On Collaborative Translation: an interview with Cristina Viti

SP:
Cristina, you are translator and poet who works in English, French and Italian. Over the last three years, you have directed collaborative translation workshops with students in London, France and Italy as a way of exploring the potentials and limitations of revolutionary language, as it first emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. You have translated both a Manifesto and a piece of revolutionary theatre, and have produced a document of translation workshop basics for us. I want to start by asking why were you interested in this project? What drew you to this project, given the difficulties of translating revolutionary rhetoric into English?

CV:

I guess for me the element of impossibility is directly connected to wanting to be involved in a translation. Because that makes it a learning process: a translation is something I want to come out of having done or thought about things I didn't know before. There are two sides to this: on one side, it’s hubristic, a sense of measuring up to the original; and on the other side the humility of saying, well yes, I have to do it and I want to do it well, I’m going to put in the hours.

SP:
What were some of the challenges of translating the Manifesto of Equals, an eighteenth-century text unpublished at the time but subsequently considered a founding text of socialist, anarchist and communist revolutions?

CV:

The first challenge, even before we got to the intricacies in the language, was staying with the awareness of the time lapse between the texts. With an original written over two hundred years ago, we have a shift in the perception of what is culturally acceptable, or some shared cultural elements that can no longer be approached without an extra level of analysis. So one challenge in this project was not falling for simplistic assumptions about the author we’re translating, and remembering that the standards of our judgement are produced by our own cultural and social context. And then the challenge of working that awareness into the translation of a text that needs to retain a high level of immediacy. It is very interesting: we have widely different registers shifting quite suddenly, and we need to constantly return to the form and rhythm, sometimes to the root of single words, to get the tone right. And I think our discussions did lead us to a good, lively relationship with the text.

SP:

Why might translation be a useful practice for understanding political languages, whether in the past or the present?

CV:

In a general sense, all language is inherently political: the way we speak to one another immediately reveals our ability, inability, willingness or unwillingness to relate. Translation sharpens our awareness of language, and that makes it one of the most useful instruments to analyze what power dynamics might lie at the core of any language expression, and also to counter the sort of entropy by which language becomes mired in formulas.

SP:

What difference do you think working collectively or collaboratively makes for you as a translator, and specifically for our project, do you think this collaborative effort has a significance for understanding the politics of the text?

CV:

Working collaboratively is an enrichment on many levels, and it takes different forms, from the relationship with a good editor when you are publishing a book, to co-translation, where you might feel a certain text needs wider diffusion but know your language skills or your understanding of a certain cultural context need the support of a native speaker who would instinctively understand certain references or expressions. And there is the workshop dimension, where the discussion is widened to more people. All of these situations challenge the stereotype of writing and translating as individual efforts, as something coming out of individual perception: in a workshop environment, certain affinities with other people will emerge on the basis of a shared sense of the text and of language. That revitalizes language and relationships, and it can lead to the creation of—I don't know if I want to call them networks, because many networks can become grids and then get gridlocked, unless each node of the network is able to reflect all the others. I think more of self-organizing collectives: to my mind, that mirrors the self-organizing quality of language, and in collaborative translation you’re somehow enacting and extending that process.

JMcG:

So do you think there’s a kind of proximity between the political intentions of this text, and that idea of working collaboratively as almost being a kind of collective organisation in itself, a collective political intention?

CV:
I think there is, and I think it's also a great antidote to the merchandising of the persona of the writer, the cult of personality around the writer. There are collectives of writers through the ages that have worked in that way, whether to evade censorship or for other reasons. That also happens in translation: the old concept of a translation being good if the translator is ‘invisible’ referred to the quality of the text; but the question of ‘visibility’ is now increasingly referred to the figure of the translator. On the one hand the translator has reached a form of visibility which is desirable from a contractual point of view, because translation should be seen as work, as writing or teaching are work; but on the other hand, we don’t want to be forced into visibility if that means our agency becomes subordinated to commercial profiling or the marketing of a persona. In a workshop, that shading of each person into others is interesting, and does I think hark back to the collectives and loose associations formed by the authors we are studying and translating. We were inspired by their journeys and meetings, by the fact that translation was seen as a practical way to repair broken links in discourse.

SP:
So that leads to my next question. That the past is a foreign country has become a proverbial expression. Do you agree with this description? And do you see yourself as making the past present again in some way?

CV:
‘The past is a foreign country’ is a tad too ‘geolocalized’ for me (laughs): really we are looking at huge abstractions, ‘the past’, ‘the present’… I am interested in the great work done by contemporary writers who show the very direct links between the possibilities opened up by digital technologies and utopian thinking from the time frame we are considering in our translation workshops. We are making connections—or rather, connections are already there, but we are clearing away the dust. We need to be clear about our purpose, to test our intuition that there is a lot to learn from what was said in those texts, including the mistakes that were made: those ideas can nurture our practice, not through affiliation to any tradition but as a form of live inspiration. A feedback loop by which what you have received in the form of inspiration you will then put back by way of revivifying the original language.

JMcG:

Translators in the late 18th century were interested in whether translation was a creative practice—an art—or a technical exercise. How do you feel about that historical question, or about its implications for your present practice?

CV:

To my mind, the dichotomy between ‘creative practice’ and ‘technical exercise’ is a reductionist fallacy, something that had no place in earlier traditions (nor, increasingly, in contemporary perception), where the concept of applied knowledge was not split away from that of creative endeavour, just like science was not separated from art. It comes down to accepting that the imperative is practice, that the idea of craft, devotion to craft, is at the heart of creativity. You could say that ‘art’ is ‘technique’ taken to its extreme, which includes imperfection and the unfinished: ‘technique’ watching itself as it unfolds and exceeds itself.

JMcG:

I suppose another way of asking this is, does the act of translation produce something new? Does it produce a different thing in the present to the thing in the past, or does it reproduce this text from the past?

CV:

I think it definitely does create something new, but at the same time congruent to the original, as two angles of the same width inside a geometrical figure might be said to be not equal but congruent. It's a double awareness. On one side, you realize that your text can never be a flat reproduction of the original. To say the translator is ‘invisible’ is like saying the scientist who conducts an experiment is not a factor in the experiment itself. But on the other hand, this is also a carceral term (we speak of being ‘translated’ into jail): you need to be aware that you're under some constraints, that the text you’re translating is a set of processes and not a blank canvas, and within those constraints achieve maximum freedom.

SP:
The collaborative translation of the Manifesto of Equals was recently read aloud as part of an art project by Stanley Schtinter called Important Books (Or, Manifestos Read By Children). The work you've done with our students was read aloud by a 9-year-old girl from London, who presumably does not really understand all that she's reading. Or she might have some feelings about certain combinations of words and not others. So I guess I wanted to ask, how does it feel to hear the translation read by someone who might not know the whole context or even the meaning of some of the words? And then more generally, what is the value of oral performance for you?

CV:

How does it feel… it brought back the best times in the classroom, when being out of my depth and having to make an effort made things more interesting. There are some complicated passages in that text which a young child might find quite difficult, but then, the core points get across quite easily, I think. I was pleased that Maréchal’s Manifesto became part of that archive, and I like Stanley’s approach, which seems to me to counter the stultifying ‘edutainment’ agenda with some challenging ideas. To my mind, children grappling with these big but very basic concepts mirrors a healthy relationship with language: we may believe we know a language, but I think we can never fully ‘know’ even ‘our own’ language—and that's the beauty of it. As a process, I think language is something akin to magic and child's play, which has its own weird, reality-making logic. So the answer to how I feel about this ‘meeting of projects’ is: great!

As to the role of the voice, to me that quite simply makes the difference on whether a translation works or not. With the Manifesto, we noted how the translation really came alive when we read it aloud, and how some difficulties were only resolved by hearing how it sounded. And in my practice, once I’ve drafted a translation and checked it for accuracy, I will read it aloud, no matter the genre, and invariably find that many things which were previously unclear or problematic will be ‘fixed’. We are pushed towards compartmentalizing areas of creativity, including translation, and told that different sets of skills are needed for different genres. But what makes a good translation is how close you can stay to the original tone, and tone lies in rhythm, the breath of the language.

SP:
We're now in the process of making a film based on fragments of the translation directed by La Phenomena, a French theatre collective. These fragments are used to inspire new writing and performances using movement, dance, poetry and improvisation. How do you understand these acts of ‘embodied translation’? How are they in relation with what you did: are these adaptations, or retranslations, or continuations of your project?

CV:
We can speak of embodied translation, but in this case that’s somewhat tautological, I think: translation is a language act, and a language act stems from the body, at least insofar as we are speaking of human language. At the same time, translation is inevitably text based: we have two language systems, two systems of syntax, of semantic values, of cultural references, and we need to very strictly and precisely put them in comparison so that they will shine light onto each other. For me, the time-honoured, working definition of that as ‘translation’ is perfectly adequate. What then happens when the translation is taken and put to use in different ways is for whoever takes it, and it’s their work to define or redefine it. You need to make your translation perfectly attuned to the original, but you can’t control where it goes once it’s finished—and neither should you, unless you see that it has been badly distorted for political reasons. It’s also a matter of working relationships: you can be in such close contact with a theatre company that you practically become part of them, because they feel supported by your presence during rehearsals, or you can simply deliver the text and watch it go its own way, unpredictable as that may be. In this case, the fact that our translation is at the heart of a film or a play on utopia can start us thinking about the role of the theatre in the French Revolution, and more widely about the relationship between revolution and festive feeling, the fact of people coming together in celebration and affirmation. And that’s a great thing.

JMcG:

This follows into our next question, which was about the end or ends of translation, about what it leads to.

CV:

We can speak of ends and means: how our means of production and survival are being brutally curtailed, and how against those constraints our ends remain the same. As a translators’ workshop based on a shared sense of what language does, we can continue our practice, deepening our understanding of language and searching for texts that deserve to be reappraised. When we speak of what writing and translation can do, we think of the need to counter the general drive against complexity: it’s a sort of undertow, the constant risk of language being impoverished, cut into sound bites, banalized—and as translators, as writers, we’re here to work against that.

SP:

What you say is connected to specialisms, the language of specialism and jargon, how that stops us from being able to dissent as well. It stops the flow of things. Really good ideas, once they enter this specialist, expert-driven language—or not even expert-driven but quite empty categories, bureaucratic categories—the original impulse of the words loses meaning. We end up bandying about terms—sovereignty, right, or whatever it is—without any concept of what we're talking about anymore.

CV:

Yeah, that is a danger, and in fact we’re constantly pushed towards ossifying our language as much as is conducive to the self-perpetuating of bureaucracy. Which means that working to produce a good translation, an honest piece of writing that has accuracy and flair, that can follow its own internal logic even when that’s at odds with style conventions or market forces, is a basic part of the politics of language.

JMcG

So there’s a sense in which democratic openness is connected to resisting oversimplification: in some sense, literature enables a more complex relationship with words, an opportunity to resist oversimplificaiton.

CV:

Yes: banalized language produces a sort of ‘culture void’ which then becomes a breeding ground for really dangerous rhetoric. Literature and translation are so often co-opted into that and pushed towards becoming instrumental to that—but if we stay aware of that danger, they can become most effective against it.

SP:

Any final words for people undertaking radical translations of their own?

CV:

I was talking with some students in a high school in Italy a few weeks ago about language, about how translation is a branch of writing, which should be obvious but is so often forgotten. About how it is a radically political act to work on your writing skills, to cultivate readiness, to keep your language rich and supple, ready for register shifts and opportunities for expression. And about the need to ask yourself, where can I make my most radical contribution to discourse. The practice of sharpening attention and the resolve to refuse work that runs against what we called our ‘aesth/ethics’.

SP:
I want to close by just saying thank you, Cristina, what you've done with the students with such difficult texts – you've engaged them for so long: the workshops would sometimes be over 3 hours long with no comfort break, no coffee break, using zoom during covid confinements, working with 18th century vocabulary and categories.... It was really, really super what you've done with the students. They loved the translation part, and that was a surprise to me: I thought more students would be interested in performance rather than the actual work of translation. And so thank you for that.

CV:

Thank you Sanja, and thanks to all the students: true, we sometimes forgot all about breaks, and during our meetings in person people just began moving between spaces as needed while work on the text unfolded. At times it felt a bit like being in a jam session: a place where the level of improvisational freedom is directly proportional to the level of precision we're prepared to pursue.

A good way to work, I think.