Quantcast
Channel: oversættelse – Promenaden
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 5

Why write in many languages?

0
0

by Uljana Wolf

Uljana WolfFor my talk on “Why write in many languages“ I want to focus on the translingual poetry of LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, whose poems continue to be a source of inspiration, confusion, activation, exhilaration, multiplication, and makkaronization; in doing this, I would like to also think about how to translate such translingual writing, or rather, how the failure of translating such writing can turn into most multi-tongued truths. I want to begin by trying to describe what kind of translingual writing these poems present, what they look like, what they sound like, and into what experience they invite the eye and ear of their readers. LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs poems from the 2013 collection “TwERK“ are written in a deliciously disorienting mix of languages: English, Spanish, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Maori, Hawaiian, Samoan, Caribbean dialects, Swahili, Runa Simi (Quechua), Yoruba, Portuguese, Cherokee (Tsa’lâgî), Tagalog, Chamorro, Papiamentu. Diggs juxtaposes and explores practices of othering, racist thinking, and figures of blackness in the global (white) imagination, along with their colonial residues, Creole overlaps, narrative gaps, linguistic ruptures and raptures—from Japanese anime culture to nearly extinct indigenous languages to the multilingual, sonically overflowing humming and tracks-a-thrumming of the New York subway, as well as Caribbean and African myths and Dancehall. The poems are fast, tender, confusing, while at the same time clear in so many ways; they are hilarious, funny, vibrating, multi-voiced, hypnotic, sexy, acrobatic; they embody a linguistic nomadism that is hard to resist. Many poems make obvious use of translation or inter-lingual multiplication as a formal device: Sometimes a poem consists of lines written in multiple languages and their English translations in italics below (la loca ningyo, ¡cucumber¡); sometimes languages rub shoulders or cheeks, so when a Hawaiian word describing a body part is put „literally beside“ the English word for it; the poems in the cycle March of the Stylized Natives contain, among other languages, lines from the Dr. Seuss book One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish in Cherokee (Tsa’lâgî). Often multiple languages are left to mix, rub, glubb, blubb and vibbsi with each other without obvious markers, liquefying the grammatical, phonetic and visual features of the English language. The poems project a translingual imagination across territories, postcolonial landscapes, suppressed histories. They thus stage what is present but not visible, what is visible but not present. As such, they realize, actualize and at the same time overcome Èdouard Glissant’s famous dictum that writing today must mean “to write in the presence of all the world’s languages“, even if one doesn’t know all the world’s languages. As Glissant writes further: “It means that in the present context of multiple literatures and of the relation of poetics with the chaos-world, I can no longer write in a monolingual manner. Which is to say that I return and force my language not into syntheses but toward linguistic openings which permit me to conceive of the relations between today’s languages on the surface of the earth—relations of domination, connivance, absorption, oppression, erosion, tangency, etc.—as the fact of an immense drama, an immense tragedy from which my own language cannot be exempt and safe.“ As LaTasha pointed out at a panel on multilingual writing in Berlin this year, she also does not know all the world’s languages—but her writing relies heavily on the experience of their presence, as it can be felt, for example, in New York, with decolonized ears turned to and tuned into the other. She also moves towards these linguistic openings by making the presence of languages, their speakers, the speakers’ bodies and histories more audible and palpable through multiple acts of collaboration—by including quotations from songs and myths as well as pop culture, by embedding lines of other poets in the “Golden Shovel“ form invented by Terrence Hayes, or by asking friends to translate lines into other languages which are then included in the poems. In its far-reaching, over-the-top, complex multi-tongued collaboration, this kind of translingual writing differs from the exploration of linguistic openings of Latina/o poets such as Mónica de la Torre, Rodrigo Toscano, Edwin Torres, Heriberto Yépez, or Urayoán Noel, to name a field that seems to include much of the multi- or translingual writing in contemporary American poetry. In other words, it differs from writing which employs “only“ the native and the acquired languages of the speaker / poet, and which tends to explore identity politics and historical experiences of oppression or omission within a more specific geo-political sphere. [To be sure, bilingual writing can of course also be translingual, if translingual is a kind of writing where multiple languages interact and interfere with each other, transgressing and destabilizing in effect both languages and creating a third space. The question of terminology was much discussed at and after this panel, and it remains an open and interesting task to see if the prefixes can be used to work out a more detailed catalogue of writing-in-many-languages.] In any case, Diggs’ writing connects to Latino/a explorations of language politics and border-linguality as much as it does to the code-switching of radiant multilingual subjects of global neocolonism—and perhaps also to the birth of the multilingual postmodern poem at the beginning of the Twentieth Century by writers such as Walter Mehring, who oscillated between Dada, Kabarett and Surrealism and announced the “Internationale Sprachkunstwerk“ and “language ragtime“ as a representation of the modern cosmopolitan trade metropolis. And yet, TwErK is all of that and nothing like it, it is, as Joyelle McSweeney wrote, “not unwriting the damage of globalism but defibrillating it, re-animating it, converting the damage to something else entirely: something next.” This “next” might also be called, to borrow a word from with Jacques Derrida’s “Monolingualism of the Other”, the desire to invent a language that does not exist yet, that never existed, not a first language but a “pre-first language (avant-premiére langue),“ a language of constant arrival and becoming which might or might not be capable of narrating the gaps, the hidden, the silenced memories and histories of disowned languages. Disowned to a small part also by a thinking that ties linguistic origins to kinship, race, nation, and territory—a thinking that hands out poetic licenses in der Muttersprache and maybe one or two others, but that’s it. The first immediate result of such a pre-first language is that her reader becomes part of the narrative-in-arrival. In this arrival, stutter will be your new Mutter. You will probably—and you should!—read the poems out loud, and since you won’t know all the words, this reading will put you words apart. This reading put your lips apart. This reading will make you sound putzig. This putting putzige words in your mouth will make you feel dizzy. You will probably inhale to much air. You will probably not know how to arrange your jaw, lip, tongue, your inbreath and outbreath in the right order around the new sounds, the new sounds and their supposed meaning with neighboring sounds. Maybe you are japsing. Maybe your are jazzing. Maybe all this apart-putting puts your lips in a slippery arc. You will sound out of sync. You will sound like a Kind. You will sound like the child of a kind alien. You will sound like niño que nachmacht n Eistruck. ¡holla, dis mein Eindruck! Reading a translingual poem out loud topples the sounds, deterritorializes your mouth. It will rearrange your speech things. It will strange-range you from your mother tongue. (The tongue that was put into your mouth by the way your mother was taught to speak it from the mother who was taught to speak it from the guy who taught mothers to speak like natives.) Now what happens when you attempt to translate such a poem? Words detach from their angestammte forms, they become liquid, they bubble and jump and make new words in multiple languages, or more accurately: on the threshold of languages. Instead of reading meaning, your read meandering. Instead of reading what you’re used to, you will re-member new bodies of words and they dance. Perhaps this is true for any translation. As Emanuel Hocquard wrote so beautifully, translation is charting the “blank spots“ on the map, a language within French that looks like French but isn’t quite French. So maybe this is true with any poetic translation. But with translingual translation, one is simultaneously charting a map and leaving it, one is leaving the realm of “enriching“ one’s own language, by bending it “towards foreign likeness“, as Friedrich Schleiermacher famously put it. Coz enriching it won’t help when what is called for is a new poverty. And by that I mean: The reader of a pre-first language needs to forget that there is such a thing as only one mother tongue, she needs to forget that there was a first way or a best way to say this or that. If “Translation is the traumatic loss of native tongue“ (Emily Apter), then translation of translingual writing is the loss of the concept that there ever was a native tongue. The translator needs to become a nomad, form a kind of schizo-memory, displace herself. Time for a concrete example! The footnote for the poem damn right … it’s better than yours reads the following: “… contains several words from Barbadian dialect. Kaiso is a popular music from Trinidad and several other Caribbean islands. Kikongo (Congo) is one of several African nations that were transported to the western hemisphere and one of many where linguistic traces are still prevalent in what Kamau Brathwaite defines as Nation Language.“ It is impossible to translate into German, even multilingual German, the charged complex colonialized narratives underlying the poem, plus its sexed-up transposed setting involving the echo of Kelis’ milk bar. Impossible. Unmöglich. Taea. Fukanō. Naa-mumkin. But like the reader of these poems, the translator is a translator of the future: She will be created by the questions that are asked by the words unbelonging from this collaboration. So when I set out to do a version of damn right… in German, I firstly focused on the sound: the strange sonic echoes in my mouth, the rhythmical progression. I decided to leave many words that are not English in their other language. Then I decided that the German was going to be a German that included inflections spoken by Arab and Turkish minorities—a language that was long dismissed as a ‘corrupted’ German or ‘aggressive youth slang,’ but which has more recently been shown by linguists and sociologists to be a new hybrid-German with an elaborated grammatical, lexical, and syntactical system. I’ve also tried to put this “Kiezdeutsch” or “Kanaksprak” to poetic use, in another poem, titled Pidgin Toe, attempting to decolonize, as it were, my native German by omitting articles, deforming syntax (the position of the verb), using more dative than accusative case, and including the doubling of endings such as “pastelmastel” instead of “pastel”. The result is a thickly sonic othered German that bears, in its language politics, little resemblance to the politics of the original poem—how could the ‘Gastarbeiter’ trajectory be an adequate translation of Caribbean slave history—but then again, perhaps the purpose of translating such translingual writing is not and never to produce adequate relations, but to create most unmodest unadequate relations, multiply narrations, re-learn hearing, to re-draw maps of diverse linguistic relations which ultimately detach from the concept of the mother tongue and its sociopolitical, limiting demarcations.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 5

Latest Images

Trending Articles


Di: gianni


ANTIK SØLV CARL JUUL KARTOFFELSKE L-27cm,vejer-55g,1903ÅR


Densiteten af vodka


fritidshus bortgives


De blødeste hæklede kaniner med lange ører


EX Rumia (Touhou)


SKE48 – Pareo wa emerald – PV_HQ


Nazrin (Touhou)


Aida Mana (PreCure Dokidoki!)


Akaza Akari (Yuruyuri)