Response

By addressing the linkage of translation and migration, translation studies comes up against a crisis.1 It is the crisis of a disciplinary knowledge that, in facing the challenge of a newly resurrected historical praxis, becomes aware of the ideological limits immanent to its institutional – that is, academic – containment. At least, there is an opportunity for translation studies to become aware of those limits. In her excellent inquiry on the cross-links between translation and migration, Loredana Polezzi clearly recognizes that opportunity, and even embraces it, urging us to shift our attention from an abstract notion of migration or an impersonal image of “the migrant” to migrants as agents of translation and to concrete sites of migrant translation and self-translation. She believes that this will serve as an antidote for an overly metaphorical use of the idea of translation – but this is too modest a belief. The shift she proposes could, in fact, render redundant the very contradiction between “translation proper” – that is, translation as a primarily linguistic activity – and its potentially infinite metaphorical (mis)use, the Scylla and Charybdis between which it has become almost impossible to navigate today's debates on translation. That is why we are well advised to follow Polezzi's hint. She also suggests one possible way to realize it, namely by turning our attention to contemporary artistic production that focuses on the experience of migration. In what follows, I will accept this suggestion, and change the perspective from a site of academic knowledge production on translation and migration – a Department of Italian in British academia, where Polezzi is based – to Italy as a site where migration and translation merge in practice. There is an artwork which can help in this task: the 2006 video installation Detour. One Particular Sunday by Alexander Vaindorf, himself a migrant from Russia to Sweden. The film depicts the life of female migrants from the former Soviet Union who work as housekeepers in Rome, mostly illegally, often locked up like slaves in the houses of Italian families. From the stories of these women we discover a curious detail regarding their command of Italian: those who don't speak the language, or speak it very badly, start to work in the south of the country, where there are “low wages, bad conditions” but where “language isn't important”. As they improve their Italian, they move northwards, where conditions are better and wages higher.

First, let us note that this story does not match the common picture of migrants who come from abroad to enter a homogeneous space of the “host” country. Instead, here they join another migrant movement, one that follows a domestic migration route from south to north. But the meaning of this route is far more than the internal Italian division. At stake is, very generally, the global divide between the poor and the rich, arbitrarily located in the respective time-spaces of “the south” and “the north”. This divide, which can be traced everywhere on the globe, also marks the gap that modern global capitalism, unable to close it, has made a precondition for survival and expansion. But the divide discloses, too, a never-healed fracture along which political systems in crisis, as is the case for the EU today, threaten to break apart. Finally, this same divide casts light on a usually ignored aspect of migration. Beyond the picture of the migrant as a figure of transformation, constantly struggling with all sorts of (mostly cultural) differences, there is a moment of continuity, repetition and imitation: yes, coming to Italy, these women must radically change their “whole way of life” (see Williams 1958/1989, 4), but only to remain on the same track that they embarked upon in the former Soviet Union: the “poor-to-rich route”. And when they finally arrive, they join, as fellows and followers, the community of Italian migrants whose historically facilitated route they begin to repeat.

In the trope of a transformation performed through repetition and imitation, in establishing continuity in discontinuous contexts, in carrying sameness across differences, migration necessarily evokes an idea of translation that blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, past and current, “here” and “there” … But stop, isn't this “too metaphorical a use of the idea of translation”?

Indeed. We should, therefore, ask instead where “translation proper”, in its conventional sense of communication of meaning from one language to another (beyond the difference of the written and the spoken), occur on the migrants’ way to the North?

Curiously, at the point of departure – I will call it the Palermo level – where the migrant has no command of Italian, translation proper in this sense, although badly needed, actually does not take place, for here “the language isn't important”. Nor does it take place at the end of the route, for in the North – let's call it the Milan level – a migrant is supposed to have full command of the language, which makes translation dispensable.

If at all, such translation occurs at the institutional threshold – comprised also of the institution of national language – of the host country that structurally and linguistically defines the boundary between the private and the public, the backbone of the modern liberal democratic state. It takes place at the moment when the migrant's existence, otherwise obscured, surfaces publicly, almost always as a traumatic encounter – an encounter not with the linguistically or culturally foreign, but with what makes the migrants politically foreign, in other words with the apparatus of the nation state that blocks migrants’ access to the sphere of political equality and cuts them off from the most important social and political rights. When translation as an apparently purely linguistic activity occurs, then, migrants do not experience it as a means of communication, but rather as an instrument of political exclusion and control.

The linguistic transparency and comprehensibility that such a translation claims to bring about in fact masks an opacity that is inseparable from the precarious nature of migrants’ life and working conditions – concretely, their everyday struggle with incomprehensibility in social and labour relations, and the experience of a systematically distorted communication which no translation can reverse into perfect transparency. This is because the translation that takes place here is not simply a means to facilitate communication and, as such, an auxiliary to migrants’ labour; rather, it is itself this labour. Hence, the concept of translation as primarily linguistic activity actually obscures not simply a true labour of translation but, above all, translation as labour. However, in our case there is proof of the existence of translation as labour: the materialistically real and financially measurable difference between working conditions and migrant wages in Palermo and Milan. The claim that, at the Palermo level, “the language isn't important” in practice means a “do-it-yourself translation”, the outsourcing of the translation labour. At stake is a translation without “proper translators” that takes place as an intrinsic part of the social praxis of migrant labour. It is more than a self-translation, for it involves the whole social context of migrants’ life and work, including fellow migrants and Italian employers. And it operates at different levels of linguistic skill, communicative and cultural competence, and educational background. It is a translation in which there is no clear divide between comprehensibility and incomprehensibility, transparency and opacity, for it is as precarious as the conditions of migrants’ life and work. Finally, it seems to lack the quality of mediation and the capacity to generate any middle ground. If it nevertheless manages to create some sort of cultural hybridity, there is always a sword of binary division hanging over the new “cultural in-betweenness”, a sword whose very blade is made of translation as something claimed to be a purely linguistic activity and that threatens at any moment to reverse this hybridity, cutting it in two, into foreign and domestic, inside and outside, what is legal and what is illegal, and so on. This is not the sword that – as in the well-known joke that Dionysius of Syracuse, not far from today's Palermo, played on Damocles – hangs above those sitting on the throne. In our case, it hangs above the heads of the impoverished and powerless, the underdogs of the South whom Gramsci once called subaltern and who now cannot speak (Italian), which is why they must translate.

Yet this particular merging of migration and translation is highly contradictory. A translation that appears abstractly, as the very vehicle moving migrants along their route and therefore operating as a metaphor for migration itself, in fact discloses the concrete praxis of migrants’ social life and work. On the other hand, a translation that is understood as a concrete linguistic activity actually determines, in a profoundly metaphorical way, both the teleology and the narrative structure of the praxis of migration. Of course, this latter is a historically and normatively particular understanding of translation, one based on a presupposed mono- and homolinguality of the given social space. It defines the migrant route by its start in Palermo, where migrants occupy the linguistic outside of the society in which they work and live, an outside that automatically implies political exclusion, and by its teleological end in Milan, where this outside is sublated into a homogenous linguistic space that coincides with the nation state's society and allows for political inclusion. Within this teleological construction, the journey from Palermo to Milan is narratively structured as a process of Bildung that, for the migrants, takes the shape of a Hegelian struggle for recognition: enslaved by their Italian masters, they rely on self-creation through labour – a labour that obviously presupposes and in part consists of translation – and this finally brings about the recognition of their equality with the masters. At the Milan level, then, the contradiction between migrants and their Italian masters is finally dissolved. The migrant as such disappears, sublated in the figure of the Italian citizen. In dialectical terms: the subject has happily reappropriated its alienated substance, freedom. Game over!

Curiously, this teleological construction, structured by the conventional notion of translation as a primarily linguistic activity, seems actually to exclude that very linguistic translation. If at the beginning of the route it is needed, but does not occur because “the language isn't important”, at the end of the route, where the language becomes crucially important, it is no longer needed. Are we not then left with only a metaphor of translation?

In fact, the question of when exactly, on the teleological route from Palermo to Milan, the “translation proper” (apart from the “institutional translation”) actually turns into a metaphor recalls the well-known paradox of the heap: the removal of precisely which grain from a heap of sand makes this heap a non-heap? This is why the question of when exactly in the praxis of his or her social life and labour a migrant, conceived of as an abstract figure of a purely linguistic translation – as a representative of a foreign, homogeneous linguistic community that addresses the equally homogenous host one and is addressed by it as such – becomes a concrete social being, an exploited labour force, a struggling political agency or a subject of cultural creativity, is a sophism.

Not unlike the notion of heap, translation is a vague term. It refers to a section of a continuum that cannot be clearly determined, and therefore involves a grey zone of meaning in which translation always becomes “more than translation itself”. Consequently, efforts to eliminate this vagueness will be in vain, for it is not only intrinsic to the so-called natural languages, but is what every true translation struggles, works and lives with. A metaphorical use of “translation” doesn't begin at an outer boundary of its purely linguistic use. It is present from the very beginning. As our case has shown, it is precisely the idea of translation as a purely linguistic activity that is too abstract a metaphor to deal with the concrete social praxis of both migration and translation.

Much of the particular trouble with migration is that it so openly challenges democratic legitimation of existing political systems. It is, so to speak, charged with political agonism. In their “cultural” identification with the host community, Vaindorf's migrants in Rome directly translate local cultural heritage, specifically that of Ancient Rome, into their own class consciousness: “But who we are? The lowest social class, as low as you can get. And others … what are we for them? Slaves. […] Slaves were just tools, they were just to be used, and to throw away” (Vaindorf 2006). Where once there were “tools that speak” there are now “tools that translate”. Without any assistance by academically trained, “proper” translators, these migrants have obviously managed to translate themselves from “identity-bearing animals” into these political ones. This is where translation theory can learn from them. It cannot succeed as knowledge production on migration unless it recognizes migration as knowledge production on translation.

Notes

1. This response is substantially influenced by Sakai (1997).