Translation and Transmigration

Siri Nergaard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138543652
• eBook ISBN: 9781000332810
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In our globalized and transcultural world it has become more common than ever to live among different languages, to cross geographical and cultural borders frequently, to negotiate between multiple spaces and loyalties: from global businesspeople to guest workers, from tourists to refugees. In this book, Siri Nergaard examines translation as a personal, intimate experience of a subject living in and among different languages and cultures and sees living in translation as a socio-psychological condition of transmigrancy with strong implications on emotions and behaviour.

Adopting a wide transdisciplinary approach, drawing on theories in psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, semiotics, and philosophy, the author investigates the situations of translation affecting individuals, and in particular migrants. With examples from documentaries, photographs, exhibitions, and testimonies, Nergaard also analyses how migrants get translated in political discourse and in official documents, and how they perform their lives as transmigrants. The first part examines in particular three issues and concepts: the figure of the migrant, hospitality, and the border, which are viewed as representing the most fundamental questions of what living in translation means. The second part of the book presents examples of lives in translation through representations in a variety of modes and expressions.

This timely book is key reading for researchers and advanced students in translation and interpreting studies, anthropology, migration studies, and related areas.

Part I

1Figures of the migrant

The foreign other that comes from elsewhere has moved to get here, displacement causes her arrival, and it is precisely her motion, her transposition, that is the origin of the encounter between differences, between the self and the other. It is precisely this encounter that in turn originates translation; that movement is the feature that contradistinguishes both translation and migration. Yes, movement is perhaps the crucial quality of the change and transition that every translation and every migration originate. Movement is thus both the primary quality of migration and translation, and the quality that connects them, representing the common motor of the disquieting change that intimately interconnects them.

Since antiquity, motion is described and explained as change. And change means transformation, in space as well as in time, from one condition to another. This motion, however, does not necessarily go in one direction – from A to B – but in many directions and in a movement that may have more than one departure, many points of arrival, or even no arrival. And motion and change (as well as motion as change) is the opposite of fixity. Similarly, although we know that translations as well as migrants are traditionally thought to follow a linear movement from A to B, from source to arrival, they also follow complex paths of motion – there might be no origin or original, the directions and forms of interaction may be diverse, and relations are seldom one to one, or from one fixed place to another.

The etymological meaning of both migration and translation is also connected to movement. The verb “to migrate” comes from the Latin “migrare”, which means, precisely, to move from one place to another. The verb probably originates from the Greek “ameibein”, which means “to change”, a possible extension from the root mei-, meaning “to change, go, move”. Today, the definition of what it means to migrate insists on the feature of movement, as we can see from the official statements of the International Organization of Migration (IOM). Stating that there does not exist any established definition of a migrant, it proposes the following:

Any person who is moving or has moved across an international border or within a State away from his/her habitual place of residence, regardless of (1) the person’s legal status; (2) whether the movement is voluntary or involuntary; (3) what the causes for the movement are; or (4) what the length of the stay is.

(www.iom.int/who-is-a-migrant, accessed May 2019)

The word translation is also originally linked to movement, as it comes from the Latin “traducere”, from trans and ducere, which literally means “bringing across”, thus developing and providing a deeper correlation with the concept of movement in connection to translation.

However, though the etymological meaning and the current definition of each practice simply describe their connection to movement without a connotation or value attribution, their movements are loaded with interpretations giving the existence of each a political meaning, a meaning that in turn changes both in time and space. The words for defining the migrant in different languages, and their diverse translations, correspond to political and institutional classifications which again sign epistemologies of how migrants are perceived and thus treated in different historical spaces and different geopolitical areas. Similarly, translation has meant different things in different historical periods, its meaning changes in space, and the cultural, social, as well as political value ascribed to the practice are profoundly variable.

In The Figure of the Migrant (2015), Thomas Nail argues for a politics of movement, or what he calls a kinopolitics, which is a radical proposal for a political theory able to take the phenomenon of migration seriously, which for Nail means reinterpreting the migrant from the perspective that defines her, namely movement. The high and continuously increasing number of migrants in the world and the impact of migration on our contemporary world lead Nail to the conclusion that the migrant has become the political figure of our time. The problem is, however, that existing political frameworks of liberalism, Marxism, or multiculturalism are unable, he argues, to recognize the migrant as a primary, or even constitutive figure of politics, since they do not recognize the migrant’s primary feature – movement – as valuable. Movement has a negative connotation as opposed to stasis, and is thus considered as secondary, as Nail argues. According to existing frameworks, the moving migrant only appears as an exception to the rule, as the opposite of the “normal” immobile or settled citizen, and thus – due to the misrecognized feature of motion – as secondary and even lacking.

This secondariness ascribed to movement appears as a paradox, since we know that people have always migrated, and especially today, when displacement, resettling, and global mobility are more frequent than ever. Introducing an alternative paradigm seems thus timely. In addition, even recognizing that movement is a primary feature of cultures, liberating thus the migrant from her exceptionality, we have to consider that although a privileged part of the world’s population can travel more freely, faster and easily than ever, for many moving is dangerous, and even forbidden. And that travels are subject to obstacles, and can even at times be impossible for all people, is something that the world has experienced after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced so many governments to introduce lockdown limiting people’s movement in unprecedented ways. The idea of unbound mobility has certainly been challenged by the pandemic, stimulating new visions of what mobility means, and undoubtedly worsening the migrants’ condition utterly, blocking them more than ever in camps or reception centres, suspending their routes. Without considering all the different and dramatic effects of the pandemic, it has certainly reminded about the precarious balance on which our lives, and our lives in mobility are depending.

As the migrant does not correspond to “place-bound social membership” (Nail 2015, 3) based upon a principle of stasis, the migrant has been principally understood and perceived as a secondary or derivative figure, Nail explains. Since permanent, and geographically stable, forms of living are considered as primary, it follows that movement, and living without a static place, is considered secondary. Due to movement, the migrant is seen as the citizen’s opposite, or even as a “failed citizen”, not corresponding to the necessary features of membership within the static state. Nail argues for a theoretical framework “that begins with movement instead of stasis”, so that the migrant’s own defining social feature can be understood. Only with such a new and alternative framework is it possible to recognize the migrant as our time’s primary figure.

According to Nail there are two perspectives, namely those of stasis and state, that are predominant in the understanding of the migrant, theorizing her as a secondary or derivative figure, due to her movement. Since she does not correspond to the perspectives of stasis and state, she is somewhat excluded from the whole theoretical framework, which is only able to recognize her as an exception. These perspectives, in order to recognize migrants as primary political figures, represent a problem that needs be overcome, Nail argues: stasis and state need to be replaced by an alternative theoretical perspective that takes its leave from the social movement that the migrant enacts, and sees the migrant’s movement rather as the constitutive condition of contemporary politics. What Nail therefore does is invert the perspective: instead of seeing the migrant as an exception, it is rather the sedentary societies of static entities and fixed members that are the exceptions to the rule of motion, and this move is justifiable since migration is a historically constant phenomenon, which means that it needs to be included in a framework that puts sedentarism in a secondary position instead of the contrary. Migration and movement are constitutive experiences of our societies. Mary Louise Pratt observes similarly how there has been a “monopoly of one of the most taken-for-granted norms of human social life, namely the normativity of staying”, which “the new mobilities are disrupting” (Pratt 1992 [2008], 243).

Movement is actually the primary characteristic of the stranger as she is conceptualized by Georg Simmel – the stranger that we will connect to the figure of the migrant later on in this chapter. Simmel opens his famous essay on “The Stranger” as follows:

If wandering, considered as a state of detachment from every given point in the space, is the conceptual opposite of attachment to any point, then the sociological form of the stranger” is another indication that spatial relations not only are determining conditions of relationships among men, but also symbolic of those relationships).

(1908 [1971], 143)

The stranger, according to Simmel, has “the specific character of mobility” (1908 [1971], 145); she comes today and stays tomorrow.

Following Nail’s suggestion and applying it to translation, in its quality of being characterized by movement as well, would recognize in similar ways the constitutive condition of translation in our societies, elevating translation from its secondary position compared to stable “originals”. Edwin Gentzler (2008) actually advances a proposal that in some ways is parallel to Nail’s, in that he considers not movement but translation as constitutive of culture itself.¹ Instead of considering translation as “something that happens between separate and distinct cultures”, he suggests that it is “more something that is constitutive” of the cultures involved. In a comparable way to Nail, he thus sees translation not as a result of a pre-existing culture, but as the condition for the same being of culture. Translation is thus much more than “a trope or a metaphor for a cultural condition”: it is a permanent condition. What precisely does this mean? It means that the dynamism – which basically signifies movement, which again signifies change – guaranteed by translation is what is constitutive of culture, is actually very much parallel to the idea of motion as constitutive of society. The connection I am suggesting here between translation and Nail’s vision of the migrant’s movement as constitutive also draws from Gentzler’s proposal, since it is exactly from such a perspective on translation – as constitutive of culture – that the parallelism between migration and translation as practices of motion and change is realized.

Through “regimes of circulation”, motion becomes in Nail’s proposal the primary feature of social life giving a completely new and primary role to the migrant and, we could add, acknowledging translation as taking place in similar regimes of circulation.

This proposal is obviously relevant for translation in more ways than one. Haunted by similar prejudices, and relegated in a secondary and derivative position, translation could be released from the role of inferiority for exactly the same reasons as migration. For, as we anticipated, the many relations between translation and migration actually depend on the primary role that motion plays in each. In addition, the secondary position traditionally ascribed to translation is likely to be seen as depending on the same reasons as those that are valid for migration: the exceptional or subordinate attribute of motion as opposed to the dominant stasis of the state. Translation’s secondary position to an original text is also contingent to the stasis–motion opposition: the original is generated within the same fixed and “authentic” language–state system, representing immobile sameness, while the translation is “inauthentic” due to its movement, away from sameness towards change, thus losing the correspondence and unity of language and state. Seeing translation as a practice which moves texts between fixed languages belonging to similarly fixed states and fixed literatures again considers the movement from the point of view of stasis, thus secondary and derivative. Inverting the positions between (static) original and (moving) translation is not the objective of course, while rather seeing both original and translation as texts in motion, of which the latter is not inferior or derivative compared to the first.

Through the focus on motion we both see how the secondary position occupied by the phenomenon has influenced the cultural and political considerations of both migration and translation in modernity, and it underscores even more plainly how these two practices are intimately connected.

Nail shows how motion through history has occupied a socially inferior position and how this in turn has influenced anti-immigrant politics that still rely on the idea that people who move to a territory are not legitimate members of that society, and are thus equally not authorized to enter. The history of translation in the modern world testifies the same: translations are considered as inferior, secondary and derivative to originals.

Movement, Nail argues, can in a spatiotemporal sense be conceived as “beginning from a point of departure (A) and passing, via translation, to a place of arrival (B). Movement according to this definition is change of place” (2015, 11). Movement is thus seen as occurring between the two points A and B, in succession, where each point is immobile, and where the space between A and B also consists of infinite immobile points, where each can be considered as potential points of arrival. But such a perspective is in reality spatializing and immobilizing movement, reducing it to fixed, immobile stages, thus “unrepresenting” movement itself.

Such an immobilizing perspective on movement also haunts the migrant’s motion, Nails argues. According to this logic, the migrant is “often defined as the one who moves from country A to country B – from one fixed social point to another” (2015, 12), not considering that the migrant’s movement is much more complex, following a diversified regime of circulation. And since the fixed social points are presupposed as primary, the migrant is thus someone who lacks the fixity of social membership. The result of this logic where the migrant does not fit in, is that “the migrant is the political figure that is unrepresented but still exists socially as unrepresented in the system” (2015, 12). The migrant is thus an exception, the exception that confirms the rule – the rule of political fixity.

This is a paradox of course, since in and of itself, without considering the reasons for a person’s displacement, movement itself is neither bad nor good, and may be – if considered differently – a potential for social change. But as long as migration and movement are seen as a lack, and “the illusion of social stasis” (2015, 13) continues to dominate, marginalization and expulsion of the migrant is justified. If (social) movement could be seen from another perspective, and not only as the exception to fixity and immobility, its positive transformative aspects could emerge, and the migrant could be perceived positively. In addition to the “extensive and quantitative movement” that corresponds to the change of place from A to B, Nail envisions an alternative one – intensive and qualitative – which engages “a change in the whole, a transformation” (2015, 13). So the migrant’s movement is not only from A to B, but also “the constitutive condition for the qualitative transformation of the society as a whole” (2015, 13). From such a perspective there are flows and junctions, different regimes of circulation, continual processes that move in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Index