Posts filed under 'temporality'

Compound Vision: In Conversation with Catherine Xinxin Yu on Translating Wu Ming-yi’s “Cloudland”

July 31, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

Blurring this boundary [between speech and thought] almost creates an overlap between the human self and the personhood of the landscape. . .

Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi’s short story, “Cloudland”, makes use of grief’s overwhelming ranges to set out a narrative of exploration, dream-making, and the multiplicity of life. After the death of his wife, the bereaved Shutter begins a journey to write the ending of a tale that she had not be able to finish, and on his way, he finds the wondrous methods that landscape and animals have long used to express and communicate, offering a way of thinking and feeling that his technologically dense, hurried world does not allow. A gorgeous, lush story that introduces Wu’s sensitive ecowriting, “Cloudland” merges the richness of language with the richness of the natural world. In this interview, Alex Tan talks to the translator of “Cloudland”, Catherine Xinxin Yu, about the operation of images in her methodology, the trick of incorporating definitions into the prose, and making use of a textual reality.

Alex Tan (AT): Technologies of perception populate this excerpt from “Cloudland”: the night-vision cameras placed in the forest by Shutter, the Rift in the Cloud constituting a virtual catalogue of a life, the mediatised footage of the train bombing, and most fundamentally, the unfinished story of Shutter’s wife—which of course precipitates his grief and the quest for the elusive clouded leopard. There’s such an ambivalence to some of these forms of knowledge-making, as Wu also seems to be commenting on the ubiquity—and the risks—of digital surveillance. I wonder how you navigated the interplay between the visual and the textual, when you approached this work as a translator. Did it stylistically inflect your translation in any way?

Catherine Xinxin Yu (CXY): I remember interviewing Wu Ming-yi for my MA dissertation, which included a translation and commentary on “Cloudland”, focusing on eco-conscious ways to translate nature-oriented writing. I asked him why he decided to stop using Facebook and other social media from 2019 onwards, upon which he talked about his apprehension exactly of the ubiquity of digital surveillance that you mentioned.

Both in real life and in the collection that “Cloudland” is from (Kuyuzhidi 苦雨之地, which I tentatively translated as Where Rain Falls Amiss), digital traces are so fine-grained and invasive that they can piece together the most secret aspects of individuals. According to Wu, it is both frightening and cruel to be forced to see a loved one’s dark depths; I think that is a crucial part of the pain that pervades “Cloudland”: not only losing a spouse and a wild species, but also discovering how little one knew about them: seeing that “rift’’ and realising there is no way to remedy it.

Many of his works contain a multiplicity of perspectives, where vision functions as a means and a metaphor for perceiving, conceiving, and knowing. Reality (or its shadow) shapeshifts from the visual to the textual. As a photographer myself, I identify with this and I know how an entire narrative can be encapsulated in one gaze. Short of actually visiting and seeing the landscape where the story is set, I looked at a lot of images and videos while translating Cloudland, so it wasn’t just a text-to-text translation, but also image-to-text. Visualisation allowed me to embody the text and then perform it in English. I suppose the result is that, by describing the visual rather than simply transferring words from one language to the other, the translation ends up being more vivid and immediate. Or so I hope. READ MORE…

Shifting Temporalities: An Interview with Bryan Flavin

October 3, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Rose Bialer

We should consider an absence not as something that inhibits access but rather as an opportunity to actively discover. . .

Featured in the Summer 2022 issue, “The Ayah of the Throne,” by Habib Tengour, is a lyrical story that explores the French colonial power in Algeria toward the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. The story centers around how colonial forces shaped the narrator’s experience of education, language, religion, and even how and when one can tell stories. With this vibrant and original account of his childhood, Tengour reclaims the power of storytelling and relays a life-altering moment with humor and compassion.

In his English translation, Bryan Flavin deftly captures Tengour’s voice and introduces Anglophone speakers to an important piece of writing from one of the foremost voices in contemporary Francophone Maghrebi literature. I had the opportunity to speak with Flavin over email about his experience translating “The Ayah of the Throne.” In the following interview, we discuss the intricacies of working with multilingualism, the importance of not explicating in translation, and the complex and interwoven histories of French and Arabic.

Rose Bialer (RB): I always like asking translators how they first began translating. I am even more curious in your case since you work in both French and Arabic.

Bryan Flavin (BF): I’ve always loved the precision and structure in linguistics and language studies, as well as the exploration and plurality of language in literature and creating writing. During my undergraduate education, I studied linguistics and French literature with a specialization in Arabic language and culture and ended up discovering literary translation as a sort of intersection for all my interests. I was lucky enough to take classes on French translation and global literacy toward the end of my studies and started with translating student writing with an undergraduate translation magazine I helped co-found. It was something I continued practicing on my own until deciding to pursue it in my graduate studies.

RB: You mention in your Translator’s Note that you had the chance to work with Habib Tengour during his Fall 2021 residency with the International Writing Program. This program sounds fascinating, and I would love to hear more about your experience, especially collaborating with Tengour in person.

BF: My translation program had the opportunity to pair with one of the residents to produce a translation of their work during workshop sessions devoted to each piece. Both the original writer and translator were present and active contributors during each workshop, and the balance (and sometimes friction, but in a generative way) between the author’s original intention and the translator’s means to produce something independent in the English was uniquely pronounced due to the workshop’s collaborative nature, which made for a great learning experience.

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A Silent Textual Revolution: On Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s In My Heart

February 7, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun

Its words capacitate the human imagination’s ability to dream of change . . .

In My Heart by Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng, translated from the Sesotho by Nhlanhla Maake, Seagull Books, 2021

Despite an intent to explore beyond Anglocentric spaces, the framework of decolonial studies—defined as the analysis of dynamics between Anglocentrism and colonialism as well as of colonised populations—is still plagued with first-world privileges. Most decolonial texts are theorised and written by a dominantly white scholar community, within a hegemonic Euro-U.S. production. In fact, in the introduction to the original text of Pelong ya Ka (translated as “In My Heart”), Simon Gikandi quoted Karin Barber on how postcolonial criticism has failed to include texts written in African languages, “eliminating African-language expression from view.” By designating Anglocentrism as the form of knowledge production, academia defines what can be classified as “decolonial writing” based on an imperialist discipline of worth determination—comprising of research, praxis, theories, formulations, and discourses operating in materialistic space. To have decolonial texts navigate inter- and intrapersonal spaces is almost unheard of, and is unacknowledged as “real” decolonial scholarship in the Anglo academic sphere.

Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s In My Heart is a collection of meditative essays which enter and navigate these unheard-of spaces, introducing Sesotho worldview in radical decolonial studies. In this undertaking, he charts the territory of the heart, wherein the values and experiences largely considered universal—such as death and time—are interrogated instead as largely dominated by privilege. Gayatri Spivak introduces this book, the second publication of Seagull Books’ “Elsewhere Texts” series, as among the pivotal works of decolonial studies within their respective countries, essential in fighting  “against a rest-of-the-world counter-essentialism.” She criticises the “global” efforts in bridging multiple cultures, however, through “the imperial languages, protected by a combination of sanctioned ignorance and superficial solidarities . . . even when they are at these global functions.”

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Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Traian T. Coșovei

October 13, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Adam J. Sorkin and Andreea Scridon

This autumn has dyed all the lovers in the park yellow

This week’s Translation Tuesday brings you three poems from Romanian poet Traian T. Coșovei (1954-2014), a member of the 1980s generation of poets and a major influence on postmodern Romanian poetry. Of note in these selections is Coșovei’s use of indentation to flout the margin’s gravity, thereby providing the reader a sense of movement; given the speaker’s fixation on static moments in time, this motion feels paradoxical and almost dizzying. In “The Accursed Wheel,” the poet uses repetition, visceral and kinetic imagery, and rhythmic indentation to replicate a sense of thwarted progress. In “State of Mind,” autumnal imagery locates our speaker’s love amidst an awareness of the violent history that surrounds him. And in “The Last Supper,” a moment of heartbreak is preserved like a holy image when a scene of contemporary, mundane occurrences unfolds within a lover’s recollection as something almost eternal–again, repetition is deftly deployed to convey the speaker’s sense of temporality.

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