Translation as Politics

Reading as activism

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In the essay “Palestine Agenda”, the late Edward Said provides an account of the Nineteenth Session of the Palestine National Council, held in Algiers in 1988, at which he was tasked with helping to translate the Council’s main statement:

He [PLO leader Yasir Arafat] handed me the Arabic draft of the declaration of statehood and asked me to render it into English. It had been drafted by committee, then rewritten by Mahmoud Darwish, then, alas, covered with often ludicrously clumsy insertions, and inexplicable deletions. Later Darwish told me that the phrase “collective memory” had been struck by the Old Man because, we both opined, he took it for a poetic phrase. “Tell him it has a serious and even scientific meaning,” Darwish implored me; “maybe he’ll listen to you.” He didn’t, and I didn’t listen to Arafat when he wanted other phrases inserted, often lifted out of inappropriate contexts.

Said’s account is an exquisite description not only of the labour and care involved in translation, but of the stakes of translation in politics. A political statement that must, against the odds, convey the needs of five million people with no state of their own, is co-written, re-written, translated and re-translated by an aging political leader, a national poet and one of the great literary critics of the twentieth century.

Although translation, like writing itself, is sometimes represented as a lone and lonely task, the individual professional sitting at an isolated desk, lost in concentration, scratching her head over a dictionary as she takes red pen time and again to the page until the perfect word is found, in reality translation always involves more than one person, and usually several people. In the case of translations that must convey an urgent collective demand, the translation itself becomes a collective task.

Said’s description of what is lost, as well as gained, in the work of translation captures the challenges of this communal labour. In the words of the Turkish journalist Ayşe Düzkan, who was imprisoned for her activist writing,

working collectively takes more time and is harder than working alone or in a hierarchy but the result is stronger.

Collectivity is one feature of what Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian, in their introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, call “translational activism”. But translation’s cooperative character is not limited to work of the translators; it extends to the process of reading. For Gould and Tahmasebian, a translation is activist precisely whenever and however it stirs readers and audiences to action.

Transnational solidarities of the kind that are demanded of us in these times are literally impossible without the work of translators: whether multilingual journalists reporting from conflict zones, poets using their literary skills to translate political documents, citizen translators of social media. Take the recent death of the Gazan poet, teacher and translator Refaat Alareers, killed by an Israeli bomb earlier this month. News of Alareers’s death prompted a flurry of translations of one of his final poems on X. Translation itself thus became a form of activism.

Yet in the English-language world, whether in the mainstream media or on platforms such as Substack, I too rarely come across commentary that shows awareness that “our” already partial and always inadequate understanding of the world is facilitated by translation, by translators whose labour is all too often invisible.

The politics of who does, learns to or is allowed to speak in one or more languages is complicated by structures – class and money, gender and citizenship, ability and education – so that speaking across tongues is not a matter of boasting, any more than failing to do so should be a matter of shame. Still – there is a particular privilege that allows English speakers in the West to remain largely oblivious to the movements of language, to the labour of others who facilitate our knowledge.

Being willing to learn from translation means being willing to confront our own ignorance. Being stirred to act comes not as a result of being able to relate to something, of hearing an echo of one’s own experience. It comes from an openness to learning across difference, without demanding that that difference collapse into sameness or assimilation.

While professional translators are often trained and praised for translations that are so seamless the reader would not know she is reading a translation at all, some translators have criticised this quest for total translational fluency. In his 1986 article “The Invisibility of the Translator” Lawrence Venuti argued that the best translations contain moments that might appear awkward or unfamiliar, so that the particularities of the source language, the context in which the work was written and the labour of translation are apparent to the reader. His argument aimed not only to enhance the reputation – and, perhaps, the incomes – of translators, but also to caution against translations that impose Western bourgeois ideology (individualism and consumerism) on texts whose original was more subversive. In this way, Venuti recognised both the capitalist and imperialist nature of much contemporary commercial translation into English.

Of course, even the best translation is not immune to the bad faith of the close-minded reader. At the end of “Palestine Agenda”, Said recognises the limitations of the work of political translation when it meets with such refusal. The mainstream Western media has developed such a bias against Palestinian self-determination that

[f]ar from reading the texts as they were meant to be read, commentators persist in suggesting that no matter what was said in the texts it could not by definition be enough.

Said’s essay highlights the politics of translation in at least three ways: the challenges of translation, which is always at best partial and imperfect; the importance of recognising the work of translation itself, its representation of a collective commitment for change; and finally, the reality that even the best-intentioned translations cannot conquer the prejudices of those with more power.

In today’s social media world, in which information is demanded immediately, in accessible, digestible, bite-sized form, taking time to read a tricky translation is probably a hard sell. But recognising the work of translation is essential, because in translation we find one of the clearest examples of how power operates in language. For translation to work as activism, it requires not only the collective effort of those demanding solidarity, but the political will of the reader to recognise in language itself a fundamental field of political struggle.

Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. You can support my writing further by buying my book  or getting me a virtual coffee.