thanks