Moving between languages can dislocate you, but creatively reorient you. I’ve been thinking about this with a group of philosophers and artists. At the final event of the HARMAA project, Disclocations, Irina Poleshchuk moderated a panel on language, experience, and art. Comics artist Sasha_D, project artist Pauliina Mäkelä, joined me as their translator and editor. We looked at what it means to move between locations and languages, and whether this is a source of creativity.
One joy of the HARMAA project was collaboration in all directions. The artists were doing much more than illustrating the philosophers’ words. Pauliina explained that sometimes she had an idea for an image, and asked the philosophers to reflect on it. On our panel, Irina gave me two huge philosophy quotes to (dis)locate:
“Even the agony of translation is based on the fact that the original words seem to be inseparable from the intended content, so that in order to make a text understandable, one often has to rewrite it in a broad interpretation instead of translating it.” (Hans-Georg Gadamer)
I love Gadamer’s idea of perspectives merging and converging, which is usually translated as fusion of horizons.Horizontverschmelzung is a wonderful word, but for me fusion sounds too nuclear. Do our horizons melt into each other like streams of lava or the colours of a sunset?
Here, Gadamer seems to devalue translation as mechanical and interpretation as unfaithful. The reality is more complex. But he is interested in how to reach an understanding. Translators are on this quest for understanding, as a text’s first readers, or last readers before it changes language. With Gadamer, I agree we achieve shared understanding through dialogue. Communication ethics is important here, as in dialogic editing. When I work with someone on their text, we are in conversation.
In trying to translate philosophy, I have a strong sense of entering a tradition, a symposium that spans centuries. So it is not only about representing the author’s meaning, but aligning it with other meanings, in previous works and translations. Choosing a translation, or deciding to modify it, is a philosophical, political choice.
The medium makes a difference. And when you add images, you add another means of making meaning. If you aren’t sure about the intended content, you must ask, enter into dialogue, join the symposium.
In Sasha’s comics we had her images, her Belarusian (close to Polish, so for me it resonated), her English, and Erika Ruonakoski’s Finnish translation. In editing, I looked at all these. Each of us had different languages that were strongest, used in communication, and unfamiliar. And two of us in that constellation had a sense of what it means to immigrate somewhere you can’t speak the language. The process could be dizzying, but creative.
“Language is the house of being. In its home human being dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.” (Martin Heidegger)
To respond to Heidegger, I’ll start with Sara Ahmed. She says in her introduction to Queer Phenomenology: “This is not to say that one has to leave home for things to be disoriented or reoriented: homes too can be ‘giddy’ places where things are not always held in place, and homes can move, as we do.”
Heidegger seems to be saying that being dwells in understanding and language, that it is behind or before language. So being is the snail and language is its shell? That’s if, like Ahmed, or me, you have a mobile understanding of home. If our understanding of being is structured in time, it is not static, it moves, even if at a snail’s pace. Being at home in a world, you know how to think, how to create. But the idea of home-in-language could be “nationalized” too easily. I often say I’m happiest in the space between languages. This space is, for me, home. My identity is multilingual, so my home is where languages melt into each other. As a nonlocal born of nonlocals, I feel dislocated in a monolingual, homogeneous environment. And monolinguals are in a global minority.
Translators help people to think and create in their strongest languages, yet communicate with people in other homes. The space between homes may feel dislocating or disorienting, but you can recreate and reorient by venturing across it. People who are less fluent in a language notice things about that language; its problems, yes – and its possibilities.
The panel was easier for me to do in English, the language I learned first. That gives me power. It gives me a job – I translate into and edit in English, the lingua franca of academia and more. Because the English expanded their home by force. So thinking and creating with words is guardianship, but that is not only care, it is also control. It worries me that in a rush to write in my strongest language, people write less in their own strongest languages, or other languages. So in conversations around texts, I try to use as many languages as are useful. Welsh speakers invented the term for this: trawsieithu, translanguaging. Or transhorizoning?
To return to the dislocations. It worries me that in Finland, monolingualism frames the conversation around immigration. On forms, you have to state one “mother tongue”: speaking another (single) language defines you as other. One needs sisu – determination – to learn and preserve Finnish, but Finnish speakers need sisu to open their language up. They need to get used to hearing Finnish with an accent and creative grammar.
If you want to enter someone else’s home, part of joining their being is learning how they create with words. If you don’t help someone to learn your language, you are saying you do not expect that person to dwell in your house, but, for instance, to clean the toilets. You are not expecting them to be a guardian of your home. Rather than keeping people out with a flaming sword, I hope we can reorient towards a shared horizon.
Ridge Writing Retreats 