Language, Literature, and Power: The limits of "global literature," the question of "for whom," and untranslatability

These readings unsettle the idea that translation can happen in a vacuum, a simple practice of reconfiguring something in one language in the shape of another. Gitanjali Patel and Nariman Youssef’s piece, “All the Violence it May Carry on its Back,” brought to mind Jodi Melamed’s Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Melamed challenges the idea that global literature alone can serve as a kind of antiracist technology. On the other hand, she says, it can be used in university settings to produce a class of "multicultural global citizens, and to uphold certain standards as (neoliberal) multicultural universals" by making accessible and fully knowable non-Western cultures "in a form that does not seem to require too much specialized knowledge" in preparation to work within "disciplinary and civilizing/disqualifying regimes that manage populations cut off from (or exploited within) circuits of global capitalism." In this political climate, it feels very important to say that diversity of literature and those translating it is incredibly important—and certainly a step forward from the white/Eurocentrism that long dominated US literary markets and classroom canons—but cannot alone free language from its colonial entanglements, nor can it alone free literature from a world order structured by global racial capitalism. 

There’s probably no easy answer for how, as actors within an inherently flawed and unjust structure, we can best move forward—as translators, writers, and even as readers. But Patel and Youssef’s insistence on questioning the "imagined reader" struck me as especially important. “There will always be a ‘for whom’ question,” they write. “Being conscious of the question and responding to it with intent, aware of how our choices include or exclude, will facilitate greater freedom in our craft.” 

And sometimes, they write, this means recognizing and honoring untranslatability—in translation, and also, I think, in writing. This brought to mind Jamil Jan Kochai's 99 Nights in Logar, which is written in English except for the penultimate chapter, where a family history that has been withheld throughout the novel is revealed in Pashto. Swept up in the narrative, I initially wanted to know what I couldn’t fully know from a poor Google Lens translation job, but ultimately was forced to sit with the fact that my linguistic/racial/national identity did not, in fact, make me entitled to having every story rendered in my own tongue—and that translation, in some cases, does perpetuate structures of oppression, of surveillance, of, historically, violence toward racialized cultures, religions, and geographies. That it is an important and necessary literary tool but also has been an imperial one. That some work can and should resist being translated into English.

- Abbey