Kissing through a Curtain: Notes on Translation

When I was young, I asked my parents to stop speaking Tagalog. When they wouldn’t comply, I stopped answering in their language; I spoke to them only in English, which I learned in school. Perhaps that was my first attempt to navigate through white space as an immigrant child born into a cold country; we lived near the Niagara escarpment and the Great Lakes, perpetually swathed by snow.

Our rural town in Southern Ontario had two rivers running through it, a population of six thousand, and no one who looked like me. We lived twenty-eight kilometers, or about seventeen miles, from the border of the Six Nations reservation, the largest First Nations reserve in Canada. It’s the only reserve in North America with all six tribes of the Iroquois, the names of which I learned by heart in elementary school: Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. The first poem I memorized was by E. Pauline Johnson, also known by her Mohawk name, Tekahionwake, which literally means “double life.”

What I didn’t realize then is that by refusing to speak Tagalog I was enacting my first attempts at translation, making sense of the dislocation I felt as an immigrant daughter translating my parents’ words into a language that symbolized belonging to me, even though I rarely felt like I belonged

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The etymology of translate is from the Old French translater and from Latin’s translatus “carried over”; from trans “across, beyond” and lātus “borne, carried.” A similar notion is behind the Old English word it replaced, awendan, from wendan “to turn, direct.” To wend. A verb I associate more with paths or a river, a medium that carries me from one place to another. “Language is migrant,” writes Cecilia Vicuña. “Words move from language to language, from culture to culture, from mouth to mouth. Our bodies are migrants, cells and bacteria are migrants too. Even galaxies migrate.” Even the archipelago of islands my parents emigrated from.

Is translating a way to make me see my own complicity, as a brown woman navigating a white world? I was only able to grasp this after returning to my parents’ country. The incongruency I felt walking on the Palawan beaches, watching tourists lounging on catamarans while villagers, including my grandmother, lived in poverty, was nearly too much to bear. Vicuña: “I see the poet/translator as the person who goes into the darkness, seeking the ‘other’ in ourselves, what we don’t wish to see, as if this act could reveal what the larger world keeps hidden.” After visiting the islands of my ancestors, it was almost a relief for me to return to Manhattan, where I wasn’t as assaulted by guilt over the privilege that my upbringing allowed. I felt complicit, but still like an outsider, disoriented by the otherness I felt in the sanitized niceties of the concert hall, the classroom, the university lounge.

Years after leaving the Canadian town where I grew up, I found myself drawn to literature in translation for the disorientation it made me feel. “Why does the syntax in your fiction sound like translated text? You write as if the original is in a different language and you are translating into English,” one professor said. I loved Thomas Bernhard, Marguerite Duras, Javier Marías, Charles Baudelaire—authors I’d only read in translation. Was it any wonder that my own work sounded like it was translated from something else, even if I wrote in English?

Perhaps it was not the translations of texts themselves that attracted me, but their dislocation, that constant state of feeling awry. Don Mee Choi, author of DMZ Colony, wrote, “I have become intrigued with displaced things—things that are wrong. And translation is in a perpetual state of being wrong.”

As someone who works in different genres—poetry, performance, lyric essay, music—and communicates in multiple languages (French, German, Tagalog, sound) everything I create is at some level translation. The predicament is that my main mode, poetry, famously refuses to explain itself; how can one elucidate that which does not want to be deciphered?

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I turned to other contemporary writers of color, as if reading their words would give me some clues on how to be. I felt seen in the hybrid works of Claudia Rankine, Fred Moten, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who wrote Dictée—a multilingual work that utilizes photos, diagrams, and untranslated sections of French, Latin, and Korean.

“The animating problem of Dictée, and the central trauma of Cha’s life, came from being severed from her home as a child refugee,” writes Ken Chen. Cha translated this dislocation into both her writing and her films. “Cha sutured together her art in the crevasse between the world and a language too deficient to depict it,” writes Chen.

This suturing of art forms was something I could connect to. In my early explorations with art-making, I read found text from acoustic manuals over David Nelson’s improvised trombone loops. I wrote a song cycle that translated Adelbert von Chamisso’s “Frauen-Liebe und Leben” (“A Woman’s Love and Life”) into post-feminist language, as a type of corrective to Chamisso’s sexist nineteenth-century poem. I asked composer Paul Cantelon to write a piece of music that he performed while Salman Rushdie and I recited our own writings on disorientation and memory. These were all attempts to create a hybrid language of music and sound.

Other writers practice forms of translation that meld multiple and variegated formal and aesthetic strategies. Translator-poet-performer Sawako Nakayasu’s Pink Waves assembles lines written in conversation with Amber DiPietro and Denise Leto’s Waveform and Adam Pendleton’s Black Dada Reader, which is itself a synthesis of various texts. Nakayasu wrote the book in the presence of an audience in a three-day durational performance. David Naimon, in an interview with Nakayasu, said “it’s hard to know where the different elements of writing begin and end for you. When is something writing versus translation, translation versus performance, performance versus writing?” Naimon also said that the text calls into question “the notion of originality, or what creativity is, of what performativity is, and what is and isn’t translation.” When I read Pink Waves, there is a polyvocality breaking through its lines, a layering of narratives: “collimation dreams of narrowing waves/the consolidation of my particulate odds.” Nakayasu’s text defines its own qualities through its oscillating movement:

previous utterance catches in the memory like death

closer to the range, the table, the unrepentant tongue

English utters a line for the dead
—From “Pink Waves”

In Nakayasu’s projects—such as “Insect Country,” an exploration of a life lived by insects and translated into dance choreography, performance, and improvisational scores; and “Open Poetry Studio,” when Nakayasu stayed in a gallery for two days and did nothing but write poems—the endeavors of poetics, performance, and translation are not separate; the genres deliquesce into hybrid forms.

In our world of blurred boundaries, as humanities departments are being morphed into media studies programs and hybrid labs, translation between mediums becomes a different kind of navigation: converting lyric into data, creations into content, decoding the greatest symphonies into sound bytes. But what does that mean for the poet, the infamous transcriber of desires?

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Walter Benjamin: “The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original.” While reading Lao Yang’s Pee Poems, translated by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, I was struck by the spatial echo made manifest by seeing the Chinese characters beside the English. I was drawn to the simplicity of the lyrics, untitled pointillistic clusters of text on the white page:

道別之後
我獨自回家
身後悄悄跟著詩

After saying goodbye
I return home alone
Following quietly behind me is the poem
—From “Pee Poems” by Lao Yang, tr. by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu

Lao Yang was born in Northeastern China and founded one of the country’s first independent advocacy spaces dedicated to experimental music and sound art, so his translation between genres is manifold. As a musician and poet, I’ve long pondered conversations across art forms, the slippages that occur along the way. Is translation across languages and genres an attempt at connection and forging kinship across borders? As Ludwig Wittgenstein asked in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, are the limits of language also the limits of one’s world? In “Culture and Value,” he also wrote that “what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.” Wittgenstein was referring to philosophy, but I believe that the translating that poets enact makes possible a more profound communication that can dissolve both metaphorical and geographic boundaries.

This kinship across borders is what interests me. Xu—who was born in Shanghai and immigrated to Chicago at the age of eight—said that she collaborated with Edwards on the translations because “I stand too close to the language, in the way that everything becomes too literal. I’ve only had to translate from English to Mandarin for my parents.” The idea that one language is too intimate, that its closeness denies translation, moves me. If one translates only for the bodies that birthed them, how difficult, then, is it to translate for a world?

Perhaps that’s why I was drawn to poetry early, as a way to orient myself in a language I could inhabit. Even music, which I played from an early age, didn’t soothe me in a way that words could. My father told me, decades later, “As a child, you were always on stage. But when you weren’t, you were always in the background, writing tiny poems.”

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Learning French as a child, and then German as an adult, opened up new sound worlds, but still, even now, Tagalog is the tongue that I can most easily recognize. But the times I tried speaking it, when I visited the Philippines as an adult, I was mistaken for a foreigner; even a stranger could deduce that it was not my mother tongue. There is a painful incongruence in being able to understand but not speak—a complicated relationship that immigrants have with their lost languages.

I think of Paul Celan’s late books, Fadensonnen (Fathomsuns), Atemwende (Breathturn), and Lichtzwang (Lightforce), which all practice a tangled syntax, suggesting what translator Ian Fairley describes as “a poetry which has turned against its own lyric powers.” Celan’s late style tended to be a kind of Geheimsprache—a private language whose associations were only fully known to Celan alone. Labeling it Geheimsprache is to recognize that the meaning is not simple to locate. The place from which it emanates, Heim, the home, is Geheim—a secret. “The location is held, if not withheld”—says Fairley in his introduction to Fadensonnen—“in parenthesis.” What is this parenthesis? My student, whose parents emigrated from Liberia before she was born, said that her poetry stems from this unknown, the unspoken of. “I feel a placelessness,” she said.

It’s a placelessness Celan could understand. He was born in Czernowitz, former capital of Bukovina, which was part of the Austrian empire until 1918; by the time of his birth in 1920 it was absorbed by Romania and is now part of Ukraine. A city passing hands. Celan—who was imprisoned in a series of forced labor camps between 1942 and 1944, who lost both parents in concentration camps, who spoke over half a dozen languages—wrote mostly in German. Celan—the refugee, the Jewish survivor living in France—harbored an existential estrangement from the language of his oppressors and created his own Geheimsprache, which translator Pierre Joris describes as a “dismantling and rewelding” of German.

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Kwame Dawes tells a story about a panel discussion on poetry and translation. A writer expresses her frustration about Russian poetry in translation, since taking it out of its original context affects the rhyme and meter. “How would you like to be kissed through a curtain?” Someone answers, “Better than not kissing at all.”

What attracts me to translation is its mediated, flawed nature, its human-ness. I tell my students that poetry is about deep listening. The poem is both a medium and a material/object of attention-making. The role of any poet is as a transcriber and a translator, wending through language’s essence. Poetry is for the immigrant child making their way across fractured landscapes, the artist forging trails into the unknown, the migrants traversing borders into an unfamiliar world. This wending, like Celan’s welding of words, brings us to the languagelessness of breath: pure poetry. Like kissing through a curtain and then lifting the veil to open up a new path.