04 2008 The Answer is in Translation
Tomislav Longinović / Boris Buden
Boris Buden: The most interesting
question raised in your “Manifesto of Cultural Translation”
is its literary form, the typical modernist form of the manifesto.
Whether Communist or Futurist, Surrealist or Dadaist manifestos are
constructed in view of something historically new. They address the
broader public, not in order to inform or explain, but to act. This
performative quality is characteristic of every manifesto. Hence, we
will search in vain for a clear-cut definition of this phenomenon in
the “Manifesto of Cultural Translation.” Cultural translation is
for you rather an activity, praxis or a “practice of
everyday life.” You openly stress its performative character. It is
therefore a form of subjectification as well. In their first
manifesto, the Russian Futurists assert the right “to stand on the
rock of the word we.” There is a similar “we” in your
manifesto, the “we” of “cultural translators.”
My questions are very simple:
first, who are those cultural translators?
Tomislav
Longinović: It is true that the performative iteration inhering in
the form of the manifesto calls for new subjects and new becomings
inherent in the task of cultural translation. The question of
translators’ identity remains at all times within the horizon of
crossing boundaries between communities and their particular idioms,
in displacements informing their particular routes of cultural
exchange. It is also within the perspective of possible futures that
the likelihood of new communities based on the experience of
identity-in-translation is theorized through the manifesto, the
convergence of cultural translators outside the extensions of
particular ethnic communities characteristic of the dominant
immigrant experience nowadays. It is especially important to
theorize this movement away from the ethnically-based diaspora, since
these are often responsible for the development of hard ethnic cores
of identity politics.
Boris
Buden: What is their aim?
Tomislav Longinović:
Whether migrant workers,
itinerant intellectuals or war victims, these subjects experience the
hard edges of the cultural divide as they struggle for identity in
the game of cultural and linguistic survival. Their aim is therefore
informed by the heteronomy of continuing life and therefore
irreducible to a single teleology. Manifesting difference is part of
this sequence of becoming across cultures, as the new subjects are
produced by travel and translation. Since thinking itself has
undergone a profound crisis under the conditions of the postmodern
cultural regime, the manifesto invokes the horizon of a possible
solidarity based on the common experience of cultural difference,
therefore the use of the “we,” the suspect pronoun so maligned by
the mass ideologies of the past century. The imagined forms of
possible thought are therefore the counterweight to the pessimism
haunting the postmodern intellectual often locked in the glass cage
of academic research and expertise.
Boris
Buden: How do they wish to achieve this aim?
Tomislav Longinović:
The practice of cultural
translation is an experience set by the exchange between subjects
caught up in the flow of global identifications. This aim may be
theorized a posteriori as an attempt to appropriate social
power by the practice of cultural translation, which is a position
they seek within the adoptive culture and are denied by the
monocultural biases of the homelands they seek to make their own.
The oxymoronic turn of the phrase contained in the concept of the
“adopted homeland” is symptomatic of this predicament of cultural
translators caught up in the perpetual in-between. The resolution of
the assimilation/resistance binary within the host culture determines
the success or failure of identity produced in the process of
translation, which is the philosophical category that will become
dominant in the globalizing universe we are increasingly facing.
Boris Buden: What you are saying
is that we can think of cultural translation in terms of a specific
cultural experience and that this cultural experience has its social
substratum – exiles, immigrants and refugees, in short, people who
share the experience of translation as a “practice of everyday
life.” However, they don’t constitute a common political
subject, at least, not yet. This of course doesn’t mean that they
don’t share a certain political experience, for instance, the
experience of, as you write, “global inequality” or “fearful
asymmetry in the rate and value of the minor culture’s
representation.” What do you mean precisely by this? Can we
speculate here about a certain “passage to politics” as being an
intrinsic potential of cultural translation?
Tomislav Longinović: Choosing
the form of the manifesto has definitely been guided by the desire to
articulate a certain type of emergent practice in the fallout of
economic globalization and its mostly devastating effects. It is
also unavoidable to take up a certain position, since nowadays the
naïve trust in the position outside the political can only be
constructed by those who are in power and need to cover up their
operating mechanisms. The process of cultural translation “lays
bare” the mechanisms that naturalize existing asymmetries and
inequalities, since most of the agents of cultural translation
perceive the shortcomings of monolingual fantasies due to their
in-between position on the border between different national
discourses. It is true that I find myself speaking “in the name
of” those who may not choose to speak themselves, hoping to
manifest the very possibility of a new type of
transnational/translational political horizon beyond the binaries of
global/local, capitalist/communist, cosmopolitan/provincial etc.
This kind of political motivation is also the starting point of my
research project The Secret of Translation: A Manifesto of Border
Cultures, which has taken up most of my thinking in the past
decade. Using the tools of translation theory, I try to extend its
reach into the realm of the politics of representation and
de-naturalize hierarchies offered to the contemporary consumer of
news, images and sounds. So, hopefully, my writing “in the name
of” will neither turn into the hypocrisy of the latter-day
commissars nor into the apathy of the latter-day yogis, to use Arthur
Koestler’s metaphor. The passage to politics based on a common
ecological platform would therefore be a very desirable outcome of
cultural translation, since humanist-based thought needs to confront
the limits of its planetary survival and move away from the myths
promoted by both the nationalists and the globalists in the current
simulation of politics without a proper subject.
Boris
Buden: Can you tell us more about this research project The Secret
of Translation: A Manifesto of Border Cultures. What is its field
of research precisely, both theoretically and—in a broader
sense—culturally? What is the role of literature – including the
experience of literary translations – and literary theory in the
project?
Tomislav
Longinović: My
interest and motivation for writing a book devoted to translation
broadly conceived has grown out of The Cultural Translation
Project (CTP), a research initiative funded by the International
Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the duration of
three years, between 1999-2001. As the director of this higher
education initiative, I have done all I could to introduce
translation studies into the traditional humanities curriculum based
on the “national” paradigm. The project was imagined as a
gathering of a varied group of faculty and students from different
disciplines in the humanities. Their diverse approaches to the
notions of “culture” and “translation“ opened up a new
perspective on the ways in which both individual and group identities
are understood, i.e. as movement and exchange across the boundaries
of a particular notion of culture, rather than as monumental
categories petrified by the malignancies of the nationalist
imaginary. The workshops, speaker series and seminars were devoted
to the traversal of cultural interfaces to witness the performance of
new transnational identities and hybrid artistic and intellectual
practices.
The
CTP was founded in part as a response to the University of
Wisconsin’s call to re-imagine the humanities in the context of a
global, post-national and post-disciplinary intellectual environment.
Partly, the need to create this advanced learning entity was based
on research that moves beyond traditional models for understanding
transnational cultural exchanges (Derrida, Spivak, Bhabha, Appadurai
etc). The restrictive models or highly idiosyncratic understandings
of the matter “exchanged” between cultures, of the cultures
themselves and of both the material and intellectual means employed
in these exchanges were exploded with the demise of the notion of the
nation. As global subjectivity was increasingly determined by
communication across languages and cultures, the universe emerging
between interacting economies was rooted in processes of translation
beyond the linguistic, as a far broader scope and rate of cultural
exchange emerged at the end of the passing era of nations and their
simplified imaginary totalities.
This
meant that a strong expertise in “foreign” languages was not only
essential for purposes of mutual intelligibility between different
“national” cultures, but also for the larger processes of
cross-cultural hybridization, which produce new and different types
of identity that are crucial for understanding the directions of
cultural development in a posthumanist universe. Translation also
heightened the awareness and need for non-translation, the in depth
study of languages which articulate a particular vision of culture by
resisting crossing over to the other side by featuring various
strategies of untranslatability. The CTP forwarded the notion
that “translation” denotes not only the art and the craft of the
“literary” or ”technical” translator, but also a larger
cultural formation that emerges through the global flow of exiles,
emigrants and refugees I mentioned before. Therefore, the concept of
cultural translation simultaneously encompassed an emergent field of
humanist study and imagined a model of everyday life for a global
community.
Boris
buden: In order to accomplish his or her task today’s cultural
translator should, as you write, identify with the role of the
medieval alchemist. What is the point of this comparison?
Tomislav Longinović:
The metaphor of the alchemist was
employed to invoke both the political position of the person involved
in the processes of cultural translation and to reference the field
itself. On the one hand, the alchemist stands at the very cusp of
change between the medieval and the modern understanding of the
universe and its realities, bringing together the spiritual and the
material, faith and science through the work of the transformatio.
I believe that we also stand at the cusp of change in the historical
arena as well—the postmodern condition persists despite the seeming
exhaustion of the forms and models it recycles, yet the horizon of
change we see in the political arena, for example, Latin America’s
turn to the Left, denotes a certain response that goes beyond the
expected in the neo-liberal universe of economic determinism. An
interesting cultural translation project would be to trace the
displacements of “the specters of Marx” from Eastern Europe to
Latin America, to observe how the movement of communist-based
ideology migrates from one continent to the other and to scrutinize
the transformation of cultural forms it takes in the process. This
is connected to the second reason for invoking alchemy: the mercurial
nature of culture itself, the unpredictable flows of which seem to
hide the secret of each collective identity shrouded in its own veil
of untranslatability. This secret is often based on some violent
and traumatic cultural artifact, which the work of cultural
translation strives to externalize and render readable in order to
mitigate the effects of silence and secrecy on which most
authoritarian politics base their power.
Boris Buden: You
mentioned Arthur Koestler, one of the best examples of a
“multilingual” intellectual of the 20th century.
Interestingly, his most famous novel Darkness at Noon exists
only as a translation without an original. Its German original has
been lost, so that the German Sonnenfinsternis is a sort of
“translation from translation” or a Rückübersetzung
(translation back) into German. But the very topic of the novel –
the experience of terror we call totalitarianism today—seems to
transcend particular cultural and historical contexts. Can you too
think, in a figurative sense of course, based on your own experience
of a “darkness at noon” today, meaning the bloody collapse of
former Yugoslavia in the wake of the “democratic revolutions” of
1989? I am asking about your personal motivation behind the task of
cultural translation, a motivation that is personal precisely since
it has a historical meaning, in short, the experience of history in
its utmost personal sense.
Tomislav Longinović: I have a
story similar to Koestler’s regarding my first novel Moment of
Silence (Burning Books: San Francisco, 1990), which was first
published in English and only seven years later in Serbo-Croatian as
Minut Ćutanja (Radio B92: Belgrade,
1997). The novel was the work of mourning for the last lost
generation of Yugoslav youth. It was a case of Rückübersetzung
and also a case of translating back-and-forth in which a sense of
what is the original and what is the translation gets radically
confused. And I suppose the same issue is at stake in the question
of my own identity and personal placement regarding issues of
translation. This question really points to the true motivation
behind the project, since I have been strongly affected by the
collapse of Yugoslavia in my own writing and ways of relating to
matters of theory. Although I left the country in 1982 to
participate in the International Writing Program at the University of
Iowa, the events of the next decade profoundly shook me in my sense
of being and belonging. I can truly say that I left Yugoslavia in
the last moments of its existence, at least for a generation of youth
I was involved with at that time. The intensity of cultural
exchanges between the then twenty-somethings from Belgrade,
Ljubljana, Sarajevo and Zagreb pointed to a clear European
integration of the entire country. Of course, most of those creative
kids did not support the unified cultural space of Yugoslavia as some
nebulous project of the party ideologues—they simply lived toward a
common future based on popular culture (the so-called new wave in
music acted as a unique cultural medium of exchange) and were
interested in overcoming the narrow-minded practices of the communist
party apparatchiks of the day. Paradoxically, they all shared a
common left-of-center orientation from the peace and hippie
movements, tempered with a certain post-punk irony. It was truly
tragic to watch as the older generation began tearing the country
apart, first with its retrograde rhetoric and then with snipers and
bombs. People were forced to take sides in nationalist disputes, as
silent cores of traumatic memory were given free reign to find
surrogate victims. The outside world responded with its own cultural
labels of the region, resurrecting visions of the Balkans as the
“powder keg” of Europe and as the realm of endemic ethnic
disputes. In the meantime, innocent civilians died while the
nationalist elites stuffed their pockets with stolen resources of the
former common state. So, while the global media’s gaze enforced a
vision of “tribal warfare” and local media involved itself with
demonizing their newly found ethnic others, I decided to try and find
the idiom through which the “third voice” could be heard. The
medium of translation seemed the best way to approach this minefield,
since you always run the risk of being accused of a number of
intellectual crimes by all sides involved. Therefore, when I visit
my native Belgrade, they see me as “American” as soon as I raise
my voice against their nationalist phantasmagorias—while in the
United States I am never allowed to declare myself as “Yugoslav”
without the inevitable second and third question about “who are you
really?” I guess the answer is in translation only.
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