Burn the Bridge: Decolonizing Metaphors of Translation

The translator has been likened to a diplomat, and translation viewed as a way to make other cultures understandable to readers of the target language, to foster relationships between countries. In much the way Robert Frost’s line “poetry is what gets lost in translation” convinced generations of readers that translation is impossible, metaphors of translation have colored the spaces translations are made in. In this panel, we’ll think through these metaphors and parse the assumptions they carry—about the author’s position, a place’s knowability, the translators’ responsibilities, and the readers’ make-up—while brainstorming new ways to make sense of translation as literary production.

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Moderator

Julia Sanches is a Brazilian-born translator of Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Cofounder of Cedilla & Co. and Chair of the Translators Group of the Authors Guild, Julia has translated the works of Susana Moreira Marques, Claudia Hernández, Geovani Martins, and Eva Baltasar, among others.

Presenters

Jeremy Tiang has translated novels by Chan Ho-Kei, Yan Ge, Li Er, Zhang Yueran, Yeng Pway Ngon and Lo Yi-Chin, among others. He also writes and translates plays. His novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. He is a member of Cedilla & Co. and lives in Flushing, Queens. Khairani Barokka is an Indonesian writer, artist, and translator whose work has been presented in fifteen countries. She was Modern Poetry in Translation’s Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, and is Researcher-in-Residence and Research Fellow at UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute. Okka is most recently author of ROPE (Nine Arches Press). Bruna Dantas Lobato is a Brazilian writer and translator based in St. Louis. Her work has appeared in A Public Space, BOMB, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Her translation of Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and is forthcoming from Archipelago Books.