WiT Month: Q&A with Julia Sanches
To celebrate Women in Translation Month this year, we asked some of our favorite translators about decolonization and decentering Europe in translation. Julia Sanches, a literary translator who works from Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, and French into English, is up next.
What is the role of the translator in decolonizing translation? In your regional/linguistic focus(es), are there certain stereotypes or tropes you have to avoid?
I’d like to push back against this question because I think decolonizing literary translation, its publication and reception has to be a collective effort. It’s worth noting that many of us translators are members of a workforce—and rather vulnerable ones at that—and as much as we’d like to burn everything to the ground and build a brave new world, our decisions are often informed by the need to pay our bills. And our labor is tied to and dependent on the gatekeeping of others. If an executive editor at X publishing house decides to make it their policy not to consider books that haven’t been awarded prizes or sold X number of books, they are perpetuating a certain power structure. If they read a certain book from Korea, say, and decide it is not Han-Kang enough to make their list, they are participating in a form of reductiveness. If they think a diverse literature begins and ends with books that are written in a single language—that “diversity” begins and ends within the borders of the United States—then they are perpetuating a colonial mode.
Because, what does it mean to decolonize translation when we are writing translations in the language of the colonizer? In a recent article by Gary Younge in the New York Review of Books about the effects of the Black Lives Matter movement in Europe, he touches on the fact that one of the reasons Trayvon Martin “was a household name in Europe in a way that Emmett Till never has been. . . is a reflection of American power.” I would extend this to say (and I don’t mean to trivialize the movement in any way but to highlight how all-consuming and blinkering it can be to live in the seat of power; do you, reader, know who João Pedro is?) that one of the reasons hardly any authors from outside the United States are a household name in America is also a reflection of American power.
But as translators what we can do, with our limited sway, is choose what to translate and not to translate, look beyond the prize-winners and the bestsellers, research writers who may have been historically overlooked, and look for the communities of writers who have been marginalized in the languages we translate from. We can also work within our own community to change the narrative of who gets to translate, which has historically excluded people of color and also heritage speakers, a phenomenon that feels almost counterintuitive. And yet one that goes hand in hand with the pervasive idea that the translator is in some way “neutral” and that they are translating for another “neutral” reader—whose feathers must certainly not be ruffled lest they take their money elsewhere—who is white, middle-class and monolingual, and I’d also add monocultural. English is the language of the Empire, and for good or ill what this means is that English can no longer belong exclusively to anyone. Finally, it’s about time we translators worked to decolonize metaphors of translation. Enough with the bridges and the hospitality. We’re not travel agents or tour guides; we’re writers.
If applicable, how do you approach a work in a colonial language? Should this affect how a translator approaches the work?
Most of the books I translate are from colonial languages (into a colonial language). I can’t say I have a blanket rule for what I do. Every book I translate sets the parameters for its translation. But because I translate into American English, and because there are at least 53 million Spanish speakers living in this country (this number is certainly dated by now) and because I have decided to write for an assumed reader who rubs shoulders with the language weekly if not daily, I will sometimes disrupt an English translation with Spanish words. I don’t always do this; again, it depends on what the language of the original text is doing, on how these disruptions affect the voice and tone, and everything else.
I’m not sure whether a translator should change the way they translate depending on whether they are working on a book from Portugal as opposed to, say, Brazil; or Spain as opposed to Mexico. I do feel strongly that if you are going to “accent” a translation, it should not be accented to a specific place. Translators are not actors, and writing language is much more complex than pretending for a second that you’re from, say, Yorkshire. When translating language that is meant to reflect how people speak in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, I certainly shouldn’t make them sound like they are characters from inner city Baltimore. The goal instead is to create the illusion that in some alternative universe in which Brazilians speak English instead of Portuguese, the characters might sound like the words I’ve put on the page.
Are there any texts not translated by you that you’re excited about right now?
Several, all the time. I’m excited for the imminent publication of Malgorzata Szejnert’s Ellis Island: A People’s History, stunningly translated by Sean Bye. It is—surprise—a history of Ellis Island, told in snapshots, and includes the testimonies of a wide range of employees who worked there as well as immigrants who passed through there (not always successfully) in the past century. I read the galley at the same time as I was reading Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing, and the parallels between the government’s control of immigration and the ways in which the police act within the borders of the country, as well as those they target, are astonishing. I’m not sure whether there’s been a history of Ellis Island written by an author who is not American; but if that’s the case, it’s about time.
Two authors I’m a fan of have new books coming out soon, and I’m excited to read them: Vigdis Hjorth’s Long Live the Post Horn! (tr. Charlotte Barslund) because it features a post office and I love post offices; and the two new Natalie Léger translations (tr. Natasha Lehrer), The White Dress and Exposition. I am also itching to get my hands on No Presents Please by Jayant Kaikini (tr. Tejaswini Niranjana) and waiting to be in the right mindset to read Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (tr. Elisabeth Jaquette).
In your linguistic focus(es), what is your favorite untranslatable word and, as best you can describe, what does it mean?
When people talk about untranslatable words in Portuguese, they always bring up the word “saudades.” It’s a pet peeve of mine. In part because it happens so regularly, and also because growing up as I did in a Brazilian family, the word “saudades” has always felt so accessible, the feeling it represents so borderless. “Saudades” is the noun-form of what we express when we say, “I miss you.” It’s not especially complex and it is certainly translatable, if not in a single word. When my mother or father call me and berate me for not picking up the phone the last time they called (an hour ago) or not calling them often enough (by which they mean every day), and tell me “Estamos com saudades,” what they are saying is that they miss their daughter. What can be more translatable than that?
One word I’m a huge fan of in Portuguese is “cafuné”. “Cafuné” is the noun-form of the act of petting someone’s head until they fall asleep. (After looking at the dictionary again, I’ve learned that in Pernambuco, a state in the Northeast of Brazil, the word “cafuné” can also mean child or boy, or to flick someone on the head.) It’s not quite untranslatable, or maybe it is now that I know it means so much more than I thought it did—no language is a monolith—but it is gloriously succinct. Another word that I learned recently when translating a poem by Brazilian poet Ricardo Domeneck, is “banzo,” which in Brazil can mean a feeling of sadness or surprise—and that’s what it means in the poem I was translating—but can also mean “the fatal or pathological nostalgia of Black African enslaved people taken away from their homeland.” That one, I think, might be untranslatable.
Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Noemi Jaffe, Claudia Hernández, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins, among others. Her shorter translations have appeared in various publications, including Words without Borders, Granta, Tin House, and Guernica. She is a founding member of Cedilla & Co. translators’ collective and currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
