Role of Poetry and Translation as Activism

Sinan Antoon, Yilin Wang, and Jane Shi discuss the role of language, translation and writing during a globally televised genocide

As diasporic poets writing against empire, who do you consider as your literary ancestors and community? Who are you thinking with in relation to politics and positionality? What does it mean for you to write in English and within the Anglophone world?

Sinan Antoon: I happen to grow up in Iraq, where poetry was and still is very foundational in our being. But it so happened that the poets that I grew up listening to and memorizing in Arabic, poets such as Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, and the Iraqi Poet Muzaffar al-Nawab, were poets who were very engaged in what was back then called resistance poetry, because, since we were talking about Gaza and Palestine, poetry was a very important archive to preserve the being and the history and the collective memory of a people who were being ethnically cleansed and a people whose institutions and lives and community bonds were being destroyed and are still being destroyed. So before reading any theory about poetry, poetry was something very tangible in our history. 

Also, I think growing up in a country that was colonized, I knew already that poetry was an important weapon in anti-colonial struggle, and it continued to be important under dictatorship. These and many of the other poets also outside of the Arabic tradition [that serve as my inspiration]. In the so-called United States, one learns of the poetic traditions of the indigenous people and the African American struggle and so on and so forth.  And lastly, I would say that—of course, we're biased, because we're poets—but aside from the images [on the news], the most potent form of distilling so much about what's happening in Gaza are the poems that come to us from people like Refaat Alareer, the martyr, but also the Arab Media. So many people in Gaza, when they were asked about what is happening, they recite a poem, because a line of poetry, has that capacity to crystallize knowledge, truth, beauty, pain. 

Jane Shi: I have been collecting a bunch of people that I’ve been reading and quotes that they have around poetry. So I'm thinking of Audre Lorde, who talked about the intimacy of scrutiny, and then also Priscilla Washington in this conversation about the role of poetry against genocide. She said “poetry is not a life-saving surgery, no matter how much we may repeat the metaphor. Poetry is not water. It cannot write the bombs out of the sky. It cannot put back together the bodies of a loved one or build a safe place for even a mouse to sleep in Gaza. But this is not to say that poetry, or words in general, are useless in a time of genocide if words had no power to influence people's feelings about the bombing of hospitals or the military detention of children and Israeli forces would not be arresting poets and other writers. And more broadly, if books did not have the capacity to shift attitudes and open up new ways of seeing the world, and there would not be so many banned books.” 

I think, for me, as someone who is from the Chinese diaspora, I think of all the poets who are not published in the mainstream media and who write from a position of being deeply silenced and oppressed by their circumstances, such as Xu Lizhi, who was a Foxconn worker who died by suicide. As well as people who write in prisons and migrant detention centers and survivors who are writing against their circumstances. I think that all of us who come to poetry from this perspective and hopefully we never lose that intimate understanding of why we come to this work and first place. Like, for example, Audrey Lorde mentioned that “Poetry is not a luxury… We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to transpose them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.” And I feel like whenever I use the word poetry that’s what I mean, even though I also understand there’s poetry that serves empire that is celebratory of representation.

Thank you to Jane for bringing up migrant worker poet Xu Lizhi, who may be a lesser known poet to readers in the Anglosphere. I am really interested in hearing also from Yilin, especially considering Yilin is a very intimate reader as well as translator for Qiujin. I know that Qiujin’s revolutionary politics and gender politics were known to be very subversive during her time. So I wanted to ask further thoughts on all of these questions.

Yilin Wang: I’ve been reading a lot of Palestinian poets. I was reading and translating some of Refaat Alareer’s work into Mandarin, and currently I’m reading his book as well that people might have heard of. And just, you know, really appreciating and thinking about the ways that I can support the powerful words that are being written in protests and to think about the ways I can serve as a translator to support what is going on. And I’ve also think of how activism work, such as Jane’s work of fundraising to send ESims to Gaza, can serve as poetic inspiration as well. Jane has posted before how that is also a type of poetry. So I think activism and the organizing work people are doing as a type of poetry, in addition to the written words. 

In terms of Qiu Jin, I have been thinking a lot about her as China's first kind of modern feminist poet writing at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century. She wrote a lot of social political commentary challenging the Qing Dynasty at the time, and about revolutionary activities for feminism and gender equality, and everything that's going on. And I think about that. And I think about what she might feel about, kind of what's going on today, and how her words, my translation, sometimes commenting on or responding to are relevant to readers now in the diaspora. She is sometimes a figure that was used by the Chinese state to create an image of nationalism that is very harmful. But if you actually look at her words, you would realize that she was very questioning of power structures and oppressive governments, and was interested in supporting the people who were disenfranchised as opposed to upholding structures of power. It was very frustrating for me that her voice would get appropriated in that nationalistic way, and similarly with what happened with the British Museum teaching her and this Qing Dynasty exhibit where they try to kind of whitewash colonial history of Britain in China. So there’s a lot to think about there as well. 

I’ve also been reading some Chinese poetry, especially classical Chinese poetry, because, like what was brought up earlier, I also kind of grew up in a culture where poetry is just part of the daily life and conversation that people have. Even from a very young age, you get exposed to poetry as an alternative narrative to the dominant ones. There were lots of poets who wrote about exile in the Tang and Song Dynasty, poets who wrote about censorship, poets who wrote about various kinds of oppression. I also thought about the poets writing during and after the Cultural revolution, such as the Misty poets. They are fairly widely translated into English but at the time were really censored and had to turn to poetry as a tool to survive. 

Is there ever a moment where you feel like English is inadequate to capture your imagination or to deliver your messages?

Sinan: if I may be very narcissistic and quote myself or quote one of my characters from my novels, I think those of us who are bilingual or trilingual and live outside of our homeland in the diaspora are constantly, in a way, culturally translating, sometimes willingly, but sometimes unwillingly. Because we are anthropological specimens that have to translate everything.

Of course, it's assumed that, for example, if I'm from Iraq, then I must know everything there is to know about Iraq. I have this terrible example in 2003 when I got a call from a radio station to be interviewed about agriculture in Iraq though my training has nothing to do with agriculture. But to go back to characters in my novel, The Book of Collateral Damage, which is about two characters. One lives in Baghdad and is living in the hell of the war the United States created, and another character is living in the belly of the beast in the empire, watching his homeland being bombarded and living with a population that's largely apathetic and oblivious to what its government is doing. And in one of the instances, he tries to translate an Iraqi song to his partner, which basically says, you know, somethings are just untranslatable. And I believe in that, because, on the one hand, because we as translators often get this question about “what's lost in translation?”, I always vigorously resist that, because there's always something lost even when we speak our mother tongue. But, because of these strategic languages--whether Chinese or Arabic or Persian--there is this “forensic interest” in our cultures, and I've written or alluded to, especially after crises or wars, the interest in the culture is not genuine interests, not that there is ever pure interest, but it's interest for forensic purposes, for destruction, for defense, for offense.

So it's important to remember that not every instance or emotion or affect can be rendered in English. Actually, there are complexities and terms in all languages of the world that are illegible to English. So this is one way that I try, in very minor, simple ways on a daily basis, to resist this machine that renders everything into English so that it would be consumed by English and produce some kind of algorithm which will eventually destroy something or [someone in this role]. But there are moments every day, especially in academia, where I feel that I'm reminded that I don't belong here, not that I did not feel alienated elsewhere. And I must say that it is only the pro-Palestine movement and the students, our brave students on campuses, that made me feel at home and that I belong to a community that was genuinely open to learning and was eager to translate, but with without that power dynamic that is just consumptive and extractive and destructive.

Jane: For me there are many things that cannot be said in spoken or written language at all. I feel like there are ways that we prioritize speech or writing when the more accurate response is to scream, and that is understood across all languages. But I think about “sullying English,” and the role colonized people have in changing English and kind of making it impure, especially if we have lost some of our heritage languages. Like putting multilingual puns in our poetry or refusing colonial English grammar – those are the ways that poets can change English language while still inhabiting it. For me, thinking about that is important because it acknowledges agency of people who lived in complex and difficult circumstances. People in the motherland – like my parents—would be pressured to learn English. My parents met because they were both in an English class, and there is such an economic drive to English. And the very foundation of English literature as a discipline has been a tool of colonization, right? But at the same time, there’s ways that people break the language with not just the other languages they know, but how being displaced changes their relationship with language in general. So I think about how a lot of us who are bilingual or multilingual-ish might ix things up between our languages, we might get things wrong, but that itself is an experience we have.

I just feel like there is a lack of purity in any language in a lot of ways. At the same time, as you know, it’s obviously extremely important to support indigenous language revitalization and it is also important to acknowledge about the forensic relationship we have to those languages or the essentialisms we might put onto language revitalization. So I think about how being imperfect or not being a good speaker or not being articulate or refusing to be grammatical is a way to say “English is not enough, I don’t care if you don’t think this is correct.”

Yilin: I think a lot about these issues as well. The way that literary translation in academic spaces often becomes this kind of anthropological exercise where it feels like they’re trying to extrapolate and look at this, as if this is some episodic, essentialized representation of culture for them to consume, rather than actual people with experiences. And I really resist the approach to translation--as someone who specifically works outside of academia--I really feel that it’s important for translators to think about who we are translating for, and why do we translate and acknowledge the power of the translator in shaping the text, and rather than pretending that the translator is this invisible king who just comes in and mash things up perfectly to other words in another language, and their roles as curators and in shaping the words—what gets lost, what you know, what gets filtered, what gets chosen [becomes invisible]. 

Translation is an interpretation. Who is doing the interpretation? What kinds of biases do they bring and what’s their agenda for translating? And I often think a lot about when to not translate or when to leave things unsaid. As someone who grew up multilingual, but all my academic education has primarily been in English, so there’s been this attempt to reconnect with or reclaim Mandarin and also Sichuanese, which is a dialect of Chinese I also speak, and thinking about how the different languages-- like, what’s the power structure—challenge or interact with one another in a piece of writing or in the act of translations. And sometimes I do find words and language for me to rethink certain concepts that I’m not able to in English. Because sometimes some concepts in Mandarin allow for more kinds of complexity and a spectrum of ideas, or less binary thinking which I feel like can be very Western. And I also think about there was a story I read by Amy Tan called “A Mother Tongue,” where she reflects on recording her mother’s struggle as someone who isn’t a native speaker in English, and how she navigates the American society in terms of the medical system, in terms of various aspects of daily life, and all the discrimination that she encounters as someone who doesn’t speak English with the kind of so-called fluency and correct standardized English, which Jane was talking about as well. And I’m thinking about ways to embrace that and celebrate that, rather than to conform to certain oppressive standards of English. And I think poets especially are good at doing this in their work because of the focus on wordplay.

Translation is also contextualized by the history of the cold war, where foreign language education was promoted as a means of “understanding the enemy” (or as Sinan just put it, a “forensic interest”). Considering this history, what are your views on the role of translation, what are some ways that it is resisting the empire and/or upholding it?

Sinan: I was just going to add something, which is brought up already about the destructive effects of colonial languages, especially English, since we’re speaking English. And how there’s this very important book I recommend called “Forget English!” by Aamir R. Mufti. And part of that it is [something I grew up with –the people] growing up have a very negative attitude towards their native literary tradition, whether Arabic or Chinese, because there is English, and because European modernity is so valorized. And, again, I’m not against, of course, opening up the entire world, but you know, rehabilitating and reestablishing one’s relationship to the indigenous cultures and all of their varieties [is important]. Now in the Arab world, we have this bizarre situation nowadays whereby so many are growing up and they speak English better than they speak their own mother tongue. But that has to do also with what's happening in the with the dominance of English language and anglophone culture so on and so forth. 

But I think to go back to your question. I already spoke about it and how, especially with Arabic already, but specifically after 9/11, that Arab or Islamic culture was treated as the site of crime, in a way, and of course, all that has to do with the way the response was organized to 9/11 that rather than being put in the context of foreign policy and geopolitics, from the get go, it was interpreted and introduced to the world as a civilizational, cultural battle. And of course, the archive of Orientalism and Islamophobia was already there, so it was all very convenient. 

But we as translators, now that we have social media, with all of its ills, at least we can avoid, as we always do, choose a certain wrong that will never be accepted by a literary publication, and then just put it out there on social media in a way to disrupt the narrative that's out there because the other aspect of getting translations out there is, of course, all the haggling and the navigation with editors and publishing houses and with literary journals. And the last nine months, if anyone needed the masks to come off, have also exposed, by and large, the cowardice and complicity and racism of most literary institutions in this country and elsewhere. So I think the space we have on social media is--at least I speak from personal experience-- what I choose, I think strategically, certain poems to translate, and I don't have to go through the long process and the cultural racism of so many editors and others. But when it comes to Arabic, it's an uphill battle, because of all of the complexity and all of the assumptions and expectations about and how, of course, the entire culture is essentialized and monolithized. And I think the same applies, of course, to the way Chinese cultures and history [was treated]--But you can speak to that, that's what I have to say.

Yilin: I've written in the past, and I have thought a lot about this, which is in North America and in the Anglosphere, who gets to become a translator, and what kinds of translation gets published? And that ties in with this question about translators in the academia. Because when you look at the statistics and the information out there, you find there's a huge overlap between people who attain PhDs in area studies and in languages as academics becoming literary translators, as opposed to people, say, who are heritage speakers to a language, people who are maybe community members of the languages being translated from, people who have lived experience with literature and languages in other ways that are not formal or academic, but the way that language, education access, and the power that these institutions and publishing industry and all these tools of empire.

They tend to go for these folks with a much more co-clinical relationship to language, and that really shapes what we see. But that doesn't mean that that's the only way to translate, or those are the translations out there. So now I was talking about the use of social media. I think it's really important to encourage and foster these translators working outside of these traditional spaces, and some of my kind of interest is in trying to encourage more of these heritage speakers, or other folks, non-native speakers of English, people who come to texts and language with different positionality to take up the active translation, and again, to think about translating works that resist stereotypes and harmful kinds of expectations, and what the Empire expects of us and our literatures. The things that get published and read in Chinese, it's such a more much more diverse range of voices and representation and different dialects and different literary traditions. And voices that are not in mainstream publishing and that are overlooked in China, censored in China, a lot of these don't end up making an issue to English because it's the lack of attention paid by the publishers of translations. And I think that is such a kind of loss for the community, you know, in terms of what we're able to access and read, and I think that's really important to bring as well. So I think a lot about that. And a translator, I like a translator of speculative fiction, Ken Liu, has spoken in the past about the role of translation to disrupt not just in terms of kind of grammar and in terms of bringing words and concepts, but you know, world views, views of storytelling, or challenging Western views of storytelling, such as of what is a poem of representation, of how Chinese folks, you know, are seeing in the west of how I imagine, many literatures from the Global South, are understood and read--disrupting that should the act of translation, which I think is a very different kind of translation than the ones we're talking about earlier at the beginning. 

Jane: I think that in addition to literary translation, there is a very real role in translation as accessibility and translation as sort of like a way for people to connect with one another and provide resources, like lack of translation of certain medical information, or things not being in sign language, or like only certain kinds of right wing propaganda appears in certain like Chinese newspapers, for example. So that was one of the reasons why myself and other people decided to translate Wet’suwet’en and Palestine solidarity statements into Chinese and other languages. That's why we are bringing Chinese language signs to protests, so that, because I've had people come up to me in marches and protests to say, hey, it's so cool that I am seeing this here. I hope that there are more like Chinese diaspora at these things and sort of having like that resource available breaks the sort of like information silos that people have. So in addition to literary translation, as like those used by diasporic writers, there's also a real need for more urgent kinds of translation work, which is, of course, you know, spontaneous and not necessarily guaranteed, but I think that it's important to, like, facilitate those things in moments of when community needs to come together for something. 

Yilin: There's a lot of translation that happens from English and other languages as well. And it's really important for a lot of organizing information to be available in multiple languages. Because, we can assume an English readership, and it's really important, to combat false misinformation, to address kind of gaps, to acknowledge and to raise awareness by translating materials into other languages. For example, I was copying Jane and a few Chinese translators as well as Taiwanese translators to help Jane to translate some of the materials about donating and sending ESims to Palestine into traditional and simplified Chinese, and I've done similar work in the past, as well supporting, like indigenous land defenders in the so called Canada protesting against pipelines into Chinese to help people understand what is going on who might not otherwise have that access to information. And similarly, I've been seeing a lot of signage and various materials at different protests, at the college camps as well, where they provide solidarity across languages. And I think that is really important. And I also know of different translators organizations that have popped up where translators volunteer to get translated materials about the different fundraisers going on, and up-to-date news information to various languages, so that people can then respond and show solidarity. Accessibility is important and translators play a role in that.