Translation, Migration, Mobilization

Quick Overview

The panel discussion on translation, migration, and mobilization reveals that literary translation is a fundamentally relational and often challenging practice, navigating linguistic nuances, genre conventions, and the commercial demands of the publishing industry, particularly in the US market. Translators often contend with the idea of authorship as a shared endeavor, the untranslatability of certain cultural or linguistic specificities, and the ethical implications of how and why certain literatures gain an audience.

Key Points: Translation is fundamentally relational, as writer and translator Karina del Valle Schwersky states, "the work feels like mine" even when articulating someone else's poem, suggesting that "How is anything born but through a foreign body?" Panelists navigate diverse linguistic backgrounds; John Keene, for instance, moves between Portuguese and French, viewing language learning as a "liberatory experience" that offers "access to other ways of looking at the world." Mona Karim, who learned English as a second language at 17, describes her relationship with English as one of "labor and exhaustion," noting that "literature was part of my process of learning English." Translators often contend with the "untamed" nature of source texts; Mona Karim criticizes how English translations often "butcher" Arabic novels into "short sentences" that are "tamed and organized," suppressing their original stylistic power. Publishing translated works faces challenges due to "US taste" and the "capitalist industry"; Jenny Croft spent 10 years trying to sell Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, which was deemed "too slow" and "too strange" by editors. Translation can be a "counter-hegemonic practice," as John Keene suggests, allowing for a different way of thinking about and reading into language, including "translating blackness." The demand for translated literature can be problematically tied to geopolitical events; Salman Sharif's anecdote highlights how military actions, like the bombing of Afghanistan, can create a narrow, temporary "appetite for translated literature."