Jonas Jacobsson, Unsplash.
In the first chapter of the 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa writes: “the U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”
Una herida abierta, an open wound. The political and geographical landscape from which Anzaldúa wrote is situated in the configuration we today call North America, more specifically in the Texan borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico. Being a daughter of Spanish-speaking farmers, her biography was intertwined with the histories of a border drawn and redrawn, cutting through languages and communities. In the past, what is today Texas had been the Spanish and later Mexican province Tejas, the name borrowed from the indigenous Caddo word for “friend”. The Spaniarnds had not come as friends, they had come as conquerors. As had the Anglos, arriving after them. Anzaldúa again:
This land was Mexican once
was Indian always
and is.
And will be again
It was with the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty between Meixco and the U.S. in 1848, that Tejas became Texas and an undisputed part of the U.S., as is to this day. After 1848 Tejanos started to be treated as foreigners in their own land. A border placed and displaced, racialised and re-racialised. It continues to be a wound, repeatedly cut open through fresh walls and fences. We did not cross the border, the border crossed us.
Borderlands/La Frontera reflects these histories, in both form and content of the book. It is at the same time a historical essay, an autobiographical account, an epistemological argument, and a work of poetry. While written in English, the language is broken up by frequent use of Spanish and occasionally Nahuatl. In the characterization of the border quoted above, the text shifts at the very moment of pain. It is as if the language of the white Anglos cannot make this pain justice and the wound needs to be named in Spanish. For even if Spanish, just like English, is the language of conquerors, for Anzaldúa it is also a mother tongue.
Can the mother tongue do pain justice? Can literature?
In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s tale The Little Prince from 1943, a young prince from a far-away planet arrives onat earth. He meets a fox who insistently begs him to tame him. Unfamiliar with the word “tame”, the prince asks the fox to explain. The animal answers that it is about creating ties:
To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need for you. And you, on your part, have no need for me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…
“I have not much time”, the prince objects, and explains that he needs to meet people and learn to understand things. But the fox replies: "One only understands the things that one tames".
I wonder, is the fox right? And further: is his argument valid also for translation? Indeed, translation creates ties, but of what sort is not obvious. The vocabulary of taming evokes disturbing colonial echoes. Do I really need to “tame” a text to understand it well enough to translate?
Dubravka Ugrešić says of the mother tongue, that it was the only souvenir her country bequeathed her. If we take metaphors literallyliterary, we might imagine ourselves arriving at a new place and a new language with a bloody tongue in our hands, ripped out of the mouth of a mother.
The mother tongue is surrounded by mysticism. Many years ago, I conducted interviews with teenagers of migrant background in a Swedish urban periphery. One of the things I asked them was how they would define a mother tongue. I remember a young Swedish-Somali girl suggesting that a mother tongue is the language one hears in one’s dreams. The others nodded in agreement. But when I asked them what language was usually spoken in their dreams, most of them admitted to dreaming in Swedish. And yet, they strongly rejected the idea that Swedish could be called their mother tongue.
Perhaps the mother tongue is the language of one’s dreams in another sense: that of longing to belong when caught in histories of a loss that is sometimes inherited through various generations. I dream almost exclusively in Swedish. I write in Swedish. I teach most comfortably in Swedish. I have most of my intimate relations in Swedish. But the only language in which I can be truly silly is Portuguese. Only in Portuguese can I drop my defences. A mother’s tongue. The decision to raise my child in Portuguese was to reclaim something I did not even know had been lost.
When I taught Anzaldúa to Swedish students, I used to talk about her Borderlands/La Frontera as an untranslatable text. Defending the place of such texts, and of the untranslatable, is becoming ever harder in a world demanding exchangeability in the most radical sense.
Strong economic interests are trying to convince us that an increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence will soon make translators in general superfluous. But every literary translator knows all too well that what is at stake in translation is not only, or even primarily, linguistic accuracy. What does a text do in its different contexts; the one in which it is written, the one in which it is read, and then, the one in which it is given a new life through translation? The Latin word translation means to “bring across”. What, in translation, is brought and what is left, what is added? What AI translation does, as Dalibor Plečić observes in this volume, is reducing the untranslatable to statistical anomalies.
When the logic of exchangeability enters language, it has deep political implications. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback talks about how anyzation (in Portuguese, qualquerização) functions in the digital era. In the excess of statements produced and circulated, inflated by bots and algorithmic patterns, anything can come to mean anything, and meaning loses its meaning. It is, she argues, the sense of the singular dissipating, a deflation of meaning through which fascism now operates. What we come to have, instead of a political life, is a radically individualised mass communication, suffocating those in-between spaces necessary for the political to thrive.
What is at stake is not the risk of of AI becoming “like us”. We humans are not God of Genesis, looking down at our creation and saying: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil” (Gen. 3:22). Quite the opposite. When language is radically changed through new technologies for mass communication, how long before we start to become like AI?
As a source of resistance against anyzation in general and fascism in particular, Schuback turns to poetry. It is an exercise in precision, in the non-exchangeability of the poetic word. She reminds us that the Greek word poiesis means to bring into the world what was not there before. Different from AI, which works entirely with probability as inducted from what already is, poetic work deals with the possible in an oscillation between what is and what could be. In this opening up of an in-between, Schuback finds a continuing exercise in resistance/re-existence.
Anzaldúa’s text uses poetry in order to approach the border, that moment and place of pain, precisely in its ambiguity between what is and what could be. Of translation, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak says: “in every possible sense [it] is necessary but impossible”. Translation is linguistic, but not merely. It involves creating bridges also across political, historical and cosmological contexts.
In 1987, when Borderlands/La Frontera was first published, it became a groundbreaking work in what would become a growing body of literature dealing with experiences of colonisation, displacement, exile, diaspora et cetera. In Writing Outside the Nation (2000), Azade Seyhan discusses the implications for criticism brought about by “modern transcultural texts”, that is, texts not possible to accommodate within one single national tradition or theoretical camp. She argues that these texts express a need for a “third geography”, understood as a “space of memory, of language, of translation”.
Seyhan’s readings of diasporic literature in North America and Europe creates resonances across time and space, disrupting tendencies of placing authorships within the confines of a “national literature”. Chicana/o works are, for example, read not only through the Chicano or even U.S. context, but also through the tradition of the romantic Bildungsroman.
And yet, it is significant how Seyhan already in the title of her book centres the “nation”, and imagines the “third geography” she calls for mainly in relation to the nation’s inner and outer borders. Her reading of Anzaldúa and other Chicana/o writers makes the problem apparent. For when the Chicana/o position is understood within a theoretical framework that privileges border crossings, the U.S. turns into a “host country” for people since generations native to its soil. The political border separating Mexico and the U.S. becomes reified as a dividing line, and the histories of the border moving over the landscape are projected instead on the figure of the “migrant” as the one doing the crossing.
We should be wary with how we treat borders and how they are engraved in ideology rather than in landscape. “It could be said”, Dubravka Ugrešić writes, “that I didn’t actually leave my country, but rather […] my country, Yugoslavia, left me.” Every border, even the youngest ones, must appear as reflecting a natural, and therefore immemorial, division; a clearcut line between one national belonging and the other.
It was fitting, therefore, when Freud used topographic and demographic analogies to explain the limitations of his own map of the human consciousness; the conscious, the pre-conscious and the repressed. Our consciousness and its different provinces, he said, remind of a landscape inhabited by different peoples – Germans, Magyars and Slovaks perhaps. Each group has its specific industry, and in theory, they are easily separated each in their specific province. But in practice, there will be overlapping and mixes, both in terms of language, industry and topography itself. In short: consciousness, just like borders, is a mess. The map is at best a futile attempt to bring an illusion of order where no clear divisions are possible.
On the map, the border is what defines the spatial division between one nation-state and the other. But running rather right through the very imaginary of the nation, conceptually the border is at its heart. For Anzaldúa it is yet something more; a territory, a privileged place from which to see the world.
So I taught Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera to my Swedish students as an untranslatable text. The topic of the course in question was “excentric readings”. With that, we meant the reading of texts written from what is usually conceptualized as periphery, as if they were in fact accepted as text from the metropole. The idea was to destabilise notions of centre and periphery, but also to offer an exercise in reading texts that offer the resistance of the unfamiliar. We wanted to give our students time with these texts, make them read and reread. Work in ways not that different from when one is doing a translation.
Proficiency in English is a general requirement for university studies in Sweden. This I could thus expect from my students. Spanish is a popular enough a third language in middle school (after Swedish and English), for me to assume that the group would include at least one student with some proficiency in Spanish. But my first group of students hade none. Their knowledge of Spanish was limited to pop culture clichés, hasta la vista, baby and the like.
The group thus found itself in a position similar to the one Anzaldúa puts a monolingual English-speaking reader in. They were deprived of thedeprived the linguistic privilege usually adhering to the majority. Spanish, Anzaldúa’s mother tongue, enters the text in different shapes. Sometimes it is sprinkled as single words, sometimes as a large chunk, other times yet as whole poems. When discussing particularities of Chicano culture, Anzaldúa sometimes inserts explaining notes. When recounting histories of dispossession and displacement, very rarely. At the moments when the text burns with pain, it burns in Spanish.
I worried it might be too much of a pedagogical challenge for my students. I worried that they might feel rejected in such a way that it became an obstacle for them to engage. I was wrong.
I remember this course in an almost utopian light. Something remarkable happened in that room. Without hesitation, students engaged with the text and with what it held forward to them as well as what it withdrew. I had told them it was untranslatable, but what we did together in a series of seminars was in reality an act of translation, in all its unavoidable impossibility.
Spivak talks about translation as the most intimate act of reading. Anzaldúa became, a couple of years after my course, my first more extensive project of translation for publication. As a project, it grew out of my own passion and desire to engage deeper and even more intimately with the Anzaldúa’s text. So I betrayed my earlier statement about it as untranslatable, and sat down to work on a Swedish version – at the time I am writing this, still only partly finished.
Translation might be the most intimate act of reading, but unavoidably it is also an act of betrayal. That is the meaning of the Italian proverb traduttore / traditore. How can I translate in a way that minimizes the betrayal? What reading is the most true to this text that I love?
I have discussed with editors how to deal with the bilinguality of the text. Should the Spanish sections be translated into Swedish? If so, should these translations be integrated in the main text? No, that would be a disrespectful abuse ofn the original. But perhaps translations could appear in footnotes, or in the margins? A quite practical solution it seems, but practical is not the only consideration here. Originally, Borderlands/La Frontera was published in Anglo-dominant U.S. Anzaldúa had her reasons for not translating the Spanish sections, for not striving to please the linguistic majority. As a minimum, a translation should honour those reasons.
At times, I toyed with the idea of finding a partner who could translate the Spanish sections into a whole other language, a language that in Sweden occupies a position more similar to Spanish in the US. Rather than an “immigrant language”, that might have been either Finnish or Meänkieli, or perhaps a combination of both; border languages that have for centuries been part of Sweden, and yet are frequently treated as “foreign”. Also, languages that just like Spanish in the U.S., carry a strong association to labour migration.
Such a move might havehad resulted in a truer translation. But I guess in this case I allowed for my own possessive love to betray the text. For I cannot feel the taste of Finnish or Meänkieli in my mouth as I can with Spanish. To translate into these languages would also mean letting the text draw itself away from me, and doing so precisely at the moments where my love is the strongest. I could not stand that. Traduttore/traditore.
The border has no physical reality in itself, not even when following a river, as the Rio Grande between Mexico and the U.S. For if the river can be seen as a dividing line, it can just as well be regarded as a waterway for travel. And immediately the clear distinction between the one side of the border and the other collapses.
To state that the border lacks physical reality is a truism. And yet, just as money is given its mystical power by our daily practices of treating it as valuable, the border is made to have material consequences by daily practices treating it as if it werewas a physical reality; the border is materialized in guards and checkpoints, fences and walls.
The notion of the border as a dividing line marking an essential difference between inside and outside, is its most powerful fiction. It is frequently reproduced even in well-meaning criticism of border politics and border security. Therefore, it might be goodwell to remind of the contingency of borders, and that the facts created by the crossing of borders are – as Patricia Mindus argues – institutional and not empirical. That is, what ultimately decides your status at a specific place is not your crossing the border or not. Rather, it is about how your legal status is institutionalized in relation to this imagined border – regardless if you find yourselves outside its confines or inside them.
The border, thus, is territory rather than a line. A borderland, Anzaldúa writes,
is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the Mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal”.
A few years ago, my son of another mother was finally legalised as a resident in Sweden. Together, we went to the tax authority to formally register him. He got to fill a form stating he had moved to Sweden. We laughed at it as at a joke, for he had already been living in the country several years prior to the date stated in the form. He had slept, eaten, and loved here. We laughed, and it was out of relief over him being finally – albeit only temporally – safe. But what the phrasings of the form also meant, was the administrative erasure of his life in Sweden as immediately deportable “alien”.
To be irregular, is not to be outside. Rather, one is included as excluded, to speak with Giorgio Agamben. If we take the border seriously as territory rather than dividing line, what happens with our ways of conceptualizing the relation between people and place? Between inside and outside? What Anzaldúa, standing at the herida abierta, offers us is not a view from an “outside”. Rather, she claims the borderland as a privileged place from which to look at the world in its entirety.
This place is like a surface where inside and outside coincide. That is how I think of my son’s first precarious years in Sweden. The border has the shape of a Möbius loop. In mathematical terms, this is a non-orientable surface. And yet, for those who inhabit it, the only choice is to keep trying to orient oneself.
There are rivers flowing beneath the soil of Roraima, in the northern Amazon of what we today call Brazil. When they, occasionally, rupture onto the surface, they form eye-shaped natural springs: olhos d’água, eyes of water. Makuxi artist and writer Jaider Esbell uses these rivers as a description of the continuing indigenous life under colonialism.
Reading Anzaldúa together with Esbell, stretches the borderland down to the underworld of a national project that – similar to the Mexican – has claimed indigenous people as mythical ancestors, but denied their existence in the present. In the post-independent construction of the Brazilian state in the 19th century, the “Indian”, the índio, was regarded as the distinguishing mark between “real” Brazilians and “foreign” Portuguese. But this índio was always placed in the past, preferably at the dawn of conquest, perishing heroically and only surviving as a bloodline in the new nation to be born. Such has been the national mythology of colonisation. Or, as literature scholar Antônio Paulo Graça puts it, the “poetics of genocide”.
The rivers in Esbells writing however, appear as a cardiovascular system of an earth never fully conquered. In Roraima the border is not only the one between Brazil and Venezuela, but also the colonial frontier of private property and industrial agriculture. Esbell describes growing up at this frontier as an inverted privilege of sorts; the proximity to violence gave a specific ability to see, similar to the effects of the chilli the Macuxi people sometimes put in their eyes in order to distinguish what is otherwise hidden. At the frontier, things that usually pass as invisible, become visible in all their brutality.
As the northernmost frontier of the Brazilian national project and its exercise of territorial sovereignty, Roraima is usually conceptualised as a periphery. But Roraima poet Elikain Rufino once told me: this is the place where Brazil finds itself. And he is right. For this, the colonial frontier, is indeed the place where the mythical birth of Brazil repeats itself again and again in the present. On the map it might be a periphery, conceptually it is at the heart. The Möbius loop, again.
“Centre” and “periphery” lose their meaning here. For, as Esbell writes, “from where I depart is the moving centre of an imposed periphery.”
I keep being disturbed by the fox. But Amazonia gives me another tentative possibility: what if translation can be understood in analogy with anthropophagy? During some intense weeks a few years ago, I was translating into Swedish a text by Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami shaman from the Toototobi valley in Amazonia. The text was a chapter from Kopenawa’s 2010 book La chute de ciel, written in collaboration with French anthropologist Bruce Albert. My “originals” consisted of three other translations. Originally, Albert had recorded Kopenawa’s voice in Yanomami. He then translated the recordings into French for publication, and the French book was in turn translated into English and Portuguese. I sat down with different versions in three colonial languages, working with a text from a cultural context in many ways utterly strange to me. What was familiar, however, was the political context; frontier colonialism, gold rushes and land grabbing in Amazonia.
I am therefore also left with the question Plečić poses in his contribution to this volume: when dealing with texts from a world we barely understand, are we able to read it as literature or do we read it rather as perhaps sociology? I turned to the cannibal for guidance, for the name of the chapter I worked on was precisely “Cannibal Gold”.
For long, I used to believe that anthropophagy was merely a colonial prejudice. Amazonia has taught me that the idea of anthropophagy as a prejudice was in reality a postcolonial prejudice. The huge ideological value the image of the savage “cannibal” has had for colonial dominance, has made many of us immediately dismiss any claim that human eating of human flesh is an empirical reality.
But far beyond the colonial fantasy of the “cannibal”, there is in Amazonia a tradition of anthropophagy that is not only a practice of eating, but in an extended sense also a way of relating to the world. The distinction between human and animal is here not necessarily what determines the difference between who can be eaten and who cannot. Knowledge in Indigenous Amazonia, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argues, depart from an assumption of everyone – human or non-human animal – possessing subjectivity. And eating is one expression for the same sort of approaching – subject to subject – that makes knowledge possible. To eat, therefore, to incorporate something or someone in oneself, is to learn to know.
A curious ambiguity in Swedish resonates with Castro’s argument about Amazonian epistemology. The word for “to feel” coincides with the word for “to know”: känna. In the last instance, in order to really feel/know something you need to devour it.
So I translate, tasting the strangeness of the text in my mouth, trying to find a language for that which I struggle to understand without feeling the ground under my feet.
The Yanomami language is spoken by perhaps 35 000 people. The various steps of translation – from spoken word in Yanomami, to written French, English and Portuguese (and also, as a small parenthesis partly into Swedish) – have made Kopenawa’s text accessible to what we can call a global majority. “There is nothing essentially noble about the law of the majority”, Spivak remarks somewhat dryly. “It is merely the easiest way of being ‘democratic’ with minorities.”
What do we do with translations that are impossible, yet necessary? Kopenawa’s book is a history of the Yanomami people and of Yanomami cosmology. But it is also a shaman’s prophecy directed as a warning towards the modern world. On this, Kopenawa is very clear. To insist on its translation, is also a strive to be true to the prophetic claim of the text. But I keep wondering, how much of anthropophagic cosmology do I need to understand – to be able to digest, let us say – if I am to translate at all? I am not sure, but I do believe that Amazonian anthropophagy has helped me to understand something about translation in general. And hopefully, the practice of translation has helped me to grasp some little thing about Amazonian anthropophagy. For all things considered, is it not possible to discern a certain affinity between anthropophagic epistemology and hermeneutical practices of translation?
This is not to reduce anthropophagy to hermeneutics. It is merely to keep insisting on trying to find places where we can fix provisional abutments for the bridges. The “utopian translator”, as Spivak observes, has not yet arrived. I eat Kopenawa’s text in the colonial languages that are the only ones I have: French, English, Portuguese.
Can the mother tongue do pain justice? Can literature? I started out with those questions.
In Harry Martinson’s novel The Road from 1948, the history of modern Sweden is told from the perspective of the vagrant, the tramp. The narrative never leaves the confines of the nation, and yet the place inhabited by the despised tramps seems to curiously coincide with Anzaldúa’s land of the squint-eyed and queer. In these borderlands, not between nations but between provinces and parishes, Martinsons tells the story that must be told but that cannot be.
He knew that there was a protest which can never be voiced as it should be voiced, because there is no one to whom to direct it. There was none who would understand it other than the queer ones themselves, and it could not be addressed to them. Therefore it could only be given one form, one formulation, which was: touch us not! Leave us in peace! We own that which is astray. The lost is our property. It is a large and remarkable property. It faces the stars, the woods and the seas, the roaming waves and the wind-sown flowers.
The question raised in the text, is about the (im)possibility of translating a queer language to those who would need to hear it. It is not “queer” as in our use today, and yet it is on one level absolutely true to that use. The Swedish original here is egendomlig. Other possible translations could have been “peculiar” or “strange”.
Just like my son, Martinson’s vagrant are not in a place describable as simply an “outside”. Rather, they are the undigestible remains of modernity, the vomited parts from the belly of the beast. And as such, they hold a knowledge of this beast more intimate than the beast has of itself. But speech, in this context, comes with obstacles; not only due to the queerness of one’s words, but also as a result of hostility and persecutions. The words are worn down. What remains is sometimes only mutilated mumbling, what Martinson calls “gnomic dialogues”.
Spivak, once again: “In every possible sense, translation is necessary but impossible”. Sometimes, what remains is only to make space for silence.
Patricia Lorenzoni
