“One’s whole life is in the work, in the writing and in the play.”
That’s Donna Haraway, a scientist-cultural activist-professor. In the documentary Story Telling for Earthly Survival by Fabrizio Terranova (58:02), Haraway presents my favorite beyond-colonial, beyond-patriarchal approach to being in the now, on earth, in community. It’s all about being present, embodied, here, now.
Her words also resonate with my translating. My whole life is in it.
It’s like the story of the shucked corn cobs Earcell would bring my family. She’d call about 5:30 of an evening: “Git your pot on, water a-boiling. I’m heading to the field. Be over tirectly.” That corn, with the freshest sugar, grown by our thoughtful generous neighbor, walked over and shared with us, then cooked by my mother, well, no other corn on the cob has ever, and I mean ever, tasted as delicious.
Translating sometimes reminds me of that freshest taste of the gift of just-picked corn.
The snow leopard, called “the ghost of the mountains,” is elusive and beautiful. Evolved to thrive in some of the harshest environments on our planet. Elusive also because its grey, yellow, brown-spotted pelage blends in with its rocky, snowy environment.
A good translator is a little like a snow leopard. If doing the job well, the translator may disappear into the text.
A beautiful series of unending acts. Sometimes a translator sits down at a desk and respectfully makes the alchemy happen that slowly turns this text into another one. Other times translating is walking in the marsh or washing dishes or listening to students who’ve faced guns pointed at them merely because their skin is Black. Sometimes translating is resting.
In a world that worships this-or-that, one thing over another, translation is neither and both and something else entirely, all at once. Its essential nature is on the move. “Across and beyond,” trans places, trans times, trans people, it magically carries meaning and beauty and joy between multiple complex points, existing everywhere and nowhere.
Always in complex motion, and outside simplistic categorizing. Translators may be patted on the head and called “clever,” or praised for their “areas of expertise,” but only 44% of books carry their translator’s name on the front cover. That’s from Pamela Paul’s “Stop Pretending All Books Are Written in English” (May 29, 2022, NYT). Thankfully, Jennifer Croft, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many others are pointing out this “unique form of neglect.”
Author, critic, and translator working from Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish, Croft asserts, “[I]t’s still considered almost a threat to name anyone other than the author.” Croft’s own Man Booker International Prize-winning translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights doesn’t have Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft on the front cover, and Croft resolved, “I’m not translating any more books without my name on the cover” (Oct. 15, 2021, PW).
You’d also not know that the novelist and translator Jhumpa Lahiri translated Domenico Starnone’s novel Trust, because you don’t see Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri on the front cover. Lahiri argues in Translating Myself and Others: “Translators are often described as being invisible, discreet, self-sacrificing presences. Their names are frequently absent on book covers; their roles are meant to be supportive. . . . Indeed, feminist scholars have argued that the practice of translation corresponds to traditional feminine archetypes in which a woman’s position and identity were subservient to a man’s” (May 12, 2022, TCC).
Lahiri adds that writing and translating are “two aspects of the same activity, two faces of the same coin, or maybe two strokes, that allow me to swim greater distances, and at greater depths” (May 29, 2022, NYT). Isn’t that superlative, I think to myself, another third way to look at the creative process that is writing and translating.
In the lyrical This Little Art translator and author Kate Briggs explores that third way in writing. Her book is fun to read, even if you don’t care about translation one bit, if you just love words and history and joy and walking around in Europe. My favorite books are genre-bursting, like Briggs’ essay, scholarship, novel, poetry, and philosophy all rolled into beautiful words, words you like, words I take in like I eat barbeque potato chips. Happily, simply.
I am blushingly, deeply in love with words. I admit it. When I translate, the sound of the words and their rhythms matter to me as much as their meanings.
As a kind friend and colleague, also a professional editor, pointed out to me recently, I am not likely meant to say, as on the About webpage I remade recently: “Carmen is the author of x-number-of books,” if some are translations. Aren’t translations books?
When my translation of Practice of the Presence is published by Broadleaf Books, I will have worked on, written, revised, translated, been translated by, and put my body, mind, heart, and soul into ten books, not even counting time invested in reissues, new editions, Audible releases, and the like, and even so, I can’t say I’m the author of ten books? Ah, words. Ah, world.
When I think of translating a work from one language and one time period into English and now, I think of how my “whole life” is in that translating, in the writing and in the high-serious play and joy of the countless little acts. I’m looking up innumerable etymologies of words, lovingly finding old dictionaries that offer words in their timely habitats of sentences from that period so I can see how they were used then. I’m also studying history and who knew Paris experienced a Little Ice Age and then floods in the late seventeenth-century.
And I’m letting the words and their meanings “happen” to me by entering into the entire wisdom of the work that translates me, so where past translations of Nicolas Herman see a word like bonté in French and just hear “goodness,” as a binary-system antithesis of “evil,” the Spirit shows me the “kindness” that exists outside a binary view and that is omnipresent in Brother Lawrence’s teaching. Which helps us create all sorts of relationships that Haraway sees as kinships she calls oddkins. These relationships include animals, trees, and yes, relationships human-to-human, with each other.
Noble laureate Olga Tokarczuk in the essay “Ognosia” translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft, calls this “multiorganismicity” (June 6, 2022), at Words Without Borders: “Complexity, multiplicity, diversity, mutual influence, metasymbiosis—these are the new perspectives from which we observe the world.” This essay is a must-read.
Alice Walker dedicates The Color Purple:
“To the Spirit: / Without whose assistance / Neither this book / Nor I / Would have been / Written.”
That dedication speaks to me and my experience of translating. How I best listen to the palpable silence. With my body, mind, heart, and soul alert to the Spirit, who seems a friend, and the Spirit is also my body, mind, heart, and soul, a third way, a fourth way, a fifth way opening. Way opens, meaning kindness.
Translation is how I find my way to more kindness.
Translating is bodyful. A term I take from Christine Caldwell’s Bodyfulness (Shambhala). New days need new terms. New ways of being-awake need new words.
Bodyfulness is her neologism. Caldwell says, “The body isn’t a thing we have but an experience we are” (xxv). She calls bodyfulness “attention during action,” “a purposeful and athletic ability to alter our attentional focus” so that “the amount and type of sensations we work with can be nourishing and deeply informative.”
Body as experience is a complex process of my capillaries, my acetylcholinesterase, my toes, my thinking, the water I drink, my breathing, grief, tears, saying sorry, meaning it and changing, my listening, my joy that we have the right to vote and have our votes counted, my worries for America, my love for others, my love for my self, the tang of coffee, the getting up, the sitting down, the walking, the snowy egrets, and always the dancing.
Caldwell is wise like Haraway. She says, “Humans invent words because we need language to articulate and share our experience with others, yet our words also actively shape how we perceive and move in the world.”
When a friend asked me to write down my translation philosophy recently, I thought, Translation philosophy? because until that moment I translated almost unselfconsciously, but when I sat down to do the task my friend suggested, out came the words embodied mysticism, which after reading Caldwell became bodyful mysticism. I translate because I love words and wisdom and kindness and self-compassion and changing and making community. Because I actually love making space in me for listening to an other, and then sharing their beauty, and it’s a puzzle I respect and it makes me sway and shimmy and spin . . . with myself and others.
Mysticism is not an elite word. Though it’s become rarefied. Treated like champagne when it’s really clean water and oxygen. It merely means my translation listens for mystery and makes room for mystery and respects mystery and honors mystery and opens for the kind Other in others, which cannot be worded, just as the mystic Marguerite Porete’s Loing Près is a Far Nearness happily decentering-Me while embracing me, and I others. This is the Something More healer Ann Bedford Ulanov often mentions, the Source of the Source.
Mysticism is ordinary. It’s a cup of tea, its steam rising. It’s not exclusive. Not housed in institutions. It’s certainly no gatekeeper. It’s a cup of coffee, its steam rising. It’s my breath on a cold day. Your breath. It’s working to make sure everyone can breathe.
Translation is also making oddkins. A portmanteau from Old Norse oddi, “third or additional number,” and Old English cynn, “family,” plus a soupçon of Octavia Butler’s parables, this neologism articulates Haraway’s vision of surprising ways of kin-making. She sees kin as “a wild category” that people “do their best to domesticate” but can’t. Oddkins expresses our need for “unexpected collaborations and combinations,” for “becom[ing]-with each other or not at all.” Making oddkins is “cultivating multispecies justice” among humans, dolphins, ants, corals of the seas and lichens of the land, orchids, bees, you name it.
Living on “Terra” during “disturbing” and “mixed-up” times, Haraway describes our “task” as learning to respond well by inventive kin-making, finding connections with each other, even though as humans we’re all a little “bumptious,” which is a sweet way of saying obnoxious, or as Merriam-Webster‘s puts it: “presumptuously, obtusely, and often noisily self-assertive.” Aren’t we all.
She sees oddkinning as a “practice,” a “response-ability” to make a “thick, ongoing present.” Echoing the wise Georgia Congressman John Lewis, she says, “Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.” She teaches that “staying with the trouble” requires not focusing on an “awful or edenic” past nor an “apocalyptic or salvific” future, but instead on “learning to be truly present.”
“Learning to be truly present” is what Practice of the Presence is about. I spent the quarantine summer of 2020 and beyond in seventeenth-century Paris with Brother Lawrence, translating solidly. This dedication of my time deepened my lifelong walk with this simple practice that heals complexly. When out of the blue on June 9th, someone who read my translation of the Cloud of Unknowing, also a Companion of Julian of Norwich emailed me a gut-wrenching breath prayer: Slowly inhale, I can’t breathe and slowly out, Come, Spirit.
George Floyd’s presence is in Practice of the Presence too. So is Ahmaud Arbery’s and Breonna Taylor’s. As I translated, I began seeing Brother Lawrence, disabled veteran and an unremarkable Carmelite friar then, slipping into his self-repaired sandals, picking up a homemade #LesViesNoiresComptent sign, and marching down the rue de Vaugirard, with a profound limp.
Making oddkins happens where, when, how? Here, now, being present. Haraway translates her vision into a new word. To learn to be present and stay with what Lewis names “trouble,” Haraway renames our present age, seeing the traditional term for our “current geological age,” Anthropocene, as limited, limiting. For our “transformative . . . timeplace” Haraway makes the “simple word” Chthulucene, pronounced, / ˈTHOO luh scene / (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene).
Chthulucene envisions our present moment, with its “vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy,” as the time “to make trouble” by “staying with the trouble . . . [through] learning to be truly present.” Chthulucene is the present moment where we take the third way of sym-poiesis, or making-with all other creatures. Haraway believes, “We become-with each other or not at all.” That’s why she coined Chthulucene by marrying the Greek khthôn/χθών or “earth,” with kainos/καινός or “now . . . thick, ongoing presence.” (Which is very much what the friar’s practicing the presence is: “being present now on earth.”)
Brits keep the initial “k” for χ, but mostly it’s dropped from khthôn/χθών, and the word starts with θ or “th.” A fun word to say, it’s also beautiful. It lands on the tongue like life and love: / ˈTHOO luh scene /. Its sound doesn’t match its looks, which is just the kind of vertigo love makes. Like the word kin, Chthulucene is a “wild category” open to untold healthy possibilities. It’s more inclusive and generates more joy and more opportunities to connect in “unexpected collaborations and combinations,” rather than Anthropocene, which centers man in anthro and excludes other creatures.
We’re all kin and wildly, wonderfully odd. We’re here now, on earth, made of dust, together.
And as my very bones know, translation is a process some may also call, yes, love.