Lost and Found in Translation To translate is to commit treason. George Steiner I had thought to open this meditation on translation in relation to documentary poetics, specifically to the process of working on my book of interview-poems, When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, co-authored with the photographer Rebecca Ross, with the following sentence: Creating these pieces was an inductive process of exploration and discovery begun with an act of “attentive listening.” But the first word, creating, is misleading, because it suggests quite a different project than the apparently simple act of sustained listening to someone being interviewed, after which I then transcribed the spoken words, formalized their presentation, and transformed them into something resembling poetry. Although the works are narrative, I term them interview-poems to distinguish them generically from lyric or narrative poems, and to acknowledge that they had an actual source, the interviewee-evacuee. I used only their words (with their permission), and worked carefully with each one to ensure that everything in the poem was accurate to their experience. I wanted to individualize evacuees from New Orleans who did not have a voice—not to “give” them voice, but to offer a forum in which their voices might be audible, particularized, and dignified by the poetic measures that I came to hear as I worked on transcribing the interviews, meditated on the material, found the gold thread, as it were, of the story. How does one come to the work one does? In the sense that watching on TV the beautiful, historic city in which I had once lived drown compelled me to find a way to respond that was not about my feelings of loss, I was “called” to this work. In the sense that seeing a significant number of our fellow citizens being filmed as “breaking news” while they were stranded for a week on the bridges and roofs and overpasses of New Orleans, I sought out evacuees in order to hear their side. I wanted desperately to counter the unconscious stereotypes of those stranded in New Orleans, as purveyed uncritically by many journalists. In the sense that I learned so much about race relations in this country from living in New Orleans, a truly multicultural (if troubled) city for four years, I did not “find” this material: it found me. It could be said that I found a way to translate it. It is sometimes said of the process of translation that what gets lost in translation is the art. We think less often about what is entailed in turning some source material that isn’t aesthetic, in this case a conversational interview, into something that is. That process is a precise reversal of what we usually consider translation to be: that is, what gets found in translation is art.
The more presence with which the voice can be conveyed, the more sense of the person speaking—with all their human hesitance, heartbreak, grit and insight—can be apprehended. I tried to step out and stay out of the picture (much like the photographer), so that each of the poems could reveal the individual who had been interviewed without framing them. When I conducted the interviews, I was aware that I was consciously practicing “attentive listening,” the first step in conflict resolution as taught by the Mennonites, with whom I trained over a decade ago (as it happens, the year after I left New Orleans). This practice is an ancient form of offering respect by inviting another to share his or her deepest feelings, his or her story. I was also very aware that each of the interviewees had given me a great gift, in telling me their story, in order that it be available to others—to inform, perhaps to instruct, and hopefully, as with translation from one language to another, to enlarge the reader’s world. “When we learn to speak, we learn to translate,” writes Octavio Paz, to which I would add: When we learn to listen, we are translating our openness to another. As Heather McHugh has put it, “A translator is an openness to more than one language.” An interview-poem involves a translation of the body’s, the mind’s, the heart’s “speech,” available initially only to the interviewer. Her task, the task of the poet-translator, isn’t the magic of apostrophe, as Jonathan Culler theorizes it, conjuring animate presence from the inanimate or from an absence through the poem’s power, but rather, conveying a real presence into the imaginary—and shared—realm of the poem. When I was asked about the process previously, I called the interview-poems transcriptions that were nevertheless “distillations” of long, prose interviews. In that sense, making the poems entailed a “concentration” of the substance of each interview down to the “essence.” But that description essentializes a process that was much more open-ended, exploratory, a feeling along through the voice’s words until the poem began to emerge. The work is more accurately characterized by the process of translation, and as all translations are, each of the interview-poems entailed a discovery of the way, which comes, when it comes, like the spark of insight into another’s interior language. Describing the process by which I made these interview-poems as translationacknowledges another significant aspect of the project, that in making interviews into poems, I betray unavoidably the very individual presence that I was attempting to convey. As George Steiner remarks, in the quotation that serves as my epigraph, “To translate is to commit treason.” By invoking Steiner’s contention, I note the fact that—whatever the craft of the translator, and some of our greatest artists were also great translators—translation fails necessarily to translate the original. Translation succeeds in accomplishing other things, we can say, but not in transporting the original into its new form, another language or media, anymore than Ross’s photographs translated—or even attempted to translate—the interview-poems into images. This fact was best illustrated for me dramatically this fall, when all the evacuees in the book still left in Phoenix were honored at our exhibition reception, a “Meet & Greet” held at the Scottsdale Public Library, and one of the evacuees, Deborah Green, made a
passing remark that suddenly brought home to me the truth, which is that I had not succeeded in transporting anything but her words to a page—certainly not her “self,” absolutely not her “presence.” “Debbie Green” on the page and the wall was a stranger to Deborah, the woman standing in front of me. “I am going to reacquaint myself with Debbie over there,” she said to me. “Who?” I asked blankly. I had always addressed her as “Deborah.” “Why Debbie!” she nodded over at her photograph, so full of sorrow and fortitude, I had always thought. She was doing much better since she’d had a knee replacement, which gave her some measure of mobility again. “Ah,” I said at last. “You mean you five years and another life ago!” “Hmm-mmm,” she said, as she had so many times in her interview. A line break or caesura marking hesitancy on the speaker’s part, or the deep emotion of the act of telling for the speaker, bears the body’s mark, I suggest, and the cadence, line length and syntactic unit trace the voice and the character of the person as she or he emerged to me while I transcribed the interviews. I got to know those voices so intimately through listening to them again and again that I could believe I’d transported their essence wholly to the text. But, as Steiner’s remark underscores, we betray the source in transforming it. I could, like any good translator, hope that I had conveyed something of the source, the person, by turning their words into poems, but what was lost in translation was, precisely, them-in-flux. I had fixed “them” into a form that was static. With each public reading, I reanimate their words dramatically, but as an impostor. For it was I, cited as the book came out as the “co-author,” who found myself being called upon to speak for the very evacuees whom I had so carefully refrained from framing in the poems, to whom I had tried to offer a forum so that they might speak for themselves. It is a paradox not only at the core of translation, but at the heart of documentary art. Ross and I envisioned the interview-poems together in the book with the photographs, in concert, choral, the poems in dialogue among each other and with the photographs, interfacing in fresh and unpredictable ways. In the interviews, many of the evacuees made similar remarks, for example, so I included the repetitions in order that they bubble up and echo each other. I imagined that a poetic record of individuals analyzing their own predicament, observing the failures on the government’s part, remarking on race relations as historically and geographically embedded, could illustrate a simple truth: if individuals who are otherwise invisible and inaudible are rendered visible and audible, they have much to tell us, and we have much to learn from them. But, of course, no truth is simple. The author wishes to thank James Belflower and his Poetics of Witness class at SUNY/ Albany for the lively exchanges that served as the seed of this essay, and expresses gratitude to her team-teacher, Paul Morris, and their 2010 graduate class in Literary Translation for the semester’s engaged work and brainstorming about
translation. Altogether, they’ve been an inspiration!