The Relocation of Culture: Translations, Migrations, Borders 9781501365225, 9781501365218, 9781501365256, 9781501365249

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The Relocation of Culture

Literatures, Cultures, Translation Literatures, Cultures, Translation presents books that engage central issues in translation studies such as history, politics, and gender in and of literary translation, as well as books that open new avenues for study. Volumes in the series follow two main strands of inquiry: one strand brings a wider context to translation through an interdisciplinary interrogation, while the other hones in on the history and politics of the translation of seminal works in literary and intellectual history. Series Editors Brian James Baer, Kent State University, USA Michelle Woods, The State University of New York, New Paltz, USA Editorial Board Paul Bandia, Concordia University, Canada, and Harvard University, USA Susan Bassnett, Warwick University, UK Leo Tak-hung Chan, Guangxi University, Hong Kong, China Michael Cronin, Dublin City University, Republic of Ireland Edwin Gentzler, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA Carol Maier, Kent State University, USA Denise Merkle, Moncton University, Canada Michaela Wolf, University of Graz, Austria Volumes in the Series Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature by Brian James Baer Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps edited by Michaela Wolf Exorcising Translation: Towards an Intercivilizational Turn by Douglas Robinson Literary Translation and the Making of Originals by Karen Emmerich The Translator on Stage by Geraldine Brodie Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address by Douglas Robinson Western Theory in East Asian Contexts: Translation and Translingual Writing by Leo Tak-hung Chan The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction by Heather Cleary The Relocation of Culture: Translations, Migrations, Borders by Simona Bertacco and Nicoletta Vallorani

The Relocation of Culture Translations, Migrations, Borders Simona Bertacco and Nicoletta Vallorani Foreword by Homi K. Bhabha

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Simona Bertacco and Nicoletta Vallorani, 2021 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xviii–xx constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover photograph © Gaia De Luca All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6522-5 PB: 978-1-5013-6521-8 ePDF: 978-1-5013-6524-9 eBook: 978-1-5013-6523-2 Series: Literatures, Cultures, Translation Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This is to our students, in both continents, because they helped us write this book, without realizing it. And to Antonietta, the lady and the tomboy, who did not see the end of this work, but would have been very proud.

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Contents List of Figures Foreword: Translation’s Foreign Relations Homi K. Bhabha Acknowledgments Introduction 0.1 The Location and Relocation of Culture 0.2 Disciplinary Border-Crossings 0.3 Translation as Migration 0.4 Migration as Translation 0.5 Two Authors, One Book

ix x xviii 1 1 5 8 12 15

Part One  Translation as Migration 1

2

Translation and Worldly Knowledge 1.1 Translation as Worldly Knowledge 1.2 Translation as Migration: A New Schema 1.3 A Mediterranean Via Crucis 1.4 Translating Right(s) at Entry Point

21

The Postcolonial Lesson 2.1 Translation, Migration, and Postcolonial Literature 2.2 The Accent in Postcolonial Writing 2.3 Born Creole: A Caribbean Vocabulary for Reading 2.4 Accented Reading

47

21 23 28 39

47 49 51 64

Part Two  Migration as Translation 3

Navigating the Mediterranean Sea 3.1 Mediterranean Blood Ties 3.2 Making Sense of the Unknown 3.3 The “Project of Unforgetting” 3.4 The Issue of Respect

69 69 72 76 81

Contents

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5

The Gaze of Medusa 4.1 “I Don’t Want to Go to Europe” 4.2 Pics and Other Objects 4.3 Familiarizing/Defamiliarizing 4.4 Their Own Gaze Melting Wor(l)ds 5.1 Translation on the Border/Translation as Bordering 5.2 Translation as the Relocation of Culture 5.3 Translation Literacy and Global Citizenship

References Index

87 87 92 100 108 111 111 115 120 122 138

Figures 0.1 The Queer Diasporist’s Facebook Post available at: https://www. facebook.com/queerdiasporist/photos/a.365969260693860/444 355356188583/?type=3&theater 1.1 Emily Jacir, Stazione, 2009. Proposal for public installation located on line 1 Vaporetto stops (Digital Photographs) Arsenale (2008–9) 1.2 Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016. I – ‫توملاب هيلع موكحم عوسي‬/ Jesus is condemned to death. Keys from Palestinian homes. Nakba 1.3 Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016. II – ‫ىلع ةيبيلصلا لماح عوسي‬ ‫ةيبكنم‬/Jesus carries his cross 1.4 Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016. VII –‫تحت انه عقو عوسيلا‬ ‫ةيناثلا ةرملل بيلصلا‬/Jesus fall the second time 1.5 Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016, XIV. Il corpo di Gesù è deposto nel sepolcro/Jesus is laid in the tomb 4.1 Mario Badagliacca, A Pakistani Man at Belgrade Waterfront, Serbia, 2016. Ongoing project: The Game 4.2 Antonello da Messina, Annunciata di Palermo, 1475 (Galleria Regionale della Sicilia, Palermo) 4.3 Francisco de Zurbaràn, Ecce Agnus Dei, 1640 4.4 Rohit Chawla, Portrait of Ai Weiwei, 2016. Project: Artists 4.5 Eduardo Salles, La memoria colectiva es de corto plazo, 2015 4.6 Anonymous Facebook post (October 2015) 5.1 Photograph of pages 80–1 of M. N. Philip’s Zong!, 2008 5.2 From Il Corriere della Sera, June 30, 2017, p. 6

12

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33 34 35 37 93 94 102 103 104 104 117 118

Foreword Translation’s Foreign Relations Homi K. Bhabha

The generous hospitality extended to my work by Simona Bertacco and Nicoletta Vallorani in The Relocation of Culture is an honor and a homecoming. It is an honor to have these engaged and innovative writers pitch their tent adjacent to my texts and establish pathways and passages that lead from one to the other and in diverse directions beyond. Hospitality is not merely an invitation to reside in proximity; it is an obligation to revise one’s ways of being, living, and thinking, side by side, in a spirit of complementation, not completion, to use a concept that plays a crucial role in Walter Benjamin’s remarkable reflections on translation. With this abiding understanding of hospitality there comes an invitation to reenter an edifice of one’s own making in a state of belatedness, as indigene and stranger, both at once. To properly understand the significance of returning home, you have to relearn the languages of domicile and domesticity, as they are rerouted through the wayward and wandering vocabularies of displacement. Without a translational “turn” it becomes difficult to evaluate what it means to locate or relocate—whether you are returning or resettling—because translation is, at once, a test of time and place. Translation as a test of time and place? Yes, I want to take a small risk with Walter Benjamin’s renowned work “The Task of the Translator” in this brief foreword. The afterlife of Benjamin’s essay has been marked by a restless slew of translations, revisions, and interpretations. Its enigmatic utterances have been thoroughly mined, leaving no meaning unturned, no margin redrawn. This excessive activity of translation, provoked by the most original work on translation in our possession, is surely a tribute to the sublime untranslatability of the essay itself. “Untranslatable,” Benjamin explains, “not because meaning weighs on [translations] too heavily, but rather because it attaches to them all too fleetingly” (Rendall 1997, 164). The translator’s task is, indeed, fleeting and fragile. Fleeting because the translator catches the reverberating echo of the original, not its resemblance. And fragile

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because the translator works only with the fragments of the original— be it “language” or “culture”—which can be repurposed and resignified because fragments complement each other but they do not resemble one another. Accompanying the task of translation—listening for the reverberating echo, crafting the fragmented vessel—is the test to which translation is put. Embedded in the meaning of Aufgabe as task—“Aufgabe: a ‘task’ or ‘assignment’ or ‘school exercise’ … a ‘purpose’ or a ‘duty’ (giving yourself up to a higher, trans-individual demand)”1—lies translation’s test. All assignments, school exercises in particular, are tested; a purposeful activity must likewise be tested to see if it lives up to its aspirations and duties. A translational test, however, is not one that you pass or fail; it has nothing to do with philological norms or pedagogical forms dedicated to making progress, or achieving an end in sight: do better next time! follow the work more carefully! stay close to the author’s intentions! Translation doesn’t pass the test of time by catching up with language’s past or recalling the original. No, indeed, Benjamin emphatically argues: “[A] translation proceeds from the original. Not indeed from its life as from its ‘afterlife’ or ‘survival’ [Überleben]” (Rendall, 153). The task of translation lies in its ability to test “this eternal continuing life of the work” and to see if it lives up to the assignment of the afterlife. For the fate and freedom of translation’s afterlife lies “in coming to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other”: But if languages grow in this way until they reach the messianic end of their history, then it is translation that is ignited by the eternal continuing life of the work and the endless revival of languages in order to constantly test this sacred growth of languages, to determine how distant what is hidden within them is from revelation, how close it might become with knowledge of this distance … To say this is of course to admit that translation is merely a preliminary way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other. A dissolution of this foreignness that would not be temporal and preliminary, but rather instantaneous and final, remains out of human reach, or is at least not to be sought directly. (Rendall 157, emphasis added)

I will not venture to do what remains out of human reach. To pursue the messianism of “pure language”—so frequently invoked in commentaries As always, my gratitude to my colleague John Hamilton, my generous and illuminating German philologist and literary guide.

1

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on this essay—is an aspiration too lofty for my temporal and preliminary purposes. Nor does the modest scale of a foreword give me the space to explore Benjamin’s intricate understanding of modes of intentionality that haunt the elusive enunciations of languages, be they natural or national. My selective argument explores what I will refer to as translation’s “foreign relations”—translation as a secular project, a preliminary way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages. The sacred is in no sense alien to the secular; the secular and the sacred are “foreign” to each other, while coexisting in a translational condition of growing kinship. The mission of secularism shares a common fate with the task of translation: both are caught in the trade winds of historical contingency and linguistic flux. The question is, how do we constantly test the secular growth of languages in terms of their foreign relations? Translation does not mirror another language or culture, which would amount to no more than cultural appropriation and linguistic assimilation. In negotiating language’s foreign relations, translation motivates a kinetic movement between languages strange to each other, while setting the course for a “tangential” form of kinship that is adjacent and affiliative rather than mimetic and hierarchical: Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux. Without explicitly naming or substantiating it, Rudolf Pannwitz has characterized the true significance of this freedom …. “Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. Our translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works …. The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.” (Rendall, 163)

The test of translation—Aufgabe—is only partially met by the kinetic convergence of the foreign relation—“a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense.” To pass the test, translation’s “touch” must be intimate and intensive, although its expression

Foreword

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hovers in a temporal realm of transition—“an incomplete form,” a seed yet to sprout, a reality glimpsed only in linguistic life, as Benjamin makes abundantly clear: Thus translation ultimately has as its purpose the expression of the most intimate relationships among languages. Translation cannot possibly reveal or produce this hidden relationship; however, translation can represent this relationship, insofar as it realizes it seminally or intensively. In fact, this representation of the intended object by means of an incomplete form or seed of its production is a very special mode of representation seldom to be encountered in the domain of non-linguistic life. For in analogies and signs non-linguistic life has types of reference other than intensive, that is, anticipatory, intimating realization.—This imagined, inner relationship among languages is, however, a relationship of special convergence. (Rendall, 154)

What counts as intimacy for language’s flourishing foreign relations? The echo-play that ricochets through the essay is one “incomplete form” of an intimate foreign relation: the translation echoes the original “at that one point of sense” where languages touch, and from within the forest of signification, the original language returns a reverberating echo (Rendall, 159). Echo calling to echo via echo. Another seed of intimacy is surely sown in Benjamin’s seminal trope of the vessel of translation: fragile fragments of a broken vessel need to touch each other tangentially, and at one point only, because “in order to be fitted together, [they] must correspond to each other in the tiniest details but need not resemble each other” (Rendall, 161). And again, we marvel at the chiasmatic intimacy by which German is turned into Hindi, Greek, English, “powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.” At these touching points foreign languages and cultures cross each other’s paths of originality (not their national-linguistic “origins” or identities) and the kinetic charge, which is at once intimate and intensive, puts each language “powerfully in movement by the foreign language” (Rendall, 163). In what foreign direction does the powerful movement propel one’s own language? What task awaits the translator when he returns to his language from foreign parts? The more remote the time-travel, the more distant the influence of foreign relations, the more urgent it becomes for the translator to repair homeward:

xiv

Foreword [T]he fundamental error of the translator is that he holds fast to the state in which his own language happens to be rather than allowing it to be put powerfully in movement by the foreign language. (Rendall, 163)2 Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own, he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge. He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. It is not generally realized to what extent this is possible, to what extent any language can be transformed, how language differs from language almost the way dialect differs from dialect; however, this last is true only if one takes language seriously enough, not if one takes it lightly. (Zohn 2007, 81)

The translator returns to find that she is now a partial foreigner who has reached a point of no return. To ensure the survival of the original language and its cultural norms—and let us recall that “a translation proceeds from the original. Not indeed so much from its life as from its ‘afterlife’ or ‘survival’ [Überleben]”—the translator cannot hold fast to the state in which her language happens to be. Resisting the powerful movement of foreign relations condemns language to still life, a living death. Protecting the sovereignty of the national language and the identity of its cultural holism comes at the cost of losing what is unique to linguistic life: the intimate experience of time in transition and meaning in anticipation, relocated across territorial borders and cultural borderlines in search of a kinship of foreign relations. Embodied in the tangential “touches” of language’s foreign relations is a displacement that is nonetheless decisive: fragments fitting together as vessels; tangents lightly touching circles; echoes reverberating in the high forest of language; German discovering its afterlife in Hindi. What are these translational “touches” if not the ontology of language itself: tropes, metaphors, allegories, translation? In the afterlife of language lies its power of secular prophecy that retrieves a past that refuses to die and a future that will not wait to be born. In between these intimations of figurative time, we survive the frailty and freedom of history’s flux by means of the “incomplete forms” made present to us in the domain of linguistic life, which lies “half-way between poetry and doctrine” (Rendall, 160)—to cite Benjamin’s translation of Mallarmé’s poetic invocation. Incomplete forms of linguistic life play a significant part This quotation is a mash-up of Rendall’s and Zohn’s translations of Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator.”

2

Foreword

xv

in the making of historical meaning as history marks time in the present moment. The afterlife of translation makes a salient appearance in Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which owes its broken chronology to a mode of historical understanding that “is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife of that which is understood” (Eiland and McLaughlin 1999, 460). The Arcades Project is the epitome of an incomplete form, a vessel fabricated from archival fragments that “holds water” because it resists the political dogmas and historical determinisms that accompany the marching song of Progress: “as soon as it becomes the signature of historical process as a whole, the concept of progress bespeaks an uncritical hypostatization rather than a critical interrogation” (Eiland and McLaughlin, 478). Incomplete forms, articulated in fragments and dossiers, assemble the body of the Arcades. They are physical and textual openings, breaks in the continuity and chronology of the reading of history and literature, which touch each other lightly to articulate an understanding of history as a practice of translation. The present moment of the translational trope—touching, anticipating, intimating—is neither simply the transmission of history’s past nor its revision for the future. The “now,” enunciated in linguistic life in the imaginative interests of historical life, is a complex state of the afterlife of language and history. Translation in “non-linguistic life,” I believe, is the critical matrix for understanding Benjamin’s concept of the “historical index,” which is everywhere present in his landmark, late text, “On the Concept of History”: For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time. And indeed this acceding “to legibility” constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time … It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. (Eiland and McLaughlin, 462)

The historical index points us to the “now” of particularity, the “now” of every passing present day, and in this iterative intimation of something that is as-yet to accede “to legibility,” the historical index points like a moving finger to what is transitional and emergent in historical constellations. The urgency of history’s task, like the emergence of translation’s test, does not

xvi

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let the writer’s hand rest: the index finger restlessly points—now … now … now …—trying to catch up with the unfulfilled promise of those incomplete forms of linguistic and nonlinguistic life that it is our task to make legible. Benjamin’s historical index—pointing to an imminent, yet-to-be realized historical legibility—resembles Wittgenstein’s concept of the language game as a form of “pointing” to some incomplete-form in order to access its legibility. History’s index is a movement of historical knowledge that assumes a paradoxical form: it signifies a recognizable knowledge of the material history of the nonlinguistic present, now in the territorial present, while pointing to the incomplete forms of linguistic life signified now in the tropic present. When these “nows” touch each other tangentially, we learn the translational lesson of the historical index: there is a difference between “knowing” one’s history intimately as material existence and learning to “read” its intimations through the incomplete forms of linguistic life. In this sense, knowing one’s history and learning to read its foreign relations are complementary but they are not the same thing—they are determined by different modes of intention. Translation’s test takes place on the cusp between immanent knowing and imminent reading, where truth is charged—guilty or not?—with the task of forming a constellation in which the incomplete forms of linguistic life— truth and beauty, fairness and justice, metaphor and materiality—become the political projects and ethical aspirations we strive to make legible in our nonlinguistic forms of life. “Translation understood as an act of witnessing … is only imaginable through a schema of translation which strives to make the multilingual complexity of the world visible and audible,” Bertacco and Vallorani state in their attempt to turn the trope of translation into a mode of ethical witnessing. My brief foray into the force of translation as a coming to terms with language’s “foreign relations” argues that worldly complexity must result in a form of linguistic complementation. To achieve this purpose, only ever temporal and preliminary, the sovereign nationality of languages and their cultural supremacism must pass the test of translation’s equitable foreign relations. When your own language is put powerfully in movement by a foreign language, then languages echo each other in the way that dialects differ between themselves, complementing one another in recognition, without resemblance. At the critical point where translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, it is empowered to pursue its own course in the freedom of linguistic flux. Listen, as I end, to Valeria Luiselli’s account of the afterlife of language and literature that emerges in the flux of translation’s foreign relations:

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In the parts narrated by a third-person narrator, Elegies for Lost Children, sources are embedded and paraphrased but not quoted or cited. The Elegies are composed by means of a series of allusions to literary works that are about voyages, journeying, migrating, etc. The allusions need not be evident. I’m not interested in intertextuality as an outward, performative gesture but as a method or procedure of composition. The first elegies allude to Ezra Pound’s “Canto I,” which is itself an “allusion” to Homer’s Book XI of the Odyssey—his “Canto I” is a free translation from Latin, and not Greek, into English, following AngloSaxon accentual verse metrics, of Book XI of the Odyssey. Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey, as well as Pound’s “Canto I,” is about journeying/ descending into the underworld. So, in the opening Elegies about the lost children, I reappropriate certain rhythmic cadences as well as imagery and lexicon from Homer/Pound, in order to establish an analogy between migrating and descending into the underworld. I repurpose and recombine words or word-pairings like “swart/night,” “heavy/weeping,” and “stretched/wretched”—all of which derive from lines in “Canto I.” (Luiselli 2019, 380)

Acknowledgments We began this book in 2016, a few days after the Brexit Referendum and in a moment of international turmoil, specifically connected to the issue of mass migrations. It was conceived as a way of working together, on the grounds of a long-established friendship and collaboration, despite living and teaching in different continents and therefore observing the same events from different vantage points. First and foremost, and with profound gratitude, we want to thank Homi K. Bhabha, whose work has been a constant source of inspiration. Choosing to go back to The Location of Culture as a starting point for our own reflection was certainly ambitious and paralyzing at first, but it also provided a challenge that we felt was needed. Homi Bhabha’s research and teaching were our main reference points through every stage of this project. He then accepted to preface our work, and this is a priceless honor and a shelter for which we will be forever grateful. Emily Jacir and Mario Badagliacca kindly granted permission to use images of their artwork in this book and, for permission to republish a section of Chapter 2, we gratefully acknowledge Small Axe 62 (2020). Our thanks also go to the academic institutions where we work, the Università degli Studi di Milano and the University of Louisville. In different ways, they nourish academic scholarship in the humanities, and we hope this support will last. We are very grateful to the Doctoral School in “Studi linguistici, letterari e interculturali” (Linguistic, Literary and Intercultural Studies) at the Università degli Studi di Milano, which granted a visiting professorship and the possibility to work with doctoral students who helped us discuss the issues under exam. We are equally thankful to the Department of Comparative Humanities and the Ph.D. in Humanities at the University of Louisville whose interdisciplinary model of a humanities education has provided the perfect environment in which to envision and carry out this project. Our colleagues, on both sides of the Atlantic, have always been supportive, and we wish to thank, in particular, Pamela Beattie, Lisa Björkman, Alessandra Di Maio, Karl Swinehart, Patrick Heaney, Paolo Caponi, Nicoletta Di Ciolla, Cinzia Scarpino, Anna Pasolini, Emanuele Monegato, Laura Scarabelli, and Patricia Hampton for being inspiring interlocutors at various stages of this project as well as for their precious feedback.

Acknowledgments

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Occasions to present our work in progress were provided by seminars, lectures, conferences, and professional meetings that we attended together and individually. We wish to thank AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica [Italian Association of English Studies]) for hosting— as a Master class anticipating their Summer School in 2018—a round table on translation and migration (The Good Life: Translation, Worldly Knowledge and the Postcolonial Text) involving Simona Bertacco, and for providing plenty of occasions for discussing current theories of translation at the 2019 Summer School (Translated Wor(l)ds: Perspectives, Domains and Directions, June 3–7, 2019). Special thanks go to Loredana Polezzi whose lecture on migration and translation (“The Translational/ Transnational Memory of Translation”) offered an inspiration for this project. A different approach was chosen for the conference CriMiNaRe. Crime, Migration, Narration, Resistance (November 24–25, 2016), which was conceived as an occasion for an interdisciplinary and international discussion on issues of crime and migration. For this we thank the research center CHAIN (Criminal Hero: Archive of In-between Narratives) at the Università degli Studi di Milano. We wish to thank the many colleagues who invited us to present parts of this project at their universities: Jeremy Killian at Coastal Carolina University; Desrine Bogle at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados; and Donna Jo Napoli at Swarthmore College. And also Maria Cecilia Rizzardi at the University of Pisa, Silvia Albertazzi at the University of Bologna, Maria Micaela Coppola at the University of Trento, Serena Guarracino at the University of L’Aquila, Silvia Antosa at the University “Koré” of Enna, and Giulia Despuches at the University of Palermo. To each of these colleagues goes our warmest gratefulness. Lastly, there are some people without whom this book really would not have been written. At Bloomsbury, we owe the hugest debt to Brian Baer and Michelle Woods for their unwavering support for this project from the very beginning, their enthusiasm for the idea of this book, and their serious and generous feedback; to Haaris Naqvi, Amy Martin, Rachel Moore, Rachel Walker and Shanmathi Priya Sampath for their precious help at every stage of the project. We were also very fortunate in the two anonymous reviewers enlisted: their engaged and rigorous comments helped immeasurably in guiding the revision of the manuscript. During the years we have spent studying translation and migration, we noticed that we were often drawing the same conclusions. This may also depend on the fact that we both believe that the humanities can and must change the way we approach and try to solve problems. Therefore, unusual as

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it may be, we are deeply grateful for the way in which each author supported the other. Writing this book has been like playing cat’s cradle in the sense that Donna Haraway, in her Staying with the Trouble, suggests—a sympoiesis waiting to be completed by the readers.

Introduction

A place on the map is also a place in history. —Adrienne Rich, “Notes towards a Politics of Location,” 1984

0.1 The Location and Relocation of Culture This is a book about accents and borders, about people that have accents, and cultures that cross borders. It claims that language, translation, and the humanities are important tools to come to grips with contemporary affairs and to produce new forms of understanding, civility, and citizenship in response to the situations around us. The book deals with translation and migration and with the ways in which the current phenomenon of global migrations has sharply raised the currency of translation—in practical as well as theoretical terms—as an area of study. Instead of seeing translation merely as a movement of meaning across languages, cultures, and borders, we read translation as a relocating act: of meanings and texts but also of people and cultures. As a keyword of today’s global culture, in fact, relocation commonly refers to the redistribution of migrants, but it also describes the cultural and linguistic adjustments that people who move from one form of belonging to another know firsthand. In its current usage, that is, relocation contains both “the contours of inclusion and exclusion” (Inghilleri 2017, 2) and, therefore, needs to be understood in more dynamic and diversified terms than is commonly done. The basic idea of the book is to explore in depth the theoretical and practical nexus of translation and migration, two of the most visible and anxietyproducing keywords of our age, and to use translation as the foundation for a global cultural theory firmly grounded in the humanities—both as creative output and method of scholarship. Thus, we decline translation as migration and vice versa, proposing a close reading of the different schemas implicit in what Brian Baer calls the “fact of translation” (Baer 2020, 140)— or translation proper—and their relation to “the fact” of migration in both political and cultural terms. As Homi Bhabha writes, “The liminality of the

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The Relocation of Culture

migrant experience is no less a transitional phenomenon than a translational one; there is no resolution to it because the two conditions are ambivalently enjoined in the ‘survival’ of migrant life” (Bhabha 2004, 321). Caught between their status as “a problem”—what Benjamin defines “the irresolution, or liminality, of translation” (Benjamin 1968, 75)—and their inability of being totally translatable into the new culture, in fact, migrants today are still “almost the same but not quite” (Bhabha 2004, 123). In the preface to the 2004 Routledge Classic Edition of The Location of Culture, Bhabha looks back on his own theoretical trajectory and takes a step forward with the definition of “a vernacular cosmopolitanism” as a useful concept to rethink the discourses of globalization today. And it is the fiction by the often-criticized Trinidadian author V. S. Naipaul that Bhabha offers as emblematic of the vernacular condition of contemporary planetary life: “Naipaul’s people are vernacular cosmopolitans of a kind, moving inbetween cultural traditions, and revealing hybrid forms of life and art that do not have a prior existence within the discrete world of any single culture and language” (Bhabha 2004, xiii). The implications of this view are such that, on the one hand, we cannot fully understand migration without confronting the multiple translation processes that accompany it—linguistic, cultural, legal, occupational, etc.—and, on the other hand, we cannot fully understand translation if we do not also see the physical and material aspects, beyond the linguistic and textual level, through which it impacts the lives of the “vernacular cosmopolitans” of our times. The book title explicitly pays homage to two texts that taught the current generation of educators and social activists in what, in critical theory, was called the West and now is often referred to as the “epistemological” North (Santos 2018) to begin their work as intellectuals by locating themselves on the world map. Adrienne Rich’s “Notes towards a Politics of Location” (1984) and Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994, 2004) provided a shared vocabulary to talk about culture, identity, and agency through a concrete engagement with the politics of the body, gender, decolonization, and translation. Now that more than a quarter century has elapsed since the first publication of Rich’s and Bhabha’s seminal works, and in a world context where migration has irrefutably become a central issue in the political, cultural, economic, and sociological agenda for countries all over the world, it seems important to resume and engage with the conversation they started and the terms it has produced. It is no coincidence that Bhabha’s 2004 preface finds one of its most effective moments in the close reading of two poems, the first one by Adrienne Rich (Bhabha 2004, xix) and the second one by Prakash Jadhav (Bhabha 2004, xxi): two different artists who strive to find the words to explore porous and complex forms of belonging—whatever the word has

Introduction

3

come to mean—and who both find in the “right to narrate” the first necessary step toward “our national or communal identity in a global world” (Bhabha 2004, xx). We begin, then, with one of the new terms in Bhabha’s cultural lexicon—the third space of cultural translation—a concept that tied together translation, decolonization, and space in a way that made it possible to interpret twentieth-century culture from the vantage point of the postcolony. In the 1990s and after, “cultural translation” became a buzz word, especially within anglophone postcolonial studies, and was both revered and criticized, but it marked, in fact, an important attempt to bring translation into a politically informed discussion about cultural relations and humanistic knowledge in the context of a world heavily marked by the aftermath of colonialism but rarely studied through its lens.1 In What Is Cultural Translation?, Sarah Maitland writes that the fact that cultural translation has given life to such a “vociferous debate augurs well for the future” (Maitland 2017, 82). The question, she claims, “is not how we should go about limiting cultural translation’s use of the interlingual model but to ask why the interlingual model should be used as the foundation for cultural translation in the first instance” (Maitland 2017, 84). Indeed, approaching the critical discussion of migration through translation provides us with a useful vocabulary to study, describe, and come to terms with the complexities of the phenomenon and the direct and indirect ways in which migration, like translation, touches us, both individually and collectively. What has changed since the early 1990s, when the debate around cultural translation first emerged, in fact, is the intensity of the migration flow and the rapid growth in the number of stateless people.2 Quite understandably, these dramatic changes have brought to the forefront of the popular discourse at least two main reactions to the increased global mobility: anxiety and fear. As Moira Inghilleri writes, “Migration as a phenomenon is understood both positively and negatively when associated with invasion, unwanted

For an exhaustive reconstruction of the genealogy of the academic use of the term “cultural translation” and the lively debate it gave rise to, see Sarah Maitland (2017, 59–84). 2 The 2020 UN World Migration Report states that the number of international migrants in June 2019 was estimated to be almost 272 million globally, with nearly two-thirds being labor migrants. The Syrian Arab Republic and Turkey were the origin and host of the largest number of refugees globally, and Canada became the largest refugee resettlement country, resettling more refugees than the United States in 2018. The Philippines had the largest number of new disaster displacements in 2018 (3.8 million). The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was the largest source country of asylum seekers in 2018. Available at https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/wmr_2020.pdf (last accessed: June 7, 2020). 1

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competition, dependence, or unclenched forms of exclusion” (Inghilleri 2017, 16). It has become clear that the local and the global face each other particularly in sites where migration is most visible. Border politics are the hub of today’s efforts at coping with hybridity, and it is precisely on the border that translations occur constantly and in a multiplicity of ways. The theoretical and practical node of translation and migration provides the main axis of study supporting our work; it gives structure to the volume and governs the textual case studies analyzed in order to offer an engaged humanistic model. The complexity of the topic has forced us to approach the discussion on migration and translation through a multidisciplinary perspective and an admittedly diverse, if not eclectic, supporting bibliography. Among the scholars who have explored the migration-translation dyad in recent years, we are particularly indebted to the work of Michael Cronin (2003, 2006), Loredana Polezzi (2012), Edwin Gentzler (2017), and Moira Inghilleri (2017), which will be referenced widely in the following chapters. However, in this book, we also want to focus on language both, as Stuart Hall famously put it, as a “representational system of culture” (Hall, Evans and Nixon 1997, 1), but also, as Moira Inghilleri insightfully adds, as “an active site where the contours of inclusion and exclusion become most visible” (Inghilleri 2017, 2). In our focus on translation, we are not interested in translation as a form of normalization, or “translation from above,” but in translation as a mode of self-articulation and agency, or “translation from below.” Our analysis will therefore include a wide variety of texts—hence a multiplicity of codes—all of them broadly conceivable as communicative events and aimed at articulating difference differently. As new walls are being erected, regulations imposed to contain, prevent, criminalize migration, most visibly in Europe and the United States, the border emerges as a key location where migration and translation overlap and where the role of translation in the migration process can be fully explored through an experiential and ethical lens. Whether geographical, symbolic, or both, the line drawn between one culture/nation/language/ religion and the other still maintains the magic aura of the Conradian edge: once you step over it, you are “translated” into something different from what you used to be. Anticipating what has now come true, in the mid-1990s Bhabha wrote that “[i]t is in this sense that the boundary becomes the place from which something begins its ‘presencing’ in a movement not dissimilar to the ambulant, ambivalent articulation of the beyond that I have drawn out” (Bhabha 2004, 7). The “borderline work of culture” (Bhabha 2004, 10) consists in an endless process of displacement and relocation, where language as a signifying practice holds a key role, both as a tool of empathy and inclusion and as a means of othering and exclusion.

Introduction

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Thus, location, translation, migration, borders are both the abstract notions and the material phenomena that constitute the cornerstones of this book as it studies the practical and humane outcomes of migration and considers the ways in which translation—if taken as a method of knowledge—involves us directly in the process. Since language and emotions interlace in many ways, differences are often difficult to measure or are so deeply intertwined with our culture as to hardly reach the level of critical awareness. In everyday life, we “translate” our feelings about the foreigner—the invader, the criminal, the shadowy enemy—into attitudes and emotional reactions that are instinctual and almost prelinguistic. Language—any language—marks a step forward. It signals awareness and requires a notion of translation that is complex and nuanced if it is to be of use as a tool to decipher the density of the world in which we live.

0.2 Disciplinary Border-Crossings Reading translation through a line of thinking that connects scholars as diverse as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Venuti, Vicente Rafael, Doris Sommer, Gayatri Spivak, Emily Apter, Sherry Simon, Rebecca Walkowitz, Sandro Mezzadra, and Naoki Sakai,3 this book argues that by using translation as a lens on the contemporary global condition and as a mode of thinking and seeing the world, we are engaging in the global humanities, that is to say, in a humanities scholarship that is—in its intentions—not just Eurocentric, Western or Northern, and not just theoretical. Translation, we argue, is the new vocabulary of this scholarship. By bringing together the disciplinary fields of translation studies and literary and cultural studies, with necessary references to postcolonial studies, migration studies, and world literature, we aim at articulating a critical idiom able to bridge the gap between academic discourse and social issues, a theory that, as Adrienne Rich poetically wrote, when it attempts to capture the larger patterns in the world, must retain the “smell” of the things it describes: Theory—the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees— theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects the rain cloud

This list is far from exhaustive, but all the scholars mentioned above share the effort to bring together different disciplinary fields in their work on issues of multilingualism, cultural studies, migration studies, and translation.

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The Relocation of Culture and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn’t smell of the earth, it isn’t good for the earth. (Rich 1984, 213–14)

While each part of this book establishes a dialogue with a specific field, the overall project locates itself firmly in literary and cultural studies and in translation studies, that is, in two disciplinary macro-areas that have known alternate phases of fortune and visibility within the intellectual debate at the turn of the millennium. The institutional and critical positioning of cultural studies is complex and uneven to say the least on the intellectual global map. As Lidia Curti, one of its Italian most vocal representatives, writes, its practitioners are both central and marginal (Curti 1992, 134–53), and as a discursive formation, it finds a (temporary) definition in a project explicitly built to gather multiple discourses resulting from positionalities that are never absolute. These positionalities—springing from what Bhabha called “social agency” (Bhabha 2004, 269)—“can’t be translated intact from one conjuncture to another; they cannot be depended on to remain in the same place” (Hall 1992, 277). The flexibility inbuilt in anglophone cultural studies—in its British moment as well as in its US theoretical and practical inflections—and that results from its many encounters with Marxism, structuralism, semiotics, and poststructuralism, provides the field with an ability to approach the “infinite semiosis of meaning” (Hall 1992, 284) that is currently becoming the most relevant outcome of relocation through migration. Questions surrounding language—as it was for Raymond Williams—continue being central, although the very word language is to be understood in its wider meaning, thus allowing for a consideration of texts, meanings, and cultures as sites of representation and resistance (Hall 1992, 285). The interdisciplinary mandate that was proper to cultural studies from the beginning, the inbuilt attitude to produce connections across different fields of study, and the porosity of its borders allow for a multiplicity of approaches that may prove useful to this project. In particular, Jean-François Lyotard’s distinction between grande histoire and petits récits (1979) and Yuri Lotman’s reflections on the typologies of cultures (Lotman and Uspenskij 2001) easily intertwine with the shared statement of a need for the intellectual (public or academic) to be engaged with the real world. In the process of building a working agenda to approach marginal cultures, cultural studies constantly hybridizes with other contiguous fields (mostly pertaining to the areas of sociology, anthropology, history, and geography) to produce a method aimed at resisting its transformation into a purely speculative theorization while retaining its nature of “site of

Introduction

7

political struggle” (Carrington 2001, 281). In some of Paul Gilroy’s recent reflections—Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) and Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (2010)—cultural studies connects deeply with the mandate of postcolonial studies, while the many reflections on fear and anxiety resulting from the closer contact with the cultural other tend to find their critical shape not only in European cultural studies, but also in American cultural theory, transnational studies, ecocriticism, and world literature. On the other hand, the field of translation studies maintains a focus on our lives in language at the center of the discussion. As Mary Louise Pratt reminds us in a powerful piece about the vulnerability of idioms, “[A]ll languages belong to their speakers in a way they do not belong to everyone else” (Pratt 2016, 246). We can all relate to this aspect of our lives in personal and intimate terms. Making a different language recognizable to our listeners or our readers and struggling with an accent that we wish we could dissimulate are all very common experiences for foreigners and qualify the (inter)language that they speak, a language that—just as the culture it gives voice to—is marked by the process of translation. If we move from the personal to the social level, we are likely to find, as Sandra Berman perceptively writes, that issues of nation, language, and translation have never been “more important or more troubling than they are today” (Berman 2005, 1–2). Information, medical, political, military networks, governmental agencies, and international organizations, such as the UN and the EU, translate constantly for purposes of intelligence, policy, negotiation, or more simply for the dissemination of information. Yet, as a discipline, translation is often overlooked, considered as little more than “a necessary interface” (Berman 2005, 2) and not deeply intertwined with “real world” matters as is the case, instead, for the STEM disciplines: science, technology, engineering, mathematics. According to Berman, the reason behind this is that language and translation belong so fully to what we traditionally think of as the humanities, and the humanities—as the disciplines that study languages, literatures, history, philosophy, the arts, etc.—are taken to be rather “impractical” subjects. A quick look at the New Oxford American Dictionary’s definition of impractical completes the picture: “not adapted for use or action,” “not sensible or realistic,” and of a person “not skilled or interested in practical matters.”4 Thus, the situation exposes a paradox: translation has never been more crucial to the globalized lives we lead, yet it is perceived as lacking practical New Oxford American Dictionary. 3rd edition. Edited by Angus Stevenson and Christine A. Lindberg. New York: Oxford University Press (2010), 2016.

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The Relocation of Culture

value. This is the space of intervention of this book as a project firmly grounded in the conviction that, despite the general perception, matters of language and translation are central to civic life and show the practical side of humanistic training. A border discipline itself, translation studies has produced some of the most cutting-edge work in the humanities over the past fifty years. We need to only mention Lawrence Venuti’s work on the invisibility of translators (1995), Sherry Simon’s work on gender and translation (1996), Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi’s work (1999) on postcolonial translation, Michael Cronin’s work on translation and globalization (2003), Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler’s work on translation and power (2002) to have an idea of the broad range of directions that the field has taken. Indeed, translation has rapidly expanded into a “metaconcept” (Blumczynski 2016, 137) and has been appropriated by adjacent fields such as comparative and world literature (Damrosch 2003; Apter 2006, 2008, 2013; Walkowitz 2015), but also less adjacent ones such as sociology and economics (Sakai and Solomon 2006, Mezzadra 2008), and even science and medicine where labels such as “translational research” and “translational medicine” have gained currency since the 1990s (Rubio 2010).5 Therefore, as a border notion, that is, a notion that defines itself on the border of experiences, cultures, and disciplines, translation is well positioned to capture the nuances of the complex historical phenomenon of current migrations, and trying to define what translation is and where it occurs today has served as a compass in this project.

0.3 Translation as Migration Migration is the historical and social phenomenon this book explores, and translation is our main conceptual tool. More specifically, our project falls under the category of what Anita Starosta calls “accented criticism” to describe a new orientation for humanistic inquiry—within the global university and the globalized world—that sees translation as its compass.

The American National Health Institute defines translational research as follows: “Translational research includes two areas of translation. One is the process of applying discoveries generated during research in the laboratory, and in preclinical studies, to the development of trials and studies in humans. The second area of translation concerns research aimed at enhancing the adoption of best practices in the community” (quoted in Rubio 2010, 471).

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Starosta proposes to use translation “as a lens on the contemporary moment and […] as an irreducible and permanent condition of thinking and reading” (Starosta 2013, 174). In the chapters that follow, we articulate a “translation literacy,” which can be roughly defined as an ability to acknowledge and assess the translational aspects of the world around us. Indeed, by using translation as a mode of reading, we might actually read texts as well as daily news differently; as educators, we might want to make sure that the translations of the texts we use in our syllabi are from the original language and not from another translation; or that the translation is a reliable and respected one; we might consider the where and why of translations, or the impact that individual translators have had on shaping a “global taste” or a field of scholarship, and so on. To give an example of what a translation literacy might look like, we take three fairly recent translation stories: the “renaissance” of John William’s novel Stoner (Akbar 2013), the “Ferrante Fever” (Durzi 2017), and the 2008 retranslation into English of Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). The first case study can be described as the global renaissance of John Williams’s novel Stoner, which was effectively described by Tim Kreiden on the pages of The New Yorker as “the greatest American novel you’ve never heard of ” (Kreiden 2013). Published in 1965, Stoner is a quiet book about ordinary academic life, about a farm boy in Missouri who in 1910, during an undergraduate English class, is left speechless by the emotions stirred in him by literature and who finds in that moment the vocation that will guide him through life. Nothing about the novel or its plot is extraordinary or remarkable, which perhaps explains why it is not considered a major American novel. However, in 2011, the French writer Anna Gavalda—having read it in English for lack of a French translation—decided to translate it, giving the book a brandnew life, an unprecedented visibility, and a new, mostly European and Israeli, circulation. “It was the novel’s sudden success in France in 2011 that alerted other publishers to its possibilities,” writes Julian Barnes in The Guardian, calling it “the must-read novel of 2013” (Barnes 2013). For several months in 2013, in fact, Stoner was the best-selling novel in the Netherlands, Israel, Italy, Spain, and the UK. Barnes notices “a further oddity” about the revival of Stoner: “[I]t seems to be a purely European (and Israeli) phenomenon” (Barnes 2013), not started in the United States, where the book was from, but that led to its new and successful American edition as a Vintage Classic in 2012. A similar story where the translation, even though not belated as in Stoner’s case, drives the success of a book outside of its original language and country explains the international phenomenon of Elena Ferrante’s

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quartet L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend), first published in Italian in 2012 and translated the same year into English by Ann Goldstein who, at the time, was head of the copy department at The New Yorker. James Wood describes Ferrante as “one of Italy’s best-known least-known contemporary writers” (Wood 2013), referring to the author’s privacy and her choice to write under a pseudonym. In 2017, a documentary, aptly entitled Ferrante Fever, by Giacomo Durzi gathered an array of intellectual and political celebrities of the caliber of Hillary Clinton, Jonathan Franzen, Elizabeth Strout, and Roberto Saviano, with the intent to try to explain what makes Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels “hypnotic,” and finally, in 2018, an HBO/RAI series directed by Saverio Costanzo adapted the novels for the screen to great international acclaim. In both this and Stoner’s case, the work, the visibility, and the institutional location of the translators provided the novels with important and visible platforms and transnational audiences that, while granting them an unexpected life, also reveal a fascinating web of connections across countries, intellectual institutions, readers, and markets. Yet what remains unexplained is what exactly made these translated books so successful, and more successful “abroad” than “at home.” The last case study, instead, is more explicitly related to the world of higher education and scholarship and concerns the 2008 retranslation into English of Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs by Richard Philcox, the partner and translator of Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé. The new translation had a remarkable impact in the field of anglophone postcolonial studies because it transformed the “activist Fanon” of the 1970s into “the postcolonial Fanon” of the 2000s. One of the central chapters in Fanon’s book—chapter 5 “L’ expérience vécue du Noir”—was translated by Charles Lam Markmann in 1967 as “The Fact of Blackness” and rendered instead by Richard Philcox as “The Lived Experience of the Black Man.” The 1967 translation of Fanon’s book bore the traits of the historical and intellectual milieu and of the publishing house that was commissioning the translation. The 1968 Black Cat edition, published by Grove Press, was in fact in large part responsible for turning Fanon into the champion for the then emergent African American liberationist discourse in the United States. In 2008, instead, Richard Philcox, as a profound connoisseur not only of Fanon’s Martinican background but also of his active engagement with continental philosophy, especially the phenomenology of Marcel Merleau-Ponty, wishes to recuperate Fanon as a theorist and an intellectual, which well responds to the role and significance of Frantz Fanon’s work in postcolonial and decolonial studies today.

Introduction

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This digression on translation and global culture shows the extent to which—at least some—translations touch us daily, in books, on television, online, at school, sometimes without us even realizing it, and makes the case for a translation literacy to become a “pressing concern,” as Brian Baer insightfully points out, next to digital or information literacy in our global university syllabi (Baer 2020, 157). Seeing the work of translation and of individual translators in action, in fact, allows us to achieve an understanding of globalization also in humanistic—and educational—terms and to see translation, to use a visual metaphor, in high definition, outside of “a Romantic discourse of loss and distortion” (Baer 2020, 140) that will only see translation as an impossible achievement, a necessary evil, or as secondorder knowledge and ignore its material, political, and economic existence as “one of the fundamental modes of operation of global capital” (Mezzadra 2010, 122). Reacting against such a reductive vision of translation as loss and death, Salman Rushdie famously called himself and all migrants “translated people” (Rushdie 1991, 17), a metaphor that is often used, and perhaps abused, today to describe the many migrants of the Mediterranean that occupy the front pages of newspapers (Sofo 2015; Soyinka and Di Maio 2016). By connecting the act of translation to the physical displacement of people and to a condition of human existence, in 1991, Rushdie would pave the way to discussions of translation “to describe and even explain identity as it surfaces in travelling, migrating, diasporic, and border-crossing individuals and cultures” (Arduini and Nergaard 2011, 8) with which we are engaging in this book. The lesson that we have learned is that texts and people do not remain the same after an experience of dislocation: something changes forever, but people and texts can and do live on. The step forward, therefore, is to see the broad spectrum of translated lives around us but also to ask some important questions of ourselves. How do we understand the stories of translated people that surround us? Through which schemas of the world? Using translation as the method with which to approach today’s stories of migration, this book questions what literary and cultural criticism might look like if representation is understood as experiential and experimental, and what it does to our long-held categories regarding cultures, people, and languages. Thus, we begin this book by theorizing language and culture from within the social, cultural, and political contingencies of today, which means engaging with migration as a fact of our culture, with plurilingualism as the normal condition of planetary cultural life, and with translation as a way of life as is captured effectively by the blog post below:

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Figure 0.1  The Queer Diasporist’s Facebook Post available at: https://www. facebook.com/queerdiasporist/photos/a.365969260693860/444355356188583/?ty pe=3&theater6

0.4 Migration as Translation In the Western world, we are experiencing an increasing flow of writings of different kinds (both narrative and critical), all trying to account for the tragedy that is taking place in the Mediterranean Sea. The twofold reactions of artists and researchers, globally, result in a Janus-faced attitude. On The Queer Diasporist’s Facebook Post available at: https://www.facebook.com/ queerdiasporist/photos/a.365969260693860/444355356188583/?type=3&theater

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the one hand, we want to provide tools for understanding a process that is ominous and disturbing and that in fact requires a readjustment of our social as well as epistemological frameworks. On the other, as Gikandi wrote in 2001, we seem unable to realize that the issue of migration is not merely an historical occurrence springing from the late failure of colonization as a would-be civilizing process, but also an actual tragedy resulting in the actual suffering and death of human beings shipwrecked on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea (Gikandi 2001, 631–2). What we normally do is translate this process into a text that is understandable to us. The inclusive “we” gathers diverging varieties of Westerners and includes both artists and scholars, activists and non-activists. We produce texts, on the ground of the most obvious use of representation, which is to generate meanings, or to reshape already familiar meanings so as to make them graspable, manageable, controllable. In our work here we want to combine translation as a metaphor and the fact of translation (Baer 2020, 143), trying to devise some research and pedagogical tools that may be useful to approach the experience of migrancy through its cultural representations. Looking at some cultural texts and considering the most recurring strategies exploited by several creative artists (both in images and in words), we spot two sometimes converging attitudes that seem to suggest two “modes” of translation. In both of them, the Western, most familiar cultural traditions—what we may define the shared cultural codes—are exploited, though in different ways. In the first “mode” of translation, some artists try to inscribe the migrant experience within canonical Western codes (as it happens, for example, in Nilüfer Demir’s photo or in Erri De Luca’s short film). In the second, artists choose to reverse some familiar images or shared beliefs and to estrange them as to show the dramatic absurdity of what is happening in the Mediterranean Sea (as in Caccia’s short film or in Badagliacca’s photographs). Within this horizon and considering the differences in the world order between fifty years ago and today, Said’s words about exile may be of use. Reflecting on his own condition of non-belonging—a condition that, we must remind ourselves, was sad but privileged in comparison to what is happening today to migrants in the Mediterranean Sea—Said introduces the notion of a “plurality of vision” as an effect of being an exile (Said 1984). In very simple terms, this means that the monologic surface of representation—so quiet and understandable when you belong to a certain culture—is broken, and this break calls for a different “way of seeing” (Berger 2008) that must be plural and that gives rise to “an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal” (Said 1984, 148). Being a contrapuntal human being is a complex condition. It means

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renouncing the stability of one’s own land (geographically and symbolically) to enter a territory that resembles more an archipelago of small islands than a continent, and constantly moving, by sea, through stormy weather and dead calm, from one landing to another. In Europe, starting in the 1970s, millions of African migrants have retraced the millennial routes across the Mediterranean Sea (Di Maio 2012, 152).7 The question now is not why they leave—an issue that should be clear enough in its relation to the many troubles marking their homelands—but, rather, what prevailing attitude qualifies their choice to leave. To a large extent, the people migrating today know from birth that they are going to be obliged to leave, mostly because of the never concluded process of nation building after the end of historical colonialism (Santos 2018, 109). This latter has created the need—theoretical as well as pragmatic—of rethinking the very concept of nation as a stable entity, producing an endless proliferation of in-between identities (Di Maio 2012, 162). It is true that the migration flow has increased enormously in a comparatively short span of time. But the most interesting—and in some respect tragic—change concerns the varieties of migrants, who now come from many different African countries, as well as from the Middle East, all of whom face administrative, political, economic, and even moral troubles that have remained cogently unresolved for many years. Biographically belonging to unstable countries, the people fleeing are, in a sense, fated to flee and doomed from the start. They are, in some way, “born translated” (Walkowitz 2015). “Born translated” is an idea introduced by Rebecca Walkowitz in her reflections on a corpus of literary works that seem to be “written for translation, in the hope of being translated, but they are also written as translation, pretending to take place in a language other than the one in which they have, in fact, been composed” (Walkowitz 2015, 4). This notion may also be applied to people living in the condition described above: they are natural-born migrants in that they know for sure that they are not going to be allowed to grow up and get old in the place where they were born. When

According to the UN 2017 International Migration Report, 2016 was the record year for the number of people displaced from their homes since the Second World War when the UN started keeping the records; in 2015 alone, over 1 million migrants reached Europe crossing the Mediterranean Sea. By population, the report said Syria still accounts for the biggest number of displaced people at 12 million, followed by Colombia with 7.7 million, Afghanistan with 4.7 million, Iraq with 4.2 million, and South Sudan at 3.3 million. Those rankings do not include the long-standing Palestinian population of roughly 5.3 million, but that figure is included in the total. https://www.un.org/en/development/ desa/population/migration/publications/migrationreport/docs/MigrationReport2017_ Highlights.pdf

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migrating, they become translated people, in Rushdie’s words, and this is an issue linked not merely to language but also to a whole existential condition, which is lived in very different ways. They experience the same gap that Bhabha mentions between “languages lived and languages learned” (Bhabha 2004, x), where the notion of language involves a whole way of life. Therefore, even though the discourse of migration in the Mediterranean Sea is not a new one and goes back to ancient Greece (Malkin 1998),8 it is quite true that the contingencies of history make some difference in the nature of migration,9 separating the legal profile of the asylum seeker from that of the illegal immigrant, an outlaw subject to penalties. The condition of stranger-in-need is a liminal one, and both the law and popular culture have difficulties in translating their identity into something understandable. Both the language and the culture we use to represent and account for the migrants’ presence among us are unstable and ineffective, and they need some adjustment. What happens today twines with the issue of asylum claiming as “a form of double-voiced discourse (in the Bakhtinian sense that no instance of language can be monologic, because each utterance contains multiple utterances and moments of speech)” (Farrier 2011, 6). At the same time, the current condition goes beyond the mere issue of language and calls for the interweaving of multiple critical discourses, necessarily evoking the tools and strategies of translation in an utterly new way. As a method, translation must become able to account for the human experience of being translated from one place to another: an experience that is linked to language, articulated via language, but that goes beyond it.

0.5 Two Authors, One Book The book is divided into two symmetrical parts. In the first part, written by the US-based literary critic Simona Bertacco, translation occupies the central focus and is declined from the point of view of migration as it is understood today: as an unsettling process that is inconceivable according to the national Irad Malkin, in The Return of Odysseus, provides an articulate reflection of “the ambivalence implied in exploration and protocolonization,” showing how the notion of imagined community was in fact shaped by the many ways in which ethnos and nation interlaced and were progressively translated in the Mediterranean Sea (Malkin 1998, 4–30). 9 The fact that the replacement program was meant to patrol the Italian coastline and could count on, approximately, one-third of the resources of “Mare Nostrum” has modified the profile of the migrant, instantly transforming it into that of a criminal. 8

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The Relocation of Culture

models of culture inherited in Eurocentric educational systems. Part One, which is entitled “Translation as Migration,” includes chapters that focus on the view of knowledge, literature, and culture that we can extract from the practice of translation that surrounds us in our everyday lives. The disciplinary angle is that offered by postcolonial and translation studies, Bertacco’s areas of specialization, and the chapters articulate a critical literacy—a translation literacy—that can be established by seeing translation as an experiential and epistemological condition of human life. Chapter 1 asks what new knowledge can be gained if we think (of) translation outside the usual dichotomies of native language/homeland versus foreign language/homeland and develops a new schema of translation premised on the acknowledgment that we live in heavily translational cultures and, very likely, always have. The nexus between translation and migration offers an ideal test case to imagine a theory of translation that starts from the ground up and establishes what we call a “translation literacy” through close readings of translational works by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir and Mexican American writer Valeria Luiselli. Chapter 2 expands the discussion to the literary field by considering as exemplary a body of literature—postcolonial literature—that has been produced via multiple acts of translation. As a corpus of writing that needs to be approached not only transnationally but also translingually, postcolonial literature provides the ideal context to study translation and migration. Notions of accents, dialects, and the exploration of a creole poetics constitute the main foci of this chapter, and an “accented reading” (i.e., a critical practice that sees the accent in writing as a plus and, through the lens of translation, is able to discuss it) of texts by Derek Walcott, Velma Pollard, and Dionne Brand is offered as an alternative model to traditionally monolingual reading practices. Translation emerges as the premise that can allow a decolonial— or accented—reading practice by making the reader enter the translative exchange as a translator. Part Two is entitled “Migration as Translation” and is authored by the Italian cultural theorist and novelist Nicoletta Vallorani. The key concept in this part is that of the border, and the basic assumption is that migration is a kind of translation, symbolically implying the total revision of one’s own identity, pragmatically requiring a new language, and in fact producing translated people. Chapter 3 focuses on the border as the place of translation of a migrant’s identity. The context analyzed is that of the Mediterranean Sea, caught as it is today in the pathway of desperate routes of migration toward northern Europe. The chapter examines, in an historical perspective, the European fear of the other and considers specific representations of the migrant that are passed around and “translated” according to the

Introduction

17

cultural framework of each European country. The borders considered in this chapter are, respectively, the boats, the detention and identification sites, the refugee camps, the temporary shelters for migrant women and unaccompanied minors. Through the analysis of the forms of representations and iconization imposed onto the migrants in these places, Vallorani shows how “borders, far from serving simply to block or obstruct global flows, have become essential devices for their articulation” (Farrier 2011, 6). The texts taken into consideration are authored by Anders Lustgarten, Maylis de Kerangal, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Jenny Erpenbeck, Chris Cleave, Vanessa Redgrave, Margaret Mazzantini, Davide Enia, and Lina Prosa. Chapter 4 is entirely dedicated to the language of images. Vallorani focuses on visual representations, working on the assumption that photographs, films, videos, and drawings are translated as much as linguistic texts when crossing borders and entering a culture that is different from the one in which they originated. We start on the assumption that the gaze is also influenced by the colonial semiosis (Mignolo 2000, 14) and is consequently geohistorically located, thus shaping a definite knowledge production (Mignolo 2000, 173). More directly than words, images raise the issue of a biopolitics of language related to Butler’s notion of precarious lives (Butler 2004) and potently foregrounding the vulnerable bodies of the migrants. This chapter discusses some of the leading artists who are visually mapping the forms of migration in Europe. Through a close reading of some of these works (photographic projects by Mario De Carolis, Nilüfer Demir, Mario Badagliacca, Rohit Chawla, Kevin McElvaney; short films by De Luca-Gassmann, Morgan Knibbe, and Andrea Caccia), the chapter offers an original theory, via translation, of what we do when we decode an image, especially if it is of someone who looks different from us. The chapter also investigates the steps of the encoding and decoding process, expanding the theory introduced by Stuart Hall as to include the shaping and reshaping of visual messages when they enter the globalized circulation mediated by social networks. Chapter 5 brings our reflection full circle and contextualizes our work as educators in the here and now, caught in-between the discussion of Brexit, which is currently redrawing the cultural map of Europe, and the US-Mexico wall, which is conceptually dividing the Americas as they were never divided before. As academics, we are constantly encouraged to cross disciplinary borders to access a wider horizon; yet we tend to keep within the reassuring boundaries of our fields and often prove unable to understand that, particularly in the humanities, moving beyond the limina is not only unavoidable, but necessary to the process of understanding the issues of our time. In concluding our work, we argue that translation grants us “transit visas” to different cultures, places, and epochs, while training our hearts and

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The Relocation of Culture

our minds as citizens of the world. A transit visa10 is a powerful image for a view of translation grounded in stories of migration; it subverts the dynamic between sameness and otherness, which is often implicit in conventional views of translation and emphasizes, instead, the foreignness in the receiver (as the potential traveler). The works that we shall analyze in the chapters that follow grant us such temporary transit visas: they show us a picture of the world as heavily translational and send back a picture of ourselves as agents of translation but also, simultaneously, as translated people.

We borrow the metaphor of the transit visa from Ariella Azoulay’s book on photography as civic contract (Azoulay 2008) and the discussion it generates in Sara Sentilles’s Draw Your Weapons (Sentilles 2017).

10

Part One

Translation as Migration

20

1

Translation and Worldly Knowledge

Will translation be a keyword for the 21st century? And if so, in what semantic networks? —Barbara Godard, “Translation Poetics,” 2003 Historically, how we represent translation prescribes not only how we collectively imagine national communities and ethnic identities but also how we relate individually to national sovereignty. —Naoki Sakai, “Dislocation in Translation,” 2009

1.1 Translation as Worldly Knowledge In the quotation above, the late Barbara Godard delves into the heart of the matter for the study of translation today. While it is a fact widely acknowledged that translation is a keyword of our era, there is no agreement around the semantic network that defines its study as this has to do both with the disciplinary location and with the final aim of the branch of translation studies one embraces: whether it describes the theory or the practice of translation; whether it deals with written translation or interpreting; whether it looks at translation diachronically or comparatively; or whether it uses translation as a metaphor to talk about cultural phenomena or as the method to study them. The second epigraph by Naoki Sakai, therefore, makes explicit the larger aim of this chapter—its semantic field so to speak—which is to discuss the relationship existing between our schemas for understanding translation and our schemas for understanding the world. Although the increased visibility of translation studies in the academy has brought with it a more diversified appraisal of the phenomena surrounding translation (be they knowledge transmission, cultural diversity, epistemological difference, language domination and language loss, issues of global justice, or global

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The Relocation of Culture

aesthetics), not much has changed in the way translation is conceived of, learned, and taught. The field remains prevalently language- and text-centric and based on European theories developed in the 1970s and early 1980s in need of review and updating (Gentzler 2017, 1). In our understanding, translation indicates much more than mechanical processes of transferring concepts and texts from one language, literary or cultural tradition, to another on an illusionary horizontal plan of equity and equivalence. Rather, translation also speaks of the many and diverse life experiences of people who move individually or collectively across borders, and therefore it needs to be understood beyond the linguistic and textual dimensions. Thus, the study of translation through the lens of migration allows us to close the gap that is often left open between our experience of the world and the abstract categories through which we make sense of that experience. Translation is here posited not as an action to be performed or a skill to be learned but as a condition of living—temporary or permanent— and a way to see the world, that is a form of “worldly knowledge” à la Said. This is the way we decline translation: as a foundational epistemological and communicative mode, a condition of living, and as one of the most important processes that train us to become cultural agents. In his book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, David Bellos offers an impassioned defense of the centrality of translation in the history of human civilizations. Translation, Bellos argues, is not a secondary activity of human culture located in a little invisible corner of the universe. It is placed right at the center of a civilization where it illustrates what it means to have a language and to use a language. It is the living, malleable matter of cultural production, change, and survival. Linguistic diversity is the nature of language, not its aberration, and even less a curse, like in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Bellos 2011, 335–8). And that is because languages—as we shall see in Chapter 2 in the case of Caribbean creole languages—lead plurilingual lives: they change, live, and die in constant contact, or war, with other idioms. Seen from this angle, the idea that translation can and should be studied through the lens of migration emerges, not as a trendy metaphor, but as a necessary conceptual framework to discuss the globalized and multilingual world in which we operate. Therefore, in this chapter we ask what new knowledge can be gained if we rethink translation outside the usual dichotomies of native language/homeland versus foreign language/homeland, and we imagine a new schema of translation premised on the acknowledgment that we live in heavily translational cultures and most peoples, very likely, always have. In this way, as Gentzler notes, the collective experiences of migrants, immigrants, and displaced people that have dominated the news and political discussion in the first two decades of this millennium shift from the margins to the

Translation and Worldly Knowledge

23

very center of the cultural discussion as issues of adaptation, assimilation, and resistance are acknowledged as defining traits of contemporary cultures (Gentzler 2017, 7–8). This chapter begins with an exploration of the schemas through which we usually understand translation and ends by proposing a model of translation that takes the diverse lived experience of relocated people as its starting point. It considers what happens if we decline translation as worldly knowledge in terms of how we construct the categories and the methods of our scholarship. The link between translation and migration offers an ideal test case to imagine a theory of translation that starts from the ground up and aims at establishing what we call a “translation literacy” through the closereading sections of the next chapters.

1.2 Translation as Migration: A New Schema In the dynamic field of translation studies, the metaphoricity of the nexus between translation and migration has grown exponentially and has been studied by scholars within the field but also, and increasingly, by scholars in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and literary theory. As Loredana Polezzi writes, “[T]he popularity of the link is in itself revealing: it underlines the increased centrality of migration and of translation (as notions as well as practices) […]; and it foregrounds the suggestive as well as anxiety-inducing nature of any interweaving of the two” (345). The descriptor “translated people” (Rushdie 1991, 17) has prophetically stretched to symbolize the condition of an ever-increasing number of subjects of different kinds, from common travelers to work migrants, from cosmopolitan globe-trotters to immigrants, from asylum seekers to deportees. By connecting the act of translation to the physical movement of people, Rushdie was pointing to a simple yet important fact. It is not only texts, ideas, and languages that are translated, but human beings, too. And this, as many scholars are now saying,1 is a key factor for a translation studies approach to migration as it radically changes how we think about the work of translation and the discipline. Polezzi, from whose work we draw extensively, highlights the ethical dimension implicit in this shift of perspective:

Some of the scholars who have responded to the ethical challenge implicit in the translation-migration dyad include Inghilleri, Mezzadra and Neilson, Vallorani, Di Maio, Polezzi, Gentzler, and Hedge.

1

24

The Relocation of Culture If we take into account people rather than, or at least as well as, texts, then the implications of “translating” them necessarily foreground ethical questions: there is, after all, a crucial difference between “manipulating”, “domesticating” or even “betraying” a literary work and doing the same with a human being. (Polezzi 2012, 347)

In Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies, Edwin Gentzler suggests a method for what he calls post-translation studies that goes beyond the analysis of textual matter and explores, instead, the pre- and postconditions of translation, that is, all the variables that affect translative events in the diverse environments in which they occur (Gentzler 2017, 2–4). In his words, “What if translation became viewed less as a temporal act to be carried out between languages and cultures and instead as a precondition underlying the languages and cultures upon which communication is based?” (Gentzler 2017, 5). Given the fact that the questions posed by a migration-oriented theory of translation (how is translation conceived of by the people who have relocated into new places?; how is translation experienced by those who live translated lives?; how are human beings translated?; who are or can be translators?2) do not find answers in conventional models of translation, it might indeed be useful to follow Gentzler’s invitation and approach the discourse on translation from outside of the discipline to better analyze the translational phenomena as they occur and to develop a model that can account for them. Another scholar who has recently problematized the conventional terms with which we conceptualize translation is Naoki Sakai. His starting point is that translation always implies a worldly and comparative view of knowledge: Translation is not secondary or derivative to meaning or language; it is just as fundamental or foundational in any attempt to elucidate these concepts. Translation indicates the trace of contact with the incomprehensible, the unknowable, or the unfamiliar, that is with the foreign, and there is no awareness of language or meaning until we come across the foreign. (Sakai 2009, 170)

Let’s compare Sakai’s view with the commonly held second-order label cast on translation in the following quotation from David Bellos: An excellent analysis of the existential condition of translators in war settings is provided in Vicente Rafael’s “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of Empire.” Social Text, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2009): 1–23.

2

Translation and Worldly Knowledge

25

It’s a well-known fact that a translation is no substitute for the original. It’s also perfectly obvious that this is wrong. Translations are substitutes for original texts. You use them in the place of a work written in a language you cannot read with ease. (Bellos 2011, 37, emphasis added)

What Sakai defines as the “ancien régime” of the study of translation (exemplified in the first part of Bellos’s quotation above) finds its origin in the modern nation-state and its invention of “countable national languages, languages as individual units that can be isolated and juxtaposed like apples, for example, and unlike water” (Sakai 2009, 170). According to this model, for instance, the Creole continuum could be imagined as a “water language”—an image that captures well the fluidity that characterizes language use in the Caribbean as we shall see in Chapter 2. In particular, the modern schema of co-figuration commonly applied to translation—whereby translation identifies a linear transfer of meaning between two clearly demarcated unities of ethnic and national languages—is directly associated with the image of the world it presupposes and conveys, i.e., as an international agglomerate of distinct nations (Sakai 2009, 169). In other words, a shared modern regime of co-figured, standardized, and nationalized languages is co-terminous with a regime of translation as “an institutionalized assemblage of protocols, rules of conduct, canons of accuracy and ways of viewing” (Sakai 2009, 172, emphasis added). Thus, the model of separate and distinct languages that Sakai outlines is the apparatus that also allows us to imagine or represent what happens in translation; it provides us with an image or representation (Sakai 2009b, 75)—a theory—of translation. There are two main lessons that can be extracted from Sakai’s analysis: i. The representation (or schema) of translation has not only replaced actualized translation—or translation as a pre-condition of our life in language—but also prescribed the conventional way of seeing languages and cultures as neatly distinct and separate, with contact or translation zones othered as areas of exception or aberration, a description that misreads and mystifies the way in which we experience culture in our world and erases linguistic diversity as a meaningful and real cultural experience. ii. Translation, as a condition as well as a form of knowledge, even within what Sakai calls the “ancien régime” of translation studies, has always been, and can only be, worldly as it moves from the consciousness of the familiar and the local toward the (awe-inspiring or anxiety-producing) unfamiliar and foreign.

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The Relocation of Culture

The notion of translation as worldly culture attaches itself to a robust line of thinking that approaches the study of “the contemporary” from the vantage point of the aftermath of European colonialism and that deals explicitly with the issue of translation: Said (1993), Bhabha (1994, 2004, 2018), Spivak (2012), Chakrabarty (2000), Mezzadra (2008), Mignolo (2012), Sommer (2004), Rafael (2005), Santos (2014) are just some of the most prominent names that have made this subfield. Starting from their work, the reflection on translation as the location, or articulation, of a nonnational idea of culture has become central in translation studies, literary studies, and postcolonial studies. In its earlier definition, cultural translation emerged as the modus operandi of postcolonial and diasporic cultures, cultures that can be pictured as translations with no retrievable originals and whose system of values is caught in a wandering status between the precolonial, the colonial, and postcolonial or diasporic orders of knowledge and existence. The term relocation, in its current usage in relation to migration, gives us an ideal semantic field within which to discuss translation in historical and material terms without forgetting, however, that experiences of migration are always plural and diverse. Relocation is in fact commonly used to refer to the redistribution of migrants in so-called receiving nations, but it also indicates the material experiences lived by people who have crossed national borders and are being relocated; therefore it needs to be understood in its double signification of control and hospitality—on the one hand as a form of containment and policing and, on the other, as a form of assimilation, articulation, and agency. If we apply the traditional schema of translation to migration, we get an image of (passive) migrants requiring translation, in space, time, and language or culture. However, if we consider translation through the lens of migration itself, the linear notion of translation as something that happens between two discreet linguistic and cultural units reveals itself to be inadequate because it does not account for the diversity of the migrant experience. People decide to leave their homeland for a multiplicity of reasons and with very diverse means; hopefully they arrive safely and are accepted into a new place and, in a sense, cease existing as “translated people.” They in fact shift from a passive to an active translation status—though that necessary legal passage is crucial—and start translating for themselves and their groups. Individual agency is crucial when we think translation through the lens of migration: migrants become/act as translators in their new communities, in informal daily exchanges, or in important lifechanging exchanges with the immigration or health systems as we shall see in the section dedicated to Valeria Luiselli’s essay Tell Me How It Ends.

Translation and Worldly Knowledge

27

Taking migration into consideration, as Polezzi insightfully argues, forces us to ask not just what translation is, but also who the translator is or who could become one (Polezzi 2012, 348–9). These are important questions that remain unanswered within the “ancien régime” of translation studies but that lie at the core of the translation and migration stories of our times. It is not an accident in fact that the fascination with translation and language diversity has become a steady feature of contemporary globalized culture, from cinema to literature to music and the arts, and promises to become a central focus of scholarship in the years to come. In our role as cultural critics, we can begin to contribute to this new scholarship by studying the forms and the tropes through which translation and migration manifest themselves on the cultural front. In her powerful book Draw Your Weapons, Sarah Sentilles reflects on art and violence and on the ways in which images—particularly documentary photographs—affect us or change the way we see the world. “Photographs,” she writes, “allow viewers to be somewhere they could not otherwise be, to see what would otherwise remain invisible. The theorist Ariella Azoulay calls photographs ‘transit visas,’ and […] she insists the camera grants a kind of citizenship that transcends borders” (Sentilles 2017, 187–9). At the core of Sentilles’s scholarship, writing, and activism is a commitment to investigating the roles that language, images, and practices play in oppression, violence, and social transformation, and she advocates for what she calls “a visual literacy,” that is, a pedagogical project that questions received ways of seeing and puts the emphasis on the viewer’s agency. Sentilles’s project, especially her analysis of our ability to respond as well as our responsibility as viewers, aligns with the preoccupation with a “translation literacy” that we are articulating in this book. Our intention is to read the translational side of the world, outside of what Chaudhury calls the unilingualism and the monosemy of the mind that European colonialism has exported across the world (Chaudhury 1999, 68). As Harish Trivedi argues in “In Our Own Time, on Our Own Terms,” translation, as it is understood in the West, arrived in India with colonization (Trivedi 2006, 102–3). However, there are innumerable aspects of Indian culture that can be described as translational but that remain unaccounted for according to the colonial or Western translation schema. It all depends on how one looks. Indeed, there are many aspects of our own cultures that could be seen as translational when we know how to look. Like photographs, translations grant us transit visas to different cultures, places, and epochs, while training our hearts and our minds as citizens of the world. Through a close reading of works by Emily Jacir and Valeria Luiselli, in this chapter

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The Relocation of Culture

we articulate the possibility of a translation literacy as a responsible way of reading migration stories.

1.3 A Mediterranean Via Crucis Born in Palestine, raised and educated between Rome, Ramallah, and New York, Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre that explores translation, mobility, resistance, and cultural erasure in the Mediterranean region. Her work investigates personal and collective movement and its implications on the physical and social experience of trans-Mediterranean space and time, in particular between Italy and Palestine, her two homelands. Her work has received many accolades and awards, but it has also met with protests and censorship.3 Starting with her 2003 installation “Translate Allah,” in the aftermath of September 11, covering the Queen’s Museum of Art building in New York City, we can follow Jacir’s attempt to read the world around us through translation. Translate Allah has been widely analyzed by several scholars, Emily Apter in particular (Apter 2006, 2013), in relation to the study of translation in a cultural and interlingual framework. The two pieces by Jacir that we want to discuss, instead, capture translation as a way of living and knowing, have a Mediterranean context of reference, and were created in response to the global discourse around the “migration crisis”: Stazione (2009) was prepared for the 53rd Venice Biennale, and Via Crucis (2016) is a permanent installation in Milan, inside the Chiesa di San Raffaele. Stazione was created for Palestine c/o Venice, a side event of the Venice Biennale in 2009. Jacir translated each of the twenty-four stops of the vaporetto along the crowded Linea 1, going from Piazzale Roma and Santa Lucia along the Grand Canal to Rialto and San Marco (Figure 1.1). Venice is a translational city. It is the city where the first Jewish ghetto was instituted in 15164 and where the word ghetto originates, where street

Emily Jacir is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), a Prince Claus Award (2007), the Hugo Boss Prize (2008), the Herb Alpert Award (2011), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015) (https://darjacir.com/Team). 4 The word ghetto initially referred to the copper foundry of the Venetian government, il ghetto (sometimes spelled gheto, getto, or geto) where cannon balls were cast, from the root gettare, to cast or to throw. Established by decree of Doge Leonardo Loredan on March 29, 1516, the ghetto became the compulsory, segregated, and enclosed quarter to which all the Jews in Venice were relegated because of religious difference. 3

Translation and Worldly Knowledge

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Figure 1.1  Emily Jacir, Stazione, 2009.

names are painted on nizioleti (tiny sheets) in Venetian dialect on the walls of the buildings, and it is the only European city that has an Arabic name: Al-bunduqiyya. According to the Somali-Italian writer Igiaba Scego, there is a metropolitan legend surrounding its origin: Bunduqīyya in Arabic means “gun”, “rifle”, or even “bullets”. The common belief is that Venice was given this name because of its important role as a centre of production and distribution of firearms. However, the word bunduqīyya has been used to refer to firearms only after the fourteenth century, whereas Venice was called Bunduqīyya in much earlier days. The metropolitan legend, therefore, seems to have little credibility, if any. But Lord, how fascinating! (Scego 2013, 2)

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Jacir’s intention was to create a bilingual network of transport through the city, and the words in Arabic were meant to unearth and visualize the shared hidden history of Venice and Palestine—Palestine c/o Venice—and reclaim Venice’s Arab cultural heritage. In her words: “Addressing this rendered invisibility, my project aims to remind visitors and citizens of Venice, not only of its deep and varied cultural origins, exchanges and influences but also of possible futures of exchange” (Jacir 2011). The project also entailed the printing of a trilingual map (in Italian, Arabic, and English), inscribed within the comprehensive map of the public transportation system. Before the opening of the biennale, the Venice Transport Consortium (ACTV, or Azienda Consorzio Trasporti Veneziano) revoked the authorization without explanation. The artist was not allowed to issue a statement for the cancelation of the event; she was only allowed to add the writing “THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN CANCELLED” to the trilingual maps of the city, which had been printed for distribution. The artist comments on the events: My work was completely secular, addressing cultural exchange between Venice and the Arab world. I really don’t think the fact that I am a Palestinian was the issue in Venice … I think it is more likely that the work was being presented in the public realm, in the streets of Venice, and not being confined to a designated “art” space … I do believe that the Arabic script was a problem … When Arabic crawls out of … borders … and becomes part of the cityscape … perhaps this was the very thing that was so threatening to them. (Jacir 2011)

Jacir’s idea to use the material translation of the stops of the vaporetto to invite her audience on a journey along the Grand Canal, zigzagging from one bank to the other, and reactivating lost associations, forgotten exchanges, disclaimed heritages is particularly ingenious and adds an unearthing element to the translation as migration nexus. During the boat ride, in fact, borders are crossed multiple times and translations occur; however, translation is also the movement from one bank to the other of the Canal and, by extension, the Mediterranean. If “untranslatability” has emerged in recent years as a key concept in discussions of cultural translation (Apter 2013), in Jacir’s work, it is shown to be less about an incommensurable distance between cultures and more about the political friction at play. The artist’s antidote to political untranslatability is to take the understanding into our own hands, as translated and translating people, by getting on board the vaporetto and seeing Venice/ Al-bunduqiyya, first from one bank of the Grand Canal and then from the opposite one.

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In 2016 Jacir recreated a Mediterranean Via Crucis in a small church in the very center of Milan to contemplate the current refugee and migrant crisis, which, as Chapters 3 and 4 of this book show, urgently calls for a redefinition of European culture. Like Stazione, this project tells its story through travel and translation, and it establishes an important link between the shared legacies of Italy—as the country that hosts the Catholic Church’s state—and Palestine, as the place of origin of many of the relics found in Italian churches. The translatio of relics from the Holy Land provides the first translational palimpsest through which we approach this installation, which, in line with Jacir’s previous work, can be described as translation art. The second translational palimpsest is religious—the Via Crucis, which is chosen as the narrative device for the composition. The story is told through large rounds of steel placed above square- or rectangle-shaped glass cases containing the objects from Palestine. The story begins at the top of the left nave, below the altar steps, with the first seven stations of the cross identified in Arabic to resume, symmetrically, on the right side of the altar, with stations VIII through XIV signaled in Italian.5 This is the full scheme of the composition: I – ‫[ يسوع محكوم عليه بالموت‬Yasue mahkum ealayh bialmawt]/ Jesus is condemned to death. Keys from Palestinian homes Nakba. II‫[ يسوع حامل الصليبية على منكبية‬Yasue hamil salibiat ealaa mankibia]/ Jesus carries his cross Valise Disposession. Exile. III – ‫يسوع ساقط تحت الصليب للمرة‬ ‫[ االولى‬Yasue saqitanaan taht aslib lilmarih al’uwlaa]/Jesus falls for the first time Barbed wire from West Bank Occupation. Separation.

VIII – Gesù incontra le donne di Gerusalemme/Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem Piece of traditional Jerusalem woman’s dress (embroidered in Bethlehem 120 years ago). Tears. Resistance. IX – Gesù cade per la terza volta/ Jesus falls for the third time Cement The Apartheid Wall. X – Gesù è spogliato delle vesti/Jesus is stripped of his garments Olive wood from Bayt Jalla 800,000 trees. And more. Uprooted. Destroyed.

We would like to thank Federico Pozzoli, doctoral student in Humanities at the Università degli Studi di Milano, and Soukaina Tarraf, MA student in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Louisville, for their help transcribing and interpreting the Arabic portion of Jacir’s work.

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IV –‫[ يسوع ملتقيا بأمه الحزينة‬Yasue multaqiaan bi’amih alhazina]/ Jesus meets his mother Glass cast in Venice The sea. V –‫وقد اعانه هنا سمعان القيرواني على حمل‬ ‫[ الصليب‬Waqd ‘aeanah huna samean alqiriwani ealaa hamal alsalib]/ Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross Piece from fisherman’s boat from Gaza Vittorio Arrigoni. VI –‫مسحة هنا وجه اليسوع القديسة ڤيرونيكة‬ [Msihat huna wajhah alqadisat vyrwnyka]/V eronica wipes the face of Jesus Photograph from Bethlehem (circa1915) Lampedusa. Lost photographs. VII –‫اليسوع وقع هنا تحت الصليب للمرة‬ ‫[ الثانية‬waqae huna taht alsalib lilmarat althania]/Jesus fall the second time Iron rusting Political prisoners. Child prisoners. Prisoners “Iron always rusts.”

XI – Gesù è inchiodato sulla croce/Jesus is nailed to the cross. M16 shells from the West Bank Violence. XII – Gesù muore sulla croce/ Jesus dies on the cross. Fishing nets from Gazan fishermen 3 km perimeter. Forbidden. XIII – Gesù è deposto dalla croce/ Jesus is taken down from the cross. Keffiye from Hebron Shroud. XIV – Il corpo di Gesù è deposto nel sepolcro/Jesus is laid in the tomb. Slayeb stone from Bayt Jalla Right to be buried in our homeland. Palestine.

The iconic correlation of station to object makes this installation moving and compelling: the first station (Jesus is condemned to death) (Figure 1.2) showcases a tangle of rusty keys to recall the image of Palestinian homes abandoned during the Nakba in 1972. A symbol both of an exile/death sentence and of the hope of a return to the homeland, the abandoned key is turned into an equally powerful symbol of dispossession and longing for belonging for displaced people throughout history.

Translation and Worldly Knowledge

Figure 1.2  Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016.

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The Relocation of Culture

The second station (Jesus carries his cross) (Figure 1.3) shows the first tool of all journeys: in a small glass square case a leather suitcase is so crumpled as to be unrecognizable. The icon for the third station (Jesus falls for the first time) is a crown made of barbed wire from the West Bank. In Station IV (Jesus meets his mother), a glossy tile of azure glass blown in Venice recalls the color

Figure 1.3  Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016.

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of Mary’s veil in western iconography. The semi-circle begins with the rusty “keys from Palestinian homes” and ends with a tile of rusty iron in Station VII: Jesus falls for the second time. A slab of rusty iron. Political prisoners, children prisoners. Prisoners, and the caption: “iron always rusts” (Figure 1.4).6

Figure 1.4  Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016.

The quoted captions are contained in Translatio, the book authored by Emily Jacir, John Lansdowne, and Christopher MacEvitt that accompanies the installation. It has no page numbers. See bibliography for full reference.

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This is “a story told in things,” John Lansdowne writes in Translatio, the collaborative book that accompanies the installation, inspired by the medieval tradition of collecting and displaying the relics of saints brought from Palestine in Italian churches (Lansdowne 2016, 11). There are so many layers of symbolism to be unpacked, starting from the matching of the language script with the direction of the narrative and the physical movement of the Via Crucis (the stations in Arabic script proceed anticlockwise in the left nave and the stations in Italian clockwise in the right nave of the church), to the evocation of places and communities through elaborate artifacts or, instead, through materials such as iron, cement, marble, wood, glass. Jacir’s relics are, in many cases, the things left behind—the literal meaning of relic—as in Station VI where a waterdamaged photograph is showcased and connected to the stories of migration that the Mediterranean Sea has witnessed from Bethlehem to Lampedusa, or in Station XI in which spent M16 shells collected in the West Bank are displayed to form an artistic symmetry. As Lansdowne points out, the “thinginess” (Lansdowne 2016, 9) of Jacir’s objects is perhaps stronger in the artifacts created for the installation, because the materials she chooses—the piece of olive wood, marble as part of the land, cement, iron—do not by themselves convey sacredness until they are invested with the cultural terms that make them unique. The last station, the one that commemorates Jesus being laid in the sepulcher, for instance, is a slab of red slayeb marble from Bayt Jalla, from the quarries now inaccessible to the local Christian community since they have been incorporated into the Israeli settlement of Gilo (MacEvitt 2016, 107–8). The red and bloody color of the marble associated with the caption in the book—Right to be buried in our homeland. Palestine—is particularly touching for a modern viewer (See Figure 1.5). Jacir’s stations are iconoclastic, an oxymoron in terms of figuration, as they speak of people without showing them and intensely evoke places through the materials, the crafts, the techniques with which they were created. As the viewer has to make an effort to decipher some of the objects given the position of the stations and the paucity of light in the church or to connect them with the religious narrative of the Via Crucis, the viewer turns into a pilgrim moving from station to station. In its origins, the Via Crucis was meant to be “a pilgrimage by proxy” (Lansdowne 2016, 12) for all the Christians who could not go to Jerusalem and worship at the actual places through which Jesus had carried the cross. In other words, the Via

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Figure 1.5  Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016.

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Crucis translated Jerusalem to Italy so that would-be pilgrims could worship. Even today, the Way of the Cross creates a physical space for prayer and meditation in commemoration of Christ’s Passion and crucifixion, but also a space to think about and initiate action, and Jacir’s stations add an extra layer to the meditation that becomes simultaneously intimate and spiritual or religious, social and historical. For the Catholics who pray in this church, this is the Way of the Cross, their pilgrimage by proxy, as there are no indications that this is an art installation;7 however, with half the station titles written in Arabic and half in Italian, it functions, properly, as a translation while simultaneously posing the question: which is the original? The fact that Via Crucis speaks its message of adoration and devotion through translation is what moves us to a halt. The Passion of Christ is represented through the contemporary passion of Palestinians as well as of all the people displaced from their homes. Migrants, Jacir seems to be saying, are today’s Christs, but who are they saving? What is palpably absent is the idea of Jesus’s salvific suffering that turns the passion into the powerful metaphor of redemption that it is for Christians. Yet the question is looming and permeates the viewer’s experience. What is certain is that suffering of this scale and proportion, which the installation in its overpowering materiality emphasizes, cannot escape the viewer. Translatio is the term used to describe the transfer of a saint’s body or a relic from one place to another. When relics were acquired and “translated” to Italy, thanks to the will of important patrons such as Saint Helena (Emperor Constantine’s mother) or Theodelinda (Queen of the Lombards), the churches in which they were placed were renamed as the relics’ presence gave them a new meaning and function (Lansdowne 2016, 13). Good examples of this, as Lansdowne points out, both in Rome, are the Basilica Herulaem, which is today Santa Croce di Gerusalemme, and Santa Maria Maggiore, which is today Santa Maria ad Praesepe. In Via Crucis, Jacir is the translator, she is the agent of the translatio of secular relics, and she brings or recreates them, for people to see, worship, and meditate on. How do these relics change the meaning and function of the church in which they are placed? San Raffaele is considered as one of Milan’s minor churches, built in the late sixteenth century in proximity to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, today known as the Duomo, and is so tightly squeezed in between the glittering Rinascente shopping mall and the majestic cathedral merely steps away that it can very easily be overlooked. Indeed, the marginal status

The church of San Raffaele is associated to a cultural center by the same name and regularly houses artists’ collections and installations.

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of the church in which the installation is located seems to mirror and call attention to the invisible status of migrants and their suffering, which is the subject of the installation itself. The contrast, as often happens with Jacir’s art, is powerful and arresting.8 Like in Stazione, Jacir insists on the deep historical and cultural ties connecting Italy and Palestine, but at the center of this work is not the history of Milan, rather it is the Palestinians’ forced exile, placed side by side with the sufferings of today’s migrants, presented as different facets of the same martyrdom. Translation as a mode of understanding the world allows Jacir to turn the tables on the standard narrative of migration given in political discourse and circulated by the media: the story of migration is told from the point of view of the people who have left the keys to their homes behind, the ornate dresses, their mothers, their children captured or hunted down by M16s, or who have lost photographs in the Mediterranean Sea. This is the story of migration that Jacir bears witness to, and translation—or rather translatio—provides the language for the story to be told.

1.4 Translating Right(s) at Entry Point Moving from the fourteen stations of Jacir’s Mediterranean Via Crucis to the forty questions of the intake questionnaire for child asylum seekers in Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli, which describes a pan-American Via Dolorosa, the transition is disturbingly seamless. However, while Jacir’s ingenious use of the trope of the translatio of relics puts the emphasis on the “migrational” aspect of translation, Luiselli’s book looks at a key location where translation and migration meet, the immigration court system; this is where translation is directly connected to migrants’ lives. Tell Me How It Ends collects the Mexican American writer and essayist Valeria Luiselli’s reflections on the screening sessions of child asylum seekers after they have crossed the US-Mexico border and on her role as a volunteer translator-interpreter for the New York court system. This extremely readable 120-page long essay is formatted after the questionnaire the court uses to interview the children. It was met with great success when it was published in 2017 at the height of the immigration crisis on US soil: a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism in 2017, it was also adopted as common reading in some

We would like to thank Pamela Beattie for bringing this parallelism to our attention.

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General Education programs in colleges across the United States.9 Tell Me How It Ends has achieved a visibility and won accolades that are inversely proportional to what is perceived as the dominant political rhetoric of migration in the United States, and this fact alone is worthy of notice. Some reviewers state that it has “opened doors” to the discussion of the migrant crisis in American society in “new terms” (de León 2019), and in fact Luiselli’s intent was to reframe the way we think and talk about migration by taking a hemispheric—this is one of the new terms she proposes—approach and digging into the historical, political, and cultural context of the current crisis. Situations of interpreting within the immigration court system represent translation—understood as linguistic and cultural transfer—in action and provide an ideal test case for the argument developed in this chapter about the inadequacy of linguistic schemas of translation to account for the full complexity of the fact of translation. In fact, when we start taking into account people rather than texts, the ethical implications of translation are suddenly foregrounded. In her study of the conditions of interpreting within the asylum-seeking legal process, Moira Inghilleri emphasizes the active role played by interpreters and translators, a role almost as important as that played by immigration officers, even though the public and media perception seem to ignore or belittle their essential contribution. By law, asylum seekers are to be provided with an interpreter before a formal interview with an immigration officer can be conducted, and Luiselli’s essay details the risky process through which the information is collected and organized prior to a formal hearing within the US immigration system. The year of the events described in Luiselli’s essay is 2015, when the numbers of migrants are, according to the UN, at their highest, and when the dominant rhetoric surrounding migration in the United States invokes the same trope of a fortress invaded and under siege that is circulating in Europe. By organizing her essay around the forty questions of the intake questionnaire, Luiselli leaves this polarizing rhetoric behind and directs the reader’s attention to the actual vocabulary of immigration, its underlying assumptions, and its current usage: screening, for instance, is the term used for the interviews; aliens is the legal term for non-citizens; removal the word for deportation; sending countries are opposed to receiving countries, etc. Behind these words a precise image of the world materializes: it is the world as an We are indebted for this information to Hilary Levinson’s reflection on her own experience at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Common Book Program, a program that distributes the selected book among its first-year students. It also invites the wider Richmond community to read it since the author is invited to campus for a public lecture. Another notable book in recent years that has had a similar success and General Education trajectory is Citizen by Claudia Rankine published in 2014.

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international agglomerate of distinct nations that Sakai discusses in his work. In her signature incisive manner, Luiselli draws attention to the world view behind the words: “The intake questionnaire for undocumented children […] reveals a colder, more cynical and brutal reality. It reads as if it had been written in high definition, and as you make your way down its forty questions it’s impossible not to feel that the world has become a much more fucked-up place than anyone could have ever imagined” (Luiselli 2017, 10). The language of the current immigration systems is not the language of “universal hospitality” invoked by Kant in Perpetual Peace (Kant 1795/1957, 20).10 Since the terrorist attacks in 2001 and the global war on terror, in fact, it has been transformed into the language of homeland security, protection, and control of the nation’s entry points. We need to only look at the news and see the images of the detention/hospitality centers designed to contain migrants and refugee seekers and separate them from the rest of the population to bring this point home. However, for lack of better words, interpreters selfconsciously negotiate this vocabulary in their job every day. They are aware that the interviews they translate at the early point in the process are highly significant and can determine the final outcome of the migrants’ cases; they participate in the excluding practices of screening through which nationstates exert their control over those who demand entrance while, on the other hand, they bear witness to the stories of the migrants and provide a form of real hospitality, linguistic and cultural, that is crucial in the process (Inghilleri 2012, 76–8). Luiselli’s book sheds some much-needed light onto interpreting as a crucial aspect of the legal migration process while also underscoring the necessity of reviewing the schemas behind translation and, by extension, interpreting through which we operate. The opposition often drawn between interpreting and advocacy when migrants come face to face with legal institutions is a case in point, as Loredana Polezzi notes (Polezzi 2012, 349). This opposition is artificial at best and misleading at its core since it does not consider how mediation works, simplifying a process that is, in reality, very complex and fraught with potentially consequential errors. Within the prevalent skills-based approach, interpreters are imagined as passive “conduits” of information (Inghilleri 2012, 85), and migrants are “translated” between places and cultures, with no attention given to the active role of participants in the interpreting event, that is, the intricate social, Several scholars have highlighted, by referring to Hannah Arendt’s work, how the case of asylum seekers explodes the logic of possibility of the nation-state and its association of rights with citizenship. See Giorgio Agamben (1998, 126–35), Loredana Polezzi (2012, 353–3), Homi Bhabha (NEMLA Keynote, Washington, DC, March 22, 2019).

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ideological, and emotional components that inform the communicative exchange at entry points. Luiselli showcases the interpreter’s dilemma: But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end. (Luiselli 2017, 7)

Tell Me How It Ends explodes the conduit schema of interpreting by describing the difficulty and at times impossibility of translating the words of the children she interviews who often cannot understand the questions they are being asked: “[I]nterpreters have to reconfigure the questions, shift them from the language of adults to the language of children, breaking the intake questions up in smaller phrases until she finds a way to connect with the children” (Luiselli 2017, 63). In making the interpreter’s role fully visible and acknowledging its importance but also its challenges, Luiselli shows what a migration-based approach to translation (and interpreting) has to offer: a recognition of the ethical dimension of any translational encounter. As an immigrant to the United States, Luiselli reflects on the incommensurable distance between her own process of immigration and her status as a “permanent resident” and that of the children she is screening. She is both translated and translator, mirroring the common experience of immigrant children who become the official interpreters for their families. In other words, Luiselli shows the multilayered notion of agency that is a crucial part of the translational phenomena surrounding migration, and she does it through her metalinguistic musings about her exchanges with the young migrants. Once again, the traditional schema of translation with its idealized view of homolingual speakers and enunciation, and of interpreters as passive conduits of transfer, proves sorely inadequate to represent translation as it lives and is lived in contexts of migration. As in the case of Via Crucis and Stazione by Jacir, translation constitutes the subject matter of this book, but also, beautifully, it constitutes its form. Tell Me How It Ends fully participates in the genre of testimonial texts,11 We would like to thank Hilary Levison for pointing out the connection between translation and testimonial writing at the 2019 ACLA annual convention held at Georgetown University. See her “Disturbing Translations: Distance, Memory, and Representation in Contemporary.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015.

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texts that can be seen as translations, or versions, of original stories, stories that would be lost without translation. Writing about AIDS narratives, Ross Chambers describes these texts as relays, as they imply or make use of a metaphor of relay in their account of what the writing of testimonial entails, or they employ other metaphors suggestive of portability such as reporting or fostering. Such tropes describe the witnessing writer as a mediating agent, connecting or attempting to (re)connect those who cannot speak (the dead) and those (the living) who seem oblivious to their fate, as if it were not relevant to them. (Chambers 2004, 37)

Even though the children are alive and not dead, like in most testimonial writing, the book is explicit about its witnessing function: “Telling stories doesn’t solve anything, doesn’t reassemble broken lives. But perhaps it is a way of understanding the unthinkable. If a story haunts us, we keep telling it to ourselves, in silence, replaying it in the silence while we shower, while we walk alone down streets, or in our moments of insomnia” (Luiselli 2017, 69–70). Following the rhetoric of testimonial writing, which entails a de-authorization of the author, Luiselli’s book lists the questions one by one, commenting on the typology of answers they elicit and on the words that are repeated in the exchanges and that we learn to understand as we read (coyotes, pandrilleros, La Bestia, the hielera, La Migra), as in the example below where two little sisters from Guatemala, aged five and seven, are being screened: Why did you come to the United States? I don’t know. How did you travel here? A man brought us. A coyote? No, a man. Was he nice to you? Yes, he was nice, I think. And where did you cross the border? I don’t know. Texas? Arizona? Yes! Texas Arizona.

(Luiselli 2017, 55–6)

Stealing a sad smile from the reader, Luiselli shows how complicated things are when lives are being translated into a place that does not seem to want

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them. The fear of saying the wrong thing or getting in trouble often determines the wrong answers, and by recording them Luiselli points to the paradox of the interpreter’s predicament: the correct answers to the questionnaire are those that as a human being she would not want to hear as they refer to the violent circumstances the children are fleeing, yet they are those that she dutifully records and conveys to the lawyers because she knows that they can “strengthen” the children’s cases: Thirty-nine: “Are you scared to return?” In this same conversation, Alina also tells me that she brought the girls over after some pandrilleros from the gang that killed Manu’s friend started waiting outside her eldest daughter’s school every day, following her slowly back home on motorbikes as she walked along the side of the road, trying not to look back. Up until then, the idea of letting the children travel alone with a coyote had been unimaginable—crossing borders, mounting La Bestia. Suddenly the idea of allowing them to stay in Tegucigalpa became even more unimaginable. (Luiselli 2017, 89)

According to the UN statistics, the numbers of global migrants were at their highest before the Covid-19 pandemic. However, numbers and maps do not convey the horror that is taking place on this continent with the same impact as images and stories. Hearing and recording the children’s stories has been Luiselli’s act of witnessing; ours is the act of reading. Translation understood as an act of witnessing, as we have seen in this chapter, is only imaginable through a schema of translation that strives to make the complexity of the world visible and audible. Both artists discussed in this chapter make visible the ways in which migration touches our lives directly through images and stories that sometimes come back to haunt and perhaps shame us. What we have explored through the close reading of Jacir’s and Luiselli’s work is the central role of translation as a key epistemological concept as well as a hermeneutic and ethical practice in relation to the phenomenon of global migrations and their cultural representations. As Lawrence Venuti writes, translation changes everything it touches (Venuti 2013): a translation methodology can radically change the way we see the world but also ourselves, the way we hear other people’s stories, and the way we “view, practice, share, and develop knowledge” (Blumczynski 2016, 30). Indeed, like a vaporetto in Emily Jacir’s Stazione, translation carries us across, in body and spirit, and creates a space not only for what Homi Bhabha calls the “tropic movement of cultural

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translation” (Bhabha 2004, 328), but also for the thought process through which we, as cultural agents, make sense of what we see. What is occupied by translation is not really an interstitial space; it is, rather, a semantically and semiotically overcrowded space where signs and concepts contain multiple meanings at the same time, as Jacir’s Via Crucis installation powerfully shows, and enable unique and embodied hermeneutic experiences. This is perhaps the aspect of the connection between migration and translation that stands out the most in the works analyzed in this chapter and in this book—the interwovenness of the physical and intellectual experience that both translation and migration entail, the concreteness of relocation and the abstractness of its categories, the theories that explain migration and the practices through which it takes shape.

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This word: “shame.” No, I must write it in its original form, not in this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners’ unrepented past, this Angrezi in which I am forced to write, and so forever alter what is written … Sharam, that’s the word. For which this paltry “shame” is a wholly inadequate translation. —Salman Rushdie, Shame, 1983

2.1 Translation, Migration, and Postcolonial Literature The previous chapter argued that many of the prevailing perceptions that inform translation theory and education do not adequately reflect the complexity involved in material acts of translation and communication and advocated for the adoption of schemas grounded in the dynamic tension existing between translation and migration. This chapter follows suit by building upon those schemas and spelling out how a translational view of the world also impacts how we look at literature and literature production. Theorizing translation from within the social, cultural, and political contingencies of today, in fact, means engaging with plurilingualism as the face of our global cultural life, a condition that is kept invisible or viewed as aberrant by the mythic monolingualism of European modernity, which was both exported and made dominant through colonialism and cultural imperialism. Viv Edwards and Maria Tymoczko, among others, claim that, although we are accustomed to imagining monolingualism as the norm, it might be the case that plurilingualism is more common worldwide (Edwards 2004; Tymockzo 2006): this is almost invariably the case in postcolonial contexts where translation emerges from within the culture itself as a major mode of communication and self-expression. As a consequence, postcolonial literature is the language practice par excellence to emerge out of the nexus of migration and translation and cannot but be read as a translation affair.

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As the epigraph by Salman Rushdie makes explicit, the connection between migration and translation in postcolonial cultures, as cultures that were born out of a forced travel-based encounter between peoples and territories, is foundational and establishes the direct line that connects the colonial linguistic annihilation of indigenous cultures with the postcolonial appropriation of European languages that one finds at the core of postcolonial literature. After all, colonies were meant to be from the start “translations” of the European “originals” located elsewhere on the map (Young 2003, 239). Thus, translation was seen as part and parcel of colonial life and, unsurprisingly, it is also part and parcel of the postcolonial condition (Bertacco 2014). As the most visible body of literature to have emerged out of the colonial journey, the postcolonial in fact can be seen as emblematic of all migrant writing: on the one hand, it highlights the extent to which it is only the direction that the global journey has taken1 that has changed from colonial times to nowadays, and what was once called exploration and colonialism is now called invasion and immigration (Mignolo 2000, 278–9); on the other, as Rushdie writes in what is his signature translation novel quoted above, “the immigrants [and] the mohajirs” (Rushdie 1983, 91) are now in charge of rewriting history from a position of relocation. Postcolonial literature, thus, occupies a special place in the discussion of translation and migration that we are articulating in this book. It is defined not by the nation that contains it—even though it has often been studied as an extension of the national literature of the colonial “mother country”— but by the experience of colonization that has marked, at one point or another, the country’s history. It is also the main corpus of contemporary literature that must be approached translingually as the linguistic matrix of these literatures is not containable within the boundaries of former colonial languages but is inclusive of the indigenous languages, as well as the creole forms that developed following colonial contact. Hence local vernaculars and accents characterize these literary texts and present an interesting question to the reader. The accent in fact marks and, by doing so, alters the standard (normal/normative) word. Yet the accent also defines the word and the literary word in particular, because, as Joseph Conrad wrote, “written words have their accent too” (Conrad 1988, 2). “Who gets to decide,” Conrad asks

For lack of a better term, we keep referring to the generic “journey” in this discussion, even though it implies a horizontal plan of encounter, which is misleading, both when considering the translation of texts and the translation of cultures. The plans are in fact asymmetrical in terms of power, prestige, respect, cultural authority, etc. (see on the topic Mignolo 2000, 278–311).

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in the Preface to A Personal Record, “whether an accent is good or bad, right or wrong?” (Conrad 1988)—the writer, the reader, or the critic? These are the questions this chapter sets out to answer taking postcolonial literature as exemplary of migrant writing and proposing translation as the reading lens for global literary studies. In particular, we have selected to work on a specific postcolonial context, the Caribbean, renowned for its cultural and linguistic heterogeneity and to provide “accented readings” of “accented texts” by Derek Walcott, Velma Pollard, and Dionne Brand.

2.2 The Accent in Postcolonial Writing Within the anglophone sphere, starting from one of the earliest postcolonial novels to reach international visibility—Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, published by Faber and Faber in 1952—we could compile a very long list of texts that challenge standard English, noticeably and systematically. In other words, postcolonial writers have explored the aesthetic possibilities of an accented language. Good examples of this are Vic Reid’s and Sam Selvon’s early experiments in fiction; Ken Saro Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English; Kamau Brathwaite’s and Louise Bennett’s flamboyant innovations in Caribbean poetry; the stories of “mimic” people told by V. S. Naipaul, or of “translated” people told by Salman Rushdie; the creoles recorded in Earl Lovelace’s and Velma Pollard’s works, or sung by Linton Kwesi Johnson and Grace Nichols in their poems. Through their literary use of language, these writers have claimed a space for heterogeneity within the global publishing market, and they have done so by using translation as a mode of artistic creation. It could indeed be argued that it is the visibility given to accented writing by postcolonial and minority writers in the past century that has affected mainstream writing as well so that critics nowadays speak of a heterolingual canon of contemporary writing that plays with different languages (Sommer 2004; Ch’ien 2004; Grutman 2006; Lennon 2010; Walkowitz 2015). The terms that have been used to talk about accented writing make abundant use of spatial metaphors: “contact zones” (Pratt 1992), “third space” (Bhabha 1994, 2004), “translation zones” (Apter 2006), and “trace” (Spivak 2012). Translation is seen as something that happens somewhere, in an in-between space, and that has a transformative power. But there is still a distinction between a monolingual here and a multilingual there, an insider’s and an outsider’s position, the unmarked us and the global other,

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because the vestiges of Eurocentric parameters (spatial, linguistic, ethnic) still inform the discussion.2 In other words, the replacement of Europe as the content of what is taught in the emerging global humanities paradigm, as Starosta perceptively points out, has not dismantled its Eurocentric form (Starosta 2013, 167) and can still be detected in categories such as the migrant, the transnational, the global used as “delivery systems” of otherness (Palumbo-Liu 2012, 21). In fact, while defining the relationship between the self and the other in spatial and ethnic or linguistic terms, they stabilize the meaning of the other as intelligible and knowable but imagine the selfsame to be always stable (Starosta 2013, 164). What we are suggesting in this book, however, posits translation as a mode of self-expression but also, and equally importantly, as a model of responsible reading, or, as Lawrence Venuti writes, “an ethical action […] determined to take responsibility for bringing a foreign text into a different situation by acknowledging that its very foreignness demands cultural innovation” (Venuti 2011, 246). In other words, translation exerts its transformative power by unsettling established conventions and orthodoxies at both ends of the literary event: it informs the writing process and it can also inform practices of reading. Translation organically grows from within postcolonial literatures as a textual marker that not only highlights the internal tensions within cultures but shows what it means to write in mother tongues (in the plural), therefore serving as one of the main aesthetic principles of innovation (Meylaerts and Serban 2014, 11). Yet this aspect of translation as a principle of aesthetic renewal is still vastly under-scrutinized in postcolonial literary studies. Rebecca Walkowitz uses “born translated” for works that “are written as translation, pretending to take place in a language other than the one in which they have, in fact, been composed” (Walkowitz 2015, 4, emphasis added). The “text written as a translation” well describes literature that intentionally explores and plays with “the array of possibilities by juxtaposing or mixing languages in literature” (Grutman 2006, 19). These are the texts that we shall call translational. Translation defines their poetics as literary artifacts and should, therefore, mark the moment of reading as well. This requires a broadening of the conventional notion of translation, in the sense that the writer and the translator coincide, but it also enables a practice of reading This amounts to a broad generalization, and there are studies and examples of translingual texts in European literatures (Dante’s Commedia, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, etc.), usually predating the nation-state. However, the Romantic idea of one language per one culture and people that has informed the national(istic) view of literature is still visible in the European educational systems. As a consequence, multilingual, translingual, translational writings have been cast in a fairly negative light in literary studies (see Meylaerts and Serbian 2014).

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that acknowledges the polylingual context out of which these texts emerge instead of imposing an imagined monolingualism—imagined because it was never in the colony or postcolony in the first place—and shows the reader as well as an active translator (Bertacco 2016). An exemplary lesson in accented reading is offered by Caribbean literature as the terms and the categories that are crucial to understanding it come from the traditionally disrespected languages of the region—Creoles— and the process of their making—creolization. In an ironic and historically just turning of the tables, a region once deemed the antithesis of civilization has become one of the most creative laboratories of verbal art, both oral and written, and this is thanks to its radical creolization of the colonial languages (Lalla, D’Costa, Pollard 2014, 1). In the following section, we will sketch a model of literary analysis that, by referring to the operations of translation, responds to this kind of textual strategies, that is, a literary analysis that puts at the center of its practice a close attention to the translational poetics in the texts. We are going to consider three writers belonging to different generations, coming from three different islands and therefore using their islands’ Creoles, and who exemplify distinct attitudes toward Creole use in literary writing. While the selection is necessarily limited, we believe that it allows for a significant comparative analysis to substantiate the argument illustrated so far.

2.3 Born Creole: A Caribbean Vocabulary for Reading The Caribbean region constitutes perhaps the world’s most extensive and most varied site of creolization as a result of the very different histories of colonization and enslavement that unfolded on each of the Caribbean islands. Caribbean creoles3 have developed along different lines, and they stand in quite different relations to the European languages from which they come. A useful reminder for anyone interested in the literatures emerging from the region, as Barbara Lalla matter-of-factly points out, is that “[w]hile Creole has minority language status in relation to an international language, there is growing acknowledgment and insistence on the obvious fact that Creole

We will hereafter gather the various types of creoles together under the simple rubric Creole, capitalized, as is commonly done in literary studies and used in the sources that we cite. We will capitalize Creole when referring to a specific type of creole, therefore following the typographic convention used with standard languages, and use the term uncapitalized in all other circumstances.

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speakers have majority status within the region” (Lalla 2014b, 104). It comes as no surprise, then, that Caribbean writers, from Vic Reid to Sam Selvon, from Kamau Brathwaite to NourbeSe Philip and Velma Pollard, from V. S. Naipaul to Merle Hodge and Derek Walcott, from Earl Lovelace to Louise Bennett, from Linton Kwesi Johnson to Dionne Brand, have explored the numerous possibilities to create a fully Antillean literary language in their works. Such a language, as Betsy Wing explains in her introduction to Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, would be “capable of writing the Antilles into history” (Wing 1997, xi), by escaping the passivity associated with an imposed language of fixed forms (the colonial language) as well as the folklore traps of representing Creole merely as dialect, disrespected in intellectual and literary fields, and therefore repressed as a mode of artistic expression. In 1976 Édouard Glissant had already expressed his ideas about Creole in a famous piece entitled “Free and Forced Poetics,” published in the second issue of Alcheringa, the revolutionary journal of ethnopoetics edited by Dennis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg in the 1970s. As Glissant explains: At the beginning was the shout—the beginning is, for us, the time when Creole was created as a means of communication between the master and his slaves. It was then that the peculiar syntax of the shout took hold. To the Antillean the word is first and foremost a sound. Noise is a speech. Din is a discourse. We must first understand that. (Glissant 1976, 96)

The question of reading emerges therefore as an important question in such a linguistic and literary context. How are we to read a shout in a literary text—as sound or graph? Glissant’s piercing reflection on Creole as sound, characterized by “the peculiar syntax of the shout,” can be of use when exploring alternative modes of reading literary texts that flaunt a movement of words between standard and creolized forms of a European language— English in the texts under analysis here—because it conveys an understanding of language itself, in the Caribbean, as Creole. If one adds to this idea the basic, yet radical, observation that Creole permeates the very act of writing in the Caribbean even when that writing is not in Creole or not only in Creole, one has in full view the space of intervention delineated by this chapter. If the creolization of language and culture is a quintessential feature of the Caribbean cultural experience, it does not affect—at least not in a generalized way—how the literature from the region is read. Barbara Lalla, a scholar who has authored some of the most insightful discussions of Jamaican literary discourse from a sociolinguistic perspective, refers to this phenomenon through the concept of gestalt perception, which she defines

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in these terms: “It is generally recognized that readers bring to written work sets of understandings through which (rather than exclusively through the information of the text itself) a world takes shape in the reader’s mind, a gestalt” (Lalla 2014a, 60). Lalla posits the gestalt perception of Creole as “pivotal to the comprehension of much literary discourse in the Caribbean as Creole discourse” (Lalla 2014a, 61) and this is often missed or glossed over by non-Creole-speaking readers who only read Creole as a marked choice or as a dialect and not as literary language. To quote from Lalla once more, “the persistent assumption that Creole discourse remains inherently oral rather than literary is simplistic and somewhat paternalistic—a view betraying a colonial mindset even within academia itself. This is a mindset that so maps orality into our understanding of Creole as to obscure the extent to which Creole participates in literary discourse” (Lalla 2014a, 55). This chapter follows Lalla’s lesson and explores the limitations of the terminology that literary studies affords readers to describe the use of Creole in written texts. Given the anglophone context of reference, English literary studies and stylistics are the fields primarily taken into consideration. The closest term that we have to describe the use of Creole is dialect, and indeed dialect has been used in much literary criticism about Caribbean literature. However, as Kamau Brathwaite argues in his seminal lecture “History of the Voice,” dialect cannot constitute a viable term in Caribbean literary studies because of its pejorative overtones: Dialect is “inferior” English. Dialect is the language when you want to make fun of someone. Caricature speaks in dialect. Dialect has a long history coming from the plantation where people’s dignity was distorted through their languages and the descriptions that the dialect gave to them. Nation language, on the other hand, is the submerged area of that dialect that is much more closely allied to the African aspect of experience in the Caribbean. It may be in English, but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout, or a machine-gun, or the wind, or a wave. It is also like the blues. (Brathwaite 1993, 266)

Kamau Brathwaite prophetically sets forth nation language as the notion capable of capturing the spectrum of linguistic expression and meaning available in the Caribbean region—one that organically shifts from standard to creole and from oral to written mode. And he acknowledges that, in the Caribbean, “our novelists have always been conscious of these native resources, but the critics and academics, as is often the case, lagged far behind” (Brathwaite 1993, 268). While it is not surprising that, in the late 1970s, Brathwaite could lament a lack of scholarly interest into the ways in

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which nation language affects literature, what is striking is that things do not seem to have changed in a substantial way in the field of anglophone literary studies in the fifty years elapsed since his lecture. In fact, although today Creole has become a pervasive feature of written texts, this kind of cultural and linguistic “overload” (Sommer 2003, 1) is still generally read and interpreted as a transcription of an oral phenomenon. In literary terms, of course, this is problematic because it means that Creole is not read for what it actually signifies in a written text: literature. The assumed inferiority of dialect to standard language is also problematic from a postcolonial reading point of view because it colors our reading of the dialect-speaking characters or of the dialect portions of the text in sociological terms and hinders a literary reading. As Roberta Cimarosti points out in her lucid analysis of the postcolonial literary establishment, this critical stance has all but gone unnoticed and uncriticized by postcolonial writers themselves (Cimarosti 2014, 60–3). Walcott, for instance, personifies the patronizing attitude of much postcolonial criticism in the figure of the “critictourist,” the liberal critic who, while warming to “the speech of the ghetto […], preaches again, this time with his [sic] criticism, the whole separatebut-equal argument” (Walcott 1997a, 55). David Dabydeen talks about a “second epoch of colonization—this time by universal humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neurosis and their value system” (Dabydeen 2011, 45). The problem both writers address is the lack of a deep engagement with the texts as literature and, as Cimarosti argues, an inability on the part of the critics “to understand Caribbean and the literatures in the new Englishes away from the historical pattern that assigns them the role of victims” (Cimarosti 2014, 61). Derek Walcott (1930–2017) may seem an unusual choice to talk about creolization in literature: he considered himself to a large extent a poet of the written word and very well-read in the traditions that, despite the criticism he earned for doing so, he claimed as his own, yet—and not surprising for a writer who began his career in theater—he wrote a good body of verse in more than one Creole. As problematic an author as Walcott is in the contemporary literary world,4 he provides a good starting point in a chapter

The reference is, of course, to Derek Walcott’s sexual harassment charges during his years of teaching at Harvard University and Boston University. This chapter looks at the colossal impact that Derek Walcott’s poetic language has had on Anglophone poetry well beyond the postcolonial field and the Caribbean region. However, as women academics teaching in an often misogynistic and sexist institution in the age of the #MeToo movement, we acknowledge this highly problematic aspect of Walcott’s life.

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that focuses only on anglophone Caribbean writing, as his work shows the use, by an anglophone writer, of a French-based Creole. This provides a better sense of the gestalt perspective that Lalla mentions as well as of the highly complex linguistic and cultural makeup of the region. Possession of Saint Lucia, Walcott’s home island, went back and forth between England and France more than ten times during the colonial period. The resulting pattern of language distribution is, therefore, complicated and divided along colonial language lines: there are areas—mostly rural—that are predominantly French-Creole speaking, Catholic and black, and areas—mostly urban—that are Protestant and dominated by English and English-based Creole. Walcott was raised by an English-speaking Methodist family in Castries, the island’s capital, but he learned metropolitan French in school. He would have heard the French-based Creole everywhere while growing up, but there were strong inhibitions against speaking it. Laurence Breiner explains that “it was the language associated with the Catholic rural poor, not the class to which his family belonged” (Breiner 2005, 31). The poem entitled “Sainte Lucie”—in St. Lucian Creole—was published in the collection Sea Grapes in 1976 and showcases Walcott’s call to language, to all the languages he had at his disposal. As we read through the lines, the operation of translating a place into language—so central to the colonial experience—unfolds before our eyes: II Pomme arac, otaheite apple, pomme cythère, pomme granate, moubain, z’anananas the pineapple’s Aztec helmet, pomme, […] Come back to me, my language. Come back, cacao, grigri, solitaire ciseau the scissor-bird

(Walcott 1986a, 310)

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The enchanting tone of these lines, which read like a litany, imparts a seamless movement from English to French Creole and back, as if each language led, organically, to the other, the same way as the nouns listed lead—matter-offactly—to the flora and the fauna of the island. The invocation to language in the poem performs, symbolically, a double function: it (re)names the surrounding nature while shaping a communal tongue. The prayer, as critics have pointed out, inaugurates for Walcott a new and creative relationship to Creole. The tongue, however, is double and section III contains—as the headnote says—a “narrative Creole song heard on the back of an open truck travelling to Vieuxfort” (314), written entirely in the French Creole of St. Lucia, while section IV contains its translation into English. In other words, there are two distinct poems within this text, and each is a slightly different version of the other. Thematically and structurally, the poem speaks through translation and its conclusion is a densely interwoven fabric of old and new stylistic patterns, European languages and Creoles, orality and writing: generations going generations gone, moi c’est gens St. Lucie. C’est la moi sortie; is there I born.

(Walcott 1986b, emphasis added)

In Creole poetics, translation and a refusal to translate work hand in hand in the service of a heightened literary effect. Ciseau is rendered as the scissorbird, but no translation is given for grigri, solitaire, moi c’est gens St. Lucie. And this is perhaps the compositional signature of Walcott’s Creole poetics: his own use of St. Lucian French Creole within an English-based poem in which the two languages are kept together thanks to a firm rhyming scheme (a, b, a) that captures the reader’s attention. The first two lines in fact present a double-rhyme scheme: the word generations is used for the internal rhyme, while the final rhyme, even though unmarked orthographically, demands to be read in Creole. The next couplet, in St Lucian Creole, provides the lyrical nucleus of the stanza: a chiasmus binds together moi and c’est while gens maintains the internal rhyme with gone of the previous couplet. In the end, the prosody forces the reader, both Creole- and non-Creole-speaking, to “read in Creole” in order to make the words going, gone, and born rhyme. The stanza analyzed above is a linguistic and poetic tour de force by a writer who was at times abrasive in his critique of what he saw as an indiscriminate use of Creole in Caribbean literature. In his review of Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco (written in French Creole), he wrote:

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My hatred of the current way of writing down Creole (“orthography”) is a lost battle, but my rage continues in defeat. Coarsely phonetic, it is visually crass, its aural range is limited to a concept of peasant or artisan belligerence that denies its own subtleties of pronunciation, denying its almost completely French roots. (Walcott 1997b, 228)

For Walcott the alternative is a truly translational poetics, in which the two languages are used “side by side, like a facing-text translation” (Cimarosti 2014, 60), as we saw in the poem above. When present, code-meshing and the blending of Creole and Standard English are subject to the prosodic needs of the poem. This is perhaps the one feature that traverses Walcott’s entire poetic production, from the earlier collections to his epic masterpiece Omeros (1990), notably written in the highly elaborate terza rima: “This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes.” (a) Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking (b) his soul with their cameras. “Once wind bring the news (a) to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking (b) the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars, (c) because they could see the axes in our own eyes. (d) (Omeros, I, i, 3)

Terza rima was created by Dante in the Italian vernacular in the fourteenth century when Italian was not yet a language as we think of it today. The interlocking rhyme scheme was meant as a stylistic rendition “of his vision of an orderly universe replete with underlying patterns created by God” (Beattie 2018, 85). Unsurprisingly, since he considered Dante his model, Walcott uses the Caribbean vernacular in his own adaptation of the Italian rhyme. As he explained in a creative writing seminar at the University of Milan in 2001, “If you set yourself the rules of terza rima, then you are allowed to write about Paradiso. If you do Paradiso in free verse, it’s not Paradise, because it has no order. […] There is an idea of order, […] the poem creates its own order” (Walcott in Loreto 2009, 175). In Omeros, Walcott expresses his pride in his own poetic art. Achille, one of the characters, proudly confronts the patronizing attitude of the priest who wants to correct his language: “[W]hen he smiled at Achille’s canoe, In God We Troust, / Achille said: ‘Leave it. Is God’ spelling and mine’” (I, I, 8). From an accented reading point of view, “Is God’ spelling and mine” is not visually crass or aurally belligerent. Rather, to use the words of Velma Pollard, “Walcott’s use of Creole […] is selective and quietly forceful” (Pollard 2019, 82).

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Thus, we turn now to the work and import of Velma Pollard, another writer from Walcott’s generation, less internationally known than Walcott, but who has played an important role in the reevaluation of the folk and Creole traditions of her native Jamaica. Pollard was born in 1937 in Woodside, a small rural village in Jamaica; she trained as a teacher and a language educator in Jamaica and Canada and has contributed much of her own writing and scholarship to the systematic study and teaching of Jamaican Creole, to the use of the literary potential of Creole in her own works, as well as to close readings of other writers’ works in which she focuses on their Creole poetics. Pollard’s 1989 “Afterword” to her short story collection, Considering Woman I, became one of the first important statements on literary Creole made by a Caribbean writer. It was important because it accompanied the literary text itself and pointed to “the way forward” (Pollard 2012) in terms of how, in order to read a work of literature, we need to first see the language in which it is written: The problem of presenting on the page a language which is without a tradition of writing, and so one which is not standardised, has existed ever since West Indians began to try to represent authentic Caribbean voices. […] And so without any agreement as to how sounds should be represented, writers have tried to set down something which is recognisable to people who read English but which reproduces the sounds of the creole. (Pollard 2010, 76–7)

An example from this collection of short stories can be of use to capture the main goal of this chapter: Considering Woman, as the title of the collection, plays with the two codes used in the text and exploits the “meaning potential” (D’Costa 2014, 70) that an accented reading offers. As a title, it strikes the monolingual anglophone reader as unusual: does it mean “considering women”? Or is the present participle being used as an adjective for “woman” as a collective noun the same—albeit unmarked—way that it was common for “man”? A monolingual reading would interpret “woman” as the object in the phrase so the title would read “a collection of stories considering/about woman.” On the other hand, however, a Jamaican Creole reading would recognize “considering” as an adjective of “woman” and “woman” as the subject of the phrase, changing remarkably the meaning of the title to “a collection of stories about woman as a thinking person” (Pollard 2014, 94). In many of her works Velma Pollard retells stories from her island, complicating or questioning their meanings and, as Daryl Cumber-Dance

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points out, “resemanticizing” them (Cumber-Dance 2008, 10). Beyond the thematic aspect, however, the folk tradition seems to be entrenched in her work stylistically as well. The short story, the novella, the poem are the prevalent genres in Pollard’s creative output: they are all brief compositions and share a terseness of form, which, in turn, is reflected in the writer’s measured use of language. A good example from Pollard’s oeuvre is Karl, a novelette published in 1992 that won the Casa de las Americas Prize (1992) for fiction written in English or an anglophone Creole—one of Latin America’s oldest and most prestigious literary prizes. Set between Jamaica and Canada in the mid-1960s, the novelette tells the story of Karl, a brilliant child who grows up in a small village called Hopeville and lives through Jamaica’s transition from colony to postcolony, trying to come to terms with the oppositional value systems implicit in the political change. Karl is raised and doted upon by his mother, “Auntie,” who sacrifices herself for the sake of his education and future success in life, a success that Karl achieves at the price of his own psychological and emotional well-being. Karl opens with a brief creation tale about the black man, which provides the refrain—almost a story within the story—as well as the framework of interpretation for the book: Im is a self-made man Im mek imself Das why im no mek good (Masters, who will define what “good” is?)

(Karl 26)

In biblical terms, if compared to divine creation, human self-creation can only be imperfect, of course. However, the word “Masters” possibly invokes the context of the plantation with its disparaging view of the black subject. Seemingly uncomplicated and rendered in a terse and highly readable style, Karl offers an engrossing reading experience, interrupted by a few portions in Creole that arrest the reading and call for a rereading. For the non-Creole reader, in fact, the presence of Creole leaves a gap in one’s comprehension of the text. The gap can be filled and the deviation from the Standard English of the rest of the story can be rendered significant only if the reader perceives some deeper connection, which compensates for the linguistic oddity. Therefore, by paying attention to the Creole sections in the text, non-Creole-speaking readers also gain a much deeper appreciation of the craftiness of Karl as a literary text. Creole is used in three main ways in Karl: as in the quotation above, it provides an explicit link with Jamaican folk stories and proverbs and their formulaic genre; it is used in the service of characterization and therefore

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particularly visible in dialogue (which is the most common literary use of Creole), but it is also used, on rare but meaningful occasions, as the language of narration. Karl’s loving, hard-working, and dedicated mother, Auntie, is an important character in the book and is always presented speaking Creole: “‘Mek dih bwoy take dih Entrance, Teecha,’ Auntie had said, with not the vaguest idea how she would put the school fees together if I ever did pass that Entrance” (Karl 30). Auntie’s imperative to the teacher is a gem for literary analysis. What sounds like, and in fact is, an authoritarian order captures the pride, the love and the emotional decision Auntie is making about Karl’s future. The use of Creole here is not only relevant but useful to Auntie’s characterization; it is foregrounded for rhetorical emphasis and memorability, as often occurs in oral genres, as it provides the emotional accent of the sentence and impresses in the reader’s memory Auntie’s strength as well as her clarity of vision. Unlike Karl, who shifts in-between different linguistic, cultural, and social orders, Auntie is firmly rooted to the ground and, as the text shows through its style, Auntie and Karl speak different languages. The tension in the life of the protagonist between his comfortable life in rural Hopeville and the promise of success and advancement offered by education is expressed by the frequent code-switching between Standard Jamaican English (SJE) and Jamaican Creole (JC) in the novelette: Ras I with his multicoloured tam and pointed beard was a prophet: “You gwaine to Babylon school, man!” “Noh seh mi neva warn you.” “Mmmhmmmmm.” “Oh Babyloooooooooon, why dost thou despoil my children? Their feet shall seek no more the temples of the wicked … Soon! Soooon! Isaiah Chapter … ” I never stopped or listened to get the exact reference the fast-fastwalking brother moving with his stick would quote as he measured his steps up Vineyard Road. (Karl 33–4)

The pace of the narrative is often quickened through fast shifts between many registers and codes. In this case, a biblical reference follows the Rasta prophet’s warning, in a different religious register, to the young boy. But because Karl, as the subtitle reads, is A Monologue in the Mind of a Man, it is written in the first-person singular so the narrator using Jamaican Creole overlaps with the writer using Jamaican Standard English. A good example of this is the phrase “people like her not on his conscience” from the quotation below, which indicates Karl’s awareness of the inner stratification of Jamaican

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society. This type of code ambiguity occurs rarely in this novelette and rarely in Pollard’s oeuvre as a whole. When it happens, it signals the few moments of wholeness of the protagonist, the moments, that is, in which he speaks as a whole person and in his own voice, albeit a voice that, while not double, is mixed: Auntie never heard Ras I, for he was a city chap, Warieka Hills Rasta, and never came to Hopeville. Technically, people like her not on his conscience. But even if she had heard, she wouldn’t have listened. For she and I and Teacher Brown had already harkened to the long-haired maiden of all our water gullies singing in her high-pitched voice: Ef you cyan cook Daddy white rice You cyan go a Daddy yard. Ef you cyan wash Daddy white shirt You cyan go a daddy yard … If you can’t read Daddy book you can’t buy Daddy house. (Karl 34, emphasis added)

Indeed, the inevitable and difficult confrontation with “Daddy book,” in the quotation above, captures well the metaliterary framework within which all the writers who make a creative, aesthetically as well as ideologically, intentional use of Creole considered in this chapter are operating. An intense linguistic and literary reflection in fact constitutes a central theme in two poetry collections by the third and final author presented in this chapter: Dionne Brand. Born in Guayguayare, Trinidad, in 1953, Brand moved to Canada in 1970, where she has lived ever since. Her search for a poetic language to claim as her own is often seen as her response to her experience as an immigrant, as her way to face the challenge of finding a literary genealogy in which to bear witness to her life and to her West Indian roots. Since 1997, when she received the Governor General’s Award for poetry (Canada’s most prestigious literary prize) for Land to Light On, Brand has been fully acknowledged as a key member of Canada’s literary scene alongside authors such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Michael Ondaatje. At the same time, however, her work has been studied as belonging to a transnational Caribbean literary tradition.5 See Maria Casas’s Multimodality in Canadian Black Feminist Writing, 123–9; Edward J. Chamberlin, Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies, 266–70; Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada, 73–88.

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No Language Is Neutral, published in 1990, is the first poetic text in which Brand moves back and forth between Standard English and Trinidadian English Creole. The book’s title is taken from a line from Derek Walcott6 to which Brand responds: “No language is neutral seared in the spine’s unravelling. / Here is history too” (No Language, 34). The self is reconstructing her genealogy and going back to her personal memories. Liney is the poet’s grandmother, the woman who stays when her own mother leaves. But as an adult poet, Brand realizes she does not know anything about Liney as a woman, the kind of things she liked or disliked, the dreams she had, the men she loved. So she tries to find out from her uncle Ben who says, “[S]he was a sugar cake, sweet sweet/sweet. Yuh muma! that girl was a sugar cake!” (No Language, 24). This is the story the poetic persona is both distancing herself from as a writer but also bearing witness to in this book of poetry about women who are unknown to their own children: When Liney reach here is up to the time I hear about. Why I always have to go back to that old woman who wasn’t even from here but from another barracoon, I never understand but deeply as if is something that have no end. Even she daughter didn’t know but only leave me she life like a brown stone to see.

(No Language, 24)

The stanza above is an example of Creole used as unmarked code, not for the purpose of characterization, as it was in the quotation from the uncle, but as poetic language. The poet is musing upon the mystery that Liney’s life is to her, as it probably was to her mother as well, and on the unexplainable need that she feels to go back to her and to the island, with no end. The syntax shifts seamlessly between Standard English and Trinidadian English Creole (TEC henceforth) without marking the Creole portions or leaving the nonCreole-speaking reader out. Yet the poetic climax of the last line, with the image of the poet’s mother leaving the island but also becoming, like Liney, “a brown stone to see,” is achieved by the increased use of TEC in the last three lines of the stanza. To date, Brand has not written entire poems in Creole. However, she has used Creole as a distinctive stylistic choice in No Language Is Neutral and in the following work Land to Light On (1997) to mark, both emotionally and lyrically, very intense moments in the texts. In Land to Light On, for instance, The book’s title is taken from a line from Derek Walcott’s poem “LII I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head,” Midsummer, in Collected Poems 1948–1984, 506. No language is neutral;/ the green oak of English is a murmurous cathedral/where some took umbrage, some peace, but every shade, all,/ helped widen its shadow.

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Brand often blends Trinidadian English Creole and Standard English in what Ashcroft calls “syntactic fusion” (Ashcroft 2009) or code ambiguity, and the result is particularly poignant, as in the stanza below: I lift my head in the cold and I get confuse. It quiet here when is night, and is only me and the quiet. I try to say a word but it fall. […] … I did not know which way to turn except to try again, to find some word that could be heard by the something waiting. My mouth could not find a language. I find myself instead, useless as that. I sorry. I stop by the mailbox and I give up. (Land to Light On, 5, emphasis added)

Since the Creole past tense and the non-Creole English present tense have the same structure (e.g., no dental suffix in “lift,” “confuse,” “try,” “stop”; unmarked tense in “get,” “find,” “give” due to the highly analytical nature of creole languages),7 the consciousness of the speaking voice in this stanza shifts between the narrator in the past tense, and the actor in the present tense. But it also shifts between a literary, relatively assured persona—the one who is writing—and a Creole-speaking and “sorry” persona—the one who is written about. Read with this in mind, the line “My mouth could not find a language” makes intensely palpable the gulf between the poet and the world around her, a world in which Creole cannot serve her as a language. Yet if Creole is not a respected language in her new country, it is not only respected but essential in the poem itself where Brand explores ways of writing that look and sound standard and creole at the same time. In conclusion, the examples offered above showcase different approaches to Creole writing as translational. While Pollard in the late 1980s and early 1990s is “showing” Creole in her stories by putting it in the mouth of her characters and capturing the dynamism of the Creole continuum on the page, she nevertheless does not associate her authorial voice with it. In contrast, Brand, in the mid-1990s, exploits the points of coincidence between

Some of the terminology commonly used in creole linguistics (zero copula, non-marking of past tense of third-person singular, etc.) to describe creoles has been criticized as Eurocentric as it bases the description of creoles on the structure of European languages and therefore identifies areas of lack. More recent approaches have instead emphasized the highly analytical nature of creoles. See Laura Ekberg, Heterolingualims and Cultural Integrity in Finnish Translations of Anglophone Caribbean Novels. PhD diss., University of Turku, 30–1.

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standard and creole and elevates creole as a language of poetry. As a linguist, Pollard seems very interested in the viability of a Caribbean grapholect: in her literary works, she balances accuracy and accessibility in order to write for a wide—Caribbean as well as international—audience. Brand’s use of Creole is instead cagey and incorporates a metalinguistic reflection on Creole, which, in Pollard’s case, is present but, with very few exceptions, is not fully incorporated into the text itself. As for Walcott, in his search for the perfect clarity of expression, his poetry says it all: “Like Philoctete’s wound, this language carries its cure” (Omeros, LXIV, ii, 323).

2.4 Accented Reading In her article on translation and the global humanities, Anita Starosta reminds us that “there is no such thing as an utterance without an accent” (Starosta 2013, 179). This insight has provided the starting point of the reading model proposed in this chapter. In Starosta’s articulation, accented criticism presents two interrelated aspects worth mentioning: the fact that the foreign does not come from another place or culture but is already here, and that the foreign is also in the voice of our own criticism and theory (Starosta 2013, 167). In other words, if we want to prevent “global” as a category from becoming the umpteenth descriptor of otherness, we need to rethink the premises through which we look at literature as a primarily linguistic act. Translation, we have argued, is the premise that can allow a decolonial—and accented—reading practice by making the reader enter the translative exchange as a translator— the “reader-as-translator” or “RAT,” in Spivak’s incisive acronym (Spivak 2000, 384). “Translation is the most intimate act of reading,” Spivak famously writes in her essay “Translation as Culture” (Spivak 2012, 255) in which she reflects on her life-long engagement with the practice of translation: from her early translation of Derrida’s De la Grammatologie from French into English to her later translations of Mahasweta Devi’s works from Bengali—Spivak’s mother tongue—into English. But the opposite is also true, as Spivak acknowledges when she refers to “sympathetic reading as translation” (Spivak 2000, 384). In this chapter, we have argued that accented reading is an important act of translation: the reader/translator bears the responsibility to access “the protocols of a text” (Spivak 2012, 271) in order to understand it deeply and sympathetically but also to show competence as a “postcolonial reader.” Since in this book we are dealing with accents, the most obvious example we considered was the category of dialect used to read what some postcolonial

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writers are doing with language interference and translational textualities but in effect blocking a true engagement with the original and innovative ways in which the translational text functions. Thus, accented reading can be broadly described as reading through translation, a reading practice that sees the accent in writing as a plus and, through the lens of translation, chooses to discuss it critically. The question for the reader, then, is how to make sense of these textual strategies without resorting to the literary categories mentioned earlier that keep postcolonial literatures in an enclave separated from literature tout court. Too often, in fact, the postcolonial literary text is read and raided anthropologically as an “unmediated text” (Huggan 2001, 39) and used as a substitute for historical or political analyses of national cultures, therefore bracketing any aesthetic value the text may possess. Is it because, as Fredric Jameson boldly wrote in 1986, the “third-world novel will not offer us the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce”? (Jameson 1986, 65). This is a broad and complex question and it could lead us astray in our discussion of accented reading. However, it does illuminate the issue of the contingency of literary value, which is taken for granted in Jameson’s case and points to the issue of the legibility—rather than intelligibility—of the postcolonial literary text, which needs to be considered. In fact, in order to name—in Gerard Genette’s terms—the figures of a text, the reader has to be able to see them in the first place (Bertacco 2009, 324–9). Granted, culturally distant texts do pose a challenge to some of their readers, but no more than texts from a different epoch. Derek Attridge has written eloquently on the topic (Attridge 2004, 50–3). In his view, acknowledging the cultural distance is part of our response to these texts, but it is not what makes them literary. When we read famous works from the past, like Dante’s Commedia or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we generally rely on the work of scholars (our professors, the introductory notes, or study guides) who help us glean the work’s originality against its context. But we still respond to the Commedia or Hamlet in personal terms: they either speak to us of new possibilities of meaning, or feeling, or they don’t. In the same way, while sociohistorical and linguistic knowledge is not indispensable for our response to the postcolonial literary text, it objectively helps us understand the text and its originality better, or more in depth, the same way that Cliff Notes help contemporary students read Hamlet better, or in ways that might not have occurred to them on their own. In other words, postcolonial literature simultaneously offers and elicits a distinctive reading experience, a postcolonial reading experience, in which the translative aspect of the reading process is foregrounded. We opened this chapter calling for new shared vocabularies for reading today’s literary works. Our final claim is that the Caribbean has provided postcolonial and literary studies with one such vocabulary. Brathwaite’s nation

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language, Glissant’s poetics of relation, the theory of the “Creole continuum” developed by the linguists Bickerton and DeCamp and popularized—in the field of postcolonial studies—by Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back (1989, 2005) have altered, each in its own way, once and for all how we understand the intricate connection between language and culture in postcolonial contexts. We have offered translation as a viable approach to describe the distance traversed by meaning between the event of writing and the event of reading the postcolonial literary text. Postcolonial literatures, and Caribbean literatures in particular, are perfect examples of the “heterolingual address” of translation:8 the postcolonial writer in English often writes as a foreigner to a world readership of foreigners through a heteroglossic, or translational, text, a text that speaks its own difference. Creoles remind us that a language is a human behavior and consists of what people do with it. One lesson that postcolonial writing, when read through a translational lens, teaches us is that the notion that our cultural identity is hardwired into our language does not hold; if this were true, the very existence of postcolonial literatures, that is, literatures written mostly—not exclusively— in former colonial languages, would be threatened. By extension, the newness introduced by postcolonial writing profoundly reconstitutes what is labeled and considered “Literature.” As Ashcroft perceptively points out, “post-colonial writing necessarily produces a different reader—a translated reader, just as it produced a translated/translating writer” (Ashcroft 2009, 159). Together, translation and creolization provide more than just an explanation of how Caribbean literatures work: they demand that we set aside preconceived notions of language that are inapplicable to many literary contexts—not just postcolonial ones—and that we learn, from the texts, how to read.

We find Naoki Sakai’s concept of heterolingual address conducive to a literary criticism sensitive to the different positionalities of address in the translingual literary text: “In the case of translation, however, an ambiguity in the translator’s positionality makes the instability of the we as subject rather than of the I, since the translator cannot be a unified and coherent personality in translation. This suggests the possibility of a different attitude of address, namely, the ‘heterolingual address’ […], a situation in which one addresses oneself as a foreigner to another foreigner” (Sakai 2009, 176).

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Part Two

Migration as Translation

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3

Navigating the Mediterranean Sea

I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and its men, to whom I remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me what I am. —Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record, 1909

3.1 Mediterranean Blood Ties As anticipated by Bertacco, the approach proposed in this second part of the volume is deeply related to the notion of “born translated” introduced by Rebecca Walkowitz and applied to the debate on literary translation today. Believing that this notion may be exploited as a picklock to enter the house of current critical discussions about migration and hybridity and can equip the researcher with theoretical tools that may be more suitable than the traditional ones, we will try to show how different Western artists have suggested diverse ways to make sense of a totally new condition: mass migration in the specific context of the Mediterranean Sea. Within this geographical frame, for reasons explained below, the issues of uncertain belonging, national identity, and motherland tend to acquire a specific flavor that descends from the peculiar nature of the area surrounding this closed basin. In other words, we are persuaded that the forced “translation” of human beings from the northern coasts of Africa to the southern coasts of Europe must take into account the complex quality of this geographical environment, a quality that has developed through time and that has produced a multilayered reservoir of representations that have grown into a vital part of Mediterranean cultures, thus becoming the most obvious epistemological tool for dealing with what is currently defined the “terror of invasion.” Simplifying a little, it may be said that the Mediterranean cultures reveal two mutually related aspects. On the one hand, the sense of commonality that has been developing since ancient times among the civilizations flourishing

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around (and mostly because of) the sea has gradually shaped the feeling that we do belong to the same race (“stessa faccia stessa razza” [same face, same race], as the saying goes).1 On the other, among postcolonial countries, the colonial legacy in Africa has produced a “born-translated” attitude supporting the traditional European tendency to represent the other according to a set of predigested and culturally authorized stereotypes that the migrants have endorsed over time. The notion of “being written as translation” (Walkowitz 2015, 4) has been deeply absorbed, in a way well exemplified, for example, by the protagonist of Chris Abani’s Graceland (2005) who performs as Elvis Presley in the streets of Lagos while hoping to migrate to the United States. In his seminal study on Mediterranean cultures, Fernand Braudel reconstructs the long history of this closed basin. He clearly states that even a generic look at the many civilizations flourishing in the area confirms the now widespread opinion that the Mediterranean is “not even a single sea,” but a “multifarious collection of indented, sandy and rocky coastlines, gulfs, peninsulas, islands, hosting endlessly moving populations that have been meeting, melting and hybridizing since the origins of civilizations” (Braudel 1995, Vol. I, 16–18). In their The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History, Horden and Purcell update this position, showing how the Mediterranean Sea has always been—and has been narrated as—a place of migration crossed and recrossed by several stories that interlaced in the same way as the populations living on the coasts intermingled (Horden and Purcell 2000, 342–400). This very nature raises issues related to diversity and coexistence and triggers the need to represent a constantly changing, multifarious, and unstable reality to make sense of them (Hall, Evans and Nixon 1997, 1–5). Therefore, any analysis of the current narratives of migration in this area must obviously relate to the tradition that has contributed to revising the imagery of the journey of migration by sea in this context, though in full awareness that things have changed dramatically over time. Consequently, the idea of migration as a kind of translation is truly ancient, maybe more ancient in Europe than in the United States, and it has already produced a number of “representations,” all of which are oriented toward a successful or effective “translation” of the migrant as an exile. The shadow of Odysseus and of his literary offspring—readily evoked in Lustgarten’s Lampedusa (2015) as well as in Vanessa Redgrave’s Sea Sorrow (2016)—is still the dominant trope, that of the nomadic traveler unable to reach a safe haven, and his ship is still very much a prototype (Malkin 1998). And Antigone helps Ubah Cristina

All translations from Italian are ours unless otherwise indicated.

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Ali Farah make sense of the condition of true-to-life migrants selected to perform her Antigone Power.2 Through these cultural tools, sedimented in time and tested and reshaped in different narratives, some contemporary artists have been trying to articulate a new code and translate the experience of exile into literary storytelling. In this sense, the “European approach” to the issue of translation as the process of moving through languages, cultures, experiences, religions, arts, and sciences is necessarily “accented.” It stands out against a highly specific cultural backdrop and, to a certain extent, it draws its tools and motivations from a definite diachronic development. Precisely for these reasons, we share Starosta’s position on globalization and more specifically her statement that the “form” of Eurocentrism—including the recurring pattern of its recognition as a paradigm—is still very much present even now that we have gone “global.” Thus, the other, though rationally recognized within the new frame of a globalized Europe, still obtains visibility if and when he/she adapts to a recognition paradigm—a pharmakon—that is at the same time an obstacle and the only means to obtain full visibility within the existing object system (Starosta 2013, 169). We would also take a step forward and add that Europe is very far from being a single “country” (Balibar 2004, 5–7). The new permeability of borders between one nation and the other has not erased the preexisting symbolic, linguistic, cultural, and urban boundaries (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, vii). Hence the much-promoted positive feelings about removing borders and suddenly becoming citizens of the same “nation” merely respond to a top-down process that is by no means collectively agreed upon and that is matched by a strongly localized insistence on the specific characteristics of each single area in the European patchwork. Implicitly, what makes the whole process more complex is the fact that it has two levels. The first is synchronic and concerns the relationship connecting different, though similar, populations bordering the Mediterranean Sea; the second is diachronic and regards the impact of a long-established tradition of migration in the same area and one that has already produced a number of representations and attempts at translating the other into manageable terms. In short, the diachronic process leading to the constitution of nation-states, ideally endowed with specific “unique” features, has gradually eroded this

The project, started in 2018 and supported by the municipality of Palermo together with several cultural associations working with migrants, consisted in the adaptation of Sophocles’s tragedy by the artist and performer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah. The final performance involved the participants in a theatrical workshop—both professionals and immigrants—who were gradually led to connect the classical play with the actual experience of being an asylum seeker in Italy.

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commonality, and the current emergency of mass migration has shown that this shared legacy is not so widely shared and that the cultural and political differences are quite clear and separate one nation from the other. What we want to do in this chapter is examine the way in which some European artists are trying to represent the journey of migration—a journey they have never experienced personally—by interlacing different influences and by combining the synchronic ability to gather documents, information, details, testimonies on the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea today, and the diachronic awareness of far more ancient tales of migration, taking place in the same area but belonging to very different times. Their process of encoding these complex experiences is rooted in their culture of belonging and results in a text that is then to be decoded by the audience—in their turn necessarily influenced by the culture(s) they were born into and/or live in. In short, people translated from one country to another in the process of migration mobilize a new concept of translation, in which migrants are, as Polezzi suggests, active agents (Polezzi 2012, 353).

3.2 Making Sense of the Unknown “Re-voicing a refugee or asylum seeker’s motivation to flee famine, war or persecution, for example,” writes Moira Inghilleri, “often requires more than linguistic and cultural skills, as deliberation regarding whether universal hospitality should be denied or granted are habitually fused with social, political and discursive instruments of power” (Inghilleri 2017, 31).3 This also calls into play the collectively constructed consciousness of the foreigner as a disturbing factor in a previously balanced community. The shared drive toward normalization—a drive that is human, necessary, and fully understandable in all respects—takes different shapes, all congruent with the need to make sense of the unknown through the known. We devise a code that can allow us to approach what would otherwise be too “far away” and too “different” to be manageable. Translation works here as a method of social and cultural composition and it functions on several levels (not only linguistic). In her booklet published by Gallimard, A ce stade de la nuit (2014), Maylis de Kerangal comments on the tragic shipwreck that took place in Here, Inghilleri is developing an assumption introduced in her Interpreting Justice, and precisely in the chapter entitled “Interpreting the Asylum Applicants” (2012, 72–98), but now she expands her reflection, going beyond the mostly technical approach that was outlined there.

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the Mediterranean Sea on October 3, 2013, only a few miles off the coast of Lampedusa. In a frantic attempt at making sense of the event, she goes back to the description of the Mediterranean island provided by Tomasi di Lampedusa in Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958), which was later adapted for the cinema by Luchino Visconti (1963).4 At a loss when trying to cope with a tragedy she cannot understand, de Kerangal resorts to literature and art as to make more familiar an experience that is totally alien to her. She moves sidelong and frames her comments on the tragedy within a context that she feels more congruent with her experience as a Westerner and as an intellectual, thus reducing the impact of an event that would, otherwise, be highly disruptive. The “code” she composes in order to get nearer to the core meaning of the tragedy occurring in the Mediterranean Sea is at the same time perfectly efficient (because it provides an apparent tool for understanding) and totally misleading (because it adapts a real-life, massive, humanitarian emergency to the literary representation of the island that is going to bear the weight of it). In the same way, in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015), Richard, the old retired professor, who makes intermittent attempts to help the migrants in a refugee center in Berlin, finds out that he can exploit his classical education to enter the world of people from Ghana, Chad, Nigeria, and other parts of Africa, which were, shamefully, unfamiliar to him before. He takes notes on their religions, cultures, ways of life, drawing closer to their world. Later on, he goes back to the myth of the Gorgon, revising it in the light of Berber mythology (Erpenbeck 2015, 180), and articulates the meanings of slavery and hospitality by making references to Seneca, Plato, Ovid, Empedocles (Erpenbeck 2015, 299). Practically, that same classical culture he used to teach when working as a professor becomes the “language” that allows him to build a bridge with the foreigner. It may be said, in fact, that Richard is translating the experience of the past into the horizon of the present, transforming it into a code, in the same way that de Kerangal seems to vaguely grasp the enormous weight of the tragedy occurring in the Mediterranean Sea through the literary representations of the place provided by di Lampedusa. Yet one must also be aware of what gets lost in this process of cultural translation. Even referring to this operation in the broad sense given to the term by Sakai and Solomon when they show how universalism and particularity interact in the recurring tendency to reduce otherness to the

For marketing reasons, perhaps, de Kerangal’s booklet was re-titled Lampedusa (2016), emphasizing the reference to the island and removing (at least from the title) the point of view of the author who is fully immersed into another time and another space.

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identification of the other as a stereotype (Sakai and Solomon 2006, 150–60), the passing from one code to another, the attempt at “transporting” the other into our world, is fatally incomplete and only partly possible. The core of otherness still remains, and it may be ethically right to respect its resilience: when trying to tell a story they have not experienced, Westerners should be aware—and respectful—of this resilience and that their point of view is (and must be) different (Vallorani 2017, 43–59). Here, again, Apter’s work on the twin notions of translatability and untranslatability comes into play. In her words: Untranslatability is not unlike Walter Benjamin’s notion of translatability; qualified as something that cannot be communicated in language, a kernel of “the foreign” that remains, an ineffable textual essence only realizable in the translational afterlife, or a sacred literalness of the revelatory word that great literary works strive for but rarely ever achieve. (Apter 2008, 584)

Consequently, any conversion of a text into another language results in the unavoidable discarding of some details, some taste of the atmosphere, some cultural references that will not be transposed (Apter 2008, 582–5). This is what Apter has called “ineffable textual essence” (Apter 2008, 583): the foreign flavor always marking a translated text and fatally impairing the total understanding of the original source or model. The same point may be applied to the act of trying to represent, artistically, the experience of forced migration through Western eyes. As a Westerner, living in reasonably comfortable conditions and with no experience whatsoever of stumbling through the desert, being imprisoned in a detention camp, or crossing the Mediterranean Sea on an overcrowded raft, we should respect what is the cultural/semantic equivalent of Apter’s “ineffable textual essence” and keep in mind that our Eurocentric cultures go on being solidly there even when their specific contents have been removed (or presumably so) by globalization (Starosta 2013, 164). As Bhabha, quoting Benjamin, reminds us, when crossing borders, the migrant gains practice in a performance grounded in pre-given ethnic or cultural traits, reshaped by the need to adapt to new circumstances. There is always an “element of resistance in the process of transformation, ‘that element of translation which does not lend itself to translation’” (Bhabha 2004, 321). Thus, we go back to the persistence of borders. As in translating a foreign language, when representing the other through the tools of our cultures, we bring them as human beings into a signifying code unknown to them but familiar to us. This process does not remove the otherness but adapts it: the boundaries

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are not canceled but become crossable. The process of “relocation” as a way of drawing new borders is a nodal point. Quite obviously, the geographical removal of national limina does not imply a symbolic act of forgetting. From a general perspective, the increasing securitization and militarization of borders is a way of reacting to the European (maybe Western) fear of being unable to understand (and to label and therefore control) an identity (here given in the singular but in fact plural) of the other that has ancient roots. Therefore, what we do is stabilize a fluid identity-in-progress, translating it into a stereotype of evil and/or feebleness that we are able to understand. As Mezzadra and Neilson state, “Our interest in changing borders and migration regimes in a world in which national borders are no longer the only or necessarily the most relevant ones for dividing and restricting labor mobilities” clashes with the fact that the fading of national (European) borders has not produced the removal of borders but the increasing relevance of other, much more dangerous, and persistent, kinds of borders (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 2). Typically, the constantly redrawn frontiers in southern Europe continue to be the loci of translation. “Refugees,” “migrants,” “asylum seekers,” “unaccompanied minors” are to be understood as what they are in practice: filtering words that are filtering human beings. What emerges in language is, once again, a symptom of disturbance that happens to echo a diseased human condition. As Apter explains: A subset of politics at large, with particular agendas and strategic interests, language politics defines its theater of war in the space where a military zone may be superimposed on a linguistic hot spot or “translation zone”. The expression “translation zone” could well refer to the demarcation of a community of speakers who achieve an ideal threshold of communication (the utopia of Leibnitz, von Humboldt, and Habermas). But when war is at issue, it makes more sense to define it as a translation no-fly zone, an area of border trouble where the lines dividing discrete languages are muddy and disputatious, where linguistic separatism is enforced in high-surveillance missions or, where misfired, off-kilter semantic missiles are beached or disabled. (Apter 2006, 129)

Now the question is: what is translated, in the real world, when a person crosses a border? The body emphatically becomes a sign: it communicates. Little Bee, in Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand, reflects on her condition in the detention center on the outskirts of London, and she imagines that her body might be made into a British pound, which can easily cross borders without suffering (Cleave 2009, 1–3). She hides the fact that she is a girl to

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protect herself from the possibility of being “understood” as a female and therefore violated (Cleave 2009, 7–11). She re-signifies her belonging so as to be more easily accepted. And in so doing, she recapitulates the experience of exile, which may be universally perceived as “a discontinuous state of being” ultimately producing “a condition of terminal loss,” as Said suggests (Said 1984, 137–49), though it also implies an intense specificity, cultural and personal, that is slippery and ambiguous, “foreign” and untranslatable. The universal aspect of exile was well explained by Said—an exile himself—in 1984 and undoubtedly referring to conditions that are not the ones experienced by current migrants. He specifies, “The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever” (Said 1984, 137). This “something” takes highly diversified shapes that cannot be translated into a single narration but must go through multiple rites of passage taking place at equally varied intersections. Even so, the “kernel of the ‘foreign’ that remains,” and that Apter mentions (Apter 2008, 584), still persists, though often enveloped in a cultural halo that represents the core of the (Western) tradition and its only way of coping. In this impossibility of understanding, the “locatedness” of discourse— namely, the inextricable connections between any representation and the context from which it springs—plays a primary role: some places are more prone than others to being perceived as intersections, and this makes them, at the same time, riskier and more interesting. It imposes the obligation to give up the certainty of knowing what is foreign and where it might be found (Starosta 2013, 164). We need to cultivate doubt. The recognition paradigm outlined by Starosta needs to be overcome: it is true that it may be a pharmakon, but it proves to be an obstacle in the Mediterranean Sea.

3.3 The “Project of Unforgetting” “Literature in dominant languages,” writes Walkowitz, “tends to ‘forget’ that it has benefitted from literary works in other languages” (Walkowitz 2015, 23). In a way, this applies not only to “born-translated fiction” as a tool for triggering the process of unforgetting, but it can help to explain the relationship between ex-colonized people and the ex-colonizers once the decolonizing process is fairly advanced. Migrants from Africa, maybe more than others, bring with them a double cultural burden. They are the children of a European colonization that superimposed a foreign culture onto their own—and therefore, in most cases, they may be defined as born-translated— but they are also engaged in the process of safeguarding the memory of their

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culture of origin. Sometimes, they are even supported by Western artists, who seem to engage willingly in the process of unforgetting that is described by Walkowitz. Sea Sorrow (2016), directed by the artist and activist Vanessa Redgrave, seems to raise precisely this issue, documenting the actress’s journey through several refugee camps in Italy, France, and Lebanon. Significantly, the film’s editing creates a specific “language,” choosing to space out the sequences shot in the camps—properly belonging to the genre of documentary film reporting—with acted out passages from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Through this quite simple strategy, the film suggests a method for reinforcing the process of “unforgetting.” Two ways of “writing” the journey of migration are combined, producing a hybrid text, partly indebted to the refugees’ testimonies but also drawing on a toolbox for understanding from the noblest and most canonical works of the Western literary tradition. It is quite true that some memories—autobiographical and collective—are also introduced in the film, and they narrate the experience of forced migration as something that has been historically shared. But we would suggest that the main tool Redgrave uses to build a bridge between the experience of crossing the Mediterranean Sea today and our Western imagination of the journey is provided by Shakespeare, whose pastoral romance, among others, has shaped the alphabet for writing a new “story” of migration within the European context. This story is bound to address the issue of what Inghilleri defines as “statelessness,” encouraging the “international community,” as she says, to approach once and for all the endless nomadism of people who are born stateless (Inghilleri 2017, 12). Lampedusa (2015), written by the playwright and activist Anders Lustgarten, develops around the issue of statelessness as possibly replaced by what Conrad famously defined “the bond of the sea” (Conrad 1988, 7). This militant play consists of two thematically interlaced but geographically independent monologues. A man and a woman narrate their stories, each framed in a specific context. Their two “worlds” of reference seem far apart but in fact serve to develop the same line of reasoning. Both characters are marginalized: Denise is a debt collector (and a British-Chinese student) in Leeds, and Stefano is a fisherman now rescuing migrants’ corpses adrift in the sea. Each of them bears the gaze of an outsider. From their liminal positions, they consider the implications of the migration crisis and eventually make choices based on their personal and keenly felt experience of isolation and non-belonging. Apparently very far from the Mediterranean Sea and its troubles, Denise lives and works in Leeds, in one of the poorest areas of the UK. With the same feeling as that of Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), the setting resonates with the

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endless complaints of English people leading miserable lives on the margins of the city. A mixed race herself, Denise is doomed to listen to the clients whom she chases as a credit collector and who are often unable to repay their loans. The atmosphere she breathes is literally soaked in hatred: The hatred. The hatred and the bitterness and the rage. The misplaced, trick, ignorant rage (…) Blaming “fucking migrants” for every single thing we don’t like about ourselves. (Lustgarten 2015, 11)

Spectral presences in Leeds, the “fucking migrants” are tangible, intensely physical presences to Stefano, a seaman in a family of seamen, living and working in Lampedusa. In comparison with Denise, the character of Stefano is more explicitly Mediterranean, both geographically and culturally. He draws the very sense of his identity from his belonging to the “human category” of sailors, the kind of people that, again as Conrad lyrically states, are nomads but sedentary: “Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship—and so is their country—the sea” (Conrad 1988, 9). Shaped according to this mold, Stefano also inherits the remnants of a “colonial hydrarchy” (Gilroy 2014c, 51) that has defined the journey of discovery by sea and the tales of loss related to an unwilling exile. Though in a totally different context and framed in the sorrowful contingencies of today, his narrative cannot avoid echoing the epic journey of Ulysses, in its turn reemerging in English aestheticism from Walter Pater to Oscar Wilde (Evangelista 2009) and before that surfacing in the troubled seas and shipwreck depicted in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11) and in the Gothic yarn spun by Samuel T. Coleridge’s ancient mariner (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798). As Stefano himself says, in the very first lines of the play, “This is where the world began. This was Caesar’s highway, Hannibal’s road to glory” (Lustgarten 2015, 3). In the face of this tradition, the Italian protagonist of Lustgarten’s play proudly declares where he comes from: My father was a fisherman. And his father before him. And before and before. I always thought, always knew, I’d make my living at sea. (Lustgarten 2015, 7)

This timeline endlessly unfolding backward was interrupted by a sharp change that obliged Stefano to revise his whole life:

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But the fish are gone. The Med is dead. And my job is to fish out a very different kind of harvest. (Lustgarten 2015, 7)

Stefano makes a living by recovering the corpses of migrants who were trying to reach Europe but did not make it. His boat—his home and the symbolic trope of life and survival—has become a sad repository of “things” with no breath and no memory. Though “more varied than you think” (Lustgarten 2015, 3), the corpses soon reveal how close they are to becoming objects, their metamorphosis into “a thing rather than a person, locked away from literacy on the point of death, in a place where cognition—thinking—is not a special door to doubt, method and being but a shortcut to the vulnerability of non-being” (Gilroy 2014a). Fully aware of the paradoxical nature of his work, Stefano inhabits an interstitial space between life and death. And there he first sees Modibo, a refugee from Africa. The development of their relationship offers a working paradigm of the way in which some stereotypes operate. When Stefano first meets him, he practices the art of “unseeing” the stranger, superimposing a set of ready-made expectations onto his individual identity: Stocky, wine-dark skin. Nigerian, my guess. I’ve got decent at telling the difference between Eritreans, Somalis, Senegalese. I take a bit of pride in it, as it goes. We have bets on who’s what and I’ve won a few drinks off it. (Lustgarten 2015, 12)

When he fixes the boat’s engine, which Stefano and Salvo seem unable to mend, Modibo reveals that he comes from Mali and is a mechanic. This is the first in a row of small epiphanies that lead the two characters to share the same limbo space and speak the same language, which is one of loss and sympathy. Though incapable of fully understanding each other, they gradually step into the territory of friendship, and the care they show to each other culminates in Stefano’s decision to set out to sea on a stormy night to rescue Modibo’s wife, Aminata. So eventually the same boat that had been used to collect dead bodies is restored to its original function. It becomes the shelter and the instrument that finally saves a life: a transitional territory crossed by changing identities. According to De Michelis’s recent study of Lustgarten’s play, the author’s approach seems to resist the tendency to dismiss the discourse on migration through the politics of body counts and instead “follows a partly diverging

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perspective, premised on outrage but opening up to hope” (De Michelis 2017, 223). The two plotlines represent a progressive and honest attempt at overcoming the mere bureaucratic mechanisms informing any discourse on refuge and shelter and at building a new kind of solidarity and humanism. Davide Enia walks the same path in Appunti per un naufragio (Notes for a Shipwreck, 2017), which became a highly successful theatrical monologue entitled L’ abisso (The Abyss, 2018). Enia chooses the same location as Lustgarten—Lampedusa—to develop a very effective autobiographical reflection on the experience of meeting the other in an emotionally overloaded condition, both personal and collective. In the book as well as in the play, the artist uses the autobiographical paradigm to devise an efficient “code” for translating the borderline experiences he sees reflected in the eyes and bodies of the people reaching the island after a terrible journey by sea. The landing in Lampedusa becomes both physical and symbolical, and the two dimensions are tightly connected. When he decides to go to Lampedusa to see personally what is happening on the island, Enia is also facing the illness of a beloved uncle—zio Beppe—and, more or less at the same time and with no deliberate planning, he happens to rebuild his relationship with his father, who becomes a silent companion on his journey. Both the book and the play unfold as a cluster of experiences—quite different and not all of them tightly related to the issues of migration—slowly coalescing around one basic topic: human beings responding to two coexisting drives. They want to survive at all costs and, whenever they can, they are naturally led to help. On this ground, Enia tells with equal emotion the story of his friends Paola and Melo, the owners of a bed-and-breakfast on the island, who happen to save a number of migrants from drowning at night in front of their house, and the slow decline of his beloved uncle, unable to give in to his cancer. Meaningfully, when trying to locate in time the specific landing they are recounting to Davide and his father, Paola and Melo are unable to remember when their decision to rescue the migrants happened. In recalling the year, Paola is at a loss: Non riesco a ricordare, davvero. Però potrei dirti esattamente i movimenti che eseguii e dove ci incontrammo con Melo al centro del salone quando, guardandoci negli occhi, ci siamo detti: “Chiudiamoci dentro.” (Enia 2017, 38) (I can’t remember, really. But I could tell you exactly the movements I made and where I bumped into Melo, in the middle of the living room, when, looking into each other’s eyes, we said: “Let’s lock ourselves in.”)

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The facts of her “meeting the Others” seem out of time, and implicitly the inability to locate them evokes the everlasting tragedy of forced migration in the Mediterranean Sea. In the same way, Enia, when trying to make sense of his experiences, goes back to the myth of Europa: Una giovane fenicia fugge da Tiro e attraversa il deserto fin dove non può proseguire perché davanti a lei si stende il mare. Per sua fortuna un toro bianco la fa salire in groppa e, solcando le onde, la conduce a un approdo sicuro sull’isola di Creta. La ragazza si chiama Europa. Questa è la nostra origine. Siamo tutti figli di una traversata in barca. (Enia 2017, 147) (A young Phoenician girl escapes from Tiro and walks through the desert until she must stop because the sea stretches out in front of her. Luckily, a white bull allows her to get on his back and, crossing the waves, leads her to a safe landing on the island of Crete. The girl’s name is Europa. This is our origin. We are all children of migration by sea.)

Grande histoire and petits récits coalesce in the frantic attempt to restore the identity of people who have become stateless. This attempt pushes toward the creation of a new code in Western representations for current migrations in the Mediterranean Sea, and this code attempts to translate the experience of a journey that is reshaped in the foreign tongue of “Fortress Europe,” hybridizing signs and meanings in a brand-new way.

3.4 The Issue of Respect In a recent, unusual book, Mare al mattino (Morning Sea, 2015; first edition: 2011), Margaret Mazzantini tells the story of two women in a double narrative connecting maternity and its failures to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean Sea. In some respects, when reflecting on the gigantic tragedy taking place before our eyes, Mazzantini adopts a code quite similar to the one used by Vanessa Redgrave in her Sea Sorrow: she translates a double journey of migration into two experiences she knows and can therefore manage: maternity and exile. The protagonists of the narrative—split into two parts in the same way as Lustgarten’s Lampedusa—belong to different worlds, though they are both mothers and both live in exile. One of them, Angelina, lives in an apparently protected and safe environment, while the other, Jamila, is doomed and forced to migrate. Their symmetrical journeys

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develop in opposite directions (Angelina is going to Africa, while Jamila wants to get to Europe) and in highly different conditions (quite comfortable ones for Angelina and totally precarious ones for Jamila). And yet they are similar in their motivation: the desire to protect and save their offspring at any cost. This supposedly universal drive is the shared ground between them and what allows Mazzantini to be convincing in telling the story of Jamila as well. Maybe this very drive toward a universal perception of what is human in human beings—given in this case as the essence of maternity in its bare bones—neutralizes the political substance of Jamila’ s story, in which she is evidently not interested as an artist. At the same time, by comparing two mothers from two different contexts, Mazzantini bypasses the risk of appropriating the migrant’s experience and successfully translates a story that is not hers or ours, keeping a lot of blank spaces to be left as untranslatable. These semantic gaps belong to the specificity of each individual story and are to be respected. Significantly, Said states, “On the twentieth century scale, exile is neither aesthetically nor ethically comprehensible: at most the literature about exile objectifies an anguish and a predicament that most people rarely experience at first hand” (Said 1984, 138). Here, he is speaking in the light of his own experience of exile, which is different from the one marking, for example, Mazzantini’s past.5 When narrating the story of other characters, be they fictional or real, those artists who have gone through some condition of uprooting, forced separation, unlooked-for relocation, unavoidably and empathically tend to exploit their own feelings about exile, often using their own emotions and conclusions as the signs of a code through which they filter other narratives of exile. In so doing, they are offering a translation, which, though partial and incomplete, serves the purpose of their representation, provided both the author and the public keep in mind that this representation is not totally true to the experience of forced migration described in their texts. What is produced, therefore, is an incomplete translation, which is certainly incomplete in several ways but which may be cognitively useful all the same, depending on the way in which the encoding process is revised and re-signified through the decoding process. These incomplete translations

We want to note that, though referring to Said and other political exiles, our work focuses mostly on another kind of journey, one that is equally “forced,” but in a different way. When we mention Said and even Mazzantini, we are perfectly aware of the different conditions of their exile compared to the migrants currently moving through the Mediterranean Sea or across the Mexican borders. And yet the experience of distance from her motherland—Mazzantini was born in Dublin—apparently helps the novelist to understand the condition of migration she is describing.

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are meaningful precisely because of their incompleteness, since they signal a difference that is not a wall, but a way to articulate national cultures and the most enriching aspect of the ambiguous process called globalization. What comes to the forefront, over and over again, is the “strategic relevance of heterogeneity (…) across diverse geographical scale” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, x). This relevance, well preserved in the limbo of a boat crossing the Mediterranean Sea, tragically risks getting lost beyond the borders of the ship, when the drowned bodies are made into numbers, whose identity, nationality, religion, family, beliefs, expectations, hopes, and blood ties are simply forgotten in death. The other point then is: How can we keep memory and/or restore it, saving the “strategic relevance of heterogeneity” in death, too? How can we, as Westerners, remember that the drowned people were human beings? How can we emphasize the shared ground rather than the different “languages” in which representations of exile are “written”? The Italian playwright Lina Prosa has recently written a trilogy whose first episode was performed in 2008 in France. Trilogia del naufragio (Trilogy of the Shipwreck) opens with a play entitled Lampedusa Beach (2003),6 reporting on a shipwreck and on the drowning of a migrant from Africa, Shauba. In this very simple and effective parable of rejection, the female protagonist dies after falling into the sea while she is trying to reach the beach at Lampedusa. Quite near to the shores that mean safety and refuge for her, Shauba tells the audience of her own death, poetically evoking a sea world that has suddenly become threatening: Via, via marinaio dell’inferno. Via da me. La sola idea che in questa immensità opaca qualcosa mi sfiori mi fa venire il crepacuore. Mahama, lo sai, odio qualunque contatto fisico. Sono troppo scoperta. Non voglio morire così, di vergogna. Mi vengono addosso pesci mai visti prima. Cadaveri. Cadaveri umani

(Prosa 2013, 18)

Dating the play is quite difficult. The first version, 2003, was awarded (with slight revisions) the Premio Nazionale Annalisa Scafi per il teatro civile in 2005 and the Premio Nazionale Anima in 2007. The play was first performed at the Theatre des Bernardines, in Marseilles, on February 5, 2008. Here we are referring to the Italian version published by Editoria & Spettacolo in 2013.

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When you are on a boat illegally crossing the Mediterranean Sea, the play seems to suggest, you are re-semanticizing yourself as a foreigner and a dangerous one, so your death is preliminarily defined as to be expected (if not wished for) and your body automatically becomes disposable (so that it can eventually become “useful” as food for the fish). The circumstances of the shipwreck, in their “total simplicity,” present a fate that seems to be preordained. There is no possibility of being saved, and therefore there cannot be any resistance on the part of the victims: Il naufragio è stato totale. Ma è stato di una semplicità assoluta. Lo sai perché? Non c’è stata tempesta. Non c’è stata lotta, resistenza. Nessuna manovra di perizia marinara. Nessuna chiamata di capitano. Nessun avviso. Nessuna campanella. Non c’è stato innalzamento di onda. Niente che riguardasse il mare. Il mare è innocente

(Prosa 2013, 18–19)

(The shipwreck was total / but it was also totally simple. / Do you know why? There was no storm, / there was no fight, no resistance. / No skilled intervention of a trained sailor. / No call for a captain. / No notice. No bells. / There were no raising waves. / Nothing concerning the sea. / The sea is innocent.)

The sea is innocent, totally indifferent to the fate of the migrants. Their ontology is revised as soon as they cross the border to Europe, or even before, when they start on their journey. As Mezzadra and Neilson explain, “In so far as it serves at once to make divisions and establish connections, the border is an epistemological device, which is at work whenever a distinction between subject and object is established” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 16). The dead body of Shauba is made into an object lost at sea and, at best, rescued by a sailor, as it happens in Lustgarten’s Lampedusa.

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Shauba’s long monologue in Lampedusa Beach fully reveals the process through which the Western world finally gets to face and represent, in its own terms, the enormous tragedy of mass migration. The transformation of the dead bodies into mere numbers rather than individual human beings helps to sanitize the horror and certainly reduces the political impact of such events. In representing Shauba’s death, Prosa restores the full individuality of the drowned. The “victim” has a name, and she is a woman, a site of relationships, memories, belonging, tastes, desires, expectations, plans, all of them highly individual and all of them lost with her own death. In translating the neutral body counts of the media reports into a specific woman narrating her death while she collects her memories of the past and explains her desires for the future, Prosa tries to show the tragedy in a different perspective, still filtered through the Western gaze and yet capable of restoring the victim’s individuality and complexity. It is quite true that, while describing the experience of drowning, Prosa is universalizing Shauba’s story, more or less in the same way as Mazzantini leans on the universal feminine experience of motherhood in her novelette. But Prosa is much more physical, producing a narrative that is quite strongly connected to Peter Brooks’s reflections on the body and its suffering and death in Body Work: If the sociocultural body clearly is a construct, an ideological product, nonetheless we tend to think of the physical body as precultural and prelinguistic: sensations of pleasure and especially of pain, for instance, are generally held to be experiences outside language; and the body’s end, in death, is not simply a discursive construct. (Brooks 1993, 7)

Finally, in her representational choices, Prosa confirms the need—artistic if not humane—to retune the relationship with the other, imagining the stranger as an individual human being rather than as a lower order of existence and an infrahuman entity (Gilroy 2014b, 19–50). In the first of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values, meaningfully entitled “Suffering and Infrahumanity,”7 Paul Gilroy uncompromisingly states that colonial administration and the power related to it, whatever its specific European origin, have always been oriented primarily toward commercial purposes and solidly supported by legal and military measures. The line of conduct easily identified as the standard agenda of any imperialist enterprise has progressively removed the humanity of the oppressed population, whose slavery could (and can) The lecture was held at Yale University on February 21, 2014.

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be more easily justified once you posit the subalterns as “naturally” inferior (Gilroy 2014b, 23). This way of thinking, now and then supported by popular discourse, needs to be refused. Within this perspective, literature and the arts can be extremely effective in addressing the concerns of both the migrants and the hosting communities, rejecting the language of fear and rejection, and acknowledging a common factor belonging to the human condition (Vallorani 2017, 53–5). This process may remobilize those new “modes of representation of otherness” that Bhabha posits as urgently needed for a political epistemology capable of renouncing the protective stereotypes applied by Westerners to any form of otherness (Bhabha 2004, 94–120). As we know very well, those stereotypes are devised to transform the human subject (by nature unique and individualized) into a one-dimensional profile, exchangeable and superimposable (Bhabha 2004, 95), a translation of otherness that serves to reassure the West but that ends up by being deeply mystifying. Consequently, and going back to Apter (Apter 2008, 583), the “ineffable textual essence” that is the kernel of the migrants’ experience must simply be respected in terms of social praxis, political contexts, and cultural backgrounds (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 271) and is only translatable up to a point and only by keeping in mind a whole set of relevant differences. In Motherless Tongues, Vicente Rafael introduces the notion of “aporias of translation” as “a kind of semantic bouleversement, the sense of upheaval whereby the endlessly enfolded meanings of particular events will always make any discourse feel unfinished and incomplete” (Rafael 2016, 18). Switching to a code different from words, the difficulty remains the same. Shipwreck (2014) is a fifteen-minute, award-winning documentary that portrays the consequences of the same events triggering de Kerangal’s A ce stade de la nuit. The tragedy occurring on October 3, 2013, off the coast of Lampedusa is told here mostly through images and words collected by an impassive camera. When filming one of the survivors narrating his own tragic experience while walking through the abandoned wreckage on the island, Morgan Knibbe, the director, producer, and editor of the film, tries to be a non-intrusive presence. And yet the European point of view is very much present. Less literary and speculative than de Kerangal, Knibbe adopts the attitude of the reporter so as to produce “documents” that speak for themselves, only to discover that images themselves are translated, for, as Said notes, “[e]xile can never be discussed neutrally” (Said 1984, 140).

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Rather than dodging translation they try to keep being translated —Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated, 2015

4.1 “I Don’t Want to Go to Europe” In 2014, Morgan Knibbe released what was in all respects his debut film, Those Who Feel the Fire Burning. Though it included sequences from the award-winning Shipwreck, the operation grounding the film was totally different and the chosen point of view—that of a wandering specter—shaped a brand-new kind of discourse, combining Knibbe’s uncompromising and almost brutal facticity with a poetic perspective that smoothly transformed a potential “reportage” into magical storytelling. The opening sequence of the film, shot by a drone, provides fragments of a shipwreck. While the camera bobs along following the oscillation of the boat in a storm, a family tries to survive, and at a climactic point the grandfather falls from the boat and drowns. The time/space between the child saying, “I don’t want to go to Europe” and the old man wondering, “Is this paradise?” a few instants after drowning defines the film’s narrative pact with the audience. The story—largely based on events that are tragic and true—is going to be told through the gaze of a spirit. In fact, this gaze transforms what could be a document or a testimony into a vision filtered through a very precise interpretation. Our point in this chapter is well illustrated by this reference to Knibbe’s choices in his film. The text in itself—both thematically and stylistically— navigates between the realistic and the visionary impulse, successfully combining the two. Patricia Aufderheide, introducing her reflection on the so-called mimetic flaw of documentary filmmaking, points to some issues that may usefully be applied to our approach to different kinds of visual text. As Aufderheide clearly states, “Reality is not what is out there, but what we know, understand, share with each other of what is out

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there” (Aufderheide 2007, 5), and so documentary filmmakers—as well as photoreporters—should be considered storytellers rather than journalists (Aufderheide 2007, 1). Consequently, they do not need to bribe the audience with a pretension to reality, which is not implicit in the tools and methods of representation, but rather they should keep to their original mandate of “making poetry where no poet has gone before, and where no ends, sufficient for the purposes of art, are easily observed. It requires not only taste but also inspiration, which is to say a very laborious, deep-seeing, deep-sympathising creative effort indeed” (Corner 1996, 13). The language of images is not articulated. Even so, when we use them, like any other kind of “code,” we are exploiting an approach built in analogy with what Bakhtin defines as “creative understanding,” a process that requires some kind of distance and the condition of being “located outside the object” of representation (Bakhtin 1986, 5–7). Loredana Polezzi, in her brilliant essay on translation and migration, goes back to Bakhtin’s “outsidedness” (Polezzi 2012, 351) when she shows that the role of the migrant and the cultural interpreter can enrich the host culture rather than threaten its stability. We want to return to the same concept and use it in a different way. Working on visual representation and mostly documentary filmmaking and photography, we will focus on a specific aspect of these techniques— the physical distance required from the object represented—and we will consider the ways in which this distance (this “outsidedness”) implies and invokes a “translation” both in the act of coding the message and in the effort of decoding it. Like any other kind of text, visual texts are reality-shaping. When focusing on a specific topic, for example, forced migrations in the Mediterranean Sea, the visual artist experiences a kind of “outsidedness” that is partly indebted to what the African American artist Kara Walker defines as the “sidelong glance” (Shaw 2004)—a glance that is indirect and therefore can see otherwise invisible things and people. In devising an answer to the male, colonial gaze, Walker puts forward a representational strategy able to resist the traditional modalities of vision and create a new, decolonized alphabet. Also in the case of images, the expectations (and therefore the point of view/gaze) of the audience play a relevant role in the process of coding/ decoding the message. In the unusual book-length essay Draw Your Weapons, Sarah Sentilles describes what happened at the beginning of the nineteenth century during the first French colonization of Algerian territories: French colonists arrived in Algeria accompanied by photographers, who planned to photograph harems to create images of the women they wanted to colonize. But instead of harems, the photographers

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encountered veiled women, their bodies hidden from the cameras. Unable to photograph what they’d imagined, the photographers grew frustrated and hired models to take the veiled women’s place. The photographers set up backdrops, transformed their studios into harems and bedrooms and prisons and living rooms, and though their images were staged, though the models were paid to pose, were dressed and undressed and dressed again, the pictures were presented as if they captured the real thing. Women lounging on carpets. Women standing, naked, behind bars. Women veiled, revealing only their eyes and breasts. (Sentilles 2017, 47–8)

What was supposed to be a document thus became the fictional narrative of what the Westerners expected Algerian women to be. The truth was not relevant for the photographers in their process of encoding messages for a specific kind of public, which, by the way, shared the same culture as the authors of the photos. Taken in between the need to be faithful to reality and the wish to please their audience, they simply used their artistic tool— photography—to meet the expectations of the audience that was going to decode their visual discourse. In its turn, this process of decoding produced a definite message about Algerian women, which, though totally fictional, was sold as true, exploiting the supposed testimonial power of photographic representations. The “quantity” of consensus may reverse the “quality” of a message. The Algerian poet and literary critic Malek Alloula reflects on how intensely these colonial postcards influenced the West’s supposed (and stereotypical) familiarity with the colonial space and culture. “The postcard,” writes Alloula, “is everywhere, covering all the colonial space, immediately available to the tourist, the soldier, the colonist. It is at once their poetry and their glory captured for the ages; it is also their pseudo-knowledge of the colony. It produces stereotypes in the same manner of great seabirds producing guano. It is the fertilizer of the colonial vision” (Alloula 1986, 4).1 Translation in its wider semantic implications is clearly at stake here. The photographers complied with the Western public’s expectations, translating the real Algerian women into the familiar image held by their colonizers. To return their true meaning to these images, Alloula reminds us, a double operation is needed: “to uncover the nature and the meaning of the colonialist gaze; then to subvert the stereotype that is so tenaciously attached to the bodies of women” (Alloula 1986, 5). If it is true that “[t]he objective of

Part of the quotation also appears in Sentilles (Sentilles 2017, 47–8).

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colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction” (Bhabha 2004, 101), this purpose found strong support in the notion of visual representation as an objective testimony to the facts. This feeling grounds the first reaction of the viewer to a photographic report or to a documentary film: these texts act as an eyewitness’ report and are therefore true. The tendency toward a preliminarily oriented decoding of such texts is strengthened by the possibility of instantaneously circulating any visual image and presenting it as a document: more than any words could do, it is automatically perceived as direct evidence. Consequently, the eye of the photographer/filmmaker becomes like the eye of God. It imposes a definite reading, providing a supposedly objective representation while in fact acting on a highly subjective basis to produce a specific portrayal that is unavoidably an interpretation of the real, not the real itself. Similarly, though with a different representational purpose, the shared culture of the expected audience may be consciously exploited to orient the decoding of a visual text, supporting the understanding of a discourse that would be otherwise unintelligible (like the experience of migration if you are not a migrant). What is often not immediately evident to the audience (and sometimes the critics) is that photographers/filmmakers exploit codes that are, at the same time, individual (and related to their personal talent), technical (because they result from specific training), and cultural (relying on particular values). In most cases, this exploitation becomes a tool used with full awareness by the author of the visual text in order to get to a more complete understanding “through analogy.” Solo andata (One-Way Only, Erri De Luca and Alessandro Gassman 2014),2 for example, is a short film combining images, music, and a poetry reading by Erri De Luca, a famous Italian novelist and artist, whose political engagement is well known. In this specific case, the narrative plays on the analogies between Italian people as migrants at the end of the nineteenth

Erri De Luca mostly publishes with Feltrinelli, one of Italy’s leading publishing houses, and he was the protagonist of a quite famous lawsuit related to the public position he took, some years ago, against a great project that clearly profited from a wide network of political collusion. He was subsequently acquitted, but the case triggered support by many Italian and French artists and intellectuals (https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/oct/19/erri-de-luca-acquittal-turin-lyon-rail-line). The short video we refer to is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQwe2DNvSZ8. All translations from Italian and French are ours, unless otherwise indicated.

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century and the African people shipwrecked on the Italian coasts today. The protagonist—an ordinary man fishing on a beach and cherishing the memory of his expatriate mother while looking at her photograph—proves generous enough to save drowning refugees. Only when they are safe does he suddenly realize the analogy between the woman he has rescued and his own mother who migrated so many years before. The short video plays lyrically on the interweaving of the sad memories of an ordinary man and his desire to help drowning refugees. Solo andata attempts to achieve a double result: the authors of the short film wish to normalize the migrants, who are otherwise either criminalized or pitied by the media, and also try to make it possible for Italian people to understand them, translating their experience of migration into manageable terms. In so doing, they show how far and how persistently translation is a culture-bound process, which is unavoidably political in that it affects the cultural agenda of any community (Polezzi 2012, 354). On the other hand, if it is true that agency is the key factor in the interaction between translation and migration (Cronin 2006, 40–5; Polezzi 2012, 348), it is desirable for migrants to be given the possibility to “act” their own self-translation or at least for new tools of representation to be devised so as to reduce the impact of the Westerner’s interpretation to the minimum. Though fully aware of the limits of self-translation (Hokenson and Munson 2007), we do believe that the migrants’ own voices can and must offer crucial perspectives and fill in the relevant bits in the puzzle of the other. We will consider the possibilities described above in the following sections. In 4.2, we will work on the ways in which images may suggest a decoding path in terms of Western traditions and cultures, counting on a series of references in the mind of the public that are consciously or unconsciously taken for granted. In 4.3, we will move to examples where familiarity and lack thereof are exploited as methods to translate the experience of migration for a Western audience. Finally, in 4.4 we will consider a photographic project that endeavors to give the migrants the possibility to use their own voice/gaze to translate the experience of migration through images. In all cases, we will analyze the chosen texts as cultural discourses, so that any observations on the technical, purely filmic, or photographic features of the texts are considered only when functional to our approach. Eventually, although deeply aware that any text—be it in words, sounds, colors, or images—must consider the expectations of the addressee, we can nonetheless point out the inherent ambiguity of images, in particular,

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documentary images. Berger famously states that “[s]eeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” but also that “[w]e only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice” (Berger 2008, 15). And, we would add, what we choose to see is in large part influenced by the culture we have grown up in.

4.2 Pics and Other Objects The Game is the latest ongoing multimedia project by Mario Badagliacca,3 a young Sicilian photographer, and it deals with the Balkan route, officially closed by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) and the EU authorities (and therefore not covered by the media), though still widely used. Thousands of migrants keep on facing a journey across massively militarized borders, waiting for their turn to reach their destination, a destination that is often not (to be) reached. As a visual ethnographic project, The Game seems to evoke what Roland Barthes defines an “infra-savoir,” the unstable combination of a set of “incomplete objects” that the spectators are required to interpret on the ground of their cognitive expectations (Barthes 1980, 54). Moreover, some of Badagliacca’s photos, as we shall see, openly suggest or imply a reference to Renaissance painting and more specifically to the tradition of Italian religious art, a huge reservoir of shared knowledge, both aware and unaware. The Game is organized into six chapters. Chapter Three, entitled “The Jungle,” includes the photo of a migrant that is quite easily identifiable as the “re-coding” of a very famous painting in late medieval European art history. The position of the subject, a cloth covering his head, and his hand extended forward (see Figure 4.1) call to mind the image of the Virgin portrayed in Antonello da Messina’s Annunciata di Palermo (1475) (see Figure 4.2). Although the direction of the gaze is not the same, the subject is not the Virgin, the context is clearly different, and the extended

https://www.mariobadagliacca.com/about. Specific projects are here: https://www. mariobadagliacca.com/projects-r (last accessed: August 24, 2020).

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Figure 4.1  Mario Badagliacca, A Pakistani Man at Belgrade Waterfront—Serbia, 2016.

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Figure 4.2  Antonello da Messina, Annunciata di Palermo, 1475.

hand is not suspended in an incomplete blessing but clutching a mobile phone (probably the most vital object for a person facing the journey), the analogies are simply too many to be ignored. They help Western viewers (and probably the photographer) make sense of, and dignify, something they could not otherwise understand, translating the experience of migration into a familiar code. The meaning of the image in and of itself is the result of a

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process of multiple translations. The most famous of the Sicilian painter’s work “translated” the biblical theme of the Annunciation into the image of a simple woman, taken by surprise by an angel (who is invisible in the painting), which involves her in a fate that she cannot resist. Badagliacca, in his turn, reproduces the same intimate atmosphere, transforming the viewer into a witness of an equally unwanted, though profoundly different, fate. The operation seems to go back to the most ancient tradition of British photography and more specifically to the portraits made by Margaret Julia Cameron of maidens, servants, and humble people as saints and mythological figures (Cameron and Hamilton 1996, 40–9). We may add that Badagliacca is not new to this kind of project. His website attests to his ability to transform a work, to document an underrepresented tragedy by turning it into a form of art, where the gaze of the photographer is the hub around which the representation develops. They are performative versions of the most effective form of resistance to what postmodern theorists often fall prey to: the kind of “image fatigue” that eventually renders the visual horrors filling the world invisible (Azoulay 2008, 11). In practice, the language that Badagliacca uses is effective and hits home. The photograph we selected, in particular, was included in an exhibition entitled Altri volti (Other Faces, December 6–9, 2018).4 The public soon identified the analogy between Badagliacca’s photograph and the painting by Antonello da Messina. When asked about his intention, however, the Sicilian photographer declared the analogy was not consciously looked for: I remember that I was collecting photos for MSF, whose contact person had put me in charge of documenting, officially and photographically, the conditions of the migrants at the Waterfront in Belgrade. I was photographing quickly because the sun was setting down and it was getting dark. Wandering along the border, I found some guys at the entrance of a warehouse, sitting in a circle, on makeshift chairs, and I took that photo instinctively. Then I went on, I didn’t even stop to talk much with them (which I usually do). Just a few nods and that was all. I took a look at the photo once I got home. I hardly look at the photos immediately after taking them. I don’t want to spoil the magic of seeing the photos afterwards. It’s like opening gifts. Only then, I realized there was something familiar, but I could not put a finger on it until someone The exhibition was held in Piacenza (IT), at the venue of the association Amici dell’Arte and in collaboration with the Cultural Association TessereTrame, founded by the Italian writer Barbara Garlaschelli. It included twenty photos that inspired twenty short stories, collected in a volume bearing the same title.

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It may be said, therefore, that Badagliacca’s translation of the suspended condition of the migrant happens by a sort of cultural accident: some reference hidden in his cultural formation, cropped up and guided him. As a consequence, the photo captures the semantic and symbolic environment shared by some European cultures, relating it to a common, if general, religious reservoir of symbols, grounding his “translation” of his subject (a migrant on the Balkan border) and at the same time introducing a sense of uniqueness that is bound to be clear to anyone familiar with the “original”: the unique portrayal of the Virgin by a renowned painter. Though not necessarily identifiable in terms of a specific reference to Antonello da Messina and his work, the photo will probably raise a feeling of familiarity, which in itself may build a bridge between different cultures and experiences. The photographer’s “language” will be understood through analogy and translated into what seems to be a comprehensible “interpretation” of the issue of migration not only over the Balkan borders, but also in a more universal perspective. A visual message glossed as such is bound to make it easier, for people who have never experienced any kind of migration, to gain some awareness of what is lived through by forced immigrants and refugees. It needs to be reminded, however, that this kind of “translation by analogy” is not always positively oriented, and remains in fact ambiguous in its consequences. Broadly speaking, it is the ground in which the colonial enterprise is rooted. Boehmer analyzes it from a postcolonial perspective, explaining that the colonial gaze is “made manifest in the activities of investigation, examination, inspection, peeping, poring over, which were accompaniments to the colonial penetration of a country” (2005, 68). Boehmer goes back to the frame of reference that European cultures share, which allows us to consider incoming migrants in many ways, mostly negative. In its most prejudiced manifestations, the process is driven by a colonial tendency to “domesticate” the aliens, as to fit them into our stereotypical views of the other. We want the strangers to become familiar as to be able to cope with them. However, making them familiar, we fatally betray their true identities. Thus the Western gaze works like that of Medusa, making the object of representation into a fictional entity, far removed from the real world. In terms of encoding, this was the case with the French photographers in Algeria. But according to Paul Gilroy, the same attitude emerges in the decoding process This answer was given by Badagliacca himself by email, when we addressed the question (September 1, 2020).

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applied by many Western “liberal sympathizers to a postcolonial émigré élite” who, when approaching the representation of the dead or suffering body of the other, react by showing the kind of “cheap pseudo-solidarities” that Gilroy identifies “as an inadequate salve for real pain” (Gilroy 2000, 6). The issue is complex, and there are two sides to it. On the one hand, translating the image of the stranger into one’s own (Western) terms may neutralize the testimonial and political power of the image itself. On the other, as Gilroy maintains, there’s no understanding without sympathy, which etymologically means suffering together (Gilroy 2014). We must remember of course that sympathy is an ambiguous tool. It may lead us closer to understanding or it may remove the specificity of what or who is sympathized with, drawing us back to a stereotypical interpretation of the other. But it is nevertheless an extremely effective “entry point” to approach any condition totally unfamiliar to us. In Fanon’s interpretation of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, the stereotype is posited as inherently misleading. Its negative aspect is mistakenly considered as deriving from a false representation of a given reality. Fanon argues that the stereotype has a negative impact on the process of knowing the other because it simplifies and petrifies something that is meant to be received as a performative identity, in which the play of differences is basic (Fanon 1952, 78–82). Theoretically, this notion of an act that freezes the object it addresses is quite easily applicable to the art of producing a photographic representation of the real. According to Barthes, photography necessarily represents “ce qui a été” (“what used to be”) and therefore it takes “la voie de la certitude: l’essence de la photographie est de ratifier ce qu’elle représente” (“the way of certainty: the essence of photography is to ratify what it represents”) (Barthes 1980, 133). Between stereotype and photography, there seems to be a shared tendency toward fixity and stability that may deeply hinder the understanding of something that is in (fast) progress. But of course, it depends on what you do with photography: it is a language, and you may inflect it in different ways when trying to translate the real. The artistic project I Càrmeni. Ritratti improbabili (I Càrmeni. Unlikely Portraits) (Mario De Carolis 2013)6 is based on photography. It works—both symbolically and pragmatically—on an unusual version of the process of mimicry. De Carolis (1957–2018) was an eclectic talent, basically a painter, but also a sculptor and a photographer. He spent some years on a cooperative project in Venezuela, and on his return he began his visual research on “transcultural passages” (as he named them) in Italian society. I Càrmeni starts with a patient, time-consuming, and repeated effort to gain familiarity with the migrants in the neighborhood of San Faustino in Brescia (Italy). When they first meet him, people do not even know that De Carolis is a photographer Details on the project are available here: http://www.mariodecarolis.it/project/i-carmeni/

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and an artist. He becomes an accepted presence in the neighborhood before starting the project, and therefore his initial interaction with the migrants living in the area is casual and “free.” In the meanwhile, of course, he succeeds in exploring an urban multicultural environment that is almost unique in Italy—particularly after the recent dismantling of the Riace experiment by the former Italian Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini7—where a number of different ethnicities live side by side, peacefully coexisting, providing mutual help, and actively working for the good of the community as a whole. Not until he had become a familiar presence and a friend to many of the people living in San Faustino did De Carolis begin his photographic work, which involved shooting a number of close-ups. The photographic portraits were then printed on sheets of drilled aluminum and eventually laid on Plexiglas mirrors. The outcome of this process was revealing. The act of observing each portrait has a “multiplying” quality: the viewers see not only the face of the subject—who is a foreigner, and visibly so—but also their own face, reflected through the holes in the plates. In blending into each other, the two faces necessarily produce a new image, resulting from the unstable and provisional combination of the West and the rest in a transcultural tension within a highly dynamic representation of the contemporary drive toward globalization. In combining two faces, De Carolis symbolically evokes the fluctuating and unpredictable combination of multiple histories, cultures, experiences, and, more often than not, ethnicities. There is a peculiar connection between Badagliacca’s and De Carolis’s work, though the two artists never met. When speaking of the origin of his project, De Carolis explained that he was inspired by Antonello da Messina’s painting, the one we mentioned above as a (mostly hidden) reference for The Game. The Annunciata di Palermo (1476) functions differently for Mario De Carolis, for whom the painting played a very intentional role in his work. He said in fact that, in his project as well as in the Annunciata, the object of his representation was someone who was not there: the angel in the case of Antonello da Messina’s painting and the mixed-up identity that is progressively taking shape in Europe primarily as a consequence of mass migration in De Carolis’s photographic project.8 The former minister ordered the shutting down of the most celebrated model of integration, which was instituted in the small town of Riace, in Calabria, and overseen by its mayor, Domenico Lucano. Lucano was placed under house arrest and then forced to leave the town. The fact that he had won international prizes for his integration project, apparently, could not stop the project of dismantling. When he eventually returned to Riace, Lucano started rebuilding the old project, which is at the moment only partly operational. 8 De Carolis explains the project here: http://www.mariodecarolis.it/project/i-carmeni/. Some videos are available here: http://www.mariodecarolis.it/video-gallery/ (last accessed: September 11, 2020). The ones devoted to I Càrmeni may help to understand how the “mirror effect” works. The videos were shot and edited in collaboration with CTU— Università degli Studi di Milano. 7

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So without realizing it, De Carolis produced an example of the kind of approach Bhabha suggested in his seminal “The Other Question”: My reading of the colonial discourse suggests that the point of intervention should shift from the identification of images as positive or negative, to the understanding of the process of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse. (Bhabha 2004, 95)

Bhabha completes the articulation of this line of thought in The Location of Culture. When trying to clarify his “anatomy of colonial discourse,” he mentions the stereotype as “an arrested, fetishistic” mode of representation (Bhabha 2004, 109), symbolically replicating the formative mirror phase of the subject, any subject, in the process of growing up. In this mirror phase, two different drives interact: “narcissism” (because I—the Western subject—like what I see) and “aggressivity” (because I want to appropriate what I see). In the strategy of colonial power, the stereotype posits the same kind of duplicity: “[I]t gives knowledge of difference and simultaneously disavows or masks it. Like the mirror phase ‘the fullness’ of the stereotype—its image as identity—is always threatened by lack” (Bhabha 2004, 110). De Carolis directly engages with this sort of reflection producing a kind of representation that destroys any possibility of fixing the image of the other through a stereotypical representation. In his portraits, the viewers are necessarily involved, as they must complete the meaning of the work. And if the viewers, as often happens, are Westerners, the experience of viewing produces multiple and unstable “translations” of the Western identity of today, an identity conceived as a mosaic of local and individual bits and pieces, collected while moving from one place to another and interlacing multiple cultural and emotional relationships. De Carolis clearly exploits the notion of reflection as something more than a mere duplication: it is an act triggering proliferation and the production of uncountable new identities that will later combine, in their turn, with other identities, determining new forms of hybridization, in a transcultural play that is endlessly changing. The notion of identity we are referring to, therefore, is performative and projected outward toward many possible translations of itself in different linguistic and cultural contexts. The endless instability of globalized identities is in fact drawing new geographies where border-crossing is not only possible but necessary. In the beautiful volume devoted to Sebastiao Salgado and his art, Eduardo Galeano, one of the two editors, remarks that Salgado’s photographs seem to watch the public and to directly address the viewers in an extremely provocative and involving way. Mario De Carolis’s project deliberately develops this symbolic reflection into a specific artistic practice, which hints

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at a possible new way of producing portraits of the other, and in fact reflects on the very notion of otherness.

4.3 Familiarizing/Defamiliarizing It should be clear by now that the visual translations of the migration process and of its agents often imply a double-sided process of inscription and estrangement. When we decide to connect a totally unfamiliar experience and a representation that is familiar to us, we may follow two paths. We may show the similarities existing between, say, the migration of our Sicilian grandfathers to the US and that of the African immigrants to Europe; by this process, we make ourselves and our public more emotionally aware of the conditions enforcing migration today. Or we may refer to something familiar—be it an experience, an image, or a text—adapting it as to show how a shared cultural reference may help us to understand that the other is a human being as well. Michel Foucault draws an essential link between power and knowledge, presenting them as the two basic aspects in his notion of discourse. This term, as Foucault intends it, applies to any text of any kind, which may become both a tool of oppression and a strategy of resistance (Foucault 1998, 138–41). Power does not work in the form of a chain: it circulates (Foucault 1982, 417–32), and this is made possible by the unpredictable ways in which language (any language) is encoded in a message (any kind of message) and subsequently decoded. Stuart Hall reinforces this concept, also stressing the active role of both the addresser and the addressee, as well as the many factors that work to “encode” a message (Hall 1993, 90–8). The meaning of any text is therefore unstable and is endlessly shaped and reshaped by both the authors and the receivers (who often become new authors in their turn). We will see in what way, in the case of visual texts related to migration, the twin notions of familiarity and unfamiliarity play an active role in both the process of encoding and the process of decoding, triggering semantic interferences that are often beyond the author’s intention. In such an emotionally overloaded “discourse,” the extent to which the meaning expressed by the author is familiar enough to be identified or is sufficiently estranged as to raise the addressee’s awareness about the implied meaning of the text appears to be a preliminary step in facilitating or hindering the authors’ and the receiver’s ability to make sense of a discourse. Our first visual text is a very famous one: the photograph of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee drowned in Bodrum. He was trying to reach a safe haven off the coast of Turkey and died with his five-year-old

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brother and his mother. His father survived to tell the story. Nilüfer Demir photographed the toddler’s body on the beach of Bodrum, a resort normally crowded with holidaymakers during the day, but a place where migrants’ boats often try to avoid coastal patrols at night. For several reasons, most of them unfathomable, the photo soon became widely circulated on the web: it was endlessly shared on social networks and appeared to become an icon of the vulnerability and innocence of the migrants killed. In a way, the image perfectly fits the Western imagination of the journey in search of refuge, and it worked extremely well in attracting attention and triggering reactions of condemnation and solidarity. Images are texts. They result from the regulated combination of signs belonging to a familiar code. In the same way as a written text, they “function” if they successfully exploit the language they choose and, in an international environment, when they can be translated, more or less efficiently, into other languages and cultures. What happens with this photograph is quite simple. The photographer is a Turkish photojournalist, born in 1986. She is quite young, well trained, and belongs to a non-European culture by birth, although she functions in an international context. She consequently refers to a cultural frame of reference that is not necessarily analogous to the paradigm familiar to most European addressees. In practice, when taking the photograph, she was probably not fully aware of the steps marking its “translation” into contexts other than the Turkish one. Analyzing the way in which the photograph is encoded—whether in full awareness or unconsciously—one can easily trace many “signs” deeply rooted in Western cultures. Even though it is clear from the chronicle of the shipwreck that the drowned child is a stranger, aspects of the photograph make him appear familiar to the European viewer. For one, Aylan Kurdi has a light complexion and is dressed in Western clothes. Second, the beach looks familiar: it is in fact a resort that is quite popular with Western tourists. Aylan’s body is perfectly intact: no wounds, no blood, no signs of violence; he could easily be sleeping. On the whole, he could be the viewer’s own child, who has fallen asleep on the beach during a holiday; his death is experienced as a tragedy because he is so similar to our children and because most of us (Europeans) have experienced a holiday in a place like this. This sort of everyday familiarity is unconsciously reinforced, as the young researcher Giulio Dalvit suggests, by a clear reference to Western religious imagery. Aylan’s body, while “peacefully sleeping” on the beach, seems familiar because it replicates the image of the sacrificial lamb in a very famous painting by Francisco de Zurbaràn, Ecce Agnus Dei (1640) (see Figure 4.3), many copies of which are exhibited in Catholic churches in Europe (Dalvit 2015).

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Figure 4.3  Francisco de Zurbaràn, Ecce Agnus Dei, 1640.

The religious reference belongs to a symbolic universe that is perhaps most likely to produce an impact on the European viewer. At the same time, the hidden reference to a familiar work of art adds a sort of narrative quality to the mimetic flavor of the text, transforming the photographer into a storyteller. For these reasons, the photo inspired a huge wave of sympathetic reactions, all of them supported by the possibility of “translating” the sorrowful fate of a Syrian child into the unbearable tragedy of a child’s drowning that could— theoretically—happen in any family. Western spectators feel a familiarity that they cannot explain because they automatically translate the image into something they know and that replicates the sacrifice of an innocent victim, naturally bound to raise sympathy and compassion. The covert religious reference multiplies the effect of the photograph and mobilizes moral consciousness, “making the death of a migrant child—not the first and, sadly and infuriatingly, not the last—interesting to Western eyes” (Vallorani 2018, 116). In the spiral movement marking the dynamic processes of encoding and decoding as defined by Stuart Hall (1993), Demir’s photo becomes the canvas for a surprising number of new translations/adaptations that were triggered by the process of making the original picture available on the web. Whether these “translations” were produced by underground artists, by ordinary users of the web or internationally famous figures, what is quite clear in this endless process of circulation and translation is that each new version

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Figure 4.4  Rohit Chawla, Portrait of Ai Weiwei, 2016.

contains the original text but also translates it according to the shared code of the imagined addressee. Rohit Chawla’s photo (Figure 4.4) explicitly translates Kurdi’s death into a different narrative experience (Ai Weiwei replacing the child, a stony beach replacing the sandy one, and a black-and-white photograph in place of the color one), while the drawing by Eduardo Salles (Figure 4.5) suggests the impermanence of memory. In the same way, the anonymous Photoshop (Figure 4.6) that, soon after the event, kept popping up in various versions on social media (mostly on FB) effectively symbolizes the absence of a true identity in the image of the migrant child, implying both negative and positive consequences. In all three cases, the issues that are raised have something to do with the universal character of Aylan Kurdi’s tragedy, the need to preserve our memory of it, and the idea that there is a “hierarchy of grief,” according to which “some lives count more than others” (Butler 2004, 76) and that needs to be resisted and ultimately reversed. “Every image embodies a way of seeing,” claims Berger (Berger 2008, 13). And our contemporary way of seeing migrants often rearticulates a deeply rooted set of Western stereotypes. In suggesting a possible understanding/ translation of the experience of migration, the image fixes the identity of

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Figure 4.5  Eduardo Salles, La memoria colectiva es de corto plazo, 2015.

Figure 4.6  Anonymous Facebook post (October 2015).

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the migrant, making it less slippery, easier to grasp, quicker currently for Westerners to understand. This is the process at work in Demir’s photo of Aylan Kurdi. When Chawla, Salles, and the anonymous artist take the same image and modify it reshaping its original meanings and estranging what was believed to be familiar, another method of translation is put into practice, its hub being not familiarity but foreignization. Both strategies may be perfectly functional in translating the experience of migration through images. They are different but oriented toward the same goal. As Butler explains in Precarious Lives, we need “to establish modes of public seeing and hearing that might well respond to the cry of the human within the sphere of appearance, a sphere in which the trace of the cry has become hyperbolically inflated to rationalize a gluttonous nationalism, or fully obliterated, where both alternatives turn out to be the same” (Butler 2004, 147). Seeing is not a straightforward, unmediated process, and this is true for both photography and documentary filmmaking. In both cases and in the field of migration studies, the issues of biopolitics and precariousness tend to be progressively simplified and ultimately erased by the propensity to replicate a sadly familiar story, where the features of the individual victims are not given space, thus reducing the interest of the audience, which tends to see numbers rather than people. Again, estranging the traditional codes may help produce a more effective translation of the experience of forced migration. The short film L’estate vola (Summer Flies, 2000) develops along this mode of representation. Its author, Andrea Caccia, is primarily a filmmaker, but also a photographer and a screenwriter. He has authored both feature and documentary films, experimenting with cinematic tools to generate an unfamiliar apprehension of the work produced. Vedozero (Zerovision 2010), for example, resulted from the editing of private videos shot on mobile phones by young students attending a filmmaking workshop. The story behind L’estate vola begins on July 29, 1999, when Yaguine Koïta and Fodè Tounkara, two young boys from Guinea, decided to hide in the cargo hold of a Sabena Airlines Airbus. They were trying to flee from their home country to seek refuge in Europe. Predictably, they froze to death before getting to Brussels airport, and their bodies were not found until several days later, on August 2, after three or four return journeys had been completed between Canakry and Brussels. One of the rescuers found a letter to the European community hidden in a pocket; it was, of course, a plea for asylum that described Europe as a civilized, rich, and enlightened place. Like many stories of this kind, the narrative of Yaguine and Fodè’s death circulated widely, and it renewed debates over the condition of migrants and the moral responsibility to provide them with shelter. There was a lot of

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“pseudo-solidarity,” to use Gilroy’s definition (Gilroy 2000, 6), but then life went on, and the two boys were forgotten. In a joint interview with Arjun Appadurai and Paul Gilroy, conducted in 1997, the close connection between the removal of memory, the simplification of the West/rest relationship, and the pervasive need to get back to “business as usual” were presented as very strong obstacles to real understanding (Bell 1999, 22–3). In his essay “Globalization and the Claim of Postcoloniality,” Simon Gikandi retells the story of the Guinean boys in order to trigger a real critical discussion about the extent to which the do-gooders and the intellectuals in particular got involved in the issue of understanding the migrants even before pretending to help them (Gikandi 2001, 630). They do not seem to know the language and they cannot move beyond a formalized and neutralized commemoration of the dead and compassion toward the living. The point not directly raised by Gikandi, but certainly implied in his essay, is that migration requires a brand-new language, suited to a tragically old and recurring experience. What is needed is a kind of estrangement, the artistic ability to literally move—“transducere”—a story that may easily become another tragedy of migration to a different context, so as to translate the real into a cognitively effective fiction. L’estate vola was released by the Italian filmmaker Andrea Caccia in 2000; hence it was shot soon after the death of the Guinean boys, which was recent enough to be remembered but would soon, and predictably, fade away. Caccia decided to devote a short film to their failed attempt at running away, and though he wanted to document a real story—and his film is labeled a documentary—he chose a rather unusual narrative path. In short, he made a real, failed runaway into a science-fiction parable on the impossible rescue of a castaway. Shot in Milan in August, in an almost deserted and sweltering city, it was easy for the filmmaker to simulate a dystopian setting, a wasted and desolate landscape, quite like the urban archetype introduced by George Orwell in 1984. The leading character is never seen. He is an alien who has come to Earth in search of his lost brother but he appears only as the voice-over, narrating the story and explaining the setting. The protagonist’s brother, it seems, was marooned on Planet Earth—believed to be healthy and flourishing—when his shuttle was shipwrecked and he was then lost in unfamiliar surroundings. The protagonist is looking for him but is losing hope; he also has doubts about his ability to survive in this dangerous environment. Several technical features of the film reinforce this feeling of estrangement. Caccia decided to shoot the film in Super 8, producing footage that is rough and scratchy, deliberately unclear. The voice-over speaks French and is not always fully understandable as it recounts the story of his slow death. For

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most of the film, the viewer is fascinated but at the same time puzzled and completely focused on the need to understand what is going on. Not until the end of the film is the spectator given the key to the tale, in white end titles on a black screen. That key is Yaguine and Fodè’s letter, their naive and direct call for help alongside the persistent and well-established perception of Europe as “a better place.” No commentary is provided, thus avoiding any risk of imposing a Western interpretation onto the migrants’ words. The translation of the tragedy is in fact produced by the film itself and by the author’s choice to imagine another kind of journey and to offer his gaze as marked by the sort of “outsidedness” that Polezzi mentions (Polezzi 2012, 351). The ordinary understanding of the relationship between human and other is reversed, and what we hear is the voice of an alien, describing Earth as a totally unfamiliar place. Both the story and the setting are seen “from the outside” and what you perceive as a human being watching the film suddenly acquires a totally different meaning. The narrative strategy is a highly sophisticated one, though the resulting text produces a strong and direct impact. As a Westerner, Caccia must “translate” the experience of forced migration into something he can understand. He keeps some distance from the “real facts,” probing their meaning and eventually “reproducing” them through the filter of his culture and his talent. In so doing, he is in fact respecting the other, accepting the impossibility of replicating the real, taking in the possibility of translating the story into something different, something that is fictional but that retains the testimonial function of this kind of text. Fully aware that, as an intellectual, he must work as an interpreter, he does not approach the story directly but takes a sidelong path that combines the urge to recount a very real journey as well as a fictional story of two brothers, one looking for the other in what is perceived as a totally alien landscape. The neutralizing impact of the stereotype clashes with the creative choice of exploiting the literary tradition of dystopia, which is revised and adapted to the narrative needs of this specific tale. Thus, Caccia develops a mode of intervention that allows the shift “from the identification of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse” (Bhabha 2004, 95). Once this process of subjectification moves to center stage, it becomes impossible not to see the ambiguity of the stereotype and the mystery of the other, leading one to respect their otherness while at the same time taking full responsibility for the representation. The issue of responsibility is of paramount importance. Though compassion may be the first reaction when facing representations of death and violence, compassion is not what is called for, as Azoulay argues. What is needed is the spectators’ full awareness that they have responsibilities as

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citizens of the world (Azoulay 2008, 17). Because again, the act of seeing affects what is being seen, but also the person who sees.

4.4 Their Own Gaze “Translation,” Polezzi states, “is a consciously political act” (Polezzi 2012, 354). Borrowing from Michael Cronin, she emphasizes the relevance of agency in the relationship between translation and migration (Polezzi 2012, 348). What Cronin defines as the “autonomous practice of translation” (Cronin 2006, 45) gives the migrants the possibility to become “active subjects” in translation—switching from the passive role of objects (of study, representation, translation, etc.) to the ability to use their own voice to express their own meanings. This practice stands in sharp contrast to the more usual “heteronomous practices” that are based on the perception of the migrants as unable to translate their own meanings and therefore needing a support that may easily become a form of control (Polezzi 2012, 349). This critical frame of reference is important to keep in mind when one is working on images instead of words. The existing photographic and visual representations of migration in the Mediterranean Sea are mostly the result of the gaze of Westerners and respond to their cultural frame of mind. In practice, these images give us an idea of their individual and collective understanding of the issue of migration. The biopolitics of language also affects images. And while the political nature of language is certainly not exclusive to migration scenarios, migration enhances its visibility, highlighting the interplay of the linguistic choices that are variously permitted, frowned upon, singled out for praise, or simply barred (Polezzi 2012, 346). The young photographer Kevin McElvaney is explicitly “political,” in the sense Polezzi suggests (Polezzi 2012, 354), in his project #RefugeeCameras.9 Originating from the intention of providing the refugee seekers with a tool for self-representation so as to allow them to portray themselves (on their own), the project consisted in putting fifteen disposable cameras into the hands of a group of migrants at Izmir, Lesvos, Athens, and Idomeni. The migrants, who became friends with McElvaney, were each given a camera, together with pre-addressed envelopes and enough money to send their work back to the photographer. McElvaney received seven out of the fifteen cameras back, had

The project is fully available here: http://kevin-mcelvaney.com/portfolio/project-refugee cameras/ (last accessed: January 22, 2018).

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the photos printed and published them on his website.10 The photos sent back by Zakaria (Syria—Camera # 1) portray the migrants in the middle of the sea, on board an overcrowded rubber dinghy. The precarious space is represented in meaningful fragments: the small outboard engine, the migrants sitting on the tubes, dressed to keep out the cold, the close-up of a migrant on the left side of the photo, while at his back a rescue boat is approaching, the clustered heads of women and children, another close-up of a boy hugging a child, both of them almost smiling. All the pictures are in black and white and all of them include the boat and the sea. Finally, all of them are pervaded by a sense of being suspended, the feeling of inhabiting an ambiguous space, one that has been sought out by people in search of salvation but that may suddenly become a site of death. As a photographer and a European artist, McElvaney makes a tough choice. He could have taken the pictures himself to provide his own representation of the same journey. The photos would have been more professional, probably more effective from an artistic point of view, except that such an artistic result was not the point of the project. In a culture already saturated with images of migration, McElvaney’s project creates the conditions for the migrants to make themselves visible and succeeds in providing an original point of view, a highly individual recapitulation of a journey often generically described and domesticated by the Western media. The gaze informing the pictures— unusual in their roughness and lack of professional skill—is steeped in experience and cultures that would be difficult to imitate or to translate into our Western epistemology. In presenting the project on his website, McElvaney effectively sums up the Western way of stealing stories that are not ours: We always decide what is important to say and what is not We always photograph the refugees in their situations We are those who tell stories We.

So this is another way, a possible path toward a kind of representation that resists the understanding of images as a physiological process: the observers are not given the photographer’s interpretations of somebody else’s experience. They watch through the eyes of the migrants after having handed over the tools and stepped aside. Just like words, images do not have an immutable essence. They are translated into a definite cultural frame, normally located in space The photographs were first exhibited in Milan, during the XXI edition of the Milan Film Festival, in 2015.

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and time, which results from situated knowledge. They are historicized, and their historicity—the vital link between their visible shape and the sense to which this visible shape alludes—is never stated in terms of linear reciprocity but implies a host of factors mediating between facts and opinions, between the real and the knowledge of the real. To conclude, then, with the words with which we opened our reflection in this chapter, migrants do not dodge translation; rather, “they keep being translated” (Walkowitz 2015, 31).

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A fence here, a wall there, a line drawn here, a line crossed there. —Ali Smith, Autumn, 2016

5.1 Translation on the Border/Translation as Bordering In Book Two of Il cortegiano (1528), Baldesar Castiglione tells the story of an Italian merchant who goes to Poland to meet some Russian traders and buy sable. Russia and Poland are at war, so the two groups meet and stand on the opposite banks of the Diepr; nobody dares to cross the border by walking on the frozen surface of the river. The Italian merchant and his crew, therefore, start bellowing their questions about the fur’s price, but it is so cold that the Russians’ answers freeze in midair before reaching the other bank. Thus, the merchant decides to light a fire in order to thaw the Russian merchants’ words so that he can hear them. But by the time the fire starts burning, the Italian crew realizes that the Russians have left and that doing business with them is no longer possible (Rebecchini 2016, 257). This brief story metaphorically draws attention to two relevant issues of this book. The first, and more explicit one, pertains to the semiotic aspect of translation: you always need a way to make sense of a foreign tongue if you want to create the material conditions for dialogue. The second relates to the topographical meaning of translation, which evokes a movement in space: the story highlights the notion that translation requires the crossing of a border, a process that is as much physical and spatial as it is symbolic and epistemological. When borders are redrawn, as is happening politically today on a world scale, the impact that the operation has on the translation of people from one place to another is enormous and irreversible. Stuart Hall once wrote that “migration is a one-way trip. There’s no ‘home’ to go back to” (Hall 1987, 44). The practical implications of this statement have never been clearer than today in the Mediterranean Sea. Rejected upon reaching the southern borders of Italy and Greece or sent back to the Libyan “concentration camps” they have just left behind, migrants cannot return

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where they came from and they are prevented from moving forward. Their translation fails, yet their relocation remains a political and humane necessity (Di Maio 2013, 41–50). We see something similar in the endless debate on the need to protect the US border from immigration from the South. A real wall between the United States and Mexico can never be completed, of course, due to the geographical features of the borderland: stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the tip of southern Texas, the US border with Mexico is 1,933 miles long, of which only about 700 currently have fencing in place (Almond 2019). Yet the symbolic and cultural border between the two countries has never appeared more insurmountable. As Dennis Wood writes in a book on the power of maps, “The map doesn’t let us see anything, but it does let us know what others have seen, found out, or discovered” (Wood 1992, 6–7). And it is precisely the space between the reality we live and the maps through which we process it that has defined the scope of this book. In the movement between “real world” and “symbolic universe,” borders must be seen as something more than “imaginary lines on paper”—as the sheik Rahman says in that short, intense reflection on history, colonialism, war, and the drawing of maps that is Hutchinson’s play Durand’s Line (Hutchinson 2009, 33–6). Borders fully belong to the universe of signs: they are both topography and metaphor. Any attempt at separating one aspect from the other is impossible. They are the two sides of the same coin: they need difference to exist. This relation is made performative through the act of moving from one place (meaning the act of abandoning a whole Weltanschauung to enter another) to a different one (meaning that one must begin to frame one’s own way of life within a distinct symbolic universe) via the crossing of a borderline, whether it be natural or political. The boundaries between one place and another, therefore, also perform as symbolic thresholds. They represent the place where, electively, the phenomenon of translation is fully realized as a multifaceted process that involves a number of variables, among which language is the most visible. The border is the place where migrants—that is human beings—are translated into something different: over the centuries, they have been transformed into goods, infrahuman entities, laborers, reproductive machines, domestic workers and caregivers, etc. They may—like the foreign words in Il Cortegiano—freeze in mid-journey and be therefore obliged to renounce their right to relocation—in translation—into a new social and cultural context. In other words, they do not make sense, yet they exist and demand attention. What we have tried to do in our work is unearth the complexities, obstacles, challenges, and difficulties that occur when relocation is not completed or successful, when the entities to be translated—

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both linguistically, culturally, socially, politically, ethically—are frozen in midair and are stuck in the middle of a sea or denied access or meaning. Our primary references are to two contexts—the North and Central American one, in Chapters 1 and 2 and the European and Mediterranean one in Chapters 3 and 4. While showing the contiguities and similarities between these two different sets of conditions, they also reveal the theory of translation that we have sketched out in this book, i.e., the creation of schemas of understanding that, rather than project an image of the world as we might want it, are derived from those experiences of the world that exceed our inherited conceptual frameworks. History can come to our aid in this time of crisis. In the Mediterranean Sea in particular, what is unfolding today reveals numerous analogies with what was happening, say, in Ancient Greece. Homer told stories of border-crossings, showing quite clearly, and in the same way as many other narrators, how the boundary enclosing a community can be the locus of necessary change, the end of the world-aswe-know-it, and the beginning of a different culture and temporality. When crossing it, you may or may not translate yourself into this different culture, and if you don’t, this choice turns you into a foreigner and an outlaw. In other words, translation is posited as a good way to live. A quick survey of the newsfeeds surrounding migration in the Mediterranean today, however, conveys a very different image as the collective point of view is identified not with the traveler but with the enclosed community—Fortress Europe being the overarching metaphor—which is being invaded by migrants “assailing” its weak underbelly. Similarly, in North America, the headlines covering migration quintessentially follow the same conceptual dyad: legality as domestic, illegality as foreign. In fact, so much of the media and political attention is directed to the southern border: from issues of national security to deportations; from struggles against illegal migration to resistance against the abuse of migrants’ rights; from an electoral promise to the construction, maintenance, and policing of a border wall between the United States and Mexico as an incandescent metaphor of the new order of things. The quotation from Ali Smith’s “Brexit” novel, Autumn, which was used as an epigraph to this chapter, captures the tenor of the current global political discourse surrounding migration—and which directly relates to the pedagogical project sustaining this book—i.e., the need for a firm line of division between us and them, one nation, culture, language, and another. But what if the terms we have been using to talk about culture, identity, and community are conceptually wrong or simply out of date? How would our vision of the current state of affairs change? This is the heart of the matter, and this is what each of the chapters of this book has attempted to

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do: offer a limited but representative showcase of how we can understand language, culture, identity from the standpoint of the border, of translation, of migration. In other words, instead of positing the border, translation, migration as exceptions to the norm, they are seen as, materially as well as symbolically, the normal way of being in this world, the very center of things. According to Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon, there has not yet been a real change in the “experience of the Other” as philosophers and scholars “never really put a foot outside the metaphysical ground nor elucidate the identity of otherness. In the best of cases, they simultaneously expand the empire of logocentrism (which becomes able to rule from the margins) and accentuate the feeling of indeterminacy (which renders the margins even more unreachable) simultaneously” (Sakai and Solomon 2006, 85). For these reasons, translation and relocation are twin processes and both necessary, particularly when vulnerable subjects are involved, because the act of abandoning one’s own homeland makes the dislocated individual unsheltered and trapped in-between two worlds (Farrier 2011, 57–90), in a position where they tend to become invisible, victimized, or criminalized by norms that actively impair their relocation. The artists and the scholars quoted in our work have trained our gaze, our hearing, and our taste so that we can see this invisibility. Like the citizens of the twin cities of Beszel and UlQoma in the dystopian world created by China Miéville (2009), we are taught—both in the United States and in Europe— how to counteract the practice of “unseeing” toward the migrants, a practice that is not openly imposed by law, as in Miéville’s novel, but in practice works the same way. We progressively train ourselves to ignore the very presence of the migrants moving in our cities and working for us, thus producing a sort of imaginary topography, another city, where we are not invaded by threatening strangers. What we believe is that this process—mesmerizing as it is in Miéville’s novel—becomes dangerous and must be reversed so as to support the possibility of an epistemological relocation, which is necessary before any political or cultural change can take place. Thus, the real issue, for us as educators, is to find ways to understand relocation and articulate it without eluding or eliding its social, cultural, political, and ethical implications. Here the seminal work of Homi Bhabha has been the foundation of our analysis. Rereading them today, the opening words of The Location of Culture, sound prophetic to say the least: “It is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond” (Bhabha 2004, 1). In encouraging theories to put aside any “narrative of originary and initial subjectivities” (Bhabha 2004), Bhabha in fact anticipated the changes to come more or less forty years later, when his attempt at reframing cultures has been necessarily transformed—historically, culturally, and politically—into a process of endless relocation, which de

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facto becomes a process of endless translation (Sakai and Solomon 2006, 36). Jacir’s installation Via Crucis analyzed in Chapter 1 and Mario Badagliacca’s photographic work discussed in Chapter 4 effectively and poetically highlight the ways in which travel and translation coalesce in a multiple border-crossing that is at the same time a movement through space and time, from ancient world to the current tragedy taking place in the Mediterranean Sea. Secular relics of places and communities are reshuffled in a relocation of different traditions, and, as Vicente Rafael states, “What emerges in the aporias of translation is a kind of semantic bouleversement, the sense of upheaval whereby the endlessly enfolded meanings of particular events will always make any discourse feel unfinished and incomplete” (Rafael 2016, 18). Borders, then, become devices and may be used in different ways. In this book, we have focused our attention on borders as sites of meaning: ontological, epistemological, and cultural.

5.2 Translation as the Relocation of Culture The “translation zone” has become the key location of planetary postmodernity, writes Emily Apter in her eponymous book (Apter 2006): around the world many people and communities lead polyglot lives, and their sense of identity, history, ethnicity, and even nationality is as entangled as their way of translating between the various lects of their existence. In Border as Method, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson make use of Apter’s definition of translation zone to “question the usually harmonious resonances of the term cultural translation” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 272). Following their lead, our work has aimed to develop an analysis of the dialogic relationship between languages and cultures in the context of the relocation of people. Migration directly contributes to shaping the composition of our society and its global labor force so much so that the description of translation zones as exceptions no longer holds. In a way that is analogous to our approach, Mezzadra and Neilson explore the semantic network of the border in the creation of globalized labor forces and detail how translation is being used, in several parts of the world, to create dynamics of inclusion or exclusion, to create hierarchies and division of labor, or else to build bridges through cooperation and forms of activism. Two of the examples they provide capture the vibrant continuum of experiences that the translation-migration dyad embodies: the taxi drivers’ strikes in New York City that led to the Fare Raise victory in 2004 and that were made possible by grassroots activism and a lot of translation among the cab drivers themselves who are often over-educated polyglots in

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transit toward better job opportunities. And, at the other end of the spectrum, the case of labor migration from India to the Gulf area where companies are mindful to draw workers from a variety of regions as linguistic, national, and cultural and ethnic differences help build a docile workforce—less able to organize and strike (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 15–25). The principle, of course, is not new and was actualized on board the slave ships and on the plantations during the slave trade, creating a cacophony of words and meanings that has been brilliantly captured, visually as well as aurally, by NourbeSe Philip in her powerful performances of her Zong! poems (Figure 5.1).1 “Relocation,” in its European usage within contemporary migration discourse, indicates the “redistribution of migrants” (Figure 5.2) who have landed on the coasts of Greece and Italy across the territories of all the EU member states, which is at the moment a highly contested political issue. In fact, by entitling this book The Relocation of Culture, we explicitly chose to contextualize our work within the current migration phenomenon. If translation is a “relocation,” however temporary, of people, meanings, and ideas, then where does that relocation happen? The border, we maintain, is the space where translation exists and where, therefore, it should be studied. As Sakai writes, translation “is not only a border crossing but also and preliminarily an act of drawing a border, of bordering” (Sakai 2010, 32). Thus, our method has intentionally brought together translation and migration through a close reading of a diverse range of artifacts, all translingual, transnational, and translational. In approaching texts as diverse as, on the European side, Chris Cleave’s novel The Other Hand—portraying a young Nigerian’s search for asylum during the oil wars—and, on the American side, Valeria Luiselli’s testimonial text Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, we have had to develop a contextspecific approach to notions of displacement, migration, and relocation, while simultaneously identifying points of contiguity and similarity in the service of our theory of translation as migration. The young Nigerian girl fleeing her country to look for a new belonging and the children interviewed and translated by Luiselli share a similar migration and translation experience, though the first one is fictional. They have to relocate themselves to a new culture that was portrayed as familiar and welcoming but in fact was not. They have to deal with the language of international and immigration law, which translates their lives into cases to be won, at least in Luiselli’s book.

Zong! is an experimental book by the Tobago-born poet M. N. Philip. Published in 2008, the poem has acquired a new visibility in recent years, thanks to the powerful performances by the artist who recreates at the site of the performance the resounding environment of the slave ship by having the audience read and perform, simultaneously, short lines from the poem. A video of one of her performances is available here: https:// youtu.be/oHKaWprNCGM

1

Figure 5.1  M. N. Philip’s Zong!, 2008, 80–1.

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Figure 5.2 From Il Corriere della Sera, June 30, 2017.

Closer to the children’s experiences investigated by Luiselli is a 2018 short film by Ed Perkins, which was a 2019 Oscar nominee for Best Documentary (Short Subject).2 In Black Sheep, the border that is crossed is European, The film is available here: https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2018/11/03/black-sheep/ (Last accessed: 10 February 2021)

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intranational rather than international, and both psychological and physical. Inspired by a true story, the film is a long monologue spoken by Cornelius Walker who remembers when, soon after the murder of the ten-year-old Damilola Taylor in his neighborhood, he moved from Peckham (London) to Essex, with his family, into a totally white environment. Experiencing racism for the first time in his life, the young boy—just like Little Bee in Chris Cleave’s novel—tried to fit in. After his first fight at school—a fight during which, as he says, he simply “froze” waiting for the beating to be finished—he started a process of translating himself into something similar to the white boys he wanted to be friends with. The “signs” of translation are simple: first clothing, then hair, then accent, eyes (made blue by contact lenses), and skin (bleached). At a certain point, he simply says: “It’s not even like I wanted to be white, I just wanted to fit in” (Perkins 2018, 16:49). The issue of sharing the same language—as a code of signs—is of paramount importance and, for both Little Bee and Cornelius, it responds to the need to no longer be seen as a threat. Language is central and so is translation. Our leading questions therefore have been: to what extent can we analyze texts as diverse as a Mexican American testimonial and a British novel in light of a migration-focused notion of translation? Can the expansive notion of translation articulated in this book generate new terms in the discourse on migrant identities in Europe and in the United States? And how are they changing the Western perception of otherness and its translation into manageable terms? Our fully developed answers to these questions are in the preceding chapters, but in short, our answer is affirmative, for we are convinced that a radical perspectival shift is available if we adopt translation as a lens for reading contemporary texts about migration. As readers and scholars, we might not be able to identify with the protagonists of current stories of migration and, for many reasons having to do with the type of privileged lives that we lead, we should not, but we can read, learn, and allow these stories to challenge our view of the world, or the canons of our disciplines, or the definition of home and land, or even the meaning of common words such as ice. In Tell Me How It Ends, for instance, Luiselli talks about the meaning of la hielera (the icebox) in the context of pan-American migrations, which highlights the secondary connotations that the word “ice” has assumed in American English: The ice-box derives its name from the fact that the children in it are under ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement) custody. The name also points to the fact that the detention centers along the border are a kind of enormous refrigerator for people, constantly blasted with gelid air as if to ensure that the foreign meat does not go bad too quickly—

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naturally, it must be harboring all sorts of deadly germs. The children are treated more like carriers of diseases than children. (Luiselli 2017, 22)

The children are like the frozen words of the Russian merchants in Castiglione’s story, and translation on the border affords us the means to hear them while also making it impossible for us to ignore them. And this leads to our final point about our responsibility—both as an ability to respond and as an ethical response—as readers, critics, and intellectuals.

5.3 Translation Literacy and Global Citizenship To conclude, we would like to spend a few words on the pedagogical vision that this book articulates. It builds on our interest in and previous research on translation (Bertacco) and migration (Vallorani), respectively, as well as our general discomfort with the distance between our academic fields and the social issues surrounding us. The first idea for the book was generated in Milan in June 2016, just a few days after the Brexit Referendum that declared the UK’s intention to exit the European Union. It was such a watershed moment, whose social, financial, cultural consequences are being worked out as we write, which led us to think about a collaborative project that would be markedly different from our previous ones, a project that would reproduce the open dialogue between two scholars and two educators. The pedagogical model we had in mind was that of team-teaching: two authors bringing two approaches to the same project and two different ways of reading the phenomena of translation and migration—and their intersection. If this inevitably implies a less seamless finished product, it also constitutes a valuable instrument in the hands of readers who are invited by the structure of the book to join in the conversation with their own interpretations and case studies, notice the small inconsistencies and differences as points of discussion and negotiation, and form their own opinions on the topics under discussion. What we wanted to suggest was a different theoretical approach to translation, with reference to the issue of migration today, and to do so through an analysis of different kinds of representations (literary texts, films, documentaries, photographic and visual arts projects, performance art, documentary writing, etc.), breaking the commonly held divide between art and politics that relegates the humanities to an ancillary role when it comes to understanding the problems of the “real” world. And so we turn, once again, to Homi Bhabha and his recent interventions in which he makes a passionate case for the usefulness of the humanities in understanding the cultural and political “lifeworlds” of our times:

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“[H]umanistic disciplines articulate the changing relationships between cultural meaning and social value as they shape civic ‘agents’ who participate in the creation of public opinion and the definition of public interest” (Bhabha 2018, 7). While it goes without saying that the relationships between cultural meanings and social values change according to place, time, politics, etc., the same does not seem to apply to our educational methods, our intellectual categories, or our disciplines. A case in point, as we saw in the previous chapters, is the shared view of language, culture, and translation that still circulates in most Western educational models. In this book we argued for the practical value of a humanities education and for the humanities classroom as a place in which education for global citizenship can actually happen. Doris Sommer puts it in bolder terms when she writes, “[T]his is the kind of technical training for democracy that we can do in the fields of language arts and that cannot be done elsewhere” (Sommer 2004, 137). A truly global education starts, as Adrienne Rich wrote, from an act of locating ourselves on the world map: seeing translation as a vital principle of our cultural life, in some cases as the only way to exist in that world, acknowledging the plurality of language worlds, making room for the asymmetries between these worlds, and pausing over the points of disconnect they produce. “Whether more than one culture is inside or alongside the subject,” Sommer writes, “the doubling or multiplying of codes amounts to a humbling consciousness of one’s own limits” (Sommer 2004, 134). This, in our view, is the most urgent call to action for humanists today and the area that translation opens forcefully for our consideration. For our world to develop more complex, nonbinary relationships with the unfamiliar—whatever this may be—what is needed is a translation literacy that makes translation visible on every possible occasion. As experiences of incomprehension in front of aspects of global culture are “the new normal” in our daily lives, they should also be “the new normal” in the classroom. If we consider migration through the lens of translation, the responsibility for and to the other that translation entails is foregrounded not as something that is intentionally embraced; rather, as something that constitutes the precondition of all translative acts and defines us as agents of translation at either end of the spectrum. Within a translative framework, in fact, a person, a text, a cultural or political event does not just speak; it speaks to me in a particular way and may ask that I set aside or reexamine my received ideas or preconceptions (Blumczynski 2016, 59–61). In other words, translation establishes a calland-response relationship between its actors and we find ourselves—always and already—responsible for the other. “Without responsibility for the other,” Derek Attridge—borrowing from Levinas—writes, “there is no other” (Attridge 2004, 127). Nothing perhaps more than this single point makes translation the ideal partner concept to migration within the current cultural debate.

References Foreword Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Einland and Kevin McLaughlin. Prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Luiselli, Valeria. 2019. Lost Children Archive. New York: Alfred Knopf. Rendall, Steven. 1997. “The Translator’s Task,” Walter Benjamin (Translation). TTR 10 (2): 151–65. Zohn, Harry. (1968) 2007. “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin (Translation). In Illuminations, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, Preface by Leon Wieseltier, 69–82. New York: Schocken Books.

Acknowledgments Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Introduction Akbar, Arifa. 2013. “John William’s Stoner Enjoys Renaissance.” The Independent, June 4. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ books/features/john-williams-stoner-enjoys-renaissance-8642782.html Apter, Emily 2006. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Apter, Emily. 2008. “Untranslatables: A New World System.” New Literary History 39: 581–98. Apter, Emily 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and New York: Verso. Apter, Emily, 2016. “An Interview with Emily Apter.” Interview by Simona Bertacco. The New Centennial Review. Translation and the Global Humanities 16 (1): 9–27. Arduini, Stefano, and Siri Nergaard. 2011. “Translation: A New Paradigm.” Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal 1 (inaugural issue): 8–17.

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Chapter 5 Almond, Kyle. 2019. This Is What the US-Mexico Border Looks Like. Photographs by John Moore/Getty Images. Story by Kyle Almond, CNN. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/12/politics/border-wall-cnnphotos/ Apter, Emily. 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and New York: Verso. Attridge, Derek. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Badagliacca, Mario. “2016-ongoing.” The Game. Multimedia Project. https:// www.mariobadagliacca.com/the_game_2016_ongoing-cr6826 Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) 2004. The Location of Culture. With a new preface by the author. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. 2018. “Migration, Rights, and Survival: The Importance of the Humanities Today.” From the European South (3): 7–12. Blumczynski, Piotr. 2016. Ubiquitous Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Casteglione, Baldassar. (1528) 1998. Il libro del Cortegiano. Edited by Walter Barberis. Turin: Einaudi. Cleave, Chris. 2009. The Other Hand. London: Sceptre. Di Maio, Alessandra. 2013. “The Mediterranean or Where Africa Does (Not) Meet Italy: Andrea Segre’s A Sud Di Lampedusa (2006).” In The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives, edited by Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler, 41–52. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Farrier, David. 2011. Post-Colonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary before the Law. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

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Hall, Stuart. 1987. “Minimal Selves.” In The Real Me: Post-Modernism and the Question of Identity, ICA, Document 6. 44–6. London: The Institute of Contemporary Arts. Hutchinson, Ron. 2009. “Durand’s Line.” In The Great Game: Afghanistan, edited by Tricycle Theatre, 31–47. Oberon Modern Plays. London: Oberon Books. Jacir, Emily. 2016. Via Crucis. Installation. Milan: Chiesa di San Raffaele. Luiselli, Valeria. 2017. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Miéville, China. (2009) 2011. The City & the City. London: Pan Books. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2015. “The Drowned and The Sacred: To See The Unspeakable.” Blog. HOW TO SEE THE WORLD. August 29. https://wp.nyu. edu/howtoseetheworld/2015/08/29/auto-draft-73/ Perkins, Ed. 2018. Black Sheep. Documentary. UK. Philip, NourbeSe. 2008. Zong! (As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng). Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Rafael, Vicente L. 2016. Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation. Durham: Duke University Press. Rebecchini, Damiano. 2016. “Il Traduttore Come Autore.” PEML—Prassi Ecdotiche della Modernità Letteraria (1): 265–71. Sakai, Naoki. 2010. “Translation and the Figure of the Border.” Profession 10: 25–34. Sakai, Naoki, and Jon Solomon, eds. 2006. Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference. Traces 4. Hong Kong and London: Hong Kong University Press. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2018. The End of Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Smith, Ali. (2016) 2017. Autumn. New York: Anchor Books. Sommer, Doris. 2004. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. Durham: Duke University Press. Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. Literature Now. New York: Columbia University Press. Wood, Dennis. 1992. The Power of Maps. London and New York: Guilford Press.

Index Abani, C. 70 accent 1, 16, 48, 64, 71 accented criticism 8, 64 accented reading 16, 49, 51, 57–8, 64–6 activism 2, 13, 27, 77, 115 African cultures born-translated 70 migrants 14, 76, 83, 100 agency 2, 4, 6, 26–7, 42, 91–2, 108 Akbar, A. 9 Alighieri, D. 65 Alloula, M. 89 Almond, K. 112 anglophone cultural studies 3, 6, 10, 49, 53–5, 58–9, 63 appropriation xii, 8, 48, 82, 99 Apter, E. 5, 8, 28, 30, 49, 74–6, 86, 115 Arduini, S. 11 Ashcroft, B. 63, 66 asylum seekers 15, 23, 39–40, 72, 75, 105 Attridge, D. 65, 121 Atwood, M. 61 Aufderheide, P. 87–8 Azoulay, A. 18, 27, 95, 107 Badagliacca, M. 13, 17, 92–3, 95–6, 98 Baer, B. J. 1, 11, 13 Bakhtin, M. M. 15, 88 Balibar, É. 71 Barnes, J. 9 Barthes, R. 92, 97 Bassnett, S. 8 Beattie, P. 57 Bell, V. 106 Bellos, D. 22, 24–5 Benjamin, W. 2, 74

Bennett, L. 49, 52 Berger, J. 13, 92, 103 Berman, S. 7 Bertacco, S. 15–16, 48, 51, 65, 69, 120 Bhabha, H. 1–6, 15, 26, 41, 44, 49, 74, 86, 90, 99, 107, 114, 120 Bickerton, D. 66 Blumczynski, P. 8, 44, 121 Boehmer, E. 96 borders 1, 4–6, 8, 11, 16–17, 22, 26–7, 30, 39, 43–4, 71, 74–5, 80, 82–4, 92, 95–6, 99, 111–15, 118–19 border-crossings 5–8, 75 metaphor 111–14 symbolic and cultural border (US and Mexico) 112 symbolic thresholds 111–12, 114 Brand, D. 16, 49, 52, 61–4 Brathwaite, K. 49, 52–3, 65–6 Braudel, F. 70 Breiner, L. A. 55 Brexit 17, 113, 120 Brooks, P. 85 Butler, J. 17, 103, 105 Caccia, A. 17, 105–7 Cameron, J. 95 Caribbean Creoles 51–64 French St. Lucian Creole 55–6 Jamaican Creole (JC) 60 Standard Jamaican English (SJE) 60 Trinidadian English Creole (TEC) 62–3 Carrington, B. 7 Casas, M. 61 Castiglione, B. 111, 120 Chamberlin, E. 61 Chambers, R. 43

Index Chamoiseau, P. 56 Chawla, R. 17, 103, 105 Ch’ien, E. N-M. 49 Cimarosti, R. 54, 57 Cleave, C. 17, 75–6, 119 complexity xvi, 4, 40, 44, 47, 85 Condé, M. 10 Conrad, J. 4, 48–9, 49, 69, 77–8 Corner, J. 88 Costanzo, S. 10 Covid-19 44 Creole poetics 16, 56, 58 Creolization 51–2, 54, 66 Cronin, M. 4, 8, 91, 108 cultural translation 3, 26, 30, 44, 73 Cumber-Dance, D. 58–9 Curti, L. 6 Dabydeen, D. 54 Dalvit, G. 101 Damrosch, D. 8 D’Costa, J. 51, 58 DeCamp, D. 66 De Carolis, M. 17, 97–9 de León, C. 40 De Luca, E. 13, 17, 90 De Michelis, L. 79–80 Demir, N. 17, 101–2 Derrida, J. 64 Devi, M. 64 dialect xiv, xvi, 16, 29, 52–4, 64 Di Maio, A. 11, 14, 23, 112 dislocation 11, 114 documentary filmmaking 87–8, 105 Durzi, G. 9–10 dystopia 106–7, 114 Edwards, V. 47 Enia, D. 17, 80–1 Erpenbeck, J. 17, 73 European cultures 96, 101, 105 African migrants 14, 100 redistribution of migrants 116, 118–19

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Evangelista, S. 78 exclusion 1, 4, 115 familiar 13, 25, 73–4, 89, 94–6, 98, 100–2, 105, 116 familiarizing 100–8 Fanon, F. 9–10, 97 Farah, U. C. A. 17, 70–1 Farrier, D. 15, 17, 114 Ferrante, E. 9–10 foreign x–xiv, xvi, 16, 22, 24–5, 50, 64, 74, 76, 81, 111–13, 119 foreign relation xii–xiv, xvi Foucault, M. 100 Galeano, E. 99 Gassman, A. 17, 90 Gavalda, A. 9 gaze 17, 77, 85, 87–9, 91–2, 95–6, 107–9, 114 Genette, G. 65 Gentzler, E. 4, 8, 22–4 Gikandi, S. 13, 106 Gilroy, P. 5, 7, 78–9, 85–6, 96, 106 Glissant, E. 52, 66 global 1–9, 11–12, 17, 21–2, 27–8, 41, 44, 47–50, 64, 71, 74, 83, 98–9, 106, 113, 115, 120–1 humanities 5, 50, 64 Godard, B. 21 Goldstein, A. 10 Grutman, R. 49–50 Hall, S. 4–6, 17, 70, 100, 102, 111 Hodge, M. 52 Hokenson, W. 91 Horden, P. 70 hospitality x, 41, 72–3 Huggan, G. 65 Hutchinson, R. 112 images xv, xviii, 13, 17, 27, 41, 44, 86, 88–91, 98, 101, 103, 107, 109 audience 87–91, 105

140

Index

coding 88–90, 92, 100–2, 105 decoding 88–91, 96, 100, 102 representation 88–91, 95–100, 105, 107–9 Western viewers 89, 91–2, 96, 99–103, 105–9 Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) 119 inclusion 1, 4, 115 Inghilleri, M. 1, 3–4, 23, 40–1, 72, 77 invasion 3, 48 Jacir, E. 16, 28–39, 42, 44, 115 Jadhav, P. 2 Jameson, F. 65 Johnson, L. K. 49, 52 Kane, S. 77 Kant, I. 41 Kerangal, M. de 17, 72–3, 86 Knibbe, M. 17, 86–7 Kreiden, T. 9 Kurdi, A. 100–1, 105 Lalla, B. 51–3, 55 Lampedusa, G. T. di 32, 36, 70, 73, 77–8, 80–1, 83–6 language 1–2, 4–9, 11–12, 14–17, 21–5, 27, 39, 41–2, 47–66, 71, 73–7, 79, 83, 85–6, 88, 95–7, 100–1, 106, 108, 112–15, 119–21 biopolitics of 108 Lansdowne, J. 35–6, 38 Lennon, B. 49 Levinas, E. 121 Levinson, H. 40 linguistic (life) xii–xvi, xviii, 1–2, 5, 17, 22, 25–6, 40–1, 48–50, 52–6, 59–61, 63–5, 71–2, 75, 99, 108, 113. See also nonlinguistic literary texts 48, 52, 58–9, 65–6, 120 location 1, 4–5, 10, 21, 26, 39, 80, 115

Loreto, P. 57 loss 11, 21, 73, 76, 78–80 Lotman, J. M. 6 Lovelace, E. 49, 52 Luiselli, V. 27, 39–44, 118–19 Lustgarten, A. 17, 70, 77–81, 84 Lyotard, J-F. 6 MacEvitt, C. 35–6 Maitland, S. 3 Malkin, I. 15, 70 Markmann, C. L. 10 Marxism 6 Mazzantini, M. 17, 81–2, 85 McElvaney, K. 17, 108–9 Mediterranean Sea 12–16, 36, 39, 69–74, 76–7, 81–2, 84, 88, 108, 111, 113, 115 bordering 71, 74–5, 80, 83–4 diachronic awareness 71–2 exile narratives 70–1, 76, 78, 81–3 geography 69, 75, 77–8, 83 mass migration 69–72, 85 migration crisis 81–6 otherness, notion of 73–4 Western 73–7, 81, 83, 85–6 Merleau-Ponty, M. 10 Messina, A. da 92, 96, 98 Meylaerts, R. 50 Mezzadra, S. 5, 8, 11, 23, 26, 71, 75, 83–4, 86, 115–16 Miéville, C. 114 Mignolo, W. 17, 26, 48 migrants. See also border-crossings collective experiences 22–3, 76, 86 forms 17 redistribution 1, 26 respect 81–6 unforgetting 76–81 and the unknown 72–6 UN statistics 44 migration 1–6, 8, 11–18, 22–4, 26–8, 30, 36, 39–42, 44–5, 47–8, 67, 69–72, 74–5, 77, 79–82,

Index 85, 88, 90–1, 96, 98, 100, 103, 105–9, 111–21. See also Mediterranean Sea diversity of 14 European artists and 72 forced 74, 77, 81–2, 88, 105, 107 postcolonial literature 47–9 translational aspect 8–15 visual translations 100–8 monolingualism 16, 47, 49, 51, 58 Munro, A. 61 Naipaul, V. S. 2 narration 12, 31, 36, 39, 42–3, 56, 60, 70–1, 76, 78, 81–2, 85–7, 89–90, 102–3, 105–7, 114 Neilson, B. 71, 75, 83–4, 86, 115–16 Nergaard, S. 11 Nichols, G. 49 non-linguistic xiii, xvi Ondaatje, M. 61 Orwell, G. 106 otherness 18, 50, 64, 73–4, 86, 100, 107, 114, 119 outsidedness 88, 107 Palumbo-Liu, D. 50 Perkins, E. 118 pharmakon 71, 76 Philcox, R. 10 Philip, N. 52, 116 photography 88–9, 94, 97, 105 planetary 2, 11, 115 Polezzi, L. 4, 23–4, 26–7, 41, 72, 88, 91, 107–8 Pollard, V. 16, 49, 52, 58 postcolonial 64, 70, 96, 106 accented language 49–51 Caribbean vocabulary 51–64 literature 3, 5, 7–8, 10, 16, 26, 47–50, 54, 65–6 and translation 47–9 poststructuralism 6

141

post-translation studies 24 Pratt, M. L. 7, 49 Prosa, L. 17, 83–5 Purcell, N. 70 Rafael, V. 5, 26, 86, 115 Rankine, C. 40 “Reader-as-Translator” or “RAT” 64 reading xv–xvi, 1–2, 5, 9, 16–17, 23, 27, 39, 44, 49–52, 54, 57–9, 64–6, 90, 99, 114, 116, 119–20. See also accent, accented reading Rebecchini, D. 111 Redgrave, V. 17, 70, 77, 81 Reid, V. 52 relics 31, 36, 38–9, 115 relocation 1–5, 26, 45, 48, 75, 112, 114–16. See also Europe; Mediterranean Sea; migrants definition 1 as translation 115–19 representation xiii, 4, 6, 11, 13, 16–17, 25, 44, 69–71, 73, 76, 81–3, 85–6, 88–91, 95–100, 105, 107, 109, 114, 120 resistance 6, 23, 28 respect 14, 74, 81–6, 107 responsibility 10, 27, 50, 64, 105, 107, 120, 121 Rich, A. 2 Rothenberg, J. 52 Rubio, D. M. 8 Rushdie, S. 11, 15, 23, 47–9 Said, E. 13, 22, 26, 76, 82, 86 Sakai, N. 5, 8, 21, 24–5, 41, 66, 73–4, 114–16 Salgado, S. 99 Salles, E. 103–5 Santos, B. d. S. 2, 14, 26 Scego, I. 29 schema(s) xvi, 1, 11, 16, 21–7, 40–2, 44, 47, 113 self-translation 91

142

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Selvon, S. 52 semiotics 6 Sentilles, S. 18, 27, 88–9 Shakespeare, W. 65 Shaw, G. D. 88 Simon, S. 5 Smith, A. 111, 113 Sofo, G. 11 Solomon, J. 114–15 Sommer, D. 5, 26, 49, 54, 121 Soyinka, W. 11 Spivak, G. C. 5, 26, 49, 64 Starosta, A. 8–9, 50, 64, 71, 74, 76 stereotype 70, 74–5, 79, 86, 89, 97, 99, 103, 107 structuralism 6 Tedlock, D. 52 terza rima 57 test, Aufgabe x–xii, xv–xvi, 16, 23, 40, 71 testimony/testimonial 42–3, 72, 77, 87, 89–90, 97, 107, 116, 119. See also witnessing tragedy 12–13, 73, 81, 85–6, 95, 101, 103, 106, 115 transition/transitional xiii–xvi, 2, 39, 59, 79 Translatio 31, 35–6, 38–9 translation 1–18, 21–31, 35, 38–45, 47–51, 56–7, 64–6, 69–75, 82, 86, 88–9, 91, 95–6, 101–2, 105–10, 111–21 as border/bordering 111–15 and Caribbean literature 51–64 (see also postcolonial, literature) cultural 3, 26, 30, 44, 73, 115 global citizenship 120–21 interlingual 3, 28 literacy 9, 11, 16, 23, 27, 120–21 and migration 1–6, 8, 11–18, 22–4, 26–8, 30, 36, 39–42, 44–5, 47–8, 67, 69–72, 74–5,

77, 79–82, 85, 88, 90–1, 96, 98, 100, 103, 105–9, 111–21 and postcolonial literature 47–9 as relocation 115–19 visual representation 107–9 translational poetics 51, 57 translingual 16, 48, 116 Trivedi, H. 8, 27 Tutuola, A. 49 Tymoczko, M. 8, 47 untranslatability x, 30, 74 Uspenskij, B. A. 6 Vallorani, N. 16–17, 74, 86, 102, 120 Venuti, L. 5, 8, 44, 50 vernacular 2, 48, 57 Via Crucis/Via Dolorosa 28, 31, 35–6, 38–9 Visconti, L. 73 visual text 87–8, 90, 100 familiarity and unfamiliarity 89, 91, 96–102, 105 pics, pictures 92–100 vulnerability 7, 17, 79, 101, 114 Walcott, D. 52, 55, 57 Walkowitz, R. 5, 14, 16, 49–50, 69–70, 76–7, 87, 110 ways of seeing 27 Williams, J. 9 Williams, R. 6 Wing, B. 52 witnessing xvi, 36, 39, 41, 43–4, 61–2, 90, 95. See also testimony/ testimonial Wiwa, K. S. 49 Wood, D. 112 Wood, J. 10 worldly knowledge 21–3 Young, R. 48 Zurbaràn, F. de 101

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144

145

146

147

148