Where did you first encounter translation—at home, in a classroom, online? In the following essay, Kena Chavva reflects on her experience prompting high school students to consider their own interactions with language and translation, and the ways both shape their lives and the world around them. Throughout the course, she and her students delved into questions of authenticity and identity, of faithfulness and creativity, seeming always to come back to concerns of originality: translation or not, how can we make something that is truly our own?
It’s not uncommon to hear teachers speak of the joy in teaching something that they, as individuals, love. I had experienced something akin to this in my first year of teaching high school English—I adore Frankenstein and have an abiding affection for Macbeth, and when I taught those texts, it was clear to both me and my students that we were having a better experience of the literature and one another than we’d had with The Canterbury Tales some several months earlier. But what I’ve always found less commonly discussed is how soul-crushing it is to teach something you deeply love when your students aren’t responding to it the way you hope they will.
For me, that text was an excerpt from Pascale Casanova’s 1999 book The World Republic of Letters. The first chapter, titled “Principles of a World History of Literature”, outlines some of the hidden rules that govern the world’s literary economy:
In thrall to the notion of literature as something pure, free, and universal, the contestants of literary space refuse to acknowledge the actual functioning of its peculiar economy, the “unequal trade” (to quote Braudel once more) that takes place within it.
Casanova goes on to explain how “Literary value therefore attaches to certain languages” and that “…literature is so closely linked to language that there is a tendency to identify the “language of literature”—the “language of Racine” or the “language of Shakespeare”—with literature itself”. When I first read this very same chapter as a junior in college, it felt the way that education should feel: like you were presented with a framework through which to understand your lived experiences.
I had grown up in New Jersey and my parents were South Indian immigrants with the kind of linguistic background common to those in their social milieu: my mother grew up in Bengaluru, Karnataka, but came from a Telugu speaking family and went to Christian schools, so she speaks Telugu, Kannada, and English fluently. My father, who grew up in a number of small towns and cities in Andhra Pradesh, spoke only Telugu in his childhood, but learned English and Hindi from watching movies. My elder sister and I were raised fully fluent in English and with approximately a fifth-grade knowledge of Telugu (about the time we stopped trying to fully communicate in Telugu), and I took French starting in sixth grade until my freshman year of college.
Casanova’s excerpt helped me make sense of not just the more obvious, colonial reasons that I had considered French a language of sustained intellectual inquiry and Telugu merely just a language of intimacy, but also of the reason that there was a booming MFA industry in America and there were essentially no Telugu writers who could claim their profession solely as “writer”. There was a hierarchy of major and minor languages operating in the world, and I’d always felt it, but had never been able to critically think about it until reading Casanova. Thanks to her work, I ended up writing my bachelor’s thesis on a Telugu-language translation of The Merchant of Venice, and a significant portion of my paper examined the complex interplay between the “minor” language of Telugu and the supposed greatness of “the language of Shakespeare”.
I taught this excerpt for the first time in an English elective for high school seniors in a course titled “Lost in Translation”. The school where I taught was a highly selective college-preparatory boarding school where over ninety percent of the student body were boarding students—and the fact of their boarding was a mark of status and privilege, not a punishment. While the general student body may have lacked socioeconomic diversity, it was perfectly emblematic of the global elite: some of my students were the children of diplomats, who had grown up in more countries than I could count, and those who hadn’t grown up all over the world remained extraordinarily well-traveled. My own students in Lost in Translation were a group of eight, and between them (not including my Telugu), they could speak seven languages: English, French, Mandarin, Spanish, Georgian, Latin, and Greek. With the exception of Georgian, all of these languages were ones spoken by the global elite of the twenty-first century. Perhaps that was why my students rifled through their handouts of Casanova’s excerpt, trying to avoid eye contact with me, rather than jumping into conversation. Mentally, I tabled my hope of facilitating a thoughtful conversation about language hierarchies and instead attempted to generate more excitement by having students guess the top ten most spoken languages in the world.
I had proposed this class almost exactly a year prior to that particular moment in its teaching. There were no other English classes at the school in which students read literature translated from other languages. The only opportunities for students to do this were in their language classes, and most students dropped those after passing the third level, at which point they weren’t reading terribly complex texts anyway—at least, nothing comparable to what they would be reading in their English classes. Especially given the international spread of our student population, I envisioned the course as a way for students to think about language and culture through the lens of another discipline. I also saw the course as a way for students to broaden their definition of “translation”: certainly, they were translating when they went from school in western Massachusetts to summer vacation in Rome, but weren’t they also translating themselves between the classroom and the dorm, or between their friends at home and their friends at school? And if so, what might that mean about communication between human beings not just across linguistic and national barriers, but racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic barriers? At the course’s outset, I hoped that it might also be a synthesis exercise for these seniors in their final term of high school English, as they considered, at the most basic level, how language conveys meaning.
To that end, I began the class with three short readings: the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Teach Yourself Italian”. While the Tower of Babel suggests that the existence of different languages in the world is a punishment, Anzaldua and Lahiri provide examples of the possibilities and freedom engendered by embracing a previously shunned or entirely new language. Following our discussion of these texts, my students wrote “language memoirs”: short creative, personal essays in which they examined their own linguistic histories.
Some of them took the approach that I had generally expected. One student beautifully traced the line connecting her early childhood in Australia to her middle school years in Hong Kong, and ended with her time at our school, practicing the Chinese that she’d thought she would forget after moving away from Hong Kong. Others incorporated aspects of their personal histories that wouldn’t have occurred to me, but of course made complete sense in an exploration of their relationship with language: a stutter that one boy had all through elementary school and the speech therapy that accompanied it, or a long-lasting love affair with photography that helped one student through a mental health crisis in early high school when she felt she couldn’t vocalize any of her anxieties. Others, still, completely surpassed my expectations for what I thought my students would produce: one essay meditated upon the different grammatical structures in Latin, and yet another was a witty, extended analogy of how learning different languages was akin to acquiring DLCs (downloadable content) in video games. The day that my students read their language memoirs out loud, sharing them with one another, I had to blink back tears at a few moments; so early in the term, this experience felt like all that I could have possibly asked for. My students were being vulnerable and supportive of one another as they reflected on their lifelong relationships with language.
Following the language memoir, which functioned both as a way for students to situate themselves in conversations about language and culture as well as a getting-to-know-you exercise, I wanted students to then start to think about translation. What did it mean to actually translate something? We began our discussion of translation by reading an article on Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey published in The New York Times Magazine by Wyatt Mason. Mason’s article provides a real-life situation in which the skills emphasized in high school English class—close-reading and an understanding of cultural context—are practiced in a high-stakes (as far as literature goes) situation. While Mason’s article delves into some of Wilson’s translation decisions (the article opens with her pondering how to translate Odysseus’s epithet polytropos; another illustrative example discusses the Greek word dmoai, which describes the young female slaves in Odysseus’s palace), the only next logical step in the course was for students to better appreciate the difficulties of translation by practicing it themselves.
Even before planning the course, I had read Ana Menéndez’s essay in Lit Hub, “Are We Different People in Different Languages?”, in which she writes (in part) about teaching a multilingual creative writing course. In just a line, she describes a translation exercise using Alfred Tennyson’s “The Eagle”: “Those students who do not speak another language are asked to rewrite the poem without using the letter “e”, a translation hurdle in itself.” Because my course description had promised students that “they need not have fluency in a language other than English to enjoy this course” (and in fact three out of the eight students in my class did not have fluency in a language other than English), we spent one class period doing this exact exercise. In groups of two or three, my students attempted to rewrite “The Eagle” without any e’s. It was the kind of activity that balances deep, attentive thinking with unencumbered play. One group burst into argument when someone suggested adding another line, and all of the groups ultimately chose to maintain the rhyme scheme and stanza length of the poem. Another group proudly titled their poem “King Bird” and came up with an alternate name for Alfred Tennyson—too many e’s in his name!
I had assumed that Mason’s article on Emily Wilson and the translation exercise would provide students with a basic, but essential understanding: translation is hard. And not only is translation hard, but it is an imperfect art. There are countless ways to translate a text, and each one brings something from the original text into clearer view. And yet, during a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s famously complex essay on translation, “The Translator’s Task”, one of my students vehemently disagreed with Benjamin’s assertion that:
Just as a tangent touches a circle fleetingly and at only a single point, and just as this contact, not the point, prescribes the law in accord with which the tangent pursues its path into the infinite, in the same way a translation touches the original fleetingly and only at the infinitely small point of meaning, in order to follow its own path in accord with the law of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic development.
My student instead compared translation to a tracing of a drawing, or a print of a famous painting. A translation was entirely a reproduction.
Personally, if I believed that translations were mechanical reproductions of works of literature, I would not have written my thesis on a translation, nor would I have proposed this course in the first place. About half of my students were quick to disagree with their classmate, citing Emily Wilson and their own inadequate translations of “The Eagle”. The other half, I could tell, if unable to accept that a translation was a total reproduction of another text, believed that a translation did not possess the same quality of “originality” as the text that was being translated. “It’s halfway in between a copy and the original,” one of them offered. “But would a better translation be closer to the original or the copy?”
The original instigator of this particular discussion pointed to AI technology as evidence that because translation could be accomplished by machines, it wasn’t an act of artistry. Immediately, some of his other classmates disagreed. AI could also generate images, songs, stories, and poems—that didn’t automatically negate the artistry of people who made those things. In fact, it made the artistry of people who made those things (just like translators) more valuable. At this point, the class was bursting with energy—and not the kind of energy that I had hoped a high schoolers’ discussion of Walter Benjamin could generate. In an effort to focus their enthusiasm, I projected ChatGPT 4.0 onto the whiteboard and asked it to rewrite “The Eagle” without any e’s—could it do a better job than any of them had, if this was a purely mechanical task?
At that current moment in time—April 2024—it could not. Several of the versions that GPT-4 generated contained the letter e, and though it maintained a consistent rhyme scheme, many of the versions created four-line stanzas rather than the three-line stanzas my students had insisted were so important to the structure and feel of the poem. I then plugged an English sentence into Translate GPT, ChatGPT’s translation technology, and translated into Spanish, asking my Spanish-speaking students to assess the accuracy of the translation. They unanimously agreed that the translation was subpar, and that they would do it differently, offering some alternate phrases on the spot. One of the primary features of AI, particularly ChatGPT, of course, is that it is always optimizing itself, but it was useful to have a real-time example of how translation could not yet be immediately replaced by technology—because literature itself is not a mechanical reproduction of the world.
While my class’s conversation (or lack thereof) about The World Republic of Letters was disappointing to me, in that it showed me how a text that had essentially sparked the intertwining of my personal and intellectual journeys essentially seemed to mean nothing to my students, I realized that something different was happening in our conversation about ChatGPT. While I had hoped that we might be able to make some sense of “The Translator’s Task” together (and had wrongly assumed that students would accept the inherent originality of a translation), instead they had stumbled upon a fundamental question that interested them more than Benjamin: what does it mean to produce something original?
Over the course of the term, I watched them return to this question through the lens of other texts, too. During a unit I had intended as a postcolonial examination of translations, I assigned Chinua Achebe’s essay “The African Writer and the English Language” in conversation with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s “The Language of African Literature” in order to introduce the idea that different languages carry different, often violent, histories, and therefore stakes. When I called on one of my students to defend his own position in this debate, he—a white, American student—deferred the question, citing his white American identity as a reason that his thoughts on this matter didn’t matter. Was that true? This became the more provocative question of the class period, rather than the direct arguments of Achebe or Ngũgĩ . (Usefully, we returned to this topic in the context of David Foster Wallace’s famous essay, “Authority and American Usage”).
When designing the course, I had imagined it as an exploration of how translation operates. But instead, my students wanted to know how originality operates. Oftentimes, in class, I had the sense that whatever I had planned for the day could go in one of two directions: perfectly (as with the language memoirs, or our translations of “The Eagle”) or completely off the rails (as with our discussion of The World Republic of Letters or “The Translator’s Task”). This made me anxious, and also excited. And in that sense, we were creating something original together—something different from what they had expected when signing up for the course, and something different from what I had expected planning the course. Months later, as I reflect upon it, it feels obvious to me that the central question of the course would be one of authenticity. My students had just undergone a grueling, competitive college admissions process in which they were asked to package themselves into kind, creative, athletic, intellectually engaged young adults in a way that still read as genuine and unpracticed to the highly trained eye of a college admissions officer. That process had concluded, and they were now standing on the precipice of another reinvention: who is the self that would enter their first year of college? And which of those versions was really them?
By the time I met my senior students, translation had already become integral in the narrative of how I saw myself—but that hadn’t yet happened for them, and so they were freer to challenge some of my most basic assumptions about the topic. For their final project, I tried to give them free rein, to encourage them be as original as they wished. They could write a creative essay, an analytical essay, or complete a translation of their own choosing as long as they put themselves in conversation (loosely defined) with at least three of the texts we had discussed over the course of the term. I was fascinated to see how the interests the students began the class with in their language memoirs refracted into new shapes. The student who had grown up in Hong Kong wrote a research-based essay that explored the standardization and modernization of written Chinese. The one who wrote about different grammatical structures in Latin expanded the purview of her final project, producing a personal essay that situated her own understanding of time within the constraints of the English language, and looked beyond English to imagine how other cultures might understand time differently. Perhaps the most ambitious of the projects was a three part translation: a student translated a Terrance Hayes poem into Spanish, a Jorge Luis Borges short story into Georgian, and a poem by the Georgian poet Galaktion Tabidze into English. Some part of me was relieved that at least one of my students was interested enough in the mechanics of translation to choose that option, and that her project was in fact the one that received the most questions, interest, and compliments from her peers, but on a more basic level I knew that I couldn’t claim much credit: she had made her final project entirely her own.
Kena Chavva is a writer and teacher. She grew up in New Jersey and currently lives in San Francisco. You can find her work elsewhere at Bright Wall/Dark Room.
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Read more on the Asymptote blog:
- Teaching and Learning Narrative Identity
- In Conversation: Cristina Serverius on Teaching and Translation
- In Conversation: Natasha Wimmer on Teaching Translation