The Australian Association for Literary Translation had its second public lecture at Monash University’s Caulfield Campus yesterday. It’s just as well I checked the newsletter one last time before leaving or I would have ended up in Clayton which is a good deal farther away. I’m glad I got to the right place and in time though, because it was just so good to talk to people about the work I’m doing, the work they’re doing, about language acquisition, linguistic shifts, choosing languages, who ‘owns’ language, writing in another language, picking up other languages through the languages one already knows, translation, interpretation, regional variants in language, accents, the linguistic/cultural dominance of English-English vs US-English…and all this is before the actual lecture. *swoon*

Dr Jean Anderson teaches at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and “fell into” translation. She translates into French and her lecture was primarily about issues of cultural difference when translating literature from the Pacific island nations – a group of which she contends New Zealand is a part. Her particular problem had to do with translating work that, while written, comes from a highly developed oral tradition into French, which has fairly rigid conventions. Repetition, she said, was one example. Where a Mao’hi writer could repeat words, ‘good’ French writing demands that a particular word not be repeated until several paragraphs after its first appearance. Such conventions, be they in whatever language, throw up interesting quandaries for translators and quite often one has to make a decision based on what will ultimately be most acceptable to readers.

That raises the question of domesticating a text: risking the elimination of the original voice of the text by absorbing it too deeply into the target language (and culture).  And that in turn raises the question of why a translation shouldn’t ‘look’ like a translation. Why shouldn’t it look foreign if that’s what it is? All of which constitutes a fairly long-standing debate in the field of translation.

 I don’t know if translation studies is where I want to go necessarily; it represents to me a fairly black-and-white approach to language that I don’t think I’m entirely comfortable with. I prefer a more nebulous approach to language and that may well have to do with having grown up speaking three languages. I never had to ‘learn’ any of them formally although I’ve had lessons in all three at one time or another. Actually, when you think about it, it’s odd that this should come as a ‘surprise’ to translators because I’m hardly alone. The majority of the world’s population does grow up multilingual – there’s usually a national language as well as a regional language or dialect at the very least, as well as English and any other languages that may be relevant. It’s people in English-speaking countries who have to make an active effort to learn a new language, and those who do constitute a fairly small minority of language learners. And yet our theories of language acquisition center on the latter approach to language learning. …I have to go read me some more Venuti, I think.

Bless the Daily Puppy. I wandered over to their site again and prompty fell for this little one. Meet Zoey, the dachshund-chihuahua mix.

I love web comics. My latest discovery is 7 Shades of Black by James Treagus. It begins with Violet being so goth that Death turns up thinking she’s dead. Violet, naturaly, seems to develop an…erm…attachment to Death and proceeds to woo him. Oh and then there’s Poe, Violet’s cat, providing social commentary and a general reason. They’re all still getting to know each other at the moment, but I hope this strip sticks around. It’s funny in the way only death and cats can be.

Another discovery, although it’s been around for years is Questionable Content. I started at the beginning as I tend to do and so far the whole indie/emo thing is quite funny. I don’t know how it’s developed over the years, but the drawing’s certainly improved between #27 and #891.

I handed in my final assignment for my research course yesterday. Yes, it’s silly to have to write a research proposal for a thesis that’s due in a few weeks, but that should actually make it easier to write. I took it as a good sign that I got it done without bursting into tears – that means I actually do have some idea what I’m doing. Yaay.

The creative component was fun though, specially since I’ve opted to not include a creative component in my thesis and I wanted to see what I might have come up with if I had.  I thought of doing an ‘imitiation’ of Faiz in English, but discarded that idea pretty fast since I’d need my examiner to be able to read the original for it to make sense. What I did take from Faiz was the images and sentiment he uses in “Aaj Bazaar Mein Pabajaulan Chalo” which translates roughly as “Come to the marketplace in shackles today”.

[Digression] 

I’ve tried translating that one line over and over and simply cannot come up with any kind of phrasing in English that manages to convey the right combination of grief or determination or resignation or any of the other emotions that one line carries. ‘Aaj’ means today. ‘Bazaar’ is not just a marketplace, it’s the town centre or square where the business of living, not just trade, is carried out. ‘Mein’ is ‘in’. ‘Pabajaulan’ means ‘with shackled feet. ‘Chalo’ means ‘walk’ but it can also mean come or go. But that doesn’t really help because we don’t know who the line is addressed to. It could mean: 

• come with me to the marketplace in shackels
• let us go to the marketplace in shackles today
• I must walk in shackles through the marketplace today
• walk in shackles in the marketplace today
• We have come to a time when we must walk in shackles in the marketplace

So which is it? The problem is, it’s all of them. The poet himself actually did have to pass through the marketplace in chains one day because he needed to see a doctor and one couldn’t come to him in prison that day(Faiz was jailed because the government didn’t like his political opinions). The idea of having to walk chained in his own country for the crime of actually caring about its people stayed with him. It is also a comment on subjugation and the idea that, visible or not, everyone living under an oppressive regime is in shackles in public. It is also not only touches on (and the poem later discusses it explicitly) the humiliation faced by those with the will to fight but suggests that the brave come out in shackles willingly and take whatever other punishment the ‘oppressors’ wish to heap on them. Yes this is still the one line.

[/Digression]

 Since I’ve been reading Ilhan’s book at the same time and given my own interest in the ancient history of the land, I also picked up the image of the Dancing Girl of Mohenjodaro and again used Faiz’s idea of her ‘birth’ as the moment when time began (until we figure out what the real myths of the time were, I suppose we’ll just have to make up our own). Combine that with the Indus River (because I can) and you have a narrator all set to tell the story of a land in political turmoil. It was also easier to use the dancing girl as the speaker than myself because I feel my own emotional connection to the land is quite tenuous, despite my anger at the current situation there. (But that division is a whole other post.)

Overall, I’m not unhappy with the stuff I turned in. I’m avoiding reading it because I know I’ll find something I could have put better or should have left out or something. Plus I have my Writing the Unconscious assignment due next and have to go look up stuff on Jung. A jungian short story. What the hell was I thinking?!

In his May 20 column, Cowasjee lists all the leaders Pakistan has had. The list begins with Mohammad Ali Jinnah, naturally, but it’s frightening how quickly the downward spiral starts after Jinnah’s death. Cowasjee has comments and a few insights to offer, which is only natural given that he is of the generation that was born under the Raj and was present when Pakistan’s history began. Come to think of it, once our grandparents are gone, there won’t be too many people left in the world who can claim to have seen a country being born.

So what do you do when your country’s going down the tubes? You watch funny stuff on YouTube of course. Things like Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry looking disturbingly young as they parody that play about the Brownings. While you’re there, check out the clips from Fry and Laurie (that’s Hugh Laurie as in Dr House on tv).

Metroblogging Karachi has this article by a journalist on duty in Karachi on May 12.

Lawyers across the country are on strike.

Islamists are (rightly) accusing Musharraf of clinging to his uniform despite it being time to give it up, plus there’s the violation of the constitution thing. Although the poor constitution’s been contravened so many times already that its abuse is almost part of the ruler’s job description. Musharraf is also past retirement, never mind that he’s been blocking the Chief of Army Staff seat for far longer than his appointment allowed.

The combined opposition walked out of Senate Monday morning, forcing its adjournment. The opposition blames the MQM, which controls Karachi and is an ‘ally’ of the government, for the violence that happened over the weekend.

The Supreme Court’s additional registrar was shot in his home in Islamabad  in what appears to be a targeted killing. It would be very odd if his killing weren’t related to the shit that’s currently flying, specially when you consider that there were about 100 policemen stationed right outside his home.

And now for some context: Ayaz Amir’s weekend (pre-bloodbath) article on the Chief Justice’s trips around the country, in which he discusses what is likely to happen on the CJ’s Karachi trip.

40 people dead and 140 injured so far and I still don’t understand what’s happened. The Chief Justice of Pakistan was to address a lawyers’ convention in Karachi on Saturday, but the political party that runs the show there apparently didn’t approve of the welcome rally that groups interested in the ‘restoration’ of democracy were planning and so held a rally of their own protesting the ‘politicising’ of the CJ’s visit. Still with me? Ok, so then, given that two opposing groups wanted to hold rallies in essentially the same space, police were deployed, ostensibly to keep things under control. Only said police apparently vanished into thin air and the two groups started shooting at each other. So maybe my reaction to the fact that they were shooting is naive: this is Karachi after all–the big, bad, dangerous, violent city that us northerners look at with a mixture of dread and envy–but I can’t help seeing shooting another creature, human or otherwise, as a fundamentally, hideously cowardly act. Oh. Wait. I think it’s just begun to make sense.

Back to the plot. Apparently the sainted government had warned our naughty little CJ that things would get out of hand if he went to Karachi. I hope they’re enjoying their ‘I told you so’ moment. Now Dawn says that Reuters says that paramilitary forces have been issued orders/permission to shoot anybody involved in “serious violence”. As opposed to what? Funny violence? (Incidentally, how appalling is it that you can, at reuters.com, select world crises by region from a handy drop-down list?) That is supposed to be a response to the loss of “precious lives”?

Apparently (because nobody ever really  knows for sure, it seems–not even the people directly involved) this could be a reemergence of the ethnic violence that Karachi was famous for two decades ago, or it could be a clash between the government’s supporters and anti-government activists and have nothing to do with the earlier violence, it could be sponsored by the government itself, or it might be something else altogether.

 Venial Sin, who happens to be from Karachi–and who I wish I’d found under happier circumstances–records his reaction to the madness as well as more details in his blog. Given that the post includes pictures of dead people, do consider your tender sensibilities before you click. And really, looking at pictures of the violence and reading about it on as many news sources as possible is the only thing we can do at the moment. At least until it begins to make some kind of non-simplistic, non-propagandist, non-asinine sense.

Khalid Hasan reviews Ilhan’s book in the Friday Times. He doesn’t comment on it too much, choosing instead to quote from it, but his point about Pakistan’s departure from its original purpose or the point of its creation is well made.