 Welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a professor at City University of New York, and I'm here with Allison Markin Powell, who translates Japanese literature and works for the Penn Translation Committee. 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 Keystone 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 we're all very well aware of, ended up launching online four months ago on the actual anniversary of the May 1970 World of Translation Conference. This evening's conversation, Democracy and Translation, will be an exploration of the context and conditions of democracy, how we conceive of it, how languages describe and disseminate it, and who has the authority to define it. We're honored and delighted to have with us poet and Mojave language activist Natalie Diaz, science fiction writer and translator Ken Mew, and poet, memoirist and translator from the Danish, Marilyn Nelson, to address a subject that feels more urgent than ever. The day after the president of the United States at a press conference, refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and said verbatim, get rid of the ballots and there won't be a transfer. Frankly, there'll be a continuation. We are particularly grateful to the Graduate Center's public programs and its promise and perils of democracy project, supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, for generously sponsoring today's conversation. And we literally could not have executed the pivot to a virtual format for Translating the Future without our central partner, the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY. We will soon hear remarks from the director, Keith Wilson, who will introduce tonight's speakers. Keith and his team at the Center for the Humanities have been unwavering in their support for this conference. And we are particularly grateful to Samson Starkweather and Kara Jordan for everything they've done behind the seat. Tonight's conversation will be followed by a Q&A. Please email your questions for Natalie Diaz, Ken Yew, and Marilyn Nelson to translatingthefuture2020atgmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous unless you know in your email that you'd like us to read your name. Translating the Future is convened by Penn America's Translational 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 interesting international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by Lynn Miller-Lachman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translationresourcesatpen.org. If you know anyone who was unable to join us for today's live stream or any of the other programs in 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 Keith, we'd like to offer our infinite gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY, at the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Penn America, and, of course, to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at HowlRound, who make this live stream possible. Keith, over to you. Thank you both so much. I want to thank our hosts for the opportunity to present our highly distinguished panel for this evening's event. But firstly, I'd like to take this chance to offer my heartfelt thanks to Alison and Tuesta for their fine work throughout the summer that's culminating in this marvelous finale week. I know I speak on behalf of the whole Center for the Humanities team here at the Graduate Center, CUNY. When I say what an absolute delight, it's been to co-host this timely series that you've both worked so hard to deliver. So thank you, Alison, and thank you, Esther. And do check out our website, Centerforthehumanities.org, where you'll see the great array of fantastic events that have been running, culminating today and tomorrow with our finale week. This evening's event entitled Democracy and Translation is supported also by the GC Presents Promise and Perils of Democracy Project, which is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Democracy means different things to each of us. In this perilous time for language, as Natalie Diaz describes it, what multiplicity of forms does the struggle to liberate ourselves from structurally embedded violence take? How much does democracy need translation? And what role did translation and multilingualism play in our democracy? So to our speakers this evening, Natalie Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Healer River Indian tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec was published by Copper Canyon Press and her second book, Post-Colonial Love Poem, was published by Gray Wolf Press in March 2020. She's a MacArthur Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, a United States Artist Ford Fellow, and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. Diaz is director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Marilyn Nelson, a three time finalist for the National Book Award, is one of America's most celebrated poets. She's the author or translator of 17 poetry books for adults and children, five chat books. And in 2014, she published a memoir named one of NPR's best books of 2014 entitled How I Discovered Poetry, a series of 50 poems about growing up in the 1950s in a military family. Each poem stamped with a place and date from the many places they lived. Her honors include two NEA Creative Writing Fellowships, the 2019 Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, an ACLS Contemplative Practices Fellowship, the Department of Army's Commanders Award for Public Service, a Full Bright Teaching Fellowship, a Fellowship from the JS Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Frost Medal, the Poetry Society of America's most prestigious award for a distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. Nelson is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut. And from 2004 to 2010, was founder, director and host of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small nonprofit writers colony, and held the office of poet laureate of the state of Connecticut from 2001 to 2006. Ken Leo is an American author of speculative fiction. He's won the Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy Awards, as well as top genre awards in Japan, Spain and France, among other countries. Lou's debut novel, The Grace of Kings is the first volume in a silk punk epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers play the role of wizards. His debut collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories has been published in more than a dozen languages. A second collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories followed. He also wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke's Skywalker. Yu is, as well, the translator for Liu Xuxin's, The Three Body Problem, Hōjīng Fang's Folding Beijing and Vagabonds, Chen Chu Fang's Waste Tide, and the editor of Invisible Planets and Broken Stars, anthologies of contemporary Chinese fiction. Without further ado, I'm delighted to hand over to our esteemed participants, Natalie, Marilyn and Ken, for this evening's conversation. Everybody, thank you for having me. I want to thank you. I am lucky to be joining Ken and Marilyn. And thank you for Esther, Allison, Keith, everyone who's put this together. I am going to read a little bit from Tony Morrison's Beloved. And I'm going to read a few small passages in relationship to Sixo's relationship with English. And then I'll kind of make a few comments and then I'll hand it over to Marilyn and Ken. So this is from chapter two. And I've been very struck since first reading this, thinking about Sixo and their relationship with language, but also their relationship with land and how that has very much been an opening for me to return to some of my own relationships. So I'm thinking a lot about the fact that democracy is built of English. And thinking not only about democracy, but about English, what of me can be translated or what is of me is is not possible in that. So and I'm beginning at a part where they're referring to the trees. So they're outside. His choice, he called brother and sat under it alone sometime, sometimes with Holly or the other pals, but more often with Sixo, who was gentle then, and still speaking English, indigo with the flame red tongue Sixo experimented with night cooked potatoes, trying to pin down exactly when to put smoking hot rocks in a hole, put potatoes on top and cover the whole thing with twigs, so that by the time they broke for the meal, hitch the animals left the field and got to brother, the potatoes would be at the peak of perfection. He might get up in the middle of the night, go all the way out there, start the earth over by starlight, or he would make the stones less hot and put the next day's potatoes on them right after the meal. He never got it right. But they ate those undercooked, overcooked, dried out or raw potatoes anyway, laughing, spitting and giving him advice. Time never worked the way Sixo thought. So of course, he never got it right. Once he plotted down to the minute, a 30 mile trip to see a woman. He left on a Saturday when the moon was in the place he wanted it to be, arrived at her cabin before church on Sunday and had just enough time to say good morning before he had to start back again. So he'd make the field call on time one day morning. He had walked for 17 hours, sat down for one turned around and walked 17 more. Holly and the Paul spent the whole day covering Sixo's fatigue from Mr. Garner. They ate no potatoes that day, sweet or white, sprawled near brother, his flame red tongue hidden from them, his indigo face closed Sixo slept through dinner like a corpse. Now there was a man and that was a tree himself lying in the bed and the tree lying next to him didn't compare. And I'm going to skip ahead a few paragraphs. And so we we've been told that Sixo was still speaking English then. And in this moment, Paul D is recalling Sixo and one of his meetings with 30 mile woman. It took three months and two 34 mile round trips to do it, to persuade her to walk one third of the way toward him to a place he knew, a deserted stone structure that red men used way back when they thought the land was theirs. Sixo discovered it on one of his night creeps and asked its permission to enter. Inside having felt what it felt like he asked the red men's presence if he could bring his woman there. It said yes. And Sixo painstakingly instructed her how to get there exactly when to start out how his welcoming or warning whistles would sound since neither could go anywhere on business of their own. And since the 30 mile woman was already 14 and scheduled for somebody's arms, the danger was real. When he arrived, she had not. He whistled and got no answer. He went into the red men's deserted lodge. She was not there. He returned to the meeting spot. She was not there. He waited longer. She still did not come. He grew frightened for her and walked down the road in the direction she should be coming from three or four miles and he stopped. It was hopeless to go on that way. So he stood in the wind and asked for help. Listening close for some sign, he heard a whimper. He turned toward it, waited and heard it again. Uncautious now, he hollered her name. She answered in a voice that sounded like life to him, not death. Not move, he shouted. Breathe hard. I can find you. He did. She believed she was already at the meeting place and was crying because she thought he had not kept his promise. Now it was too late for the rendezvous to happen at the Red Men's house. So they dropped where they were. Later he punctured her calf to simulate snake bite so she could use it in some way as an excuse for not being on time to shake worms from tobacco leaves. He gave her detailed directions about following the stream as a shortcut back and saw her off. When he got to the road, it was very light and he had his clothes in his hands. Suddenly, from around a bend, a wagon trundled toward him. Its driver wide eyed raised a whip while the woman seated behind him covered her face. But Sixo had already melted into the woods before the lash could unfurl itself on his indigo behind. He told the story to Paul F. Halle, Paul A. and Paul D. in the peculiar way that made them cry laugh. Sixo went among trees at night. For dancing, he said, to keep his bloodlines open, he said. Privately alone, he did it. None of the rest of them had seen him at it, but they could imagine it. And the picture they pictured made them eager to laugh at him. In daylight, that is, when it was safe. But that was before he stopped speaking English because there was no future in it. And one of the things I've been thinking a lot of, you know, one just being Indigenous, being Latina, but also all of the conversations about the election, about democracy, where I live on the border, you know, which like I'm thinking a lot about when we're thinking about translation and even when we're thinking about what is democracy, what is the language of democracy. I'm thinking a lot about the fact that the inability to understand or to be translated is a really important sensuality. And and that's one of the reasons why the moment with Sixo there, I'm thinking a lot about the importance of that sensuality and how that's often forgotten from the ways we're thinking about knowledge and relationality and relationship and the importance of realizing that some knowledges are not for me and some knowledges are not for you. And what does that mean of what cannot be consumed or ordered or structured? And I've been thinking a lot, you know, about democracy is an imagination of the English language. It's built from it. It's delivered and meet it out through the English language. And I'm thinking lately about the fact that I grew up thinking democracy was a good thing and that I was a part of it. And, you know, as I'm coming to my own in language and finding different powers of language or resisting certain powers of language, I'm thinking a lot about, you know, democracy doesn't doesn't make us live better. However, democracy does tell us who deserves to have a good life. And and that's been something that's been very hard to reckon with as an Indigenous person who knows I'm from a place not of this structure. And yet I am very much a part of this structure. So I'm thinking a little bit about as thinking about translation in the ways that my Mojave language resisted what that what that power structure means of democracy and that, again, it's this facade of of equality or understanding or empathy. And so there's this false sense of goodness. And I've bought into that in so many ways and I've been rewarded for certain manifestations of that, that idea that the one is for all and the all is for one. And again, these are not like groundbreaking thoughts. They're very simplistic, but it's which makes them difficult, I think, to return to in a way that can kind of crack them open. And so I'm going to read this last little piece of something I've been writing about the English language and the ways that I'm moving in it or moving outside of it. And one of the things I've been thinking is that what will never be rendered in translation is the same thing that will also never be rendered in democracy, which is my body, which is the values that I have. And so I'm I'm thinking a lot about that and the impossibility of it, which I don't think cancels out my possibility and so I just kind of wanted to show this just so I don't know if people are familiar with with weaving, but this is just I'm going to read a small paragraph, but this is the warp and the weft. So you'll know what I'm talking about. And so the warp being the materials that run downward and the weft being what moves across it. You know, so as you're weaving, the weft moves this way and actually builds the narrative that we see. Weaving is the relationship between the warp and the weft, a relationship of the one who enters and the one who is entered repeatedly. I become the warp across across which America's weft coheres our native narratives body by body, land and river by acre and acre foot accumulated. We are an imagistic epic against and through which the nation reiterates itself. America and its symbolic eagle with heavy metal poisoning, its wild west and frontier land of prosperity and amber waves of grain, missions and uranium mines, allotments and pandemics, its Indian killers and Lincoln Memorial, its fork fracking dams and wall streets, its gentrification and immigration. All of these wagered native bodies of land, water and person. For these reasons, good weavers know the warp must be strong. The warp is ever stretched, able to withstand and hold high tension so that the weft can displace tension, never responsible for it. The weft, though it pretends to be the most important agent in the weaving, is naturally weaker than the warp and relies on the warp. Yet the warp is named for a thing thrown away after it is used. Writing in English is also to be woven into the state, to hold its tension until you become tension, relieving the state of any strain at the ready to prove your utility, your capacity for labor. We perform the maintenance of the state and democracy, even while not able to maintain ourselves. And so I'll just kind of pause there. That's just a small collage of ways that I'm arriving to Marilyn and Ken. Wow, thank you, Natalie, for that. I want to start by thanking everyone for organizing this event and for being here to hear us speak. I feel very lucky to have this chance to talk to all of you and to speak about a subject that has given me a lot of difficulty and has caused me to rethink a lot of assumptions I once had. I guess I will continue in the theme that Natalie started. A lot of what she said really resonated with me. And I want to start by talking about something that, again, in her words, seems simplistic, but because they're so basic, we don't. Think about it because they are really fundamental. And that is the idea of power in translation. When we speak about translation, especially in academic settings, we often treat it as a kind of exchange between equals. We speak about it as a kind of power relationship between two equal languages, two equal communities, two equal participants. But the reality is translations are rarely equal, especially in the modern world. There's always a side with more power and the side with less power. And it's worthwhile to think about the inequality and to ask questions about it because democracy fundamentally is a particular story about power. It's a particular form of exercise of power. And to think about democracy and translation in the same context is to think about who is included in democracy, who gets to exercise power, who is not excluded and made invisible. Right. One of the fundamental assumptions about democracy is that it's a wonderful thing because it allows it's a supposedly a guard against tyranny. But, you know, something that's so fundamental and basic that we don't even pay attention to it is that in order to be protected by it, you actually have to be a member of the democracy. The United States exercises great power over peoples around the world, most of whom do not get to vote in our elections. We don't therefore somehow consider our democracy illegitimate, but in the eyes of those who do not get to participate in it, who nonetheless must pay for our decisions. Their view of this democracy is very different. In translation, power is a fundamental unit of analysis. And what frustrates me a little bit is a lot of the academic discussions about translation never pay attention to this power. Translating from a high prestige language like English into a low prestige language like Chinese is a fundamentally different thing than translating from a low prestige language like Chinese into a high prestige language like English. So this may not be so obvious to us. I'll use some examples to sort of tease this out. One of the ways in which this plays out is who gets to decide what gets translated, who pays for it, who gets to decide whether a translation is good or bad, who gets to decide what sort of works which authors are worthy of translation, who gets to decide what kind of translation ought to be performed when there's a point of ambiguity, which way should the ambiguity be resolved? At one point, Chinese is considered so low prestige that it was believed that you don't even need to know it in order to translate from it. Ezra Bond famously is well known for translating a lot of classical Chinese poetry, despite knowing none of it. That sort of thing you may think is sort of the prestige of an older time, but it's really not. I I've served on juries for translation projects and I see proposals all the time from folks who believe that they can translate from Chinese into English despite knowing almost nothing about the language or the culture or who claim that I can do it with my native informant. You know, that is the way the sort of thing is done. Moreover, when translations are done into English, just listen to the way readers respond to it, can tell you something about the way power flows. When something is translated into English and readers praise it, you often hear comments like, you know, I'm surprised that the author talks about Shakespeare, you know, I'm surprised that the author talks about Bob. I didn't think that Chinese authors were worth anything until they started talking about Bob and Shakespeare, you know, the fact that they know Western references to these readers is a sign that they are actually worthy of being read themselves. But if they don't, obviously they're not. This sort of thing happens over and over again to the point where it's simply not possible to be ignored. When you're struggling to translate from a language of grade of a very low prestige into a high prestige language, you're faced with this sort of contempt, resistance and basic lack of interest is a kind way to put it. It's more hostility is what I often have to deal with, which leads me to my next point, which is about another way in which I think about translation and democracy in context, which is democracy has one of its fundamental assumptions that we are one political community. All participants are actually part of one political community. There is a shared story that unites all of us, a shared sense of empathy and translation often is thought of as the way to build that kind of empathy between different communities, a way to bring together those who are otherwise apart. But what I want to invite all of us to think about is whether that kind of empathy building is even possible in translation in terms of the term, whether that sort of empathy is possible in a democracy at all. So let me start by trying to get you to think about some quality, some value that matters a great deal to you. Be it patriotism, love, kindness or democracy if that's the value you want to think about. So just think about it. And think about what images, what ideas, what words, what thoughts, surface as you focus on that word. I'll tell you something that I'm thinking about. When I think about the word love, what comes to mind is this image from when I was a little boy. And it was late at night I was sitting by the dining table working on my homework. I was trying to finish all these math problems and it seemed impossible. It was already late, I was tired. I just, I could not imagine how I was going to finish all of it. My grandmother came to check on me and she said, you know, how are you doing? I said, oh, you know, I'm just, I feel terrible. I can't finish these. I don't know what I'm going to do. And she said, oh, that's totally no problem. I'm going to, I will sit down next to you and I'll keep you company. And so she sat down with her. She was knitting and I could hear the needles click clack, click clack, click clack. And somehow just by her sitting there and made me feel like I could go on. So I started working on my problems and I could hear the needles going and I could hear the click clack slowing down, slowing down, slowing down. And then I look over and I could see my grandmother was dozing off. So I said, no, no, you should just go to bed. And she said, oh, no, no, I I don't know what you're talking about. I'm not tired at all. I'm I'm totally energizing, you know, she starts knitting again. So I go back to working my problem. I could hear again the needles slowing down after a while and sort of stopping. And I didn't look over because I actually wanted her sleep. I didn't want to wake her up. But I could hear just a second later, my grandmother saying, oh, I'm I'm totally awake. I'm not sleeping. I'm not tired. Who's tired. And then she starts, you know, knitting again. And I don't know how long went on and on. And, you know, I don't know how long went on. But this is a story that comes to mind, you know. And then I think for whatever value you were thinking of, and I guarantee you that you were not thinking of dictionary definitions, you were not thinking of abstract philosophy, you were not thinking about how to translate this into the words in another language, you were thinking that defines it for you. Okay. This is, as Natalie was mentioning earlier, you know, the way we understand these very fundamental values to us is the way we feel in our bodies and in our bones. It's not in abstractions. It's not in these verbal formulas. It's in these very personal concrete stories that we then seek to emulate in our own lives. We seek to love others the way we were loved. We seek to be brave for others the way those who loved us were brave for us. Okay. This is how we go on. But what you want to do is think about what this means at the level of cultures and peoples. Okay. Cultures and peoples and communities understand words and values in the same way through stories. There's a, this is why a language is often described as the memory of our ancestors. Okay. That's what it means. A language is not just a set of words in a dictionary. It's a set of stories. Okay. Idioms don't make any sense unless you know the story behind them. Every language contains these stories in them that record the experiences and wisdom and thoughts of generations of people who have suffered and loved and died in order to build for their descendants a better future. Every language is like that. And so when you think about translation how can you possibly think that the way someone else who's not American think about a word let's say something like patriotism. If you're educated in American grade schools, especially East, the story that often comes to mind is of Nathan Hale telling the British soldiers I regret that I have but one life to give for my country. Okay. If you think about liberty, if you're educated in American grade schools what comes to mind often is Patrick Henry saying give me liberty or give me death. Do you think these are the same stories that people in other countries will think about when they think about these words. So the fact that the words are deemed to be translations in the dictionary is meaningless really because that kind of translation doesn't translate across anything about the stories behind them about the memories the real meaning behind the words you know I've explained to you how even the way we understand love is so deeply personal and individualistic the idea that translation can somehow convey the memories of the entire people across is ridiculous yet yet here is where power comes into play okay one of the things that I found to be deeply fascinating is when you're going from English into Chinese translators almost never modify or change the illusions and the references whereas when you're going from Chinese to English you're often asked as a translator to change things to make things more accessible okay now for those of us who have lived always in a code switching multicultural context navigating between different power groups the explanation is very simple when you live in a low power culture you are expected to understand the stories and the references of the high power cultures but when you are native to a high power culture you are not expected to know the stories and the meanings of those who have no power that's just the way it is one of the reasons you know that where you are in the social hierarchy is whether you're expected to cater to the stories of other people and in translation this is the case when you're going from English the high high prestige language to other languages often there's no need to change anything in terms of references and stories behind because it's assumed that what Americans know and to a lesser extent what folks in the UK know is by default world culture but English doesn't just belong to America or the UK it's a world language when English is also used as the language of all the colonized peoples their stories don't therefore become part of the default assumption of what English is about they're treated as foreign it's worth looking into why it is we still have this idea of stories that are core to English and stories that are not core to it even though English is supposedly being used as a world language and then finally there are a couple other questions again simplistic that I want us to think about is this I often hear people praising a translation by saying that it reads so smoothly as though it had already had originally been written in English we treat that as some sort of praise but why? that actually makes no sense if democracy is about understanding empathy and trying to take the perspective of those who are different from you then translation is even more so trying to understand something that is fundamentally different you're trying to understand a set of stories that are not yours it will be very strange to say that you want to be comfortable and you want to be in no way challenged that you wish to not learn anything at all that's not the way it is all around the world and that's not historically the way it has to be those of you who have studied history of other languages that come into contact with European languages know that there's often this period where the local language is heavily heavily influenced modified by translations from English, French, German, what have you I know the example of Japanese and Chinese particularly well both languages were actually actively consciously and deliberately modified at the level of vocabulary and grammar, fundamental grammar by translation based on models from European languages under the assumption that in order to understand these concepts that did not exist before our languages must change to express these ideas under the assumption that these languages English, German, and French brought over ideas that are so worthy that we are willing to change ourselves then. Okay that's the positive reading of it of course the more there is a reading of this that's much more about colonial power exercise but I'm going to stick to the more positive embracing version of it this is so such an important part of it that you can now go and examine famous writers model writers in Japanese Chinese and see the extent to which their prose is influenced by western models via translation often these writers are themselves translators and they deliberately copy from the source language of their translation to modify their writing we don't see that really in the way English writers are praised or in the way English novelists do their work our model seems to be a good translation has to be so smooth so not different from what we already accept as good English prose that we want to learn nothing we wish to to expand ourselves in not even a little bit so one of the questions I want us to ask is how do we judge what is a good translation how do we tell the difference between a bad translation and just an uncomfortable one how do we actually learn from translations that will help us grow and how do we just change our entire attitude to be able to embrace the full possibility that translations can actually bring about and then finally an even more radical question might be is translation even a good idea translations in some ways doesn't actually it provides the illusion of understanding without delivering the substance of it when you're translating something from one language to another you're delivering something that's a recreation that's a different story that the story that you're starting was so if the goal of translation is to quote unquote preserve the original it will never succeed so is the fact that translation is actually never possible does that mean that we should not engage in it at all that even the act of engaging translation in some ways is a betrayal of the fundamental difference between different stories and different languages and different memories okay that's what I wanted to say and I'm going to turn this over now to Marilyn I just said yikes before I turn the mic on I'm so awestruck both of your what you call simple and simplistic comments they're not simple at all and what I have to say is probably very scattershot because I am determined to read something of a translation but I want to thank you Ken for pointing out the fundamental impossibility of translation that translating is like describing something to someone else I see a green tree there and the other person says I see a green tree too how do you know you're seeing the same green tree is green the same and so I think you have to accept the proposition that language is a kind of prism and that in translation all individual translator can do is to hold the prism up and see what light that person sees from this angle and another person holding up the same prism may very well see something different I'm not sure a translation can finally be true but to the question of translation and democracy I would push that expand that a bit to encompass literacy and democracy and that literacy is a way of engaging with larger community of people and literacy I'm thinking about people who were enslaved in the new world the entire new world and were not allowed to be taught to read and the power that they were conscious of as soon as they were able to read something of a good friend who is an African-American abstract painter and one of her paintings which I love is a painting of what looks like wallpaper and there is a rectangle in the middle of the canvas in which the wallpaper is a lighter color and on that lighter colored rectangle someone she has written words free man I mean just arbitrary words but the impression is that this is a place where someone who was enslaved was practicing writing push the dresser aside and write on the wall that's why the wallpaper is lighter it's something that I think says a lot about literacy and democracy literacy and freedom and I would say that for me the act of translation is an act of bringing bringing things into the circle into let's call it the circle of democracy I struck by Natalie's metaphor of weaving and I'm not sure as I think about it which is the warp and which is the weft I suspect that the warp is larger than the individual and that what the individual does is to bring things into this larger weaving by being the weft and I'm very much interested in the question of not who well for me it's a question of who owns the right to translate translation translation has been so much limited to speakers of more than one language so translation seems to require a level of education which is not available to everyone and I think I think that level of education is kept away purposely from some people I'm sorry this is I've already confessed that this is going to be scattershot I have notes but I'm also thinking about what the two of you have said my own experience with translation are two things I taught for a year in a junior college in a village in Denmark many years ago and one of the things I had the privilege to teach was Baldwin's Gotelet on the mountain in a Danish student edition so as you were saying Ken there are all these stories in the language stories in the idioms this book had been edited by Danish professors of English they didn't know anything about the culture Baldwin was talking about so you would get I'm sorry this was many years ago I can't give a specific example but you might get a sentence in which I don't know Baldwin makes some kind of reference specifically to African American culture and there would be a little footnote when you go to the bottom of the page and the footnote had absolutely nothing to do with what Baldwin was talking about and it was my privilege to have my little group of Danish students who left my semester really knowing something about the novel unlike the other Danish students who didn't have a guide who could explain the histories of the words and the histories of the idioms but I as I said I want to read a little bit of a translation but I also want to come back to the idea of translation being a way of contributing to the larger weave of this rug of democracy and to say that one of the poets I first discovered in translation was Rilke my freshman year college roommate a little book of translations of Rilke and I've loved his poetry ever since in one of my books I included a translation of one of Rilke's dueno allergies because I had read probably six or eight different translations of this one it's the third dueno allergy and I've read all of these English translations of this one poem and every single one of them gets one word wrong and every time I read this in English I think English speakers are not going to understand the depth of this line because the translators are changing the word to give it a literal translation that it's the word alone Rilke says the alone it's about a young man who leaves in bed at night I think it's about I think it's about sexual fantasies in teenage boys and he's in bed alone and the poem says he leaves the alone and the translators always turn that into he leaves the loneliness they turn it into a noun but I believe Rilke who was interested in mysticism I believe he's referring to the philosophy of Plotinus and to Christian mysticism and to Sufi mysticism in which the mystic by being alone comes into contact with the alone the capital A alone you are alone in order to greet the alone and if you don't get that you're missing something really deep in the poem so I had to do a translation of the whole poem which is a long poem to get that one line out so that if someone reads it I have contributed one word to the weave of understanding of that poem and that leads me again to the question of who owns the right to translate because the most challenging translation I've ever done came to me just out of the blue I happened to know this translator David Slavitt and I had met him someplace and one summer in about July he sent me a letter asking me if I had ever done any translation because he was the series editor of the University of Pennsylvania Press Greek drama series and he had set up already all of the other translation translators for a volume of Euripides but he hadn't found anybody to translate one play and he asked me if I wanted to take this on as a challenge I don't know any Greek I was teaching he asked me in July or August I had to teach that semester I worked on it all semester and at the end of the semester I finished it and he said it's great it's fine now I need you to write a translator's introduction so I wrote about four paragraphs in which I said by an incredible coincidence I was working on translating Euripides during a semester when I was teaching a graduate seminar on African American women's slave narratives and I was struck all semester by how deeply Euripides understood the situation of these Trojan women who were about to be marched off into slavery in Greece and how similar the lines of the poems of the play were to the narratives I was teaching OK this this volume was published and I've only seen one published review of the volume but the first performance the first production of this play was done in Washington DC by an African American theater company and the director tried to be true to Greek tragedy tradition half of the characters were wearing masks there were other things that the chorus was moving back and forth across the stage the Washington Post sent not their main reviewer but a second string reviewer who trashed the play in the Washington Post because she thought it was a production of the Trojan women which is a completely different play by the same playwright but it's a different play so that all of her review was about the nerve of this African American American woman to change the play and to make it not true to Euripides original OK and then the volume was reviewed in the New York Times by a famous translator scholar Daniel Mendelson he dismissed my Hecuba in two sentences which I will read these sentences seem to me to indicate that he hadn't read the play he had read the little introduction I wrote about how this play resonated with me because I'm an African American Marilyn Nelson the translator of Hecuba includes echoes of the spiritual nobody knows the trouble I've seen in that strange dramas choruses because Nelson who is an African American writes Hecuba's story is my great great great grandmother's story however well intentioned the gesture smacks of grandstanding it tells you a lot more about Nelson's interests and agendas than it does about Euripides this reviewer went to great lengths in his review to disparage the translators who were all poets for not knowing Greek for not knowing ancient Greek how can you dare to take on a translation like this if you haven't studied ancient Greek I went to public high schools a public high school public universities for all of my degrees and I don't even know if ancient Greek it certainly wasn't a possibility in high school so I would just like to read because can you said something about empathy and I feel that one of the things a translation can do is to allow readers empathy which they might not be able to achieve we open the door to them to be able to empathize with experiences which are not their own and I think do I have time to read for a minute or so heck about was the queen of Troy this place takes place right after the Trojans have lost the war the Greeks are stranded in Troy because there's no wind and they're waiting for the wind to come and just sort of sorting out what they have to do and the ghost of Achilles comes and demands Hecuba's daughter be sacrificed in his memory and so Hecuba who's lost everything now loses a daughter and her son has been murdered so she has nothing and I would just like to read two speeches this is Hecuba the chorus has just told her that her daughter's been killed ah my daughter which of this throng of griefs demands most I yield to one and they clamor around me each with its own heartbreak grief after grief a relentless tide of sorrows and with this last wave I find myself drowning in a sea of mother's tears even so a cold comfort comes from knowing how free you were as you died isn't it strange how this old ground cultivated by the gods overflows the granary while the good soil the gods forget grows a dry uncombed tangle human nature never changes the bad stay bad to the end the good even touched by disaster are as changeless as stars are we born to our nature or is it something learned surely goodness is a wise teacher and a person well taught comes to understand evil by seeing the true beauty of the good ah but these are the aimless arrows of despair and this is the last speech of the play it's the chorus and this is the speech in which I echoed a spiritual we must go to our master's tents nobody knows why what will happen to us there must happen from the harbor we must voyage to life upon the shore of bondage nobody knows why this must be fate knows no mercy necessity is hard why must everything happen as it must what is this must and why nobody knows nobody knows well I just want to defend myself against the allegation that this is grandstanding it seems to me to be a perfectly appropriate suggestion and a very small suggestion but a suggestion of parallels between the experience of an ancient woman entering slavery and the experiences of women in our country less than 200 years ago experiencing the same thing I'm thinking wait maybe we should check in are we yes absolutely please just come in I'm thinking a lot of the speeches Marilyn from Hecuba and also some of the questions that Ken was asking I think one of the tensions that I have with translation is that we've been talking about power once and the inability to hold this translation Marilyn speaks to it as well the translations are often toward the citizen and so they're reiterations of the citizen to be of the city and so then immediately reiterating who is not of the city so that power structure and I don't know if we're able to subvert it I'm thinking a lot of our ideas of the profane being outside the temple yet we've come to think of the profane as having no reverence of not necessarily being a center of knowledge and I struggle a lot with empathy and also with understanding I don't know I actually think human beings the way we define human anyway we're much too young or I wonder if we're too young to have empathy like the empathy of trees I'm thinking of course back to 6-0 the idea of his blood breathing going back to that place even before the human body and language as a kind of knowledge but I guess the one question I have is that I'm thinking is it possible to treat translation as being with versus imagining ourselves as being able to be inside or so if I can't be of that language and language being that body that experience that beyond time and I guess that's my question in terms of that power like what is translation if we don't pin it down with I understand so what does that mean can we be with still which I think we do every day with things we don't understand and so I'm kind of playing back some of your questions especially like is translation ever a good idea which I think is always that's such a powerful question and then of course thinking ideas of goodness that were being tackled in Maryland's translation so Natalie in Maryland that's wow this is just so great I haven't had a conversation that goes into such jumps about these issues in a long while and I'm really grateful that we're doing it one of the things that your remarks let me to think about is this whole idea of translation itself as an exercise of power I was talking earlier about how translation is always between unequal power, dynamics, structures communities but translation itself is often an exercise of power and I think again what I'm saying now may be very obvious but I think it's important to point out what is obvious and just so people can see it there's a huge amount of difference in saying folks like Maryland or me who have been traditionally excluded from being deemed as viable translators of ancient classical Greek you know this is a high high prestige language only people who look a certain way are allowed to do it so there's a huge difference in saying hey maybe somebody else like Maryland can get to do the translation and say something new that these other translators have never been able to see or being able to evoke before there's a huge difference between that versus again say a white male who says I don't know any Chinese that's so what I'm going to take that and then make a translation out of it I'm going to own it if you can't see the difference between those two then I'm not sure you know you're really ready for having this conversation but you know I but I think I want to point that out because sometimes people either out of honest ignorance or just willful trolling will say wow you know these are very similar things why is one okay and not the other well no they're not similar things at all one they're fundamentally different because one of them is about supplementing and filling holes Maryland's translation does not claim to exclude other translations it does not claim to be the prominent translation from which all other translations must be excluded it's not it's an exercise of speaking up of laying claim to what is the highest level of western culture to say I have a place we have a place this is an act of making democracies promises come true when someone claim who has no relationship to indigenous peoples or the sacred literatures they're translating and who say oh I don't know anything about classical Chinese but I'm going to do a double gene translation even though I know nothing about it I'm just going to put my name on it and copyright it and now this is my thing I'm a I'm a white dude and I get to do it because I'm awesome that's a fundamentally different kind of exercise of power and it's it's it's just they're not even remotely comparable yet people often will bring these things up and say you know why are you saying this is okay and this is not okay well you know you can't pretend to treat things that are obviously different the same this seems like such an obvious point but I still wanted to make it because I know if I don't there will be trolls who will jump in one supplementary note is that I myself this this European thing as I said I don't know any Greek but the play has been translated several times into English so I used all of the other translations and just didn't use their words but otherwise I feel very uncomfortable pretending to translate something that's written in a language I don't know and I've I've only done it once somebody had prepared a trot and and I just kind of prettied up the literal translation that he had made but I don't feel comfortable doing that and when I have taught translations I've always insisted students have to look at more than one translation and then think about the fact that one translator might be able to as I said about my real kids one word one translator might be interested in translating meter and one might be interested in trying to capture the fact that the original rhymes and everybody has their one little thing but in my opinion nobody can do the entirety of a work and certainly not not someone who's not a native speaker of the language that really takes you know it's it's funny because as like artists write we're writers it's the exact I mean I try not to speak in such it's the exact but it's not different from the mindset so we're thinking like art should be different right but we make sure that asylum forms are in Arabic or migration immigration forms are in Arabic yet this was the first year and you know because I don't actually know if they did it but they were going to translate or they were contemplating translating including directionally the census form into Arabic I believe that was this year you know and so it's crazy that it's the same lens to me that we're applying in these other scenarios of power of what we decide is knowledge that should be disseminated and who it should be disseminated to I'm thinking a lot about the credible fear questionnaire and so a lot of our migrants coming across the US Mexico border many of whom are not from Central or South America but who are from Africa you know and other places but that there is like very few translations and yet we were asking them questions that if they don't understand like we're actually not worried about that because our translations are meant to reiterate those structures of power you know and in some ways I'm just kind of hearing this treatment again it's as if saying like translation but only if it supports the main story only if it supports the narrative and that narrative has no capacity for tension or difference or you know in some ways the unknown meaning the imagination and so I'm also thinking of that like where does the imagination lie when we're thinking about translation you know and yeah and just how that is such an innate part of relationality like I think the ways I think about relationality being where I was raised and how I was raised it doesn't translate to understanding you know it allows for not knowing or not understanding and somehow to still be in some sort of proximity I don't really want to intervene at this point because this has been such a fascinating and intense conversation and I feel really privileged to have been part of it to have listened to it and I but I do have a question for the three of you that I've sort of formulated listening to the three of you you've told us a lot about ways in which democracy and translation are similar they're both about power they both presuppose a possibility of empathy but that may be false a false possibility they're both abstract concepts that only exist truly in embodied language and I guess my question which really has been throughout the organization of this conference since May or even long before that as we knew that we were preparing something that was going to happen six weeks before an election that was going to be a hugely important and traumatic election this sort of deep question that I feel like Marilyn has given an answer to and I'm not I don't want to say what it is but I feel I have a sense of Marilyn's answer but I'm very curious about Ken and Natalie's answer is as we see these well what we might call the crumbling of our democracy the end of our democracy in some way that we had understood it to exist can translation be a form of resistance to that does it offer any possibilities as a form of resistance to that what do you think I have a I have an answer it's not a very well thought out answer but it's one that I believe very deeply I've often said to people that I think when we talk about democracies we don't talk enough about the stuff that's outside of the constitutions and the institutions the soft stuff that helps the hardware function which is what Natalie referred to this sort of myth or this story of the city of citizens I will say this again many people seem to suddenly be discovering that our democracies are very fragile and they're sort of going crazy over the fact that the constitution actually says nothing about how electors should be picked so if one party wants to they can certainly ignore the election results and appoint electors to vote a certain way people are going are very surprised to hear that there seems to be so many loopholes in our constitution that allows things to be done all constitutions are going to be like that because they presuppose some shared set of stories that people in the polity tell each other and fill in the blanks if you're a lawyer you know you will never design a document or institution that will prevent the sort of thing from happening you are a lawyer aren't you Ken? I am a lawyer right so if you're going to do this you will never design a document or institutions that will be foolproof and is one enough people who are voters still believing that shared mythology that shared story and so in terms of how this plays into translation I think it's a question about do we live in a world in which translation is no longer possible I mean translation not in the pure linguistic sense what I mean is I've said repeatedly stories are how we make sense of the world stories are how we give meaning to abstract words when somebody who supports President Trump says things like freedom and beauty and faith do they have the same stories in mind as those who are not voting for him is it possible to even translate between them and I am no longer so sure and I'm not so sure even that that the act is a worthwhile one to do you know when you know there's so many thoughts swirling through my mind but I'll just focus on a couple this election is very much about competing stories it's just that one story appears to be a story that we all sort of we all sort of accept and believe has a long set of justifications for why and maybe the true story the other story is the sort of story that swirls around Facebook QAnon and a lot of these other mass stories these are stories that many people are collectively telling themselves that they construct a reality and give meaning to their lives and define words and allow them to think about love and freedom and equality and all these things in a different sense the fact that we're now living a world in which it is possible to have this entirely alternate reality of you well this entirely shared collective storytelling running in parallel with the other story it's astounding to me that we can do this I'm not convinced that other democracies have necessarily gone through a process like this so you know to the extent that we're witnessing the crumbling of our democracy it's in some ways a failure of collective storytelling we are no longer able to tell the same story and these competing stories are so incompatible that we cannot even translate between them that's how I feel about it it's not well thought out but it's one that I struggle with a lot and I think this is the view that makes the most sense to me Natalie? Yeah I think I can create a proximity to democracy and the ways I feel about it and translation and just the ways I come to language I think I think translation is any translation is one origin it's an origin not a beginning of something but it's a way of coming back to the cycle of energy and origin as in to rise so it's another rising and in some ways I not in some ways in maybe every way and it will be uncomfortable but I do want democracy to fall and I mean that sounds irrational to us right it sounds as irrational as abolition it sounds as irrational we're coming around with abolition but what I mean by that is like and I this is kind of I think maybe because of something that Ken was saying about the story right is that I don't know why democracy thought it would be one story like when when did that happen that it that it became of too afraid to create new origins within it especially since so many of us do anyway right we have to I mean to imagine I am I can look out my window right now and see my creation mountain and yet every day in America I have to have a new origin so I can exist here to exist with with my wife to exist with with my family to exist in academia to exist as you know speaking English like and so I guess that's what I'm thinking is that in terms of like the like translation is in some ways a submission to not knowing right and we're afraid of that we're afraid of that tension I'm afraid of it I don't know what it's it will take for I don't know how uncomfortable I am willing to be for what might need to happen in order for a collective of us to arrive well beyond or you know even beyond backward returning to a place that is not this right now and so for me thinking about translation it's you know in in all the ways I'm critical of it or wary of it it's also another way of of start of not starting but just of rising again knowing there will be a fall but somewhere along the way we pretended democracy couldn't have its descent meanwhile it's been grinding some of us into the dirt and so I as much as I'm thinking of the possibility I'm also thinking that there for me I don't know what it would look like or what again what I'm willing to do for it but I do I do I'm working hard to move myself toward a possibility that is not this democracy you know the impossibility of that it feels quite large so yeah Marilyn what are your thoughts just that democracy isn't the final the final word on human social organization there there have been other other possibilities presented none of them so far seems to work particularly well um but it's always possible that there is someone thinking right now and coming up with a new system that hasn't yet been introduced publicly and that I think is where we have to hope I think we have to hope and as far as translation I have a hard time talking about translation as a an entity for me translation is an act of love and everything I've ever worked on as a translator I've worked on it because I cared about it because I love it because it seems like a way of making a contribution to the language I was born to and therefore love I just finished translating a novel written by a dear friend of mine and I don't know whether anybody's going to publish it but it doesn't really matter I love doing it I started doing it because she died and it seemed like a good memorial tribute and then I got involved in it and then I started noticing how she was experimenting stylistically and then I started noticing how full the Danish language is of Anamada poetic verbs and how my friend was playing with them she would give you two verbs that sounded like what they were saying and then she would take that sound and write something else about it and it got me through the first four months of this pandemic shut down I got up a cup of coffee and sat down with this Danish novel and got lost in a little village in Jutland in the 1950s and these girls who were experiencing sex for the first time and it was a joy to do it and so for me the work of I don't think about what kind of what kind of place my translations may someday take in the world I just am enjoying playing with language and loving the way that languages plural exist it's amazing that we can communicate with each other at all I just started watching this Netflix film my octopus teacher it's amazing imagine that someday we'll be able to communicate with an octopus what an amazing thing that would what do they think how would we translate their experience into our experience is that possible probably not but hey that's an interesting idea and in some ways that's what we're doing I mean actually I think Netflix and others but Netflix is my idea is making a tremendous contribution to the intersections of cultures and the more the more we're able to bring experiences of other linguistic communities and cultural communities into I don't I'm sorry I'm kind of running out of steam here but I spend I spend a lot of time watching Korean television and I don't know any Korean although I think I've probably learned maybe two words but it's really especially historical things it's really wonderful to enter a world which is not at all familiar to me and to be humbled by caring about characters I know nothing about learning how to care about I'm sorry I'm blathering here you're not blathering at all in fact I think that you have talked us down and given us something really really beautiful to take away from this and hope I think you've given us hope Marilyn what can we do if we can hope there is a person in the world who is trying to kill our hope that's one of his aims and if we allow that then we might as well just lie down and let him roll over with a cement roller we can't do that we have to hope and stand against it okay I'm not going to say anything yet I'm afraid that I have to cut everybody off because our live captioner has to leave at 830 and we've already gone over time so I this has been extraordinary and I can't thank you enough Allison do you want to say our final word I would also like to thank Marilyn and Ken and Natalie it was sublime listening to each of you speak and speak together once again we'd like to thank our partners HowlRound in America the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and the Marnie Siegel Theater Center and to the GC presents Promise and Perils of Democracy Project by the Carnegie Corporation of New York for their support of this evening's event thank you all again thank you thank you I had so much pleasure in this thank you thank you it was amazing thank you everyone