Letter from the Editor: Issue 24
September 25, 2024
Dear Readers:
First, an urgent preface.
Below, I write to you about a collection of translations which speak on speculative worlds – worlds in excess of, in place of, or in conversation with the worlds we inhabit. I write from a world in which it is the eleventh month, and 76th year, of Israel’s active U.S.-backed genocide and ongoing occupation of Palestine; a world in which the U.S. government sends militarized police to brutalize water protectors who refuse the construction of oil pipelines on Indigenous lands that have yet to be returned to their caretakers, and in which resource extraction, enslaved child labor, and land grabs in Sudan and Congo fuel the technology we use to witness and move through these worlds.
Translation is a political act. Last May, UCSD translated the student movement for Palestine as a so-called “threat” to student safety, in order to best protect their own economic interests. We witnessed riot police raid the encampent, saw our friends, students, and professors beaten with batons, targeted by snipers on top of the Student Health Center, and interrogated and arrested by police in the Price Center, all for bravely taking a stand and calling for the UC’s complete divestment from genocide.
These words fall shorter than action here, and my hope is that at the very least, they further activate our tangible movement toward liberation for all oppressed peoples and all who live under occupying forces. I hope you have the chance to read these moving student accounts about building community in the encampment published in the UCSD Guardian, as well as support Other People Magazine, who published this powerful statement.
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Some questions I held close as I read through each piece in this issue: What does it mean to speculate about possible futures from within empire? Is translation already, and always, a form of speculation? And what kinds of imagination and/or memory will it take to build a liberated future? As Octavia Butler wrote in Parable of the Sower:
People speculate about intelligent life, and it’s fun to think about, but no one is claiming to have found anyone to talk to out there. I don’t care. Life alone is enough. I find it . . . more exciting and encouraging than I can explain, more important than I can explain. There is life out there.
The pieces in this issue speak to life out there, all around us–human and nonhuman. As in Gian Cruz’s “/(séro)TROPICAL(e) CHAPITRE II: Cicatrices…/,” which meticulously documents the artist’s lab results and HIV viral load amongst personal objects in order to confront “cycles of rejection and exclusion in the age of undetectability,” these works do not suppose our realities are not real, or that our histories are not repeating. Rather, it is because of their lived experiences in this place that these authors, visual artists, and translators so intricately dream up other longings. Some of these longings speak to the relationality and camaraderie felt in this reality, and how these can be stretched into our futures. Deniz Ibrahimzade, Adriana Petkova, Melisa Gjoci, Ana Cardenas, Natalie Anashkin, Elnur Ibrahimzade, Irada Ibrahimzade, Ria Raj, and Sara Moghimi write in their original work, “traduttore, traditore,” “fryma jem / you are the source of my breathing / bota jem / my entire world.” This collaboratively written, multilingual work translates the intimate emotions in language that often go untranslated, as a way of working against the historical “betrayal” of translation in projects such as occupation. The text poignantly reminds us of the relational meaning of protest chants echoing through UC San Diego campus: “[ to shake off and free the dust from a cloth / resistance / uprising / liberation / to free palestine from apartheid / to free palestine from colonialism / to free palestine from occupation / to free palestine from the military regime / to free palestine / ].”
Other texts seek language, not as refuge, but as a third space where grammar and vocabulary can be questions, rather than facts. In “Nile Like Holy Water,” Reem Hazboun Taşyakan creatively reimagines Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” placing the reader in Aswan in southern Egypt rather than Hemingway’s original Valley of Ebro in Spain. By shifting location and language, the reader is immersed in a new power dynamic–one in which Hemingway’s unnamed “girl” has a name, Dunya, and she holds access to the language and cultural symbols that intercut the scene. These subtle changes create a world in which Dunya’s agency is more possible, and on a larger scale, the urgency of rewriting the Western literary canon is viscerally felt. Nico Peck’s adaptation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus,” too, challenges the parameters of translation by experimenting with enjambments which carry the reader across song as it moves through body and land until, “The old words / find a grip / and from / your throat / they rise.” And sometimes, two worlds collide to form an alternate future. Excerpts from Víctor Cabrera’s citational poetics in WIDE SCREEN, translated from Spanish by James Richie, look to the films of Jim Jarmusch to create a world in which canonical Anglophone poets enter surreal “cross roads” experiencing “a fleeting and random encounter with / a destination not belonging to us.”
Meanwhile, pieces such as Eliseo Ortiz’s digital poem “CBP’s broken photostream” and performance “Mexico | USA” remind us that visual culture has historically been used to construct human power and maintain capitalism, enslavement, incarceration, forced migration, borders and extraction. Ortiz supposes a world in which colonial maps and U.S. Customs and Border Protection do not control the narrative of migration across the US-Mexico border, and speculates on how we might look to archival work as a process that can be reclaimed. Similarly, Gian Cruz and Gisela Marcelang’s experimental multimedia series “Portals” explores the “precarity of the visual image” and the “incoherence” of materiality in the Philippines, which as Gian Cruz writes in an accompanying essay, is both an outcome of layers of colonial rule, and a mode of resistance. Cruz speculates on how the opacity of the image can resist the white gaze and the settler/military state’s desire to ‘understand’ and ‘organize’ via forms of cultural representation, such as food and popular media.
Other works in this issue look to radically different modes of communication and ways of being, often rejecting anthropocentric epistemologies. Elif Sofya’s “Vein,” translated from Turkish by Jeffrey Kahrs and Mete Özel, centers unlearning as a practice–one which looks to nature and the body, rather than the language of heteropatriarchal structures. Sofya writes,”I crushed that language / I pulled it and dragged it and / Brought it to a halt / I stood by its water,” and later, “I forgot a very long sentence / I freed myself from speaking.” And as is made clear in Amy Newman’s translation of Antonia Pozzi’s previously censored work, the often unknowable desires of land and the elements persist despite human narratives that attempt to shape them. Pozzi hauntingly writes, “no one thinks of the life of that tree / after that evening / the blaze of those magic wings / no longer there –”
Indeed, the ‘otherworldly’ is often closer to us than we think. Ahmed Abu Hazem’s Sufi mystic text “Scattered Spectra,” translated by Essam M. Al-Jassim, brims with reverence for the holy as refuge from “corroded artifices and delusions” and a heart “as barren as a basalt boulder.” Eshitha Rao’s “Shifted Scenes” too, looks to nature and the ‘above.’ This gorgeously textured collage thinks on the formation of earth’s ever-changing moon–one which both holds great power and is incomplete. Importantly, Rao asks, “But what if the moon didn’t completely heal?” And looking to contemporary cityscapes in her “Vocero” series, Damariz Aispuro depicts language and other human-made codes as they collide with chaotic, anarchist landscapes. In one of five powerful pieces, a crumpled scrap of The New York Review’s essay on Shirley Hazzard’s realism both devours and is devoured by a human-like monster with sharp teeth.
Each of these interpretations of the ‘speculative’ contributes new meaning to the shapes a possible future could take. I am reminded of poet George Abraham’s words in their recent piece in Scalawag, “On the Eve of yet another Nakba, a Dream”:
… We naive enough to write poems imagining
the impossible, we who love ourselves enough for such
tenderness – however brief, we know the work is coming
& here already. We know the conditional tense of every dream
will have an end…
The curation of this issue was challenging in the best of ways–in that reading each piece changed how I think of the speculative and the future, and made room for the impossible. I am grateful to fellow editors Reem Hazboun Taşyakan, Bahar Abdi, K Jacobson, Kimaya Kulkarni, Barışcan Özkuzey, Vyxz Vasquez, Camille Uglow, and Olga Petrus for their respective knowledge, craft, and care. I am daily moved by the ethics, actions, and bravery each of you holds in this translation community. I would also like to thank our faculty advisory board members, and the language-specific editors for this issue, including Amanda Batarseh, Ignacio Carvajal, and Gabriel Bámgbóṣé. And finally, I would like to express my gratitude to our faculty director, Amelia Glaser, for continuous support and the encouragement to nourish this journal. As with translation, editing is a never-ending process and I will undoubtedly continue to learn from everyone in this space.
In solidarity,
Nilufar Karimi