The following conversation took place after a reading as part of “Colloquy: Translators in Conversation,” a series based in New York City and sponsored by World Poetry Books. In April 2023, the Clemente in Manhattan hosted the fifth installment of Colloquy, “Translating the Caribbean” with Aaron Coleman, Urayoán Noel, and Kaiama Glover. After the reading, the curator of the series, C. Francis Fisher, engaged the translators in the following conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.
C. Francis Fisher (CF): I want to start by asking about the title of this event. I named this evening “Translating the Caribbean” and I’m wondering whether that idea of translating the Caribbean is helpful in terms of the work that you do or whether it glosses over important differences between the cultures, languages, and realities of different islands in the Caribbean.
Aaron Coleman (AC): I’m glad that you opened with this question because for me “the Caribbean” is just one of the many frames that we can have in mind when translating. I’ll say for me, there are various frames that I try to hold in my mind at the same time. One would obviously be the national, but even within the national, we see the way that blackness sometimes complicates national identities. So, there’s the national and then there’s frames within the national, but then there’s also a regional frame to the Caribbean.
For me, the frame that I’m always searching for and curious about is beyond the national at a diasporic scale. So, we could call this translating the Caribbean, but I was also thinking about translating the African diaspora.
Kaiama Glover (KG): I’m glad you spoke first. I had a hot take. I still have the same take, but now I’ve sat with it for a second [laugh]. I have no problem with that grouping that in some ways elides the borders between the various nation states of the Caribbean because the Balkinization of the islands was based on legacies of colonialism that are still intact and have left us with language that makes it difficult for people who are of the same broad history and related culture to communicate. First, there was the initial break of community, the kidnapping of the middle passage, and then there is the persistence of that breaking through the nation language borders of the Caribbean. So, I love translating the Caribbean outward toward the diaspora.
Urayoán Noel (UN): First, I want to say thank you for the invitation and thanks to Kaiama and Aaron—what a joy to share space with you. I would just add that there’s not one Caribbean but many, and that’s really important to my own practice. When I was initially approached to do the Winston Gonzales translation, I said absolutely not, because I’m not Central American or Guatemalan or Garifuna. It was through the process of talking to Winston and understanding how he sees himself as a Caribbean poet and how important it was to him that I came to take the project on.
I also think of New York as a Caribbean space. That’s why I read that Edwin Torres piece, which took the English work of the Nuyorican poet and translated it into Spanish. I also think of what lies at the limits of translation—and a shout out to Nicole Cecilia Delgado because she writes in detail about this in her later book that I’m translating now. She also did something many people don’t, which is betray the metropolis. The expectation is that if you leave Puerto Rico, you end up in New York, and she did leave for a couple of years, but then she went back.
It’s really important to me to think about what is hidden from us, because the Caribbean is shaped in terms of certain kinds of privilege and cosmopolitan geographies of circulation. So if you’re in San Juan, you go to New York, and if you’re somewhere else, you might go to London or Paris. I want to think beyond those metropolitan areas, and that is what Nicole does with her eco-feminist land projects. What I want to get at is the fact that these privileged narratives of mobility need to be checked, while recognizing at the same time that so many bridges are built in places like New York, fraught as it is.
CF: This idea of circulation and whose voices get picked up and how these things travel brings me to my next question. I’m curious in what ways these translations are political acts, because you’ve chosen them, right? We all choose the translations we do. So, I’d love to hear a little bit about the political nature of the projects that you have chosen.
AC: Before I even talk about the political realities of my translation, I have to first talk about the politics in the original text, which is Nicolas Guillén’s The Grand Zoo. I was first enamored by the work because it rewrites a kind of pseudoscientific zoological authority, calling to the fore our understanding of what a zoo can be and what a zoo can do. In particular, it asks us to question what tends to be exoticized and placed into a cage. He has the audacity and creativity to conceptually create something wherein he’s getting to choose what’s in the cage and how it’s talked about and in what way it’s talked about. I like to think about the book as an experimental form, because he’s really making the reader be the tourist. He’s playing with the assumptions about and the exoticization of the Caribbean and using it to his own devices in this ironic and terrifying way.
To get to how the translation is a political act for me, I fell in love with the poems at first just because I read them. They’re so shrewd, but there’s also this surreal element and at the same time, this tongue in cheek way of considering the whole idea of what a zoo can be. But then there’s also very real stakes here about how putting the Amazon and Mississippi rivers together as snakes in a cage is to speak about the Americas in a way that I think we all need to think about a lot more conceptually. Importantly, he’s cultivating this Afro-diasporic consciousness in the work itself with these poems about the KKK or a lynching—making that into an animal is still terrifying to me. That’s a poem I couldn’t write, but that I needed to translate. But, what really got me excited is learning about Guillen and his relationship with Langston Hughes. These two were hanging out in Cuba in the early 1930s on two separate occasions, they went to Spain together where they both covered the Spanish Civil War, and they had correspondence over many years, which is in the Beinecke now.
I wanted to know why this one poet was reaching out to another Afro-descendant poet in a different national context to try to connect with them via translation. That led me to looking at James Weldon Johnson as a translator, because he also translated an Afro-Cuban poet in the book of American Negro Poetry, which is this seminal collection of what we consider American in a national sense. From the beginning, Johnson is thinking about that as a hemispheric project. So, translation is always political, in the sense that it’s reframing how we might think about a multilingual Afro-diasporic archive.
KG: My translations are absolutely politically intended. I translate mostly Haitian fiction from French into English, and I have very intentional reasons for doing that. First, because of the reputation that Haiti has, primarily in terms of the way that the discourse about Haiti is circulated in the wider world as one of despair, state failure, and need. Within this discourse, I feel the need to recognize that Haitians don’t often get to tell their own stories. Largely, that has to do with the hegemony of English and the fact that people barely read translation. I think it’s something like 3% of the book market is dedicated to translation. So, you can imagine how much French and Creole would get.
The other reason is very specifically for the students that I teach at my university, those who are Haitian American, and for whom French is a foreign language. Because of this, the narrative that they are most familiar with about Haiti is one that they feel defensive towards. Part of my reason for translating became making it plain to these students that there is this enormous patrimony that you have as Haitians that I want you to also have on the tip of your tongue when you’re thinking about which narratives circulate about this country.
Another reason, that was also student generated, had to do with my Black American students who I realized, much to my dismay, also held a narrative about Haiti and Haitians that was filtered through white supremacy and Americanism. I found that with Black people in America, that our blackness can be very ungenerous, because of the extent to which we also are a part of this society that in more or less subtle ways wants to tell us how lucky we are to be Black in America as opposed to say Haiti or the Caribbean or Sub-Saharan Africa.
In short, I translate for everyone, but I know I’m translating for those people in particular, and my work is a political intervention on both fronts.
UN: Well, I think one thing to add is that both of the poets I read today in my own translations, Nicole and Winston, are also translators. But they’re also very specific kinds of translators. Nicole is translating into Spanish on the one hand to pay the bills and to keep her press La Impresora afloat with things like business translations. She has to take on these translations as part of the political conditions of possibility so she can fund the work that she does. If you hang out with Nicole to collaborate, here’s what will happen: you will eat, you will go to the beach, and you will smoke. That’s her ethics: we’re going to be on island time. I realize there’s a kind of reverse extractivism going on—so much of the movement takes stuff from these poor, racialized, colonized places and circulates it into a hegemonic English for profit.
And then Winston tells me he’s working on translating Léopold Senghor from French to Garifuna and I ask him like, well, why? I think he’s interested in the opacity of it. So he talks to other Garifuna poets in Guatemala who are more instrumental about their poetry and interested in saying, “Here’s the cause of our people.” He’s like, I support you, do your thing, but leave me here with my Senghor. There’s no market possibility for that, it’s almost like the opposite, as if he’s saying, I’m going to write myself into an opacity that allows something else to happen. One thing I would emphasize is the precarity of a lot of the folks I’m translating and the ways in which they’ve taken it upon themselves to build alternative networks.
CF: I want to switch gears and ask about your own writing practices here—how does translation feed other projects like poem writing or non-fiction books?
AC: That’s something I’m always thinking about. I first fell in love with Nicolas Guillen’s poems as a poet. So, I see my relationship to poetry as finding a new outlet via translation. Any writer is also usually an obsessive reader. I see my practice as layers of an onion. The core of that is the poetry itself, but that led me into the translation of poetry. And then that got me excited about the critical aspect, which is asking: What is translation doing to cultivate relationships across the African diaspora? How can I look at the history of Black writers being translated by Black translators? A big part of this project is recognizing that we really have to provincialize the Anglophone Afro-diasporic element. I’m thinking of Anne Garland Mahler’s book From the Tricontinental to the Global South and how she talks about Afro-descendants in the United States being in the belly of the beast, but recognizing that that’s only one space among many others. The question becomes: what can we offer to a broader conversation, and what can we learn from that broader conversation? So, the engine is the poems. The poems lead to the translations and the translations lead to thinking about what translation makes possible in a critical sense and in a differently shaped and understood archive.
KG: I love that last line, “differently shaped and understood archive”—I might have to write that one down. I’m a scholar and I came to translation through scholarship. Something I was writing on hadn’t been translated into English and a publisher asked me if I’d be willing to translate it. I had never thought of translation before, and then I realized I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this, but I had just gotten tenure so I could do it, which was crucial.
I started working on it and I realized—much to my delight as an academic—that by translating this novel, I was seeing in a whole new way how the sauce is made for that writer. At that moment, I realized that if I can translate the things that I’m studying, I’m going to be so much better a scholar and teacher. The kind of intimacy required for at least trying to find some empathy and understanding with a writer—understanding what leads them to the word they choose on the page, and then finding the translation that does justice and honor to that word—is also incredibly intellectual and academic, as well as creative. So, I just was like, wow, this is like a life hack [laugh] for a professor. It’s the intimate dwelling in language alongside the writer that inflects the scholarship I produce.
UN: For me, I came of age at the Nuyorican Café in the late nineties and early two thousands, and learned from the elders. One thing they gave was a sense of how to think beyond the binary. There are many Englishes and many Spanishes and many hidden knowledges within that. That influenced the kind of self-translation I do in my own poetry and how I perform it and think about non-equivalences. I’ll throw in a shout out to Mary Louise Pratt, who was the second reader of my dissertation committee, and the way she thinks about nonequivalence in her essay, “The Traffic in Meaning: Translation, Contagion, Infiltration.”
From these ideas and the people I was hanging out with at the Café, I started playing in my own performances and improvisations, and I came up with this idea of los diasporosos. It’s not diasporic, it’s too porous for that. I was just improvising, walking around Puerto Rico in the tropical heat and feeling my pores and as I kept playing with it, a whole book came out of that wordplay, Los Días Porosos. I returned to that term when I wrote my book on the Café and wrote about Edwin, because I realized it was poets like him who gave me permission to experiment.
AC: What I hear us all talking about is how translation does not fit easily into the parameters or protocols of academia or more generally in life—it becomes this thing that is so often hidden right out in the open. We read things and we don’t think about them as a translation. I work between the English department MFA program and the Comparative Literature and translation studies community at Michigan. As soon as you said the word intimacy, I started thinking about that [Gayatri] Spivak quote from “The Politics of Translation” that says translation is the most intimate act of reading. I feel like I’m saying that all the time. This idea of how we can be most intimate with the text we’re trying to translate is a wonderful question that I’m always reaching toward and never arriving at.
The other translation studies pillar that comes to mind is Walter Benjamin and “The Task of the Translator.” Somewhere towards the end, he’s talking about how translation is midway between poetry and theory—I’m thinking about how translation is living in this tenuously undefined space, and yet is essential, because it’s necessary for everything that we do.
C. Francis Fisher is a poet and translator. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Brooklyn Rail, the New England Review, and the LA Review of Books among others. Her poem, “Self-Portrait at 25” won the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize for Columbia University. Her first book of translations, In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour, is forthcoming in Spring ’24 with World Poetry Books.
Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has written extensively about Caribbean literature, gender, and postcoloniality in such works as A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, and she is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction and francophone non-fiction, including Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst, Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano, René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams, Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women: Capitalism, Racialization, and Feminism, and Maboula Soumahoro’s Black is the Journey, Africana the Name. Her current projects include an intellectual biography titled, “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life” and a translation of Yanick Lahens’s Douces déroutes. She is also at work on a documentary titled, “Black Diva Saves the World.” Her scholarly and translation work has been supported by fellowships at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.
Aaron Coleman is a poet, translator, and scholar of the African diaspora. He is currently the Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Translation Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018) winner of the GLCA New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Prize. Aaron’s poems and essays have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Callaloo, The New York Times, the Poetry Society of America, Translation Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the J. William Fulbright Program, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association. He is currently translating AfroCuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s 1967 book, El gran zoo (The Great Zoo), and Aaron’s next poetry collection, Red Wilderness, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2024.
Urayoán Noel is a 2022 Letras Boricuas fellow and the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Transversal (University of Arizona Press, 2021), a New York Public Library Book of the Year. Other books include the LASA award-winning critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), and, as translator, adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022) and Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha (Shearman Books, 2018), a National Translation Award finalist also longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. A resident of the Bronx, Noel teaches at New York University and at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas and is a translator for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/The Puerto Rican Literature Project (PLPR).
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