Review of 𝑉𝑖𝑜𝑙𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑃ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑎
“[A] concrete act of collective impatience, a refusal to wait any longer,” begin Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang in the introduction, drawing parallels between the impetus of this anthology of essays on literary translation and the toppling of the statue of trans-Atlantic slave trader Edward Colston by Black Lives Matter activists. Titled with Fanonian allusion, Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation is both comforting and discomforting to read, especially for translators of colour and those from the contentiously labeled “Global South.”
The richness of this anthology, which blurs the historical and the personal, the longform and the fragmentary, the critical and the experiential, stems from the variety of its essays, structurally and topically. All the while, it remains coherent and, more importantly, accessible. For instance, it opens with the collaborative collage of Gitanjali Patel and Nariman Youssef, entitled “All the Violence It May Carry on its Back: A Conversation about Literary Translation,” providing context and a strong introductory grounding.
Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation. Eds. Kavita Bhanot & Jeremy Tiang. London: Tilted Axis Press, 2022.
In “’Blackness’ in French: On Translation, Haiti, and the Matter of Race,” Kaiama L. Glover’s autotheoretical notes on translating exiled Haitian novelist, poet, and essayist René Depestre as well as the conversational interview (“Considering the Dystranslation of Zong!”) on dystranslation—unapologetically translating with unintelligibility—with M. NourbeSe Philip and Barbara Ofosu-Somuah add a distinct, possibly postmodernist, flavor. Elisa Taber’s exploration on untranslatability, or the refusal to be translated, is also a compelling call to action.
While Khairani Barokka, who was my editor at Modern Poetry in Translation, interweaves the decolonization of translation with disability justice and indigeneities in “Right to Access, Right of Refusal: Translation of/as Absence, Sanctuary, Weapon,” Anton Hur does not mince words on the fallacies of readership. On the perpetually referenced but invisible “English reader,” a metaphorical stand-in for the “superego of whiteness,” Hur writes, “’beautiful language’ […is] a flat and overly ‘clear’ pseudo-Hemingway pastiche of workshop-ready minimalism.”
Perhaps the best revelation to me were the essays of Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi (“Preserving the Tender Things”) and Mona Kareem (“Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations: On the Colonial Phenomenon of Rendition as Translation”). Siddiqi’s visual essay is incisive, cutting through different issues, from the mythologies of ancestral memory to the non-human and the phrasal oxymoron of “decolonising translation” given its colonial past—and present.
On the other hand, Kareem’s “Western Poets Kidnap Your Poems and Call Them Translations” exposes “textual violence”—or “heinous practices” in Hur’s words—committed by whiteness and Westernness against that which is The Other. The poems are given a second life by being birthed into the Anglophone readership, calling attention to a problematic legacy of “bridge translators,” from Ezra Pound to Ted Hughes, from Tracy K Smith’s “rendition” of Yi Lei to Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante. On white translators, whether they’re culturally and linguistically competent on the Global South language that they’re translating from, or not, Kareem has this to say:
They do not see us as their counterparts, as their comrades; their savior-complex is clothed with polished words and self-described radical poetics. Their canon, which does not make even a third of, say, the Arabic or Chinese canon, somehow has more to draw from and fit into when they translate us. The establishment, the industry, the poet, the translator, come together in allowing a level of mediocrity afforded only to certain figures. The Third World poet too, fascinated with the West, with the wondrous machinery of Western publishing, sometimes surrenders to whatever the mud might make of their work. How can one any longer believe in ‘collaboration?
Glover also points out another perpetual elephant in the room. Bookseller success has “reflected and revealed the racialized projections and exoticist desires of the French reading public.” I daresay that the same is true in the Anglosphere.
Overall, Violent Phenomena reconsiders the questions we thought have been asked—on the North Atlantic/Global South divide, foreignization and localization, the questionable practice called “Bridge Translation,” among other power differentials—but aren’t. Glover further enquires:
How does one represent Global South culture without sensationalizing it, reifying existing racial stereotypes, or censoring its idiosyncrasies in the interest of rendering it more palatable to a world that denies its value(s)? How does one present non-Western culture to the West for consumption (comprehension, consideration) without betraying that culture in the process?
By far, this has been the most accessible essay anthology on literary translation for a generalist readership that I have read. The latest releases by publishers John Benjamins, Routledge, and Palgrave Macmillan all surely have a different target—scholarly readers. Or do they? The contributors, translator-practitioners themselves, were unafraid to call out structures bigger than themselves—translation institutes, programs, journals, magazines, and anthologies in particular, and the publishing industry in general.
As I finish reading each essay, I awaken to a familiar ambivalence, at once comforted but nevertheless uneasy. At least that's what it feels like to me. I lived through the milder forms of grim yet unsurprising experiences of these contributors. I was dismissed for being a non-Westerner, non-native English speaker, when English was forced on me from an early age—in school, in the media, and even at home. Ingrained in every postcolony is the prestige that proficiency in the coloniser’s language (English, in our case) brings. The essays confirmed my lived experience as a non-Westerner translator of colour from a non-privileged background, educationally and geolinguistically. The essays confirmed I am not alone.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them) is Asymptote Journal’s editor-at-large for the Philippines. They’re the author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021), assistant nonfiction editor at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place and Nature as well as Atlas & Alice Literary Magazine, and editorial reader at Creative Nonfiction. Their works of translation from the œuvre of Stefani J Alvarez appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation (England), Asymptote Journal (Taiwan), Rusted Radishes (Lebanon), Tolka (Ireland), and the Oxford Anthology of Translation; and from ancient Binisayâ texts in Reliquiae: Journal of Landscape, Nature, and Mythology (Scotland). They currently translate from the archives of pre-Second World War Philippine literature in Spanish and Binisayâ.