Response

Loredana Polezzi deserves credit for initiating a fertile and frank discussion which now enters a third and final round of critical and productive responses. In so doing, she has waded into the debate on the legitimization of translation studies which has now been raging for several years and for which the relationship between translation and migration constitutes a focal point. Polezzi sees her contribution as “a partial response to negative models of translation as a form of control over linguistic heterogeneity”. The claim made at the beginning of her paper and to which she repeatedly returns – namely, that translation is not necessarily at the service of monolingual speakers and readers – is rephrased at its conclusion as an opposition between two ways of understanding, and practicing, translation: “Translation […] as part of a wider range of practices which sustain the multiplicity of languages and of voices” as practiced, according to Polezzi, by migrants (albeit not exclusively by migrants); and translation as “an isolated, linear, controllable and controlled process, firmly in the hands of a recognizable elite of intellectuals […,] an instrument of containment”. This opposition is of course intentionally overstated and provocative; Polezzi herself softens it by also speaking of self-translators as “another elite group” who, however, possess only “limited control over who will be reached by their words”. An unambiguous correlation of these two conceptions of translation with migrants on the one hand and intellectual elites on the other is not compelling: where do we, the participants in this debate, locate ourselves within this opposition? Not all of us have a migratory background, and those who do are no longer (or have never been) part of the category of disadvantaged migrants about which Boris Buden writes and which Polezzi primarily has in mind. We now occupy positions as scholars, in some cases also as translators and interpreters, within the academic target culture and belong in one way or another to an intellectual elite of “in-between spaces”, as Şebnem Bahadır emphatically asserts; we obviously do not (intend to) conceive of, and practice, translation as containment – although I wonder when translation studies will enter into the era of the postmonolingual condition that Yasemin Yildiz endorses, with translation studies journals too outgrowing the monolingual. And I also wonder whether the blind spot caused by the failure to articulate one's own space of enunciation might yet become evident to some of us through Bahadır's reference to the enduring traces of migration.

Regarding the relation between migrant writing and self-translation, I agree with both Leslie A. Adelson and Bahadır who draw attention to the dangers inherent in a too narrow and at times exoticizing perception of migrant writing as an “experiential project of authorial expression” and who insist on the necessity of taking more fully into account “the aestheticized use of translational processes and of translation as a narrative technique”. When returning at this point to Polezzi's bold and metaphorical phrasing – “Who will decide who can self-translate (and initiate contagion) and who needs to be translated or even silenced (and therefore contained)?” – a number of specific questions immediately arise: how is the reader inscribed in literature written in a host language? Do even migrant authors who write in their first language have in mind from the outset the target-culture audience, and thus translation? Does this determine their style of writing, and, if so, how?1 How is migrant writing positioned within the target culture's literary field? Who publishes, and who reads, migrant writing and multilingual writing?2 Which possibilities are provided by the internet in this context, and to what degree are they embraced? And, last but not least, what translation strategies – or, to rephrase in order to take up and qualify the opposition at the center of Polezzi's question – what translation tactics 3 are used by authors in their capacity as self-translators?

I would like to point out the risk of hastily limiting migrant writing to that concerned thematically with migrant experience by highlighting the cases of two Argentine authors, Laura Alcoba and Adrián Bravi. Alcoba and her parents went into exile to France in the 1970s; Bravi has lived in Italy since the mid-1980s. The novels to which I here refer fictionalize painful experiences in Argentina in relation to the Falklands/Malvinas War (Bravi) and to persecution under the dictatorship (Alcoba). Both authors chose to write in their host language, as it granted them a distance to their experiences without which they could not have approached and dealt with their subject matter. While Alcoba's book, Manèges, has since been translated into Argentine Spanish (albeit not by her), Bravi's novel Sud 1982 still awaits translation, its author unwilling to perform this task himself. Both authors “dwell in the new language”, to use Lakhous's phrasing (as cited by Rita Wilson), but they do not write about it. Yildiz calls attention to the danger of referring migrants “back to another place as well as another language” and of denying them “presence” by disregarding their multilingual practice; focusing exclusively on the topic of migration in their works also runs the risk of confining them to their migrant identity.

Polezzi's third core theme, the biopolitics of language, has been taken up less explicitly in the responses and in depth by only Buden and Yildiz. For me, Yildiz's paper offers a very stimulating way of thinking further about the relation between translation and migration by focusing on the difference between “translational acts and (other) multilingual practices” and by introducing the already mentioned term “postmonolingual condition”. By differentiating between oral and written performances and taking into account the accent as “audible migration background”, Yildiz also illustrates the limitations of Buden's claim that “[t]he migrant as such disappears, sublated in the figure of the […] citizen”. The migrants-turned-citizens may obtain new passports but retain their accents, which signify their multilingualism and thus their migration backgrounds – and this is only one among many traces of their hybrid identities; Anette Svensson states in this context that “the need for translation continues”. By suggesting that migrants are translators in both directions, she too opens up new avenues of debate. In the texts Svensson analyzes, “[p]ower is assigned those who are allowed and able to carry out a reciprocal exchange of cultural knowledge” (emphasis mine). This claim refers to characters in migration novels but holds true for multilingual migrants as well – with regard to not only cultural translation, but also translation proper. Migrants performing self-translation in the host language can of course also translate into their first language, which is why they often work as interpreters – especially community interpreters. Bahadır has extensively studied this aspect of the relation between translation and migration (cf. Bahadır 1998, 2010, 2011), which is obviously important in the context of the biopolitics of language.

In spring 2004, while finalizing a volume of essays on the history of literary translation in Latin America, I met Doris Sommer (then on a lecture tour in Germany). When I spoke about the book project, her reaction was one of mild annoyance and, as a sort of antidote to my enthusiasm, she handed me a copy of her latest book, Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. When reading this in a bid to make sense of her reaction, I quickly came to the realization that Sommer conceptualized translation first and foremost as translation into English and as a tool for maintaining anglophone monolingualism in the US: “More than one language is a supplement, not a deficiency” (xi), she writes at the very start of her book. Sommer criticized translation as a process leading to the eradication of bilingualism – to be precise, Latino/a bilingualism in the US – in support of the predominance of the English language. While she viewed translation into English as containment, translation in colonial and postcolonial contexts was for me a creative and in part subversive process through which “original” cultural artifacts of the center are appropriated by the periphery. The point here is not to pit translation and multilingualism against one another, but to assess their interrelatedness. Multilingualism is thought to serve the task of translation as a matter of course, but not vice versa. Translation at the service of multilingualism is translation in different directions and into different languages; it is translation that valorizes and makes visible multilingualism and that contributes to the preservation and promotion of diversity. To conceptualize translation at the service of multilingualism of course necessitates an examination of the conditions under which translation studies may evolve in the future. (Translated from the German by Sebastian Schneider)

Note on contributor

Andrea Pagni was born in Argentina, where she studied at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and is currently Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg in Germany. She is the author of Post/Koloniale Reisen (1999), a book about nineteenth-century travel literature between Argentina and France; editor of América Latina, espacio de traducciones (2004); and co-editor (with Gertrudis Payàs and Patricia Willson) of Traductores y traducciones en la historia cultural de América Latina (2011). Her research focuses on the history of translation in Latin America and on travel writing, as well as on the relation between travel and translation. She is a member of the editorial board for Iberoamericana.

Notes

1. The author Antonio Skármeta, then living in exile in Berlin, told me in an interview that he still wrote in Chilean Spanish but with an eye toward translation, resulting in an intentional neutralization of his mother tongue (cf. Pagni 1986).

2. For a study of these questions primarily within a US-American context, see Brian Lennon (2010).

3. For the difference between tactics and strategies, cf. Michel de Certeau (1990).