Conference: Considering Monoculture, M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) and deBuren (the Dutch-Flemish house for culture and debate). February 2020
A reappraisal of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal works on translation from the late 1980s/early ‘90s (in particular Can the Subaltern Speak? and The Politics of Translation). Within the late-capitalist global metropolis, how can the contemporary subaltern speak?
Paper by Sophie J Williamson
Whilst societies presenting as ‘multicultural’ may superficially operate with an authoritative lingua franca, kinship and commonality often remains artificial and precarious. As Adrienne Rich so eloquently put it, ‘[t]his is the oppressor’s language / yet I need it to talk to you’. The efficiency of colonial linguistic violence remains bubbling under the surface. In the field of translation sensitivity is paid to authorship, intent and where authenticity lies; yet these questions crumble into insignificance if we do not first address the inequalities of who has the opportunity to speak and the privilege to be heard.
Whilst it may be seen as favourable to translate texts into the lingua franca, accessible to the largest readership, Spivak asserts that wholesale translation to English is far from democratic: ‘the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan.’[1] In the well-trodden circuits of art fairs and biennales, a lingua franca also exists aesthetically. Works born from vastly different contexts take on a superficial mimicry, a fictitious familiarity of both the art history and subject matter. Mimesis is hard-wired into human perception, using existing knowledge to interpret new or unfamiliar objects, words or artworks; one’s experience of cultural specificity inevitably creates subjective interpretation when translating from one context to another.
For Spivak–stressing the limits of language to translate meaning–rhetoric exists in the silence between and around words; in the fraying edges of language. In the field of translation studies, the pejorative term translatese refers to the awkwardness of unidiomatic translation, such as clunky language or over literal conversion of idioms or syntax: exposing the translator’s ineptitude in authentically translating the meaning of the original. Looking at the work of artists Simon Fujiwara, Joanna Billing, Zadie Xa, Christian Nyampeta, John Akomfrah, Seecum Cheung, Wu Tsang and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, I will explore aesthetic translatese as a space of productive potential.
Accepting and occupying the silence and fraying edges of language, these artists instigate a productive disjuncture, registering the chasm of interpretation. Through practices such as these, can languages between languages be nurtured to sing the unpronounceable nuances of contemporary experience; one which accepts where linguistic and aesthetic language reaches its limits of communicability. Far from being a mode of universal communication or a metalanguage, it is here that hegemonic dominance is shattered, where transaction and translation belongs to no single site and where the movement between languages is the destination in itself.
As we face a reconfigured global society, with widespread ecological migration on an unprecedented scale, urgent cultural concern can no longer singly focus on outdated neoliberal modes of cross-cultural, homogenising dialogue. Instead we must establish a cultural ecosystem that recognises and allows space to hold the geopolitical, and consequently cultural, clashes and miscommunications implicating our immediate and everyday social climate.
If, as Spivak asserts, translation is the most intimate act of reading, far from this being a translatory defeat, it is these chasms in translation, where meaning remains malleable and unconfined, that the empathetic agency of the receiver is called to action. In the somersaults of language and meaning, constantly transferring from one to another – vital, porous, living – cultural or linguistic translation is not a linguistic task to be outsourced to curators or critics; it is a human instinct woven into the fabric of our messy, blurred and unconcluded sense of being.
[1] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993) 182