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Near where I used to live in Brooklyn, there was a food court that advertised itself as the home of “global eats.” It offered jollof rice, jianbing, and jerk, all given a hipster sheen and consumed in an attractively industrial setting. Wandering around deciding between cuisines, choosing arepas over zabb wings, was an oddly detached experience. Obviously this wasn’t a meaningful engagement with Venezuelan culture, but perhaps that’s a lot to expect from lunch. I ate the arepas, which were mildly overpriced and delicious. It’s difficult not to succumb to commodification, which is omnipresent, and has such attractive packaging.
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Who are translators in the “world” of “world literature”? Are we meant to be tour guides, carefully planning each itinerary to allow the visitor to experience their journey with as little friction and fuss as possible? Outlandish as this sounds, it’s not far from the more common metaphor of the translator as ambassador, as if such vast gaps divide literary cultures that delicate negotiations are required to bridge them.
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Some translators mention the help they receive from “native informants,” individuals from the source who can fill the gaps in their linguistic and cultural knowledge. The term itself makes me cringe with its colonial overtones, but also I can’t help wondering, as someone who often translates within a community and language I grew up with, if that makes me my own native informant. Who exactly am I informing, and of what?
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I once received a personalized rejection from a literary journal in which the editors said they’d enjoyed the piece I’d translated, but couldn’t “find their footing early in the story,” and suggested I talk to the writer about “placement” to help “Western readers” figure out “where we’re at.” In other words, the short story—or at least its setting—was not Chinese enough for them. The first few pages were set in a bar, and it was unclear to me how different they expected a bar in China to be from one in America. Perhaps I should have said so, but instead I sent them another story by the same author, one with a more obviously “Chinese” setting. They didn’t publish that one either.
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A review of a Korean book complained that its “specific Koreanness” was “difficult to locate,” and mused “Was I certain, when reading these poems, that they were Korean? I’m not sure I was. Might Korean literature in translation need to be more Korean than in its original?” But could we not take as a given that the work will have been influenced by the sum of the author’s experiences, which would include her language and the country of her upbringing and residence, without placing upon her the burden of representing her entire culture?
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My delight at seeing two novels by Thai writers reviewed in a national newspaper quickly curdled from the orientalism of the review, which referred gratuitously to “the chili-laced cuisine” and “hazy heat” of Thailand, and said one of the books rendered Bangkok “exotic but not exoticized.” What could that last phrase mean? That the author had not exoticized Bangkok, but not to worry, the critic had done so herself?
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In Sympathy for the Traitor, Mark Polizzotti asserts that “artificially translated locales makes the poem feel more foreign and distant, and therefore less impactful, because less real: we can believe that a place in China is called Chō-fū-Sa, but not Long Wind Sand.” In this schema, then, the translation must retain a kernel of the exotic in order to be convincing; translating names renders them legible, and therefore insufficiently Other to satisfy this condition.
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There is a relatively narrow range of distances a planet can be from its sun if it is to support life. Too close, and its water will evaporate; too far, and it will be frozen solid throughout. The term for this band is “the Goldilocks Zone.” I sometimes wonder if the apparatus of world literature is performing a similar balancing act, positioning texts to be far enough from the dominant culture to provide spice, but not so distant that their unknowability becomes threatening.
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In What We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami, David Karashima refers to the 1994 Richard Avedon photoshoot that appeared in The New Yorker under the headline “Authors! Authors!” in which Haruki Murakami is the only person of the fourteen pictured who does not write in English, and quotes the translator Stephen Snyder as suggesting that “Murakami, strategically positioned between Minimalists Bobbie Ann Mason and Ann Beattie . . . serves as a safe and familiar marker of the foreign.” Looking at the photo, Murakami is on the edge of the picture where it wraps around onto the next page, and so appears twice—both times with his body sliced in two. On the first page, he looks slightly wary, hand over his mouth; on the next, his posture has changed: eyes down, arms folded defensively, body angled slightly away from Ann Beattie. You wouldn’t call him at ease, but he does seem to fit into this line-up, more or less.
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bell hooks tells us that “the commodification of difference promotes paradigms of consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other’s history through a process of decontextualization.” The idea of reading translated literature with the sole aim of learning about other countries and cultures sounds to me not like an act of empathy, but a utilitarian gleaning of surface knowledge, an instrumentalized exchange rather than a longer conversation. Conquest, not contact.
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Crazy Rich Asians was cheered in many quarters as a victory for diversity, yet its representation is shallow, an attenuated version of Singapore tailored for Western consumption (tellingly, the film was backed by the Singapore Tourist Board). At one point, Ken Jeong, playing a Singaporean man living in Singapore, says, “I don’t have an accent” when he actually sounds unmistakably American. Many American viewers will not have noticed this incongruity, regarding their own voices as uninflected and neutral, and seeing no reason why a person on the other side of the planet shouldn’t sound exactly the same as them.
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Robert Frost once told an interviewer, “I don’t like foreign languages that I haven’t had. I don’t read translations of things.” So much for taking the road less traveled.
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After watching an experimental off-Broadway play, I ran into an acquaintance in the audience who asked about the book I was holding. I started to explain it was a translation from Spanish by a friend, but got no further than the setting when she cut me off with “Oh no, that’s too esoteric for me.” We’d just watched an extremely surreal American play, but the mere idea of a Spanish-language novel set in eighteenth-century Paraguay was too far outside the range of her experience to be worth considering. This was an interesting lesson in the containment of strangeness—how some people used to comfort wish to experience the unfamiliar within strictly limited boundaries, like a swimming pool fed by the sea, with anything truly wild or threatening kept safely at bay.
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I don’t want to paint too dark a picture. There has been progress, and many brilliant writers, translators, editors, publishers, critics, and readers are doing the hard work of sustained engagement with literatures across the world on equal terms—but individual effort can only achieve so much when the wider conversation is so relentlessly inward-looking. Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating “world literature” as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?
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In Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God (tr. Marjam Idriss), the Norwegian protagonist travels to Kyoto and finds that “people’s behaviour here, their tradition, their religion are so different that I can’t see my reflection in them. I’ve disappeared almost completely. If I haven’t already forgotten or erased myself, I can do it here.” And perhaps that is the best way to approach such encounters: to allow the effacement of the self, to engage with ego-free openness so there is space for something new and magical to take place.
