‘Rendition’ and ‘rendition’: why, in the mutations of language, does an act of translation acquire a sinister shadow meaning? Why has that infamous pun ‘traduttore, traditore’ entered popular culture, along with glib recital of the phrase ‘lost in translation’ in all sorts of situations? Is there something to fear about translation? An ‘extraordinary rendition’ in the political sense is a form of disappearance, in which a suspect is whisked out of sight of prying eyes: outsourced torture. ‘Translation’ has a comparable sense of a change of state, from visible to invisible. The Biblical Enoch undergoes such a ‘translation’. Having lived for 365 years, rather than go through death, he was simply ‘not found, because God had translated him’ (in the King James Bible’s version of Hebrews 11:5). That’s the sense Shakespeare uses when Peter Quince sees Bottom with the ass’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Bless thee, Bottom! Thou art translated!’ To translate is to transform in mysterious ways, even to make disappear. Or perhaps I should say ‘to disappear’, giving the verb the transitive force, taken from Spanish, that we associate with the disappearances in Pinochet’s Chile and other such police states.

If you are still with me, you’ll see that I’m twisting meanings, too, but in the hope of opening up an investigation. For translators are among the disappeared. Time and again translation is rendered invisible, forgotten, not in the budget, airbrushed out, and I want to know why. This is surely a matter of professional self-interest to literary translators, but also a concern for someone like myself who is a consumer of translation – as we all are, whether we recognise it or not. We depend on translation in all its forms to experience and make sense of the world. As Ian Britain wrote in the special edition of Meanjin: On Translation (2005), translation is ‘something that happens beyond, as well as between, tongues, and is applicable to other parts of the body, to images and gestures as much as words, to all kinds of movement between all kinds of geographical and cultural spaces’.

I want to suggest that the reasons for the invisibility of translation are at once matters of specific practices – and I know, for instance, that the Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALiTra) has made headway in its campaign to get newspaper reviewers of translated novels to mention the translator – and larger cultural frames. I want to rehearse some arguments as to why translation needs better recognition, understanding and valuation.

Translation is routinely invisible on television current affairs programmes that use non-English speakers as their talent. Typically, the interviewer questions in English, to camera or out of frame, while the respondent speaks his or her own language with the volume turned down and a loud English voice-over gives us the gist of what is being said. We don’t know whether the interpreter is there on the spot, or even sometimes whether the interviewer is there, or whether the translation has been done back in the studio and the semblance of an exchange cut together later. It happens as if by magic. We have little sense of the laborious, complex and contentious process of interpretation that lies behind the usable English-language bite. It is a form of passing off, a degree of misrepresentation, although practice varies, and SBS is more sensitive than most to the problem. When José Ramos Horta was sworn in as prime minister of East Timor, the vows were heard in English. Yet I wanted to know what language he actually spoke for such a ceremonious occasion. There is a language question in East Timor. I strained to hear his muted voice. He was speaking Portuguese. That told me something. Our habitual acceptance of the disappearance of the business of translation in news reporting helps to confirm the dangerous illusion that we live in a monoglot world. Yet too often it is the invisible, locally engaged interpreter who is killed when journalists go into war zones. The devil is, as always, in the detail.

That is why the head-butting moment in the 2006 World Cup final gripped us. Suddenly, we needed to know exactly what Materazzi had said to wind up Zinedine Zidane like that – and we all became interpreters. Within twenty-four hours, the different versions were spinning round the world; Chinese whispers meets urban myth. I got in touch with an Italian source, hoping for some inside information. The reply came back that, with the millions of competing opinions, lip-readings, fantastic suggestions, and the clash of cultures involved, we would never know. And if we did, it wouldn’t have the same visceral effect in English anyway. The insults of one culture, that most potent area of language, are the least translatable into another as a spur to action. ‘What’s wrong with calling his mother a terrorist whore?’ I heard one Australian commentator ask. ‘Surely there are worse things?’ But not, perhaps, to Zizou.

You will forgive me for talking rather loosely about translation and interpretation. Literary translation is a specialised art at the zenith of communication across boundaries of language and culture. It is necessary to the larger and longer life of literary traditions. But it is neglected partly because it is not always distinguished from all those other activities that go under the heading of translation or interpretation. It shares in the larger resistance to developing intercultural dialogue and understanding here in Australia, the residual Anglophone monoculturalism. So while literary translation needs to be esteemed as an art for its own sake, its value must also be argued in terms of its contribution to the well-being of a pluralistic, outward-looking, curious and tolerant community, as well as more abstract goals such as universal access to cultural heritage.

International PEN has resently presented a report on Translation and Globalisation for the United Nations. Melbourne and Sydney PEN Centres have combined to produce an Australian response for this report, authored by Barbara McGilvray (a member of the Sydney PEN Translation Committee). The report, which is available at www.pen.org.au, concentrates on the state of literary translation. But PEN’s interest in translation is wider, part of a larger commitment to communication across borders. PEN does this work through its Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee, established in 1978 to promote the world’s linguistic and cultural differences, the translation of contemporary literature and the creation of a Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights. That latter commitment draws attention to minority, often indigenous languages. It can be argued that not making space for translation is a way of not listening, a refusal of another person’s voice, a kind of censorship. In the case of recent refugees in Australia who were also writers, for whom PEN campaigned, it was only when their words were adequately translated and interpreted that the full implication of their stories could be understood. The publication in 2004 of their work in the PEN anthology Another Country, edited by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally, became a significant factor in their subsequent release from detention. In some situations, the oppression of a group goes hand in hand with systematic extirpation of their language and written culture, as in Burma today. One motive for PEN’s report is a sense that the neglect of literary translation in the United States (and the Anglosphere generally) might be a symptom of a deeper failure to engage constructively with the rest of the world.

In Australia’s case, the report is gloomy in ways that are familiar. In answer to the question, ‘What percentage of the books published in your country each year are literary translations from other languages?’ (i.e. books not originated in the United States, Britain or elsewhere), the report states: ‘One estimate is half a dozen books a year, but that may be optimistic. We’re hoping this PEN report will provide us with a tool for lobbying the relevant bodies to gather such statistics.’ The report places this in context:

Translation in Australia is generally seen as a necessary service to be provided for migrants and thus for the past half century has had a welfare orientation. This is now changing, albeit slowly. Literary translation still has a low profile but there are many good Australian translators into English who publish both in Australia and in other English-language markets … [Yet] the work of the translator is not widely understood or even considered. There is still a widespread assumption that it can be done by anyone who speaks two languages. The majority of translators here work as subcontractors for government or private agencies in order to earn a living – although relatively few are able to rely on translation alone for a living.

Commenting on the situation in Australia, one respondent, Ivor Indyk, editor of HEAT magazine, looked to the wider social environment: ‘The inhospitable air which permeates the political climate … is perhaps clearest in the low priority we give to translation as an art, and as a cultural necessity.’ I take the cultural necessity to be that we must be able to understand each other in a migrant society where many people have more than one language in their lives, including many indigenous people. We are a translated and translating country, though some might wish to deny it. But the cultural necessity is also that we must understand people beyond our shores, beyond our immediate time and place, if we are to achieve the dynamic potential of cosmopolitanism and global participation.

How can we encourage and assist literary translation in Australia? Although best practice may be a kind of invisibility on the page, literary translators need to be more visible in other ways. They must be named, acknowledged, paid and celebrated. The New South Wales government continues the biannual translation prize that PEN initiated, while the Victorian government has inexplicably suspended its pioneering translation prize for this triennial. The New South Wales prize was won by Chris Andrews in 2005, not for a particular translation but for a body of work: this stipulation draws attention to the fact that translation is a practice that develops over many years, in different directions, as a calling, a way of living, and that it need not depend on the success or failure of one book by a translated author. Years may pass before recognition arrives, when, for example, a foreign writer is rediscovered and long out-of-print translations are suddenly in demand.

But recognition for literary translators requires more than putting the spotlight on individuals. The process of literary translation needs to be articulated and understood. The notion persists that it is easy, that it is like pressing One for English or Two for Spanish when dialling up and the words transform automatically. This is an anti-Babel fantasy, based on ignorance. Technology has not delivered, not so far. The things that literary translators do, the strategies they adopt, the choices of what to translate and how, for whom, for which market, the theories, the ethics, the aesthetics, the dialogue with the original, the placing of the work in context, the relationship with the author, with the publisher, all these things, along with the expertise, the time, the successive stages, the myriads of decisions, word by word – all this needs to be discernible and understood. It needs to be included in the budget. It needs to be argued and explicated as a form of practice and of research practice within the academy.

The special issue of Southerly, ‘Translations’, guest-edited by Vivian Smith in 2003, and the special issue of Meanjin in 2005, mentioned above, are two important recent interventions that showcase this work. The Asia–Pacific Writers Network website is another: apwn.net.au. AALITRA, with Monash University’s Translation and Interpreting Studies Program, is in a position to lead the way, defining and redefining the territory.

As a literary art, literary translation is a close cousin of Creative Writing. Community interest has led to rapid growth in Creative Writing programmes in universities and schools. At the University of Adelaide, for example, the PhD program in Creative Writing currently has some thirty students. Debate continues there and in most of the other programmes that make up the Australian Association of Writing Programs about how Creative Writing sits with other academic programs, such as literary, communications or cultural studies. There is a focus on how we explain what we do as research and about how Creative Writing research outcomes should be measured. If your novel sells enough copies to make money for you and the publisher, and is shortlisted for a major prize, then surely your research practice has been successful – if such were your goals. I see literary translation facing similar problems and possibilities, and I welcome literary translation as an affiliate of Creative Writing for these purposes. Among our students in Adelaide is one whose topic concerns translingualism, writing creatively in a second language, as both a practice and a topic for investigation. Her practice belongs to a tradition that includes Samuel Beckett, Milan Kundera, Gao Xingjian and Andrei Makine among others.² I look forward to the day when I have a student who is translating a literary work for a PhD in Creative Writing, in a project jointly supervised with a literary translator.

This is the edited version of a public lecture given at the inaugural meeting of the Australian Association for Literary Translation in August 2006, at the Monash University City Office.

Footnotes

¹ Jane Mayer, ‘Outsourcing Torture:The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program’, The New Yorker, 14 February 2005.

² Emma Carmody, ‘That Wonderful Lacuna: Creative Writing in French as a second language’, conference paper, XIVth Annual Conference of the Australian Society for French Studies (ASFS), University of Adelaide, 11–13 July 2006.