Response

Translation and migration as designations for social actions and the processes of constructing culture seem to be experiencing inflationary use. They are currently celebrated as favourite concepts for articulating various postmodern figures of thought, not only in translation studies or migration studies but in many other areas of research. When the notions of translation and migration are paired, and when the translator and the migrant are posited as sharing the same rehabilitation within new social, cultural and political structures that no longer seem to have centres or fixed boundaries, it is tempting to hail them as the ideal combination of terms to describe movements of transfer, transgression, transmission and the like, on different levels and in both theory and praxis. For Loredana Polezzi, the driving force behind the deliberations on migration within translation studies is the urge to question the “linear notion of translation” (which also implies questioning the boundaries and the teleological relationship between original and translation), the urge “to broaden the notion of translation” and to confront the fuzziness of the contours, the fluidity of the contents, of translation and original.

Within this framework, Polezzi finds the relationship between translation and migration a fascinating allegory to work with. She is absolutely right, as is sufficiently demonstrated by Gisella Vorderobermeier and Michaela Wolf's recent volume on language, transculturality and cultural translation in the context of migration (2008), where language and hence translation reveals itself as the crucial site of struggles around cultural encounters. However, at the very moment of broadening and fraying the edges of the concept of translation (in this case by bringing it close to migration), our control over the borders of the term is lost. To be sure, I would be the last to decry a blurring of borders and boundaries (see Bahadır 1998), yet there are fair grounds for translation scholars’ cautions: our enthusiasm for the “sociologization” and “politicization” of translational acts and actors may cause us to forget the existence of “translation proper”, the tedious and hard labour on and with texts. Dilek Dizdar (2009), for example, welcomes the opening up of the concept of translation, but expresses an important caveat: it is vital to keep sight of the complexity, productivity and contingency of translation in the narrower sense. Dizdar calls on us to reread our own roots and to reflect on translation proper, rejecting the frequent assumption in other disciplines that it is a restricted or merely mechanical act.

If Dizdar argues for closer theoretical ties between the translation metaphor and “translation proper”, Polezzi notes that in the specific case of translation as a metaphor for migration, a “far too metaphorical use” can be avoided by concentrating on the actual, flesh-and-blood migrant. In Polezzi's analysis, the translational character of each migrant life includes instances of being translated or being forced to translate in everyday contexts, so that the polysemy of migrant idioms and pluricultural migrant environments are reduced or obliterated for the sake of integrating (if not assimilating) them into a monolingual majority society. The more idealizing approach to these translational-migrating identities implies breaking with the binary relationship between original/source text and translation/target text and with the linearity of whatever it is that flows when a translation happens.

Polezzi also dwells on migrant writers as self-translators, tracing “non-linear processes of translation” in the literature of authors who write in the language of their “hosts” against the background of migration experiences. She depicts migration processes as the source of creativity, and autobiographical experience as somehow propelling this form of textual creation. Yet setting the focus on autobiography, social and political frameworks, and experiences of deterritorialization as the determining characteristics of migrant writing seems too essentializing, and pushes this literature into a niche, exoticizing it and cherishing the strangeness of self-translational creations. It would also be possible to approach this hybrid literature from a perspective that is more inclusive and integrative. Thus, Dizdar (2011) suggests that such writing is based on translational moments, and although, like Polezzi, she thinks that autobiography plays a role, it is not the concrete translational life experience that leads to a certain form of writing, but rather the aestheticized use of translational processes and of translation as a narrative technique. Constant changes of perspective, pervasive and explicit metalingual commentaries and reflections on language, interlingual and intercultural transfer – in short, playing with the borders and locations of perspectives, idioms, cultures and identities – might be regarded as the characteristics of migrant writing. Polezzi is right to state that literary treatment of the topic of translation (for example through authors translating their own works) does not really help in terms of the survival and establishment of the migrant, the hybrid, the stranger. It leaves the political and ethical difficulties of migration unchanged.

It is here that a misunderstanding frequently occurs: the connection between translation and migration most often leads to mixing the spheres of metaphor, allegory, thus theory and literature, on the one hand, and “real life”, the “empirical field”, political, social or cultural actions and activism, on the other. Addressing this problem in 1998, I tried to trace out the very specific parallels between the figure of the translator and that of the migrant, as well as the overlaps between the two roles (Bahadır 1998). At that time, migration as a trope had only just started to attract interest in translation studies – mainly via the field of community interpreting, which was then still highly marginalized. My sources of inspiration were Bhabha and Bauman, Hall and Simmel. Polezzi, too, refers to Bauman's vision of the “interpreter as the new protagonist of our times”. Bauman notes the preference for mediation over legislation in our postmodern era, in which pluralism determines our world and demands communication and mobility of everyone at every stage of his/her existence. In this way, he provides us with relevant models of postmodern lives, helping us explain how migration/translation happens and what migrants/translators do as they intrude into, perturb, contaminate and thus continually change societies. Yet Bauman's use of the metaphor of the interpreter in Interpreters and Legislators (1987) is based on the elitist intellectual equipping himself with interpretation (rather than interpreting) skills. I would argue that two other forms of postmodern migrant identities often reflected upon by Bauman are more appropriate as an allegory for translators. The first is the “stranger” (see Bauman 1991, based on Simmel's concept of der Fremde). The second is the “pariah” who becomes “parvenu” (see Bauman 1997). As I have written elsewhere on the translator's and especially the interpreter's identity and location in terms of the Simmelian stranger (see Bahadır 1998, 2007), I would now like to take Polezzi's line of thought further by turning to the ambivalent and tension-filled relationship between pariah and parvenu.

The transition from pariah to parvenu highlights important traits of the career of the stigmatized, passive, feared and fearful migrant/translator towards becoming a politically visible, and up to a certain point even socially acknowledged, active and conscious one, who nevertheless continues to bear the marks of the pariah. Bauman's metonymous use of the designation “pariah” refers to those who hoped modernity would enable them to lead a life far from discrimination, separation and segregation. The opposite occurs: they are dispersed and crushed under the wheels of modernity's progression – but still, and somehow miraculously, survive. In this context Bauman often uses expressions associated with impurity. The pariahs resist all ordering mechanisms and purifying forces; they are misfits, impure, hybrid, and fall through the grid of modernism's regulation and total organization. They are those who arrive late and try to adapt but are always forced to live with the burden of not being original, of coming from outside yet striving to be an insider. As I mentioned above, Bauman also applies the concept of the “stranger” to depict this state of secondariness and belatedness. For most modern Western civilizations, the pariahs are the migrants (including all types of migrating human beings); and if the migrant is translator, then the translator too can be investigated as one of our era's many incarnations of the pariah. The pariah has to work hard to look like the insiders, the natives, and to be a success story of integration, if not assimilation. This success story, in turn, is what makes the pariah into a parvenu, the externally presentable shape of the pariah. But actually it is only a question of appearance: it is “as if” the pariah has become parvenu. The pariah-translator tries – through modernization, integration, professionalization, becoming a visible and audible agent – to wash away the stain of coming late to the interaction (intruding, as the stranger always does), yet s/he never really manages to do so completely. A trace will always remain. This is the dilemma of any process of migration and translation.

Polezzi ends her paper with the idea that “translation as an act of witnessing” can be seen as a means to resist the “dehumanizing nature of contemporary power and its attempts at containment”. This is true. But it is equally true that translation can also be used, and is extensively used, to dehumanize, to contain, to assimilate and to silence the voices of witnesses. It would be naive to believe that this imperializing form of translation, an important stake in colonial or dictatorial regimes, is now a thing of the past. Neither translation nor migration are naturally emancipatory forces that bring about better times or conditions. Bauman depicts postmodern societies’ understanding of strangers, migrants, outcasts, pariahs as dirt. Of course we, the postmodern translation scholars, reread that dirt as a productively destabilizing force, disturbing oppressive ordering mechanisms. Dirt helps to resist overly hygienic purification movements. Translation helps to resist the homogenization and monologization that are forms of purification. And migration helps to show that nobody is original, nobody is “pure”. But what about those migrant children who long to be like the monolingual child in their neighbourhood, to be thought of as having just one cultural identity and one language? It is a long journey from being called a semilingual, deficient migrant child to being hailed as a multicultural intellectual man or woman of letters, happily living in a sphere of rootlessness and blurred borders, in in-between spaces. Even when we arrive at this state of in-betweenness, the traces remain – and perhaps the presence of such traces is precisely the shared ground of translation and migration.