Polyglossia Magazine 2019

opening windows

contents 3 5 8 10 16 18 19 20 22 24 29 31

editor’s note translation game mujer, mujer flexible positionality herbert’s ‘virtue’ & hausman’s ‘a shropshire lad’, translated into latin cambridge is my continuing chinese class ¿qué es el reguetón? we must decolonise the mml curriculum the best spanish language films/series on netflix photographs from japan nabakov and the wasteland of translation a translation of senaca’s ‘medea’

Editor and Graphic Designer: Stephanie Stacey Cover Artist: Daisy Coombs Contributors: Esme Garlake, Silas Brown, Rosie Stevenson, Chantal du Rocher, tan ning-sang, Max Hardy, Maud Rowell, Esmee Wright, Cecily Bateman Polyglossia magazine is a project of the Cambridge University Languages and Culture Society (CULCS). CULCS seeks to bring together all those united by an interest in foreign languages and foreign cultures, through a variety of cultural exchanges, careers events, and more. Look out for our term card!

CULCS Committe 2018/19: Sebastian Putman - President Hethvi Gada - Vice President Ayush Rodrigues - Treasurer and Sponsorship Officer Zoe Swanwick - Events Officer Anna Gray - Publicity Officer

from the editor...

I’m so proud to see Polyglossia bring together such a beautifully broad array of student writing, from original poetry and personal essays to political pieces examining our relationship with language-learning at the University. The scope of this magazine, with its brief of ‘languages and culture’, seems almost overwhelming large: all aspects of our lives are influenced by our different cultures, and any attempt to capture or examine these in words must, by definition, make use of language. But from this brief, contributors have generated a great many unique and wonderful works, and I encourage you to read on: each of the pieces published here truly does deserve your time.

If translation’s your thing, we’ve got a range of works translated both to and from English, and featuring languages both dead and alive. If you’re interested in the visual capture of the world in which we live, and the individual unique beauty which every location has to offer, we have a stunning range of art and photography. And if you’re looking for a personal exploration of the role of languages and culture, particularly faced with the reality of colonialism’s impact on our very means of communication, tan ningsang’s ‘Flexible Positionality’ is both

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beautiful and powerful.

Language is central to our experience in the world, to our ability to form relationships and to express ourselves. The title of this edition of Polyglossia, ‘Opening Windows’, reflects this central element of language: that of communication. Perhaps even more significantly, the title seeks to reflect the goal of broadening our conception of language and culture, and of ceasing to ignore their very political nature in our world today.

On page 20 you’ll find a direct and detailed argument on the need to decolonise the study of foreign languages at the University. As editor of Polyglossia I am very eager to encourage this magazine as a space of open discussion, a space to challenge established ideas and a space to platform the very different and personal experiences everyone has. But much further work remains necessary, both within the University and beyond, and I hope we continue to see students lead efforts to broaden and examine our comprehension of language and culture.

Thank you so much to everyone that contributed to Polyglossia, and thank you, also, to everyone who takes the time to read this magazine.

Stephanie Stacey

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translation game

by Esme Garlake Sometimes when I translate from Italian into English, I become so absorbed in my translation that I forget even to look back at the original text.

Just like looking at the canvas rather than at the object you are painting, this is a mistake that can lead you to imagine your own version of events, rather than remaining connected to the original. And yet, a bad translation is just as often a result of staying too close to the original text, and not allowing enough space for imagination and creativity.

I listened far more to what the words reminded me of: Respingere (to reject) made me think of dipingere (to paint), and so it became ‘to repaint’. For the word guaio (mess), it was the sound which most appealed to me, and I found a way of reflecting it somewhat by using the Old English ‘wáwa’ (woe), albeit at the expense of clarity of meaning. I also wanted to see how each column reflected the others and began to alter meanings or implications depending on their position in this ‘grid’.

This poem, list, collection of words or side-by-side translation, came about more for my own amusement than anything else. I had bits of paper stuck up on the wall with vocabulary to learn – a tactic probably used by most linguists at some point – but had not looked at the words for weeks. On each piece of paper an Italian word was followed by its English translation. Wanting to learn the words, I made a list of two columns. But I also wanted to see how far I could push the words, to see how close I could make English and Italian, even to the point of purposeful misunderstanding, and so I made a third list.

I wrote down the ‘rule’ to the game: translate from original English into Italian, and then translate from Italian into English again, without looking back at the original. Which English version is better?

◀ Art by Esme Garlake

It is a game which may not make much sense, but I have found it gives me more flexibility and space for creativity in translation. By allowing the appeal or immediate connotation of an individual word to influence my translation of it, without reins, I exercise the imaginative possibilities of translation, and therefore learn to better judge their uses and limits.

vocabulary

vocabolario

these are the words i stuck on my wall they’ve been up for five weeks and i still had to walk across my room at least three times while writing this list to see what they meant

queste sono le parole che ho attaccato sul muro sono rimaste cosĂŹ per quasi cinque settimane e comunque ho dovuto girare per la mia stanza almeno tre volte mentre scrivevo questa lista per vedere cosa volevano dire

abrase a cliff to provide

abradere

un sasso provvedere

basic needs to damage

fabbisogno danneggiare

to welcome poverty predicament mess to reject / dismiss eroded draft

taccogliere miseria guaio

to confront a move

sfidare una mossa

allied

alleato

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respingere / bocciare erosa bozza

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vocabulary these are the words that i pasted on the wall they have been like that for almost five weeks and still i have had to turn around my room at least three times while i was writing this list to see what they wanted to say abrade a stone to pre-view do-need to harm to accoil misery wáwa* to repaint / blackball eroded bump to distrust a move alligated * wáwa = Old English ‘woe, misery’

mujer, mujer

by Esme Garlake Porque como soy un libro me hace falta el sollozo sencillo cada noche antes de callarme en la tierra del sueño vacío.

Since I am a book I need the simple cry every night, before I fall silent in the land of empty sleep.

Quiero otra mujer que se ponga en mi lugar para que pueda yo ir a buscarme otro cuerpo.

I want another woman to put herself in my place so I can go out searching for another body.

No me importa que sea débil solamente que tenga muchacho a su lado abrazándole con besos falsos eternamente enrollados.

I don’t mind if she is weak she just needs to have a man by her side hugging her with false kisses eternally absorbed.

El periódico de ayer lamentaba la liberación de un encarcelado.

Yesterday’s newspaper lamented the freeing of a prisoner.

Ahora bien, dame tus ojos de risa, al menos me has dado tu risa, que la voy a ahogar a la vez que escucho

But give me your eyes of laughter, at least you have given your laugh, I am going to drown it whilst I listen to

la radio de voces rojas muertes abiertas, besando la imagen de ti a mi lado.

the radio of red voices open deaths, kissing the image of you by my side.

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► Art

by Esme Garlake

flexible positionality by tan ning-sang If I had to name the main character of my life story, it would be boundaries – between worlds, countries, cultures, communities, and people. If I had to describe the theme of this story, it would be the constant (re)positioning of myself as both and neither insider (n)or outsider of these boundaries, unsuccessfully applying Du Bois’s singular and binary double consciousness to the complications of our neocolonial, intersectional, cosmopolitan world. If I had to articulate a hopeful telos of the story, it would be the interrogation, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the aforementioned boundaries to locate my own subjectivity as a free, self-creating agent of change.

Much of this story is rooted in unpacking the lie I grew up with, that I had the “best of both worlds” as someone belonging to a family deeply rooted in traditions of the East whilst also learning about the West through my American international school education. But there is only one world. And, as I am increasingly learning, this world’s constant rhetorical need to reduce complexities into power-privileging binaries of ‘white/black’, ‘East/ West’, ‘rich/poor’, ‘man/woman’, ‘citizen/immigrant’, ‘oppressor/oppressed, ‘conservative/liberal’ have unjustly justified the centering and focusing on too few at the expense of the subjugation and erasure of too many.

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As a Chinese woman from an upper-class family in Hong Kong, my lived experiences in different cultural contexts have taught me to view myself, and those around me, with a certain distance and flexibility – neither in terms of Kierkegaardian either/ ors or Hegelian syntheses; but rather, committing myself to the reiterative pattern of continually traversing and subverting boundaries and borders has revealed in myself, others, and my surroundings a precarious fragmentation that exists (un)comfortably with itself. This is, broadly speaking, a creative application of Stuart Hall’s constructivist approach in Cultural Studies to the limited contents of my own lived experiences. In this essay, I shall endeavor to use narrative to illustrate the existence of this precarious fragmentation in my own life.

At the tender age of 18, I left Hong Kong for university in America. Having been educated in an American school for 14 years, speaking, reading, writing and thinking American English, watching American TV shows, listening to American music, holding an American passport – my first year in California crushed any misguided thought that I had about claiming a singular American identity. Though I looked and spoke like a ‘standard’ upper-middle class Bay-Area-or-NewJersey-bred (East) Asian-American, our questions about identity were very

different. Where I asked questions about individual identity broadly ‘between’ Asianness and Westernness, they were mostly concerned with the lack of collective recognition of ethnically Asian people as ‘American’. In rejecting the Asian-American label for myself in a land where East Asians were binarily represented as either second-generation Asian-Americans or FOBs, I struggled to understand what it might mean to be both Asian and American in a society that demanded me to be either an exoticised Asian or assimilated Asian-American.

I was made painfully aware of my non-identity in second year, during Fall 2014, when the murder of Michael Brown and eruption of #BlackLivesMatter coincided with Hong Kong’s revolutionary Umbrella Movement. Where my Asian-American friends implored one another to interrogate their anti-blackness, my ‘level’ of political discourse was limited to disagreeing with family members who considered democracy and human rights as corrupt Western influence.

In response to Asian-Americans telling me to get off my ass and participate in demonstrations, I felt crippled – simultaneously overwhelmed by my ignorance in the political discourses of both Hong Kong and America. Embarrassingly, I reverted to the excuse of “I’m not from here, this (American race problem) is not my problem.” For just as it took leaving Asia for America to better appreciate the nuances between my Asianness and Westernness, so it took confronting my conservative business family from the distanced positionality of a student of an American liberal arts college to reveal my own contradictory Conserv-

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ative and Liberal social and political attitudes.

Did ‘liberalness’ exist in California outside of a framework of analysis rightfully centered on an understanding of structural and historical racial inequality that black people experience in America? Or did my very basic, early-stage politicisation of articulating a vision of genuine democracy and fundamental human rights in contrast to my very pro-police and pro-China family automatically relegate me to the category of unwoke, or worse, the label of Conservative classical neoliberal? What does it even mean to be ‘Asian’ when my Asianness is deeply tied to a very recently-made postcolonial, ‘cosmopolitan’ but decidedly Chinese-majority city - a city that continually prides itself and capitalises on its cultural proximity and

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similarities with the West? What was my claim to ‘being American’ as a person who was not first, second, or even really 1.5-generation immigrant due to my American passport and highly privileged overseas American education?

Confused and desiring to escape the categorical binaries of identity politics, I fled to the Francophone world, in search of new language to better understand my experience. As a multilingual person, my first stop in Morocco helped me better understand my personal and political relationship with language itself. This is because the sociolinguistic landscape of Morocco mirrored that of Hong Kong: on the streets, people spoke an unwritten dialect (Cantonese/Darija); in schools, students engaged with material written in the official register

of the language family (Mandarin/ classical Arabic); yet in university and the working world, the colonisers’ language pervaded (English/French).

Finding this structural parallel of sociolinguistic complexity in both Morocco and Hong Kong helped me see that parts of my identity, in this case – multilingualism, were better understood and articulated outside of the boundaries of Asianness or Westernness. Though America taught me to seek solidarity among people of colour, Morocco taught me look beyond the boundaries of East and West and into Global South solidarity.

Shortly after this, I participated in an intercultural studies program in Marseille that gave me the analytical tools and creative agency to substantively self-express a multifarious identity in non-identity politics terms. Our first assignment was responding to Nord Perdu, where Canadian-born Nancy Heuston used her lived experience of French and English bilingualism as an analytical prism to understand her intercultural identity between Anglophone and Francophone worlds. I retorted that Heuston’s analysis depended on a neat delineation of English as childhood language and French as foreign language that failed to accommodate my upbringing in a trilingual city (an analysis made possible through my previous revelations from Morocco).

To better understand my trilingual upbringing, I then interviewed my parents and grandparents about their multilingualism. This analytical prism of analysing cultural identity through multilingualism gave me new language for old stories. Where I

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previously saw myself as an ethnically Chinese person in a majority-Chinese city, Heuston’s contrast between her “fake” bilingualism (learned in school) with “real” multilingualism (simultaneously spoken, typically in immigrant homes) helped me see that my majority ethnicity did not preclude me from an immigrant identity.

I learned to see that my grandparents addressing my parents in Hokkien and my parents replying in Cantonese, and that my parents failure to teach Hokkien to my brother and I such that we couldn’t effectively communicate with our grandparents, were all situations symptomatic of the typical immigrant experience. Moreover, I came to recognise my grandparents as political refugees: my paternal grandparents left China shortly after the Japanese Occupation and my maternal grandparents escaped labor camps during the Great Leap Forward.

Locating my family’s history within Hong Kong’s broader Sino-British political history as a colonial city bolstered by refugees from Communist China helped me to better situate my positionality beyond the binaries of citizen/immigrant, rich/poor, oppressor/oppressed. Beyond helping me see that my positionality is not an individual label, the reflexive act of writing helped me articulate the ways in which my intercultural experiences outside of the Anglo-American context require me to flexibly reconsider my positionality in light of shifting categorical binaries within different borders that I find myself in. I call this a “flexible positionality of precarious fragmentation”: ‘flexible’ in rejection of the ‘fixed’ positionalities of identity politics and ‘precarious fragmenta-

tion’ in rejection of falsely, seemingly universal binary descriptive categories that effectively obfuscate the Anglo-American cultural context.

My recent move to Cambridge demonstrates the need for such “flexible positionality”. Being within the repository of British elitism means that I occupy a different position than my previous positionality as an upper-class majority ethnic woman in Hong Kong, or as an upper-middle class woman of colour in California.

In particular, occupying the Metropole as someone who was born in a British colony adds a new aspect to my positionality that allows me to fall more squarely within the ‘oppressed’ category of ‘colonised’. In addition, the much thicker conception of ‘class’ in Britain – as something measured by more than financial wealth – positions me (I think?) in something resembling the middle-class. Because of this ‘more marginalized’ positionality that I occupy in British society, when compared to Hong Kong or American, I more strongly identify with the erasure of women of colour, and feel more impetus to engage with political activism than before.

Yet, I also strongly desire to resist the pigeonholed label of woman of colour because I find the philosophical possibilities of what I shall call the positionality of ‘intersectional double consciousness’ (as a woman and a person of colour) too limiting. To understand what is limiting about the positionality of an intersectional double consciousness requires some explanation about W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness. For Du Bois, blackness was both what enabled him

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to see into the world of whiteness, but also what caused him deep self-hatred and self-alienation, by seeing himself through the eyes of whiteness. Additionally applying Du Bois’s double consciousness to the sphere of gender would mean that women of colour are therefore double self-alienated by their positionality in relation to race and gender: by seeing ourselves through the lens of white patriarchy, we come to hate both our gender and our colour. A similar thing can be said of how Edward Said positions the postcolonial subject in relation to the colonial subject, which would mean a triple form of self-alienation for me.

Important as Du Bois and Said’s contribution to political discourse are, I am literally exhausted from these analytical prisms that repeatedly position minorities as having a “privileged” duality of holistic political insight at the expense of deep self-hatred and self-alienation.

My need for this term “flexible positionality” therefore stems from an existential need to define myself and other minorities on some terms that do not immediately objectify ourselves as the Other in a way that immediately leads to self-alienation.

I refuse to believe that we are conditioned to live in a Sartrean dystopia of constant, mutual objectification.

Therefore, I am analytically pushed to reject fixed positionalities that rest on false binaries, which I have shown here to be culturally contingent, in favor of flexible positionalities that accept and rest on precarious fragmentation of cultural pluralism. In doing so, I seek to define my existence on terms that position minorities exclusively as subjects of a non-objectify-

ing Gaze rather than at-most simultaneous subject and object of the Gaze.

In part, this essay is quite explicitly an attempt to extend anthropologist Aihwa Ong’s term “flexible citizenship” to the terrain of identity politics. But as a budding theologian, rather than move towards a conclusion borrowing heavily on social scientific approaches, I would instead like to conclude with the oft-overlooked potential helpfulness of theological analysis in secular debate.

In the incarnate Christ, impossible binaries – divine/human, eternal/ temporal, infinite/finite, life/death – are reconciled. For God so loved the world, it goes, those analytically irreconcilable binaries were brought together in the person of Jesus, who was fully God and fully man. Whoever puts their faith in Jesus, therefore, believes that reconciliation of the analytically impossible is not only possible, but true and exhibited in Jesus. Though I doubt I will ever re-

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ally understand the mechanics of the Incarnation or Resurrection, I think they have important evidentiary implications for my belief in flexible positionality.

The Resurrection displays the flexibility with which binary categories should be understood: the death of an individual life was that subsequent individuals who believe in the Resurrection can have ‘new life’ through Jesus’ overcoming of the sin condition of death itself. That the death of an individual could overcome systemic death to bring collective life shows that the binary of life/death is not fixed. But Jesus did not only flexibly position himself as spiritual mediator between God and humanity, but as a peacemaker between the powerful and the marginalized. In choosing to socially position himself among the marginalised, Jesus exhibits the true value of flexible positionality: a truly free, self-creating agency to position ourselves in life as we choose.

George Herbert, Virtue, 1653 Translated into Latin by Max Hardy Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridall of the earth and sky: The dew shall weep thy fall to night,

For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave

Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye: Thy root is ever in its grave,

And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses,

A box where sweets compacted lie; My musick shows ye have your closes,

And all must die.

Onely a sweet and vertuous soul,

Like season’d timber, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives. o dies dulcis gelide aeque fulgens, nuptiae caeli super atque terrae, ros tuum flebit, periture, lapsum

nocte cadente. grate flos, cui trux color et severus imperat tergere oculos tuentem, vestra radix semper inest sepulchro

tuque peribis. suave ver, solesque rosaeque te explent pyxidem ut qua dulcia farciuntur. te cano fines proprios habere et

cuncta perire.

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spiritus suavisque bonusque tantum, ut vetus robur, dare se recusat, cumque tellus tota favilla fiat,

tum bene vivit.

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A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, 1896 Translated into Latin by Max Hardy Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again. fatalis mea pectora intrat aura, illinc quae patria inflat a remota. qui tristes tumuli recogniti illi, qui fundus procul ille, quive turres? illic terra repleta gaudiorum est quorum nil superat (serena visu) et calles hilares, ubi ambulabam, ad quos non iterum redire possum.

KenBromleyArtSupplies

cambridge is my continuing chinese class

by Silas Brown

I didn’t anticipate being a self-taught Chinese speaker when I arrived to study Computer Science in 1997, but Cambridge has a funny way of bringing about the unexpected. I’m partially blind and wrote servers to help my blind friends navigate websites, so when I learnt that East Asian students were struggling to display their scripts on our 1990s computers, I began to extend my “access gateway” to help them as well, resulting in my introduction to quite a few Chinese and Japanese friends.

At that time, although Japanese was gaining popularity, no Chinese classes of any form were available, so I helped some students establish a society for Chinese teaching. Ten years later, the University’s Language Centre finally added a Mandarin course. But most of my actual learning has been from Pimsleur tapes and my do-it-yourself extension called “Gradint” (no it’s not “gradient” spelled wrong, it’s short for graduated intervals, and I’m rubbish at coming up with good names for my projects), and from a source that might surprise you: JW.org, the Jehovah’s Witness website. No, you don’t have to join their religion, but if you can put up with the subject matter, it’s an excellent source of synchronized translated sentences, as well as slow and clear audio in hundreds of lan-

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guages, along with some very interesting translations. They made sure, for example, that their translations of “baptism” always imply immersion rather than sprinkling.A major way I’ve diverged from the path of most language learners is by not really bothering to learn Chinese characters.

Yes I can recognise a few hundred by now, if they’re written large enough, but fundamentally I’ve just been doing speaking and listening, regarding the character processing as ‘a computer’s job’. After all, it was computer programming that triggered my initial decision to take on this mad project of learning Chinese.

My computing background has been a major asset in this language learning journey. I made an Android app, Pinyin Web Browser, which puts pronunciation guides above every word as you browse Chinese websites.

Pinyin is a way of writing Mandarin Chinese using Latin letters: you still have to learn a few pronunciation rules, but for me it’s certainly a lot easier than learning all the characters.

I also maintain an odd kind of Chinese-English dictionary supplement which collects confirmed public-domain words I’ve found that are not in normal dictionaries. Of course I would never pass a Chinese exam like this. But not being able to handle the

script without a computer doesn’t stop me from chatting to Chinese people, and that, to me, is more important than what any examiner thinks.

Things have changed a lot since I started studying Chinese. East Asian students no longer need my old access gateway to make their scripts work on

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university computers, so I’m back in obscurity, and the idea of a Westerner speaking Chinese no longer seems so unusual. I now work part-time for Oracle, maintaining a Chinese-Japanese word-grouper for their internal use, and I sometimes supervise in the Computer lab, but, learning Chinese and Japanese, I still feel like a student.

¿qué es el reguetón?

by Rosie Stevenson

El reguetón es un género musical bailable que nació en Puerto Rico en los años 90, extendiéndose por todo el Caribe, donde más tarde se mezcló con el rap y el trap, creando un estilo único derivado del reggae jamaicano, influido por el hip hop. Hoy en día el reguetón es aún más popular en particular en los Estados Unidos, donde muchos jóvenes latinos lo han tomado como un modo de expresión cultural, y en Europa, donde los “remixes” hechos con cantantes y grupos de habla inglesa han surgido como las canciones más exitosas (por ejemplo “Despacito” con Justin Bieber o “Reggaeton Lento” con Little Mix). Es difícil escuchar una canción de Daddy Yankee sin moverse, el ritmo es pegadizo - solo con oír las melodías de Ozuna me quiero poner a bailar. Es más, el reguetón como género musical se destaca como muy abierto artistas de todos los orígenes raciales y étnicos de Latinoamérica han contribuido al su crecimiento, reflejando la gran variedad de razas que es la realidad de ser latino.

Sin embargo, se tiene que admitir

que la mayoría del reguetón también refleja el machismo extendido de los países que representa, no solo en cuanto a las letras de las canciones y los mensajes que emiten, pero además en lo que atañe a la disparidad entre el éxito de los artistas masculinos y femeninos. Solo puedo nombrar como máximo tres mujeres famosas en el género de reguetón, y lo que es más, los vídeos de sus canciones promueven la imagen de una muchacha chela y hermosa (con poca ropa) junto a una letra insinuante que no me atrevería a escuchar si estuvieran mis papás en la casa conmigo (por ejemplo, “Sin Píjama de Becky G y Natti Natasha).

Aunque nos presenta las marcas distintivas de una sociedad machista, es claro que la popularidad del reguetón solo va a seguir creciendo en los años por venir a medida que se difunde por todo el mundo y colaboran cada vez más artistas de otros estilos con el estilo original. Ojalá este crecimiento traiga más oportunidades para la igualdad de todos los géneros para que este género musical que tanto queremos siga mejorando.

we must decolonise

by Chantal du Rocher

‘Decolonise the curriculum’ is an unofficial global movement which has varied in form depending on the demands of the institution and course in question. Generally speaking, decolonisation is not just about diversity (though this is an essential component) – it is about recognising that knowledge is inevitably marked by colonial power relations, and adjusting curriculums to show awareness of this.

The backlash against students of colour and queer students leading the movement has highlighted some common misconceptions about Decolonise. The movement does not strive for the total erasure of texts by white Europeans, nor does it seek to rewrite history in a naïve effort to end oppression. It’s about neglected perspectives having the platform which had previously been denied from them, and how this can benefit everyone. This is often a twofold process which involves the inclusion of minority voices, and the reassessment of ‘canonical’ texts by white Europeans under a critical lens which understands that colonial power is an inescapable element of ALL modes of study.

What we put on our curriculums ends up empowering and glorifying certain perspectives, which always culminates in the suppression of others. This complex interplay of empow-

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erment and suppression is inexorably entangled with the colonial systems that have defined world power since European overseas expansion, and which have influenced our understanding of world history even before colonialism.For that reason, no field of study is exempt from the demands of the Decolonise movement.

Decolonising the curriculum would denote an essential step in addressing these continued power imbalances which place knowledge systems, cultures and most significantly, people of non-European origin as secondary to white Europeans and the work they produce.

The unconscious assumption that white European texts are more worthy of study than others has permeated Western culture to an extent which is likely to have solidified their place in academic tradition forever. Consequently, the excision of such works in favour of works by PoC, however permanent that may be, poses no threat to European culture, but can make a significant difference to the perceived importance of non-European cultures and peoples.

Such unconscious biases which place texts by white Europeans as superior are not so different from the 15th century biases which informed and justified European overseas expansion. Resistance to decolonise the

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the mml curriculum curriculum thus signifies a refusal to give up the power that has socially organised and hierarchised the world for 600 years.

Language was one of the most essential tools employed by Europeans during the colonial era to exert power over colonised peoples – in former colonies, people whose mother tongue is of European origin still often have greater access to opportunities than those who only speak indigenous languages. The Spanish, French and Portuguese Empires all went to great lengths to establish their languages within indigenous communities as a mode of cultural imposition. Even nations which had a comparatively minimal overseas presence (Italy, Germany, Russia) are still subject to global colonial power systems which benefit the white citizens of these nations.

To ignore the white privilege of white Italians, Germans and Russians, is to ignore the racialised oppression of PoC in these countries. Not only is this offensive, but it also creates an incorrect image of what it means to be a citizen of these nations.

The academic focus of MML is hard to define, as the course encompasses much more than just language study, and so what can define MML more generally is a focus on cultural studies and identity – but whose identity?

Given that the reading lists unapologetically privilege the perspectives of white people, the course emerges as an uncritical study of whiteness.

When whiteness comes to represent all humanity and identity, then PoC are precluded from this vision of the human, which, once again, shows that we have not come very far from the archaic scholarship which dehumanised non-white people as a justification for colonialism and slavery.

On the rare occasions that minority voices are given a platform within MML, in my experience lecturers have often exhibited a sudden desire to challenge the writers’ views, or explain them in relation to canonical European writers. This is not to say that I think minority writers should be exempt from criticism, nor am I suggesting that comparison is always unproductive, but there is an obvious asymmetry between the respect accredited to white European men, and the automatic suspicion towards minority writers and the validity of their ideas.

MML staff members have the responsibility to define and address inequality as it is woven into the fabric of university life, which means ensuring that students have equal opportunities to engage with course material and succeed – the unfortunate reality is that many aspects of the course have

alienated minority students. Decolonising the curriculum can improve university welfare for groups who rarely see their experiences reflected in conventional learning – whether this means including the voices of PoC, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities or working classes, everyone has the right to understand the roles carried out by people like themselves in artistic and scholarly achievement.

There are, of course, many staff members who have worked hard to alter reading lists and modes of teaching, and some departments have achieved more than others, but a curriculum is never decolonised – global systems of power are constantly in flux and modes of scholarship must reflect this. Creating a course which claims to offer an overview of a language and its affiliated cultures, but which only adequately addresses the outlooks of elite white men does all students a disservice by offering a false image of past events, and contradicting the suggested goals of the MML degree.

Somewhere between colonial amnesia and self-congratulatory understandings of imperial history (‘we gave them railways after all’) lies the truth of colonialism and its continued impacts on everybody. Attempting to study MML without acknowledging this will maintain a conceptual barrier between the material we consume and their real-world context.

In other words, the degree cannot realise its full potential until it fully addresses all the demands of the Decolonise movement.

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the best spanish

by Rosie Stevenson

LA CASA DE PAPEL La Casa de Papel is a 2017 Spanish bank-heist series that Netflix claims to be its most-watched non-English language series ever. It certainly ticks a lot of boxes: enough plot twists and gunfire to attract the telenovela audience, a fast moving and clever plot not dissimilar to the likes of Ocean’s 8, and most importantly, an anti-capitalist critique of our current economic system. It’s a story of rebellion and resistance that you will binge-watch, and then use as inspiration for your next Halloween outfit. (Salvador Dalí masks and red jumpsuits? = A look)

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language films/series on netflix ROMA I’m yet to meet anyone who made it through the entirety of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma without dissolving into a blubbering mess (great for practising your aural comprehension skills as you’ll be crying too much to read the subtitles). This monochromatic masterpiece follows the life of Cleo, a live-in housekeeper to a middle-class family in Mexico City.

Whilst both the screenplay and story are undoubtedly beautiful and personal, what struck me most was the performance of Yalitza Aparicio, a primary school teacher of Mixtec origin who had no prior acting experience. Roma is Cuarón’s commentary on the persistence of race and class division in Mexico and perhaps the greatest film on Netflix to have ever graced our screens.

LAS CHICAS DEL CABLE A soap with a message of female empowerment and the need to fight tirelessly for gender equality, following four women who work at a telephone company in 1920’s Madrid.

The friendship they share gives me vintage Sleepover Club vibes, but the reality of their lives is quite the opposite. There’s murder, adultery, corruption, double-crossing, blackmail, romance and enough 20s style bob haircuts to put the Great Gatsby to shame – and that’s just the first episode.

COMO AGUA PARA CHOCOLATE Set against the backdrop of the Mexican revolution, the 1992 film Como agua para chocolate chronicles the struggle of a rebellious young woman, Tita, in overcoming enforced tradition and rigid gender roles. Tita uses magical cooking to defy her violent mother and woo her lover, Pedro, who married her sister Rosaura in a questionable attempt to be closer to Tita. If you’re looking for a film all about self-growth and enlightenment, this one’s for you. Imagine a saucy Mexican Bake Off, but with more feminism and less pastel bunting.that’s just the first episode.

EL RECLUSO Finished Prison Break? Looking for a new gritty series to fill the gap? Look no further. El Recluso is a 13-episode high-impact action thriller set in a Mexican prison where ex-Marine Lázaro is planted in order to rescue the daughter of a prominent Texan judge. Producer Telemundo achieves the intensity of other high-octane dramas (Taken, Homeland and House of Cards) whilst avoiding sacrificing any aspect of of the gripping story, character development or depth. It’s refreshing to see vulnerable and emotionally nuanced lead characters in a series that accurately depicts the frightening corruption of prison administration and government.

photographs from japan

by Maud Rowell Some people wake up and they can’t see any more - they have gone blind as if by magic. It wasn’t like that for me. It’s been very slow. At first it just seemed that everywhere I went the lights were a little too dim. Now, faces and words have been obliterated.

What is left is a vibrating shadow, like an eclipse, an eclipse I can’t look away from. But what’s important is that it was only after it started that I began to take pictures with film cameras.

It is not so strange that blindness made me want to engage with light and colour. I want to hold on to them. Photography gives me a sense of control over the visible world. But colour and light are also undeniably fascinating. The world is full of energy and information that is invisible - it’s spilling out of everything around us, from microwaves to telephones. Colour is a tiny part of that information that is not invisible.When you use a camera, you can better understand that vision is all about light and time.

Everything we see is light, and in our eyes, it’s gunshot fast - but a camera slows it down for us. It’s a mechanical eye, and it allows us to play with factors we can’t control in our own bodies. We can take pictures that show the path light takes over minutes, hours, days or more. Like this, cameras can show us things we can’t see by ourselves. In this way, they are better than eyes. These photographs

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were taken with colour infrared film.

Infrared light is right on the edge of what is invisible to us. This film works best when plants are photosynthesising, and when the sun is at a low slant.

Isn’t that like a magic spell? I found this film for the first time in Japan, where these pictures were taken. You can never predict exactly how infrared film will change what is in front of you - it’s magical and exciting, and Japan became beautiful in ways I wouldn’t have predicted.

Photography is always personal, just as writing is. For me, taking photographs is not about capturing what is there, what is visible. These photographs certainly aren’t faithful to what I saw in Japan. But they show a world just out of reach of our real eyes, a world that is an amalgam of visible and invisible signals. The more I grapple with losing my sight, the more I find myself wanting to explore the world around me with my mechanical eye. This eye is old, and obsolete.

It’s something largely lost to modern photographers. Every photograph takes time and effort to process and print. But film photography is a window through time to how people first sought to transform the visible world into patterns on paper. Every photograph is a memory of something an eye saw - my eyes are breaking down, but still, they have memories that I want to keep.

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nabakov and the wasteland of translation

by Esmee Wright Vladimir Nabokov is most famous (or most possibly notorious) for writing Lolita, a novel considered both as one of the greatest works of the 20th century for its literary language and one of the most despicable for its content matter. The controversial content has been discussed often in literary analysis and popular culture, with more or less sensitivity. Few know however, that he also attempted to translate the book back into his native Russian.

This attempt was less than fully successful. Critics have attributed this to a variety of things; having been in exile from Russia since the October Revolution, Nabokov had been unable to keep his Russian up-to-date with the language spoken in his home country as it changed into the Soviet Union. Equally, his theory of translation, focusing as it did on “[reproducing] with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text” (Schulte and Biguenet 134), does not exactly lend itself to creating more literary interpretations of a text.

However, I believe there was another equally as important reason why the Russian translation of Lolita did not reach the same level of literary laudation as the English one: cultural context. Many critics pinpoint Nabokov’s

descriptions of American life, written from the viewpoint of a European Emigré professor, as the reason for his literary eloquence. Walter Allen suggests that it is the shared experience of the protagonist and Nabokov, as educated men new to America, that allowed Nabokov to conjure the American life so vividly. As an outsider, he noticed things that those who grew up in the culture would not and, by using Humbert as a mouthpiece, he is able to make explicit these observations, creating a world that American readers recognised but had never thought about in such a way before.

An issue with translation is often that the translator cannot guess the exact intent of the author at all points in the text. Nabokov did not - for obvious reasons - encounter this issue.

Yet in many ways he had a more challenging problem - trying to translate a novel for an audience whose cultural knowledge he could no longer predict.

In reading both versions, it is obvious that Nabokov has made additions to his Russian version. Some are refining passages, adding details and dates for example. But some additions explain cultural context. For example, when quoting from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, the poem is cited for Russian readers but not for Anglophones. The

problems I encounter with this poem link well to the problems Nabokov somewhat anticipated his Russian readers having with his own work: that of not recognising the nwumerous implicit allusions.

T.S. Eliot had a classical education the style of which is no longer accessible to many, myself included, and as a result of this, the only versions of his poems that I can read with any great understanding are heavily footnoted editions (and by this I do mean pages generally made up of 90% footnote and 10% text). And yet constantly having to search for explanation interrupts the flow of the poem. The footnotes, I also find, often do not explain enough. “Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!” may be a line from Verlaine’s Parsifal, but as I know neither who Verlaine nor Parsifal are, this means very little to me.

If I, a Western European reader, have to Wiki search every third reference that appears in The Wasteland and still not have any real idea what the poem is supposed to mean, one wonders whether a brief footnote giving the title of the poem is enough for a citizen of the Soviet Union, whose cultural reference points would have been quite different. Even today,

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Russian does not have a universally recognised word for “cheerleader”, that emblem of American university life. Nabokov rendered it instead as “bare-legged girls in short skirts and thick jerseys, who encourage students playing the American version of rugby by rhythmic yelps and frenetic calisthenics” (Lolita 211). From this alone, you can probably understand why Lolita was not quite such a hit best seller in the Soviet Union.

The question of how much extra detail to put into a translation remains something that all translators must face, as well as how exactly to put that detail in. Looking at how Nabokov arguably failed to overcome these difficulties is, to me, important in continuing the discussion around what translation actually entails. Each text will necessarily have different levels to which it needs further explanation, and each translator will have different ways of navigating these problems, which is exactly part of what makes reading different translations such a fascinating pursuit. Many might say that you will never read the true text unless you read it in its original language, but these details and differences in each new edition of a translated work are what makes translation such an art.

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Lines 123-135 of Seneca’s Medea, translation & artwork by Cecily Bateman

‘Mariposa’, inspired by Lorca’s poem ‘Vuelta de Paseo’ , Esme Garlake