Podríamos imaginar una transmisión de flujos de energía y materia. Como si pudieran existir diferentes procesos de traducciones en múltiples direcciones. Como “un apilamiento de traducciones” en el que, por un lado, afectamos a la materia, pero al mismo tiempo nos dejamos afectar. Se produce un diálogo.
—Bustos + Galay, “Ánima,” El sonido de las plantas

Marc Liblin was six years old when he learned a completely unknown language in dreams. No one spoke this language in his small village in the Vosges region and, despite his lifelong efforts to find an inter- locutor, he failed, repeatedly. Even researchers at the University of Rennes proved incapable of deciphering or translating this dream lan- guage. Then, living already in another city and about to lose all hope, something remarkable happened. Marc performed a monologue in his dream language at a bar near the docks, surrounded by men from Tunisia. The manager, a former member of the Navy, turned around as soon as he overheard him. “I know this language,” he said, interrupt- ing the event. “I remember it from one of my journeys in Polynesia.” Excitedly, he informed Marc about a nearby woman, a military widow, who spoke his dream language. Marc rushed to her door and, realizing they understood each other, his life changed. Their lives changed. Forever.

I recalled this fragment in Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands quite often as I read these pieces in translation. It was not that I miraculously became fluent in Arabic or Ukrainian or Icelandic, but rather that I recognized, with that whip of intimacy that often gives out goosebumps, the act of translation: my language and theirs. The language we shared, regardless of the languages we spoke, when the doors flung open, and we finally met each other’s eyes, in awe. Unlike Marc Liblin, I didn’t learn this language in dreams or isolation, but there is a dream-like quality to the mode we employ when we are half ourselves and half not ourselves, becoming something irreducible in the process. Could it be that translation is a zone we incurred, unset- tling our understanding of who we are and what we do here—and how malevolent and malleable this “here” truly is? It could be.

Translation as a site of irruption and contestation, I salute you.

For the past thirty years, I’ve led an accented life, living in translation and writing in a translation mode from within the United States, the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. As one of the fifty to sixty million Spanish speakers and one of the twelve million Spanish-English bilinguals, I have resided and toiled in a land wounded by the 1848 Guadalupe Treaty, which turned the flow of a meandering river into a rigid boundary. During the mid-nineteenth century, teams of Mexican and United States engineers, soldiers, astronomists, and surveyors traversed the land, laboring to translate the words contained in a political treaty into the territory itself. Words were transmuted into geodesic monuments, wire fences, migration booths, and walls. Words metamorphosed into stone and metal and cement, clearly demarcating a neocolonial zone only some were permitted to cross.

In the beginning was translation.

I was born on the Mexican side of the US–Mexico border, within the twenty-kilometer radius known as the northern border strip, which, at least throughout the mid-twentieth century, facilitated movement for residents across the borderline. Adults in my family ventured to the Other Side quite often, whether to purchase pieces of rusted machinery for growing cotton or to obtain the weekly pack of groceries. Children visited less frequently, remaining in homes where Spanish was spoken but where most commodities bore English names and TV programs played in English nonstop. I soon learned that the language I spoke at this juncture on Earth came with heavy burdens but also with a vengeance. Everything I said could be turned against me. Everything I said could become otherwise. I could be myself and my double, simultaneously, switching back and forth. I could hide, and I could mock. I could curse, unbeknownst to my neighbors. At its very heart, translation is a wound, as Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney suggest in Deformation Zone, a proliferation of bodily openings that confounds the outside and the inside, making it unclear what the separate languages are, or were.

Gloria Anzaldúa, the Chicana writer who was born only miles away from my family home, although hers lay on the U.S. side of the border, spoke of the unequal relationship of English and Spanish as a form of linguistic terrorism. While she described the existence of at least nine different types of Spanish-English border languages, she was painfully aware that, to employ Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the “power takeover by a dominant language” forced many to bury at least half of themselves, rendering them half-silenced too. More than a cultural affair, Anzaldúa understood this takeover as a material conflagration, one in which dispossession and accumulation, racism and misogyny and homophobia, not to speak of the implementation of industrial agriculture in the region, played key roles. I believe that Gloria Anzaldúa would have agreed with Mixe linguist and language activist Yásnaya Aguilar Gil when she reminds us, from the stance of the present, that languages do not die, they are killed. Literally.

South Korean poet and translator Don Mee Choi has revised and retranslated Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum—translation is a mode—to make it account for the “interconnected histories of imperialism, colonialism, and militarism, and . . . economic interdependence,” that underlie translation practices worldwide: translation is an anti-neocolonial mode, she has argued. For, as in the story of Marc Lublin, the forces that account for the unlikely encounter between the speakers of a language one of them might have acquired in dreams, are revealed, perhaps even propelled, by the unremitting journeying of military machines across the globe. What was a member of the French Navy doing, one may ask, far away from home, in Polynesia? What kind of life did an uprooted military widow, unable to speak her language, lead in France? Translation both embodies and manifests the colonial history of these encounters. Translation announces and denounces—as the pieces included in this anthology confirm, from Palestine to Iceland, from Mexico to Indonesia—regardless of the topics they explore.

In Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, Don Mee Choi also diverges from two pervasive notions of translation. On the one hand, she not only questions the idea of mother tongues as seamless entities devoid of internal conflict but also, perhaps fundamentally, the very belief that they exist at all in the first place. In the context of the United States military incursion in South Korea, and before the combined onslaught of militarism and neoliberal devastation forced Don Mee Choi’s family into exile, she acknowledges that, as a woman, as someone always already “expelled from power,” as she notes, “even within my so-called mother-tongue, I was already born with a tongue with a task to translate . . . ” In her perspective of the takeover of dominant languages, gender and class manage to designate some of us as originary motherless translators. Similarly, pieces written originally in Tu’un Savi, Mapudungun, or Asturian included here shed light on the colonial histories of Spanish and the devastating effects on Indigenous languages and their practitioners throughout the Spanish-speaking world. They are testimony to the resilience of ways of life and modes of expression that have survived 500 years of continuous colonial expansion.

Don Mee Choi compellingly introduces the notion of a translation as an operation in opacity. In mapping the paths of neocolonialism, this translation practice mirrors states of incomprehensibility that migrants and nomads are all too familiar with. She pretended to be a foreigner even before she became one, she concedes. “As a foreigner, as foreign words myself, I seek incomprehensibility—a mirror image of myself. I seek mirrors through which I can also traverse, in order to map out the neocolonial history of my home, to translate myself.” Similarly, Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney speak of translation as “a wound that makes impossible connections between languages, unsettling stable ideas of language, productive ideas of literature.” Translation complicates things, in the sense in which Emily Wilson speaks of Odysseus as “a complicated man” in the opening line of her version of the Odyssey, for example.

Of all the books published in the United States, only 3% are works in translation—an infamous number that has endured, and a stark reminder of the dominance of English-language literature. Reading, a creative practice commonly associated with a pair of people, gets suddenly crowded when translation intervenes. Reading in translation makes it evident that, in writing as in life, we never work alone. There was once someone else, at the beginning of it all, and there is someone else now, hovering quietly over my shoulder as I flip the pages and nod in conformity or squint in disbelief. What was this like in the past? What other form could it take in the future? Translation takes time, and it is time, concentrated. This is its gift. There is always something more: an excess, a disturbance, the opacity that embodies mediation. The acknowledgment of this mediation reminds us that writing is a material practice: we must break through. There are bodies involved.

Translation warns us that there is always work to be done. As it unfinishes the text, leaving it open to the elements, translation lures us. In contrast to absorption, translation instills a basic critical awareness: we are not on a journey into the past, seeking to access the stable core of the original; rather, we are creatures of our present, rooted in and reading from the stand of the here and now, collectively shaping this here-and-now as we tread onward. It takes thousands of years for the light of the stars to reach the Earth. Although we admire the beauty of stars, it is their light that we crave. Could it be that translation is this luminescence touching our skin, making tangible contact, sheltering us? It could as well be.

Translation is generative, too. As English-Spanish translator Max Granger once told me: “Translation can erase the more radical meaning of words in service of readability and the rules of a given language, but it can also work to represent those meanings when we find creative ways to allow the source language to influence and change the target language, and thus, perhaps, to change how we think and act in that language.” When collaborating on the translation of a piece on gender violence, in which the role of the perpetrator, feminicida in Spanish, was of significance, we both concurred that the term “killer” was inadequate. A killer is a criminal, but a femicider, a term still relatively unfamiliar in English, specifically denotes a criminal who targets and kills women because of their gender, reflecting the basic definition of femicide in penal codes throughout Latin America. Femicider, a vocable that might have initially seemed awkward or incorrect to readers in the Anglophone world, was the precise term needed to convey the structural nature of this crime, holding both patriarchy and its perpetrators accountable. Uttering the term femicider in English may as well contribute to a more open discussion about the silent epidemic of gender violence that, at least in the United States, claims the lives of three women every day. Translation is always political.

In Anima, a site-specific sound piece that Bustos + Galay (Javier Bustos and Julian Galay) first performed at the Theater San Martín in Buenos Aires during the International Festival in 2020, they blended writing, improvisation, and sound art as they strove to translate the language of plants. They believed, with Murray Schafer, that listening is a way of touching from a distance. Using an electromagnetic microphone to “auscultate” a branch from the Pehuén-Có region, they were convinced that they could sense the forest where it originated, as if the branch held the memory of its surroundings. They attentively listened to this language and translated it so that it could resonate in human ears. But their curiosity went further. “We are interested in plants,” they remarked (in my translation), “precisely because they are plants, because they articulate things we cannot hear.” They thus aimed to preserve the inherent plantness within the plants, despite all interventions and against all odds. “We don’t know what plants and stones sound like, and that’s why we use fiction and poetry.” Perhaps, as with the plant kingdom, we need fiction and poetry and nonfiction in translation to approach an enigma as an enigma, with no resolution in sight.

Berlin, April 1, 2024