—Raluca Tănăsescu
Raluca Tănăsescu (RT): My first question is related to your experiences of language dynamics growing up in Ireland. We know many things about Michael Cronin the brilliant translation studies academic but I think readers would like to know how your Irish upbringing led to your work in translation theory. Did translation play a role in your youthful scholarly interests or was there something else that triggered all this remarkable work?
I suppose the first thing to say is that I grew up in a household where there were two languages: English—this hyper-global language spoken by hundreds of millions of speakers—and then Irish—spoken daily by 200,000 speakers or so. Irish was my mother’s language and English was my father’s language. So I think from a very early age I had this kind of stereoscopic or binocular experience of the world where, on the one hand, you have the world as seen through this minority language and then the world as mediated through the majority language, English. There was also a kind of sensation as a child growing up, where, on the one hand, you had a whole set of stories, of historical and cultural references that were kind of bound up with the history and the development of the island itself, these proverbs, references to people and place names in the minority language which had me very much embedded in the place that I grew up in. And then, on the other hand, there was English, which is important to consider in the context of the 1960s in Ireland, as the country was coming out of a long period of economic stagnation and things were beginning to happen. The country was beginning to modernize. My father was an electrical engineer, so we were very much caught up in this narrative of modernization. And English was the language of space travel, it was the language of popular music, the language of a great deal of change. So there was to some extent a tension between these two worlds. I was constantly moving between these two language worlds, to use Heidegger’s phrase. One of my early monographs was on travel and translation, where I talked about the traveller as a translator and the translator as a traveller; translation is a kind of travel account that is rooted in one’s own experience of mentally and psychologically and emotionally travelling between two languages. In later life, I was particularly sensitive to the question of minority and minoritized nations and of translation studies itself because of this experience inhabiting two worlds—something that I still feel to this day—which was further complicated when I went to secondary school and I began to study French. There was suddenly another language coming into my world, a language that would allow me to conceptualize things.
I found French to be an extremely powerful language insofar as it allowed me access to new bodies of thought and literature, and gave me a way of thinking in broader conceptual terms about the world. Both English and Irish are languages that are supremely invested in empirical details and the material reality of things. French can do that as well, but with a greater ability to look at broader questions or frameworks. By the time I reached the end of my secondary level schooling, these three languages were very much in my wheelhouse. I had an acute sense of how languages provide you with these different world views, different language worlds. It may seem slightly odd, but translation did not arise as an object of interest before my doctoral work, which was basically about the concept of play in literature and language: I was looking at this question of how, for Quebec novelists, contact with English was both a source of creative opportunity as well as a form of linguistic oppression.
I was also thinking about the case of Joyce in Ireland and about his multilingual world, and how he made this an opportunity for creative play. While looking at these authors and at how certain English phrases would get translated into French or the other way around, I began to think more explicitly about the mechanism or the nature of translation itself and to reflect more deeply on my own past, my own experiences growing up in Ireland. I published a few articles in journals based on my PhD work, but my first monograph was a translation history of the island of Ireland. There was a phrase that James Joyce used to say as he was talking about Tara, which is the historic, sacred centre of the island of Ireland, and about Holyhead—the port where a lot of migrants to England would go to leave North Wales. He said that the shortest route to Tara is through Holyhead. In other words, you have to leave or stand outside your culture in order to grasp the importance of certain phenomena. To some extent, I had to undertake that journey to Quebec to realize certain things about the translational dimension of my childhood.
RT: My second question is related to the driving force behind your encyclopedic work in translation: you wrote about translation and the movies, translation and identity, translation in the digital age, and eco-translation, to name but a few. What is the main thrust behind all this work in translation? What strikes me reading your work on translation is an overwhelming sense of empathy.
I think what has always driven it—although, to some extent it’s something that you think about post hoc rather than before—is the abiding concern for linguistic and cultural plurality that I feel very, very deeply and profoundly. The world is such a richer, more exciting, more interesting, and ultimately more sustainable place because of the variety of languages and cultures on the planet. Looking at cinema, technology, and travel, I was very aware of the extraordinary capacity of translation as a prism through which to think about language, contact, minority, and language stimulation. There is the bright side—which is assisting language renewal, introducing people to biblio-diversity, to the plurality of literatures of the world. Looked at this way, translation is an enabler. But we also need to reflect on the dark side of translation as a form of imperialism, a colonizing impulse, the forced assimilation of people to particular languages, and to particular cultures. One of the things that struck me most vividly when I was looking at things like travel, at the phenomenon of globalization, at debates on identity, was to find that translation hardly figured. When you look at Hollywood cinema, for instance, there is the assumption that it is all about English; that there is no translation really. But when you examine some of the most popular, most successful Hollywood films—Stagecoach, Star Wars, Oppenheimer—you find that the questions of linguistic pluralism, migration, and translation are absolutely at the heart of so many of these films. So this kind of absence of translation is a concern in so many of the great debates that dominate our time. On everything from migration, identity politics, and globalization to the ecological future of our planet, it seems to me that translation and translation perspectives have very, very important things to say. I certainly think that what was animating me was a kind of profound commitment, going back to my childhood experiences, to forms of biocultural diversity, and to the question of how do we think or how do we use translation as a way of maintaining and promoting that kind of diversity which constitutes the essential richness of what it means to be human on this earth.
Chris Tănăsescu [MARGENTO] (CT): Now we will dive into the specifics of your work. Some of its key concepts have already emerged in this fascinating quick panorama of your life and work that you just painted. What strikes me is the musical composition of your work, the recurrence of certain motifs. For instance, in Translation and Identity you speak in a very interesting way about entropy. You look into the ways in which our perception of diversity might actually bear the imprint of certain, you say, ways of sentiment regarding the evolution of literature rather than reality. Then, over a decade later in Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene, there is a literal illustration of this approach of textual reprise, in which you reproduce some of the paragraphs in the earlier book to just, immediately after that, veer into a slightly different direction, focusing more on minorities and minoritized languages and the ways in which travel is related to that, and the ways in which children’s literature can enchant the world just as minority languages do. Is this something that you developed as a compositional strategy early on and came back to years later?
Indeed, the form of the writing itself is something that is very important to me. I remember when I was an undergraduate and I was reading a lot of secondary literature on the literature courses and I found a lot of the professionals’ writing just absolutely stultifying, dead, dry, pedantic in the worst sense of the word. There was a kind of lack of grace in the language, and I used to yearn for the direct citations from the literary works. Then I would be finally able to breathe because I would be reading somebody who actually knew how to write. One of the things that I was conscious of when I started writing is that I wanted the writing itself to be the object of great care. I have long been involved with literary magazines in Ireland, with various kinds of literary adventures and I have done a lot of reviewing over the years, so I was very conscious of the need to be able to communicate in a way that was compelling for the reader. Whether you succeed or not, that’s for the reader to decide. A lot of my writing on particular topics has always reflected the way my mind works, which tends to be quite associative: I’ll start off with a particular concept and then other ideas kind of cluster around it. While I am exploring an idea, I want the reader to be there with me, to explore the idea together. The kind of tightly structured book with endless typologies and a hierarchical way of structuring the argument is just quite foreign to my way of writing. People like George Steiner and Susan Sontag have been key influences. These recurring motifs—very often you are not aware of them. When I was writing the eco-translation book it occured to me that I had actually talked about ecology in the translation and identity book in 2006. The themes have obviously been there from the beginning in a barely conscious way and they come back in various forms. Each time they come back, their reprise is different because your thinking has moved on.
I certainly think that there should be pleasure in the act of reading. Though some of my language can be quite dense and complex, it derives from a formal concern—not formal in terms of structure, but in its aesthetic engagement with the reader, that in some way gives the reader a sense of how my mind works on particular problems.
CT: I would like to ask you to expand just a little bit on an example you gave earlier. Before eco-translation you developed the concept of ecology of translation, speaking of minorities and their right to have control over the ways in which literature circulates and text and translation in journals circulate in and out of their languages and cultures. And then here you come with an updated acceptance of the term. I think it would be great for our readers if you could develop a little bit on the concepts that are employed in this revisioning of your own concept, such as translating food or translating animals.
I think that the initial way in which I thought about ecology in the early 2000s was largely within the framework of arguments around endangered languages and biocultural diversity and so on. My argument there was that the real problem for minority or minoritized languages is not the fact of contact, but the nature of contact. The problem is who controls the nature of the translation, of the relationship with language. There is always contact, but the problem is the nature of the contact and the power asymmetry surrounding it. Around 2016, I was reviewing Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman for a journal here in Ireland while in Paris on a visiting professorship to one of the universities there. Over three or four days I had a series of illuminations about this question, which stemmed from this core idea that Braidotti has in her work: a critique of anthropocentrism, of that notion that humans, particularly white male humans, are at the top of this kind of pyramid and that you have all the other subordinate groups, women, animals, the colonized and so on, who are in inferior positions—for reasons partly to do with the Judeo-Christian heritage that only humans had souls or were in the image of God and nobody else.
And then we have the division between body and mind, and the idea that the distinguishing features of the human, partly built on one of Aristotle’s ideas (the notion of logos), are that speech and reason are the two things that define the human and that they are concentrated in the mind, therefore the body is subordinate to the mind. The legacy of Cartesian dualism and the Judeo-Christian heritage meant that there was this hierarchy, that the relationship between humans and the non-human was very much a vertical one. And, of course, with the climate emergency (the climate catastrophe!) that dualism became particularly apparent, and it has bitten humans hard. So Braidotti advocates for the development of a subjectivity, where our relationships are not vertical, but horizontal; and in this new form of subjectivity, we don’t see ourselves as superior but as people who coexist with all these other entities which make our world possible, liveable, and sustainable.
As I was thinking about this, the first thing I did was to formulate my own term for this—I called it transversal subjectivity. It then occurred to me that the fundamental emphasis should be on the specific nature of relationships and relationality. Braidotti was obviously deeply influenced by Deleuze and Guattari in the emphasis on relationality, but it seemed to me that there was a problem when she talked about relationships with entities that are radically ontologically and epistemically different from ourselves. We actually need to think about the nature of this relationship, to establish some viable form of coexistence, which is precisely what translation does. Translation is about communication across difference, sometimes across forms of radical difference. Therefore, in thinking through this transversal subjectivity, which is the heart of a new way of thinking about where we situate ourselves on the planet, what needs to take centre stage is translation. Translation tries to understand difference in order to establish the possibility of some kind of communicative relationship; it does not involve the abolition of difference. This seems to me a crucial point, because, for example, when you talk about things like interspecies communication, it’s not the idea that somehow you would end up with a kind of Google Translate device for your pussycat and that you would then understand everything that the kitty is saying. Animals from other species are radically different from us in their physiological structure and their cognitive capacities, so the idea is not an abolition of these radical differences to create some form of naive Disney-like communicative instantaneity—that would clearly be ridiculous. What’s not ridiculous is the fact that already as humans we have had a communicative impact on all of the non-human species around us (just as we saw during COVID that micro-organisms can have an extraordinary influence on human lives and on the communicative relationship that our body is already engaged in through the microbiome that we all have) and it’s because forms of communication and communicative relationships already exist; there are bio-semiotic forms of translation across different organisms that allow us to survive. What characterizes the project of translation is, on the one hand, a form of revelation and, on the other, a form of engagement insofar as it makes us humans aware of the already existing communicative relationships in which we are embedded—beyond the simply human world.
And for me, that is as much about animals, rivers, and streams, as it is about the technologies that we use and the other forms of non-human objects that we engage with. The engagement is with using the translation paradigm as a way of much more consciously and self-reflexively engaging with the possibility of establishing communicative relationships with other species and with the more-than-human world and thinking. For example, in the case of forests and the fungal networks that allow trees to communicate with one other—sometimes called the Wood Wide Web—how can we understand our role in that? What are the forms of translation that are going on there that we can think about and reflect on? To me, this is important for creating the basis for a resilient future. A lot of political scientists are now talking about the need for what they call post-Holocene political institutions. If we think about the places we inhabit that we need to take into consideration: the fields, the forests, along with the species and the object world, our machines, our devices, our buildings, we must ask how do we construct a sustainable future for that place? In turn, this then means that we must find ways of giving voice to the more-than-human world, and if we think about how we give voice to the more-than-human world then we’ve got to think about who will be the translators, the interpreters for that more-than-human world. This involves something that has existed for thousands of years in indigenous cultures and indigenous thinking, where they have actively reflected on the voice of the river, the voice of the forest, the voice of animals, of giving voice and respecting that voice, respecting not eliminating difference, respecting that difference. And then I think in terms of the creation of a kind of deliberative ecological democracy and the related institutions. At the heart of these dynamics would be translation.
CT: Some of the things that you said brought to mind your concept of company of strangers in Translation in the Digital Age and the ways in which communities are not pre-established values but are created. Back then, you were referring mainly to human cultures and to the company of friendly strangers going not only beyond differences but even beyond gaps in translation. In the meantime, I see here an opening, an expansion of the concept, including in those networks, the worldwide web and the voices of the rivers, and I see the ecology of translation now as the development of earlier concepts that were already very relevant in terms of community emergence.
I took the notion of company of strangers from the title of a book by a colleague and friend, Barry McCrea, where he talks about how a lot of novels in the late 18th century and the early 19th century were based on the idea of the orphaned child, the foundling that gets some kind of education. But what such a novel is mainly about is the idea of re-establishing the proper genealogical connection and so we eventually find that the man or woman is in fact the rightful heir of some moneyed aristocrat. And then it all ends in a good wedding or marriage where all of these things are set right: we get the structure of familial inheritance reestablished. In the late 19th century and early 20th century a new model emerges with Fagin’s pickpockets in Dickens, Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus’ meeting the older Jewish man Bloom in Ulysses—and then with Marcel in À la recherche du temps perdu, and the gay community in Paris. Here what you get is a model of affinity or affiliation, which is based on this community of strangers, whereas previously the only form of conceivable community was the tight network of the family. Now it is this community of strangers that becomes your family, suggesting a new model for modernity. I was suggesting that as a model for what happens when you translate: you create a kind of company with these strange texts and strange cultures. This relates to an idea advanced by a thinker I mentioned on a number of occasions in the eco-translation book—Timothy Morton, an ecological theorist—who argues that when we go to other cultures what really propels us very often can be strangeness rather than familiarity. What strikes us is the things that we don’t find in our own code; it’s strangeness that often attracts us. And I think it is that strangeness that we need to think about in translation, the strangeness that often attracts you, the initial point of contact. To some extent, one of the things about the eco-translational paradigm is that it is a renewal of that pact of strangeness, of radical alterity, which is at the heart of a lot of our thinking and of a lot of writing over the centuries in terms of how we engage with other languages and other cultures. The French thinker Victor Segalen dwelt on the notion of the exotic in a series of essays. He said it’s when I least know you that the desire to know you is all the more intense. Curiosity about the radical difference is why I see translation itself as one of the primary expressions of the desire for knowledge.
CT: Right, fascinating! Speaking of strangeness versus familiarity, in your writings you even argued in favour of not so much genealogy but what emerges in dialogue, etymologically elucidated as a gap to be crossed. By means of translation. Which has to do with a new paradigm, like the one you just mentioned. And, in the same spirit of revisiting or doing reprises of your own concepts, I’m thinking of the way in which you revisited Franco Moretti’s distinction between, or rather binary of, the tree and the wave. While speaking of micro-cosmopolitanism, you said, well, that the house is in and of itself a wave, moreover, a particle and a wave at the same time. Just like electrons in physics. There is indeed all this diversity of fields that you are able to connect and, quite relevant in the context is your concept of hologrammatic translation and the fractal configuration of the latter. This sounds perhaps even more relevant in the meantime as it speaks to the ways in which the holographic principle has been advanced as possibly bringing together astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and quantum computing. Moreover, within a technological framework, and specifically a digital one, this translates into . . . translation being the very core of digitality as being essentially about convertibility. There is a lot for the reader to discover in your writings on multiple transdisciplinary levels. Do you pursue that consciously?
At the beginning of our interview, when answering another of your questions, I was talking very much about the notion of languages and cultures, and the contact and engagement with them, their intersection, and thus thinking about translation as a way of looking at, and negotiating, the passage from one to another. But I think there’s also another very different way of thinking about translation, which involves this extraordinary paradigm or mode of inquiry that allows you to look across so many different disciplines. I think of this translation as a sort of movement. For me in particular, this makes sense as I grew up in a house where my father was an engineer and my mother a teacher, so science and the humanities were both there in various ways in the household. This gave me that kind of omnivorous curiosity about the world and the different ways we can look at it and explore it. Translation is one of the ways of bringing together all of these different disciplines from political science and quantum physics to areas of mathematics such as geometry, topology, and so on. I mean a way to gather insights from these different subjects and bring them to bear on particular problems. And I found that the translation paradigm was something that gave me the possibility to explore all these different ideas. When I first came across Mandelbrot’s notion of fractal geometry, I remember thinking to myself that this is an extraordinary kind of paradigm that allows me to examine smaller or minority cultures, or rural areas or places that were kind of off the beaten track. With that, you have a radically different way of conceptualizing that would point not to their reductiveness, or not to their being closed in in their essentialism, but to their dynamic, endlessly complex nature.
Hence the notion of the micro-cosmopolitan in opposition to macro-cosmopolitanism, the cosmopolitanism from above. For the macro-cosmopolitan, you go from a small, rural, “backward,” area to the Metropolitan City, the capital of the empire or the former capital of the empire. And then you rub up against all these other people coming from the ethnic warehouses distributed across the empire, and that’s how you are turned into a proper cosmopolitan subject. I found that notion deeply disturbing. But in thinking through Mandelbrot’s notion of the fractal, I began to look at particular places, such as very remote islands off the West Coast of Europe, and saw all of these influences feeding into those islands so that they were already deeply complex and historically layered places in a palimpsest-like way. As Mandelbrot would say, the degree of complexity is constant across different scales. And this for me is still important as an idea in terms of fighting particular kinds of xenophobic antimigration discourse—the notion that migrants are coming in and destroying the essential character of a particular place. Because if you take pretty much any place on the planet and do a form of deep mapping and vertical travelling, you begin to travel down through layers of history and cultural and linguistic contact that have shaped that place, everything from the tiny village to a large town. And what you find again and again and again is this fractal complexity of all of these cultures and influences that are coming in from so many different places. So the past has always been migratory, just as the future will always be migratory. But the thing is that we need to find ways of representing people’s situatedness, their placedness, in a way that will give them pride rather than make them feel that they’re being scorned or treated with contempt or condescension. So, for me, this notion was a way of giving people pride in where they were and who they were in their inherited complexity rather than their imaginary purity. It just shows how an idea that is discovered, say, in mathematics, can be applied through the translational prism to make possible a different perspective on the question of migration, which is such a key one for us today.
CT: So true, indeed. And also a timely and much needed approach. In a world of, like you mentioned, xenophobia and racism and far right in politics, your work strikes me as a sort of beacon of good light and, sometimes, good news. Translation emerges in your response to such challenges as a possible way to make things better and, moreover, to advance concrete, tangible solutions. One of these solutions, particularly in speaking of subjects and disciplines, is your model of transitional universities, whereby, in your most recent book, Eco-Translation, you envisage a sort of transdisciplinarity of the future. Translation would go, in such universities, hand in hand with computer science and natural sciences and comparative literature, and so on and so forth. That model is illustrative of what I would call the operational optimism informing your work, a well-tempered optimism totally aware of the huge challenges of our time and coming up with very specific solutions to those challenges. Solutions that address not only academia. In a previous publication, Translation and Identity, for instance, you propounded a model for the modern city in which people coming from various places will find in translation a working interface between their diverse backgrounds and their different experience as they rebuild together the place and its emerging communities. There is significant optimism in such models, right?
Yes. Well, I grew up as a child in the 1960s and 1970s, and in 1968, the conflict broke out on the island of Ireland and thousands of people died and tens of thousands of people suffered life-changing injuries. Many more people were traumatized by thirty years of violence. And one of the things that such violence can school you in, paradoxically, is the necessity of hope. Because to abandon hope means deaths without end, an endless burying. So, in a strange way, the only way out is hope. That experience shaped a lot of my thinking and maybe, without wishing to overstate things, gave it a certain urgency. When I was writing I felt certain things had to be said and had to be articulated, because that was the only way of sustaining hope—a way out of particular predicaments. And you mentioned, Chris, the notion of the transitional—and also terrestrial—university which I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on in recent times and basically the question I’m asking myself there is that given the sheer scale of the climate catastrophe and the urgency of the climate emergency and the thinking about what kind of world our children or grandchildren may have as time is running out, I find it extraordinary this lack of urgency in higher education institutions where things are still kind of business as usual. I mean, of course, every university now has its sustainability policy, so they’ll talk about recycling or renewables and all that, but really it’s a kind of greenwashing. Every university has its rhetoric of sustainability, but the scale of the problem is such that we need to radically reimagine the university. So one of the proposals I had was what I call the elemental university, based on the different elements: fire, air, earth, water. For instance, in the water faculty, you’d have literature people, you would have computational people, you would have physics people, you would have biology people, because all of them have something relevant to say about water. And of course, without water, we perish. Air and water are fundamental to our existences, so why are they not the fundamental structuring principles of our educational systems and how we operationalize our disciplines? And so one things I’ve been thinking about is how we can reimagine the university for the age of the Anthropocene.
I think one of the unfortunate consequences of a lot of the climate debate has been, I think, a tendency to concentrate almost excessively or uniquely on instrumentalist solutions, say, a particular kind of techno fix or the quantification of carbon emissions, or trading, and so on. And of course, these are crucial. But if it was just a question of presenting people with evidence and facts, we wouldn’t be in a climate emergency. We wouldn’t be facing climate catastrophe. What’s acting as a serious brake on our ability to act is that we don’t have a compelling story of what a post-growth society would look like; we just find it so hard to imagine it. And because of what I would call a narrative deficit, people are just pretty much going on as usual with their recycling. But that is completely inadequate to the scale of the task. This is where I see the current humanities, in particular, translation studies, as having a hugely important role to play: in their construction of new forms of mythology and new narratives. Because that’s what we do in the humanities. We think about, we write, we reflect on, we investigate, we rhyme, we put into music stories. And we think about humans. Humans are storied beings. This is how we make sense of our own lives. This is how we make sense of the lives of our loved ones, our dependents . . . And it’s because we’ve constructed a story with all the beings around us. The thing though is that we currently have a story about human aspiration that is destroying us, and we need to come up with a more compelling story about humanness and human aspiration that will allow us not only to exist, not only to survive, but also, I think, to flourish.
CT: So true. Thank you so much. Well, the way in which you have in writing that two-pronged sense of urgency and hope already transpires in the way you speak to us about such matters. And not only. When for instance one opens a book on digital cultures the prevailing terms they will encounter are “platform capitalism” and “control” and “data extraction,” and even “algorithms of oppression.” So for me at least, personally, when I open a book on a related subject, and I am talking about your book Translation in the Digital Age now, I am elated to read about . . . the revolution! Oh yeah! An age of confusion, you say, but a kind of confusion that invites fecundity and revolutionary creativity. And in that respect, I think you already provide those much-needed narratives you just mentioned, narratives of creative togetherness informed by translation. You are, in that respect, a foremost public figure as well. Internationally speaking, you are invited on a regular basis to give keynotes and talks at conferences and other major events on your work in translation studies and beyond. In fact, you’ll have to run right after this interview to catch a plane to get to such an international event—and thanks so much again for your availability and generosity, by the way. But nationally speaking as well, you have always been a very active Irish man of letters. You served for years as the Director of the Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation at Trinity College Dublin, and previously, Director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University. You curate and chair widely covered events. A couple of months back we—Raluca and I—attended one such event featuring the widely praised Irish writer Sebastian Barry and five of his European translators. You are also very active on a weekly basis contributing literary reviews to The Irish Times. How do you manage to do so many things and juggle so many impressive projects and initiatives?
I do feel, as someone who works in a public university that’s paid for by the taxpayer and by the state, that I have a public duty. I have access to certain resources, to a knowledge base, and so on, and I want to put that knowledge at the service of the wider community. That can be done, in one way, through a daily newspaper disseminating ideas about literature as I mainly write about literature in translation and thus try to open my readers’ eyes to literature from other cultures and other languages. And then there’s also, as I said from the outset, the duty I have, as a speaker of the Irish language, to make people on the island and elsewhere, who are not speakers of the language, aware of the value and importance of the language for our future. And also maybe there is the idea of travel in two directions. You know, when I travel elsewhere it’s to bring that kind of major-minor experience to bear on debates in other places, in other countries, and to become part of that World Republic of Letters that Pascale Casanova talks about, but similarly when I’m speaking in public here in Ireland about language and cultural identity and resilience and ecological questions the task is to bring what I’ve learned from different languages and literatures and cultures to bear on debates here. I feel very strongly that when you have a particular position in a public institution, you have a civic duty to contribute to matters of public importance.
And for me, of course, this involves translation. One of the reasons for the very worrying rise in xenophobia, in racism, in very sinister forms of political expression, is that very often progressive and democratic forces in societies haven’t been able to translate their ideas into a language that is understandable by the wider public. And I also think one of the things that very regressive forces have been spectacularly good at is translation. They have been able to translate people’s anger, their despair, their sense of dispossession, into images, pictures, stories—words that have immediate resonance. It is a very, very effective form of translation, and I think that one of the things that inhibits progressive forms of thought is not finding the right language. I think that there’s a real translational task to be done for those forces that want forms of harmonious, peaceful, productive coexistence on the planet; those progressive forces need to give a lot more thought to the question of translation and how they translate these ideas into an idiom. An idiom that is readily accessible to everybody in the society, not just a kind of self-congratulatory subsection of that society.
CT: Fantastic. Thank you so much again!
I really enjoyed the conversation. It’s lovely to talk to people who have a detailed knowledge of the work.
RT: Many thanks from me as well. May I ask if you have a next project in the works right now?
Yes, I do. It is more of an Irish book, but it’s about islandness. A lot of my compatriots often forget that they’re living on an island; they have what I call mainland hubris. And when they think about islands, they think about the small ones off the west coast, like Inishmore or Arranmore . . . There are all kinds of complex reasons for this hubris that have to do with colonization, with linguistic trauma, and so on. I argue that we need to recover what I call island humility, because our islands are sinking and the waters are rising. And we need to recover a sense of islandness and of ecological sovereignty, because a lot of our history has been about territorial sovereignty—you know, what belongs to the British, what belongs to us . . . But people are fighting over land, and that land is going underwater. I want to replace that notion of territorial sovereignty with the notion of ecological sovereignty. So that all those people living on the island think about ways of doing things that will ensure the material continuation of the island itself. And that means recovering things like our maritime history and not being so focused on terrestrial histories and so on. That’s the next book, an island book.
