In this essay, translation is explored as a physical, materialist phenomenon. In comparing the craft of language-transformation to the corporeality of eating and digesting, the role of the translator is expanded beyond a secondary conduit of texts, and posited instead as the owners of a unique, private production.
In her Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Susan Sontag coined the word ‘cosmophagy’, defined as ‘the devouring of the world by consciousness.’ That neologism, physiological instead of cerebral, underscores the appetite so inherent within the act of thinking, a hunger that represents the need to absorb and to take in, but also to digest and to integrate—the outside brought inside, the other made into the self. In considering the relationship between eating and reading, the most common notion is the idea of literature as somehow satiating, or the insistence that books are an essential part of livelihood—but beyond the simplistic conjecture of text as food, correlating the two human acts invites the assertion of the self as a desiring presence, and the body as a capacious methodology of transformation. By affecting our hunger onto the world, we claim a type of ownership over it, and once the materials of the world enter the realm of our senses, they change—becoming irreducibly ours.
Translators are likely to be familiar with this textual ingestion, having spent more time chewing on their words than most. After taking their meal, they are the ones who make a home for the text, carrying it for months or years, witnessing it seep into their own voice, their own imagination. ‘A translator is a professional schizophrenic. . .’ the Hungarian writer Zoltán Pék stated. ‘He is operating in an elevated state of mind,’ which is to say, a state of harbouring multiple minds. When they are humble, many translators will use terms such as I hope or I tried to speak of their work, positioning themselves as simply one flawed interpreter, seeking the approval of the authors that still live inside their heads. This lack of vanity is essential to the craft, which often forces oneself to confront one’s lack of knowledge, fluency, originality, or ability—but it must also work to emphasise the singular inventiveness of each individual translational attempt. The author may be in there, a wonderfully influential companion, but at the end of the day, it’s still your head.
‘I have always found that it was I, not the texts, that had to do the talking,’ Arthur Waley wrote, in reference of his work between English and Chinese. It is difficult for a translator to fully establish their ‘I’ as a creative presence, but in taking responsibility as the only active speaker of a text in its new language, they are refusing to be defeated by the limits of their work’s impossible nature. When considering writing as a function of the body, we face the work’s physical, irreplicable quality. Stories and poems can be shared, but voices cannot; languages can be shared, but consciousnesses cannot. Accepting a global literature, then, is to be inspired, instead of disturbed, by the fact that our words are as unique to us as our bodies.
Though plenty of translation theories have illuminated a personal aspect, from Schopenhauer’s claim that poems can only be rewritten, to Agha Shahid Ali who prioritised emotional resonance above all else, there is an underexplored wealth of translation approaches that engage with creativity through not only the translator’s hermeneutics and style, but with the translator themselves as a cosmophagic phenomenon of metamorphosis. When we consider the activity of writing, there is often a metaphysical—even spiritual—sensibility that is applied to the journey between mind and page: muses appearing like angels, sublime flashes of idea, what André Breton called the words of ‘the shadow mouth.’ The translator, however, is depicted as a solver of puzzles, a logician and master of linguistics—though their work hinges just as equally on those sublime moments of something arriving.
As the relatively young field of translation studies has grown and become more communicative and less transactional, it has accumulated new interdisciplinary and heterogeneous approaches from non-western practitioners, who seek to distribute the power and autonomy of translation to the bodies that are practicing it on their own terms, and which, in turn, results in bolder, more radical works that open up the prospects for an inclusive, generative international literary trade. Isabel C. Gómez, in her monograph Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America, provides an invaluable dossier of poets and writers who have extended translation as a part of their own artistic practice, resulting in works that are rife with experiment, mutation, and continual dialogue. Delineating the processes and ethos of Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, Octavio Paz, and more, Gómez puts together a cohesive theory where ‘readers can see the bite marks of the process, where translators never stay invisible.’
Drawing from Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Cannibalist Manifesto,’ which aims to subvert colonial values by adapting them through a perspective of indigenous liberalisation and self-actualisation, Gómez shows how her collection of writers take external materials to strengthen and evolve their own creative mode, culminating in a destabilisation of language and an ongoing interrogation of how texts can be enlivened, renewed, and embedded with an additional contemporary urgency. When Augusto de Campos translated the works of E. E. Cummings, he took the most difficult and distinctly Anglophone aspects of Cummings’s pieces into Portuguese, breaking apart words and creating sonic resonances that produce altogether different effects, though with the same multiplicity of significations and poignant freedoms that can be found in the original. Thus, de Campos ‘builds a bridge from English to Portuguese for Cummings’—one that does not simply allow the US author to ‘walk’ into Brazil, but impels readers to travel endlessly back and forth from one language to the other, discovering the lapses and juxtapositions that are such powerful portents for discovery.
One may consider that the distinctions between English and Portuguese allow for greater expansions of translational freedom, but as Gómez also illustrates, even resemblant languages maintain space for the innovations of cannibal translation. When Haroldo de Campo translated a protest poem of Octavio Paz’s entitled ‘México: Olimpiada de 1968’ from Spanish to Portuguese, the correspondence between the Mexican and the Brazilian poet displays the latter’s conviction that it must ‘sing’ in its new language. In the essay ‘Translation: Literature and Letters,’ Paz describes his more exacting approach to translating, expressing that ‘the translator knows that his completed effort must reproduce the poem he has before him’; Haroldo, however, takes the very specific address of Paz’s poem—of the Mexican government’s violent crackdown of protestors in 1968—and broadens its scope to include ‘a shared discourse of collective resistance against state oppression,’ allowing it to resonate with the then-Brazilian dictatorship’s growing despotism with subtle word changes, additional emotional tonalities, and slight alterations of perspective; Paz’s ‘Shame / is anger / turned against oneself’ (translated with fidelity by Mark Strand) becomes, via de Campos, ‘Shame is anger / turned against ourselves.’
Hunger in its manifestation displays a need—a desperation, but ontologically, it is our most direct connection with everything beyond our body. Emmanuel Levinas described the act of eating as something which serves to define both ourselves and the other; it shows us that we can become one with what we consume, but also demonstrates that we are not what we consume; we do not transform into what we take into ourselves, and acknowledging such distinctions is what allows us to have a more solid grasp of ourselves. And thus ‘the morality of “earthly nourishments” is the first morality,’ Levinas suggests, for it illustrates most fundamentally our relationship to the things we take in—and thus our definitions of will, control, respect, and self-regard. In the ‘Thirteen Theses of Cannibal Translation’ that opens her book, Gómez begins with: ‘Cannibal translation devours texts, norms, and taboos,’ and ends with: ‘Cannibal translation is loving, expresses admiration, attention, and care.’ Translation has always begun with wonder—just as appetite begins with a dreamy craving—and as such it is important to note that we owe the objects of our consumption an ethics that is not overwhelmed by our captivation: that our wanting of them is not their definition of being, but simply our regard. Learning that separation is what keeps our art of translation whole and passionate in and of itself, while letting the original be as free, wonderful, and full of potential as it has always been.
Xiao Yue Shan is a writer, editor, and translator. shellyshan.com
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