I started reading River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation, a generous and provocative collection of reflections on what it means to live, and work, between languages, places and social and cultural identities and realities, as I was preparing to visit India for the first time in four years. I finished it as violence escalated in the Middle East, with the latest and most violent episode of a conflict that has been part of my consciousness for all of the more than six decades I have been on this planet. It marks the evolution of a troubled history that has taken on added depth and meaning for me through the words of Palestinian poets and writers, that I have been able to access through the work of translators. As a result, my recent travel, not only the open conversations with friends about the schisms we are witnessing in our own nations and communities, but the experience of navigating a vast, multilingual country without the ability to easily communicate in so many everyday situations, combined with the explosive events that have absorbed so much of my emotional attention these past weeks, has enhanced my response to the essays contained in this anthology.
Nuzhat Abbas, founder and director of trace press, has described this project, the Canadian publisher’s first anthology, as one that arose out of a desire to “NOT center whiteness” and to examine translation outside the Western conventions that tend to influence what literature deserves to be translated, and by whom. It is a project of decolonial feminism, one that might not always be a typical context for a reader like myself who, like so many other readers, translators and publishers I know, is passionate about translated literature which, in the broader publishing world, is still undervalued and even suspect. Yet, to listen to the voices of translators from the Global South for whom translation is inextricable from essential questions of identity, history, land, dislocation, gender and sexuality offers an invaluable opportunity to expand one’s understanding of what translation can be. Here, crossing linguistic borders is not simply a possible professional endeavour, it is a way of being in the world, of understanding where one comes from and how one belongs.
In her Editor’s Translation to River in an Ocean, Abbas poses the following guiding questions:
What, and where, is the time and place of translation, and of literary translation, in particular? Of the translator as writer, as attentive listener, as co-creator, responsible to what [Gayatri Chakravorty] Spivak calls “the trace of the other within the self”? Or of the editor-publisher as convenor and gatherer in the project? This anthology emerges from such a questioning, and from curious and communal conversation, to offer a space for the soundings of different trajectories—connecting spaces, times, languages and bodies with origins in East Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia.
With each one of the essays that follow, these and other questions rise, open up, revolve and return, leading the writers toward a fuller sense of self. No two essays are alike, each is unique in form and expression, yet they all speak to a longing to find, not only Spivak’s “traces of the other within the self,” but reflections of the self within the words of the other.
The collection opens with Khairani Barokka’s buoyant and provocative dual language essay “Ava Kabar, Penerjemah?” Paragraphs in Indonesian are followed by the English translation, moving back and forth between tongues, as Barroka directly addresses her fellow translators, asking if they are alright. Her concern is with the emotional and physical well-being of the translator who is marginalized by race, country of origin, illness or disability. In the second essay, Palestinian-born translator Yasmine Haj begins with the notion that translation is an activity we all engage in from our earliest moments as we learn to communicate with those around us, those who can answer our basic needs. But she moves on to reflect on how her first language, Arabic, remains distinct from the other languages that she has come to know—Hebrew, French and especially English:
To survive, we must translate, almost everything into English—sometimes even the rhythm of our thoughts. And so, it becomes the way we think, the way we write, the way we talk to ourselves. The way we dream. And so, Arabic remains a dreamless jumble of love, melancholy, nostalgia, and an inability to properly express ourselves or anything for that matter—an obsession with accents, stumped travels and halted communal growth, mother tongues and beautiful people that we could never meet.
If, in some sense, Arabic is everything that is lost, translation is a way of remapping a history— personal, political, cultural—and of finding and feeling one’s way along a path filled with uncertain obstacles and unexpected discoveries.
The contributors to this anthology include both emerging and seasoned translators, and their approaches to the central theme—why translate?—include epistolatory essays, memoir and, at times, embedded photographs and documents. Their stories are deeply personal, poetic reflections. A passion and commitment to the power of language shines through, as do the many complex dynamics that arise when one’s identity and experience crosses the boundaries between the Global South and the West.
I can attest that there is not a single essay in River in an Ocean that does not turn in a fresh, fascinating and meaningful direction, but to attempt to summarize each offering in a few sentences would be counterproductive. Rather, I will highlight a few pieces that hint at their range, beginning with Suneela Mubayi’s evocatively titled “The Temple Whore of Language.” Born in New York to an American mother of Jewish origin and a Hindu-Kashmiri father, Mubayi was raised between the US and New Delhi by a host of relatives. She (the pronoun in her bio) claims: “I put the trans back into translation.” In addition to providing an excuse to avoid her own writing, she says that she “inhabits” translation because, as someone who is mixed race and nonbinary, her identity is unsettled:
I translate because I am not stably anchored—neither in my origins, nor in my cultural affiliations, sense of belonging, or in my gender. To translate, for me, is to experience being an outsider, a trespasser, a poser— and to be able to revel in that condition.
As a trans person myself, unsettled on somewhat different grounds, I understand this internal sense of balanced imbalance well. For Mubayi, this unsettledness, along with political factors—9/11, the Iraq war and the Palestinian condition—leads her to learn Arabic, a language to which she has no ethnic or geographic connection. As a translator, her linguistic engagement with the language is informed by her unique perspective as a person who exists on the margins of more than one axis of being, and, as such, leads to some very interesting observations.
By contrast, in her essay, “A Tally of Unfulfilled Longing: Translating Dalit Poetry,” Gopika Jadeja returns, as a translator, to her native language, Gujarati, but crosses another distinct boundary. Her own mother, denied an education, was determined that her daughter have an English education. It was not simply a concern for her future, but the more immediate need to have someone at hand to translate what she could not read. This planted the seeds of her daughter’s future occupation, however:
What I choose to translate is perhaps a world that is not hers, and yet hers. I choose to translate Dalit and Adivasi poetry from western India. As a Hindu upper caste woman in postcolonial India, choosing to translate Dalit and Adivasi poetry raises more questions than it answers—both from those whose works I translate and from myself?
What she realizes, once she begins to read and translate this literature, is the full existential impact of the accepted social hierarchy on those at the very lowest rung. This leads to many open ended questions about the relationship between translation and what can be considered decolonial—especially when translating literature from marginalized communities.
In varying ways, translation as a means to engage with one’s cultural and ethnic identity seems to underlie most of the responses to the why translate question, especially for those who were born in or have immigrated to the West. In “Elegiac Moods—Letters to Agha Shahid Ali,” Rahat Kurd, the Canadian-born daughter and granddaughter of Kashmiri women, engages in a moving correspondence with the late Kashmiri-American poet and translator. She opens her first letter:
Dear Shahid,
I’m bound to begin with translation. Whether I’m working within only one language or between two, if I want to convey an experience or an impression, to inscribe the meaning of a text or an event, I will always have to draw on abstractions, memories, dreams, and fears, and hope to make myself intelligible.
Calling on his poetry, especially those he wrote for his mother, she speaks of the enormity of the loss she senses in his words, the loss of a homeland that has, in more recent years, fallen further into a state of crisis. Although Agha Ali was writing in English, Kurd recognizes translation as a “strong, changeable current” running throughout his poetry, especially the sequence of poems that recount the journey to bring his mother’s body home to India, “From Amherst to Kashmir.” Her intuitive tracing of translation as a vital force in this work had me pulling my own collection from the shelf and returning to these poems anew. She goes on to share her own journey to understand how translating can be a means of responding to and resisting the loss that estrangement from one’s past can bring.
The other contributors to this anthology include Kenyan-born, Ugandan-raised poet and scholar Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Nedra Rodrigo who was born in Sri Lanka, Ugandan Canadian writer Iryn Tushabe, Tamil poet and translator Geetha Sukumaran, Norah Alkharashi, originally from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and Lisa Ndejuru who was born in Rwanda, raised in Germany and came to Canada in her teens. The current of their translations flow between languages, with varying motivations and objectives. As well, the majority of the women involved in River in an Ocean currently live and work or study in Canada and recognize themselves as settlers on traditional Indigenous lands, a reality that adds an extra dimension to the decolonial vision at the heart of this vital project.
River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation is edited by Nuzhat Abbas and published by trace press.
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