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- Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Translation, Text and Interferences
- Sprache: Englisch
This book suggests that linguistic translation is one minute province of an immense process of creative activity that constitutes the world as an ongoing dynamism of unceasing transformation. Building upon the speculative quantum gravity theory, which provides a narrative of the push-pull dynamics of transformative translation from the very smallest scales of reality to the very greatest, this book argues that the so-called translative turn of the 1990s was correct in positing translation as a paradigmatic concept of transformation. More radically, the book stages a provocative provincialization of linguistic translation, so that literary translation in particular is shown to display a remarkable awareness of its own participation in a larger creative contact zone. As a result, the German language, literary translations in and out of German, and the German-language classroom, can be understood respectively as quantum contact zones. Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of Anglophone Literatures at the University of Tübingen and Research Associate at the University of Pretoria.
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Russell West-Pavlov
German as a Contact Zone
Towards a Quantum Theory of Translation from the Global South
Narr Francke Attempto Verlag Tübingen
© 2019 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen www.narr.de • [email protected]
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ISBN 978-3-8233-8143-3 (Print)
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Inhalt
Acknowledgements
This book emerged in tandem with and in the wake of the long drawn-out process of my acquisition, after two decades of residence in the Federal Republic, of German nationality. Like many others in my situation, the application for German citizenship ran parallel to the effort to retain the prior nationality—a stumbling block for German legal tradition. According to a long-standing principle within German citizenship law dual nationality is to be ‘avoided’ (an exception is made for EU citizens). It is however gradually becoming the de facto norm in naturalization procedures (von Münch 2007: 159-72); in 2006 the proportion of naturalizations with retention of the prior nationality for the first time exceeded the 50 %-mark and has been rising slowly ever since, reaching almost 65 % a decade and a half later (Worbs 2008: 26; Bundesbeauftragte für Integration 2016: 433; Statistisches Bundesamt 2018: 126). My experience was thus illustrative of the curious anomaly of a nation that clings, at the level of official discourse, to a legal concept of a singular national identity but, at the level of quotidian administrative practice, increasingly admits more complex configurations of plurinationality. Draft bills seeking to harmonize the juridical framework of citizenship with a slow but ineluctable diversification of civil society have repeatedly been tabled in the Bundestag since the mid-1990s (Deutscher Bundestag 1995); perhaps the shelf-life of this book will witness the genuine inauguration of German citizenship regulations as a happily hybrid contact zone unburdened by assumptions of normative mononationality.
For their generous support in the lodging of the dual citizenship application I would like to thank Karin Amos, Frank Baasner, Robert Dixon, Bernd Engler, Martin Hertkorn, Jürgen Leonhardt, Philip Mead, Dorothea Rüland, Monique Scheer, Bernd Villhauer and Andrew J. Webber.
Thanks are also due to many others as they have aided me in my journeys in and out of my own ‘German contact zones’: to Rhys Bezzant, who taught me the rudiments of the German language in Melbourne; to Dieter Buff, who mentored me during my first teaching posting at Pascal-Gymnasium, Münster; to Catherine Proescholdt, who tutored me through the Cambridge German Diploma that, two decades later, aided me in the naturalization procedure; to Helmut Peitsch, who guided me in my first steps into the world of German scholarship from the far shores of South Wales and has remained a friend and mentor ever since; and to Matthias N. Lorenz, a close friend and valued colleague since my time in Lüneburg (and who assisted in procuring a copy of the film by Sissako with which I open this volume).
Going back even further in my own diasporic-exilic academic biography, I would like to acknowledge those academic mentors who supervised my early work on translation studies: Marion Campbell at the University of Melbourne in my honours year; and Jean-Pierre Guillerm at the Université de Lille III and Maud Ellmann at the University of Cambridge for my respective doctorates.
A special word of thanks is also due to John Kinsella, sometime Public Intellectual Visiting Fellow in the Tübingen ‘Literary Cultures of the Global South’ project in 2016, co-author, debating and walking companion, and a figure in one of the chapters in this book—and to our colleague and common friend Philip Mead, who put us in contact, thinking we might have some interesting things to say to each other. Likewise, I am grateful to Ivan Vladislavić, Thomas Brückner and Mark Sanders, who came to Tübingen for a memorable workshop on ‘Translating South Africa’ in 2016; discussions with them have likewise resulted in a chapter in this book. A subsequent discussion with John Kinsella on the slopes of the Achalm in 2018 contributed some important ideas to that chapter as well. Thanks more generally to Thomas Brückner, Michael Hulse and Katharina Meyer for direct feedback on my chapters about their translations. An ongoing dialogue with Sudesh Mishra has contributed much to the book. Susana Garbe and Johannes Garbe gave useful comments on some of the material in the chapters on literary translations. And of course to Anya Heise-von der Lippe, Matthias Schmerold and Joseph Steinberg for technical advice and support and for their assistance in the preparation of the text, many thanks are due. Thanks to the anonymous external reader who made valuable suggestions for improving the text at a late stage in its genesis.
I am grateful to Fernando Resende and Beatriz Polianov for giving permission to reprint a version of an article that originally appeared in Contracampo in 2017 (chapter 11). I am similarly grateful to Suman Gupta, Satnam Virdee and Amanda Estell-Bleakley for giving permission to reprint as chapter 13 a longer version of an essay previously published in a special number of Ethnic and Racial Studies under their guest editorship. The chapter is derived in part from the article in ERS published on 15 June 2018 and available online at: wwww.tandfonline.com/ [https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2018.1468918].
Thanks are due to the following publishers for permission to reprint selections from the work of the poets I have discussed: to Arc (Todmorden) for reprint lines from John Kinsella’s Poems ‘After “Friedensfeier”’, ‘After Hölderlin’s ‘Walk’”, ‘Subtexting “Der Spaziergang”’, ‘Searching “Der Spaziergang”’, and ‘After Hölderlin’s “Der Winkel von Hardt”’, in The Wound (2018); to Jonathan Cape (London) (via Farrar Straus and Giroux), for permission to reprint lines from ‘The Star Apple Kingdom’ in Derek Walcott’s The Star-Apple Kingdom (1980); to Carcanet (Manchester), for permission to cite Michael Hamburger’s Hölderlin translations ‘The Nook at Hardt’, ‘Celebration of Peace’, and ‘The Walk’ from Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragements (Anvil, 2004); to Farrar Straus and Giroux (New York), for permission to reprint lines from Pierre Joris’ Celan translations in Breathturn (2016) and from Walcott’s ‘The Morning Moon’, ‘The Return to the Trees’, and North and South’ in Collected Poems 1948-84 (1986); to Hanser (Munich), to reprint lines from Klaus Martens’ translation of Walcott’s poems ‘Das Königreich des Sternapfels’ in the volume of the same name (1989), and ‘Der Morgenmond’ in Erzählungen von den Inseln (1993); and to Suhrkamp (Berlin) for permission to reprintlines from Celan’s Die Gedichte (2003) and Eich’s Träume (1953/1973).
I wish to register my debt to the German Federal Ministry of Research (BMBF) and the German Academic Exchnage Service (DAAD) for support for this publication via the Thematic Network project ‘Literary Cultures of the Global South’ (grant no. 57373684).
Thanks finally, of course, to Tatjana, Joshua, Iva and Niklas, fellow travellers and fellow translators—in the widest sense of the word—one and all.
Walkürenstraße, Berlin © J. Wawrzinek, 2019.
Introduction
Rostov-Luanda-[Berlin]
Mauretanian-Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako’s Rostov-Luanda (Sissako 1997) is one of the most curious road movies produced in recent decades. The film tracks the protagonist Dramane (who is played by and may be close to Sissako himself) in his quest through Luanda, the capital of Angola, and two other Angolan rural centres, to find a long-lost friend named Baribanga. Baribanga is a former fellow student from the era when Dramane/Sissako trained at the Moscow Film Academy in then Soviet Russia. The two Africans met on the long train-ride from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don, where both were to take part in a Russian language course, and became friends, but have lost contact in the years after the collapse of the Soviet world. Dramane wonders what has become of his friend after decades of civil war in Angola, and undertakes to track him down.
The quest takes Dramane/Sissako from Paris back to his native Kiffa in Southern Mauretania, prior to making the journey to war-scarred Luanda, the capital of Angola, as well as to several other regional towns in Angola. Finally, in a surprising turn of events, the journey takes the questing protagonist back to Europe—to East Berlin, where Baribanga is now living, but about to return home after the years of exile. In the final scene of the film, Germany and its capital become a ‘contact zone’—an eerie place of meeting, where presence and absence, arrival and departure, and finally, speech and silence, overlap.
Sissako’s film, in which a bewildering range of languages are spoken on the screen, gains another overlay of language in its final moments. In the last, almost mute scene, not a word of German is spoken. Yet the language is present in visual form: in the subtitles at the bottom of the screen—and in a brief glimpse of a street-sign, one that is programmatic for the import of Sissako’s film (and also for the underlying thesis of this book): ‘Walkürenstraße’ [‘Valkyrie Street’] (Sissako 1997: 56:47).
The street does exist in the real-life East Berlin suburb of Karlshorst (it can easily be located on Google Maps streetview, or visited in person if you so wish). But Sissako’s semi-mute filmic text is more interested in exploiting the mythic-allegorical resonances of the street-name: in Germanic mythology, the valkyries were the beings that accompanied warriors fallen in battle to Walhalla. Sissako’s mythicological pun is not merely about Dramane’s imminent task of accompanying Baribanga back to the erstwhile battle-grounds of South-Western Africa after the cessation of Cold War hostilities. It is also about his own place within an elaborate allegory of transportation and translation, whether geographical, linguistic, cultural or mnemonic.
Within that allegory, Germany and the German language are also translated. But not merely translated—they are more profoundly and mysteriously transmuted. Transported from its customary hegemonic position as a national language of a global economic hegemon, German is relocated to a diegetically marginalized position of urban dilapidation and imminent departure. In Sissako’s final scene, German becomes a frontier region, a departure lounge, almost a non-place à la Augé (1992). It becomes, in Sissako’s bizarre filmic semiotics, a ‘contact zone’, and thus provides a neat image for both of the two intertwined undertakings explored in this book: ‘contact zones’ and ‘translation’, with both of these being meant in a much broader sense than customary usage might suggest.
The expansion of meaning that I operate upon concepts such as ‘contact zone’ and ‘translation’ is hinted at in the name of the street upon which Sissako focuses. Sissako’s ‘Walkürenstraße’ is not merely a label that refers to passages between places, languages, or cultures. The valkyries transported the fallen warriors from this life to the after-life—across the frontier between life, death, or non-life or the-other(s)-of-life. This is no ordinary frontier, but rather, the ultimate frontier, the border par excellence; the moment of its transgression in fact announces the blurring or even abolition of all frontiers. Given the polyglot character of Sissako’s film, this frontier may also be the frontier between language and non-language, or the other(s)-of-language, whose status in the social sciences is not dissimilar to that of death in the life sciences.
I have stressed the alternative ‘other(s)-of-life’ and ‘-of-language’ that somehow eludes the binary ‘life’/‘non-life’ and ‘language’/‘non-language’ because that binary itself may be an illusion. Many streets in erstwhile Cold War Berlin were borders: Bernauer Straße between the districts of Mitte and Wedding is doubtless the most infamous example. Indeed, the East Berlin section of Sissako’s film begins with a brief sequence in which the taxi drives alongside to still remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall (Sissako 1997: 56:20). But the street in the last scene of Sissako’s film is not a frontier in that sense. Rather, it’s quite literally the street of the Valkyries, a street that crosses a frontier. Friedrichstraße at Checkpoint Charlie might be a better Cold War analogy for such a border-crossing street. The street of the Valkyries is a thoroughfare that translates between states, and no less importantly, connects them to one another. Sissako explores, via his filmic semiotics, the manner in which frontiers, from the microscopic to the planetary scales, are in fact, lieux de passage and lieux de brassage, ‘contact zones’ at which translations take place in such a way that the frontier enables rather than hinders communication and travel. His film thus exemplifies the way this book is not merely interested in expanding the semantic fields covered by ‘contact zones’ and ‘translation’ well beyond those of language and culture, but also seeks to turn that expansion back upon the line of demarcation that is constitutive of both terms, thus rendering it creative and generative.
Sissako’s film stages the absence of German and the imminent-absence of Germany as its point of arrival. In place of that evacuated site of German and Germany, it installs a periphery and a site of transition, a ‘contact zone’. Such a conceptual operation opens both the place and the language up to translation. But Sissako carries out these conceptual undertakings via the concrete semiotic presentation of built environments and natural landscapes. In this way, he suggests that translation is not merely a matter of language and culture, but, via the mediation of geography, becomes a phenomenon that pervades the entirety of the material world. Sissako’s project thus performs, albeit in reverse order, the four-part thesis of this book:
Translation is first and foremost a process that is ubiquitous in the material world, where the very smallest building blocks of matter are not so much entities as contact zones, fields of force, energy and attraction. In these constitutive contact zones, translations—exchanges of information—that make the world in its ongoing dynamic transformation, are constantly taking place.
One subset of such ongoing flows of information is language, itself a processual translative medium that interacts with other languages in what we know as interlingual translation.
One such language, German, can finally be read as a subspecies of cosmic translation. The translative nature of material itself devolves to the German language to make it, in my reading, an always already translative contact zone susceptible of new understandings—and in particular, of new pedagogical transmission in the contemporary translation classroom.
The Global South is the cradle of the contact zone as the basal form of cultural development and provides driving impulses for the reconceptualization of translation as a quantum process. This in turn generates central pedagogical inputs into the translation classroom.
Berlin coming and goings
Let us return to Sissako’s strange road movie to upack these theses about ‘German as Contact Zone’ in more detail.
Given its conclusion, Sissako’s film might better be titled Rostov-Luanda-Berlin—but even this ludic alteration might demand some further ludic tampering, producing perhaps something like Rostov-Luanda-[Berlin] or, even more adventurously, Rostov-Luanda-Berlin (with Berlin placed sous rature, in the notorious expression of Derrida). For after a long quest through the war-torn rural and urban landscapes of South-Western Africa, we see almost nothing of East Berlin. Nor indeed do we see much of Baribanga himself, except for a brief glimpse as the long-lost friend leans for a moment over the balustrade of his flat’s balcony to see who is ringing the bell at the downstairs entrance (Sissako 1997: 57:35). Barely an audible word is spoken, except the narrator’s concluding voice-over in French, supplemented by subtitles in German:
Baribanga wohnt in Berlin, aber nur noch für kurze Zeit. Ein letztes Exil, das er für die Heimat verlassen wird. An diesem Oktobermorgen, habe ich ihn etwas sagen hören, in jener Sprache unserer vergangen Illusionen. Es war das Wort ‘Rückkehr’, und es klang wie eine Erfüllung. (Sissako 1997: 57:29-47)
[Baribanga is living in Berlin, but only for a little while longer. This is a last exile, one that he is about to quit to return home. On this October morning I heard him say something in this language of our bygone illusions. It was the word ‘Return’, and it had the sound of a fulfilment.]
The penultimate word of the film is in Russian: ‘vozvrashcheniye’. In the German subtitles, it is translated. This translation has a double effect. On the one hand, the translation erases, in part at least, the ubiquitous Russian that nestles, quixotically, among the French, Portuguese, Arabic, and a number of national or regional African languages that are spoken during the protagonist’s travels through North- and South-Western Africa. By the same token, however, the translation also enacts the constant translative process that marks not only the interface between the film’s spoken languages, but also between the spoken languages and the visual footer carrying the printed German subtitles.
Yet the final moments of the film are only very partially about linguistic translation, for the simple reason that they are largely mute. The silence is broken only by a couple of murmured words between the East-Berlin taxi driver and his passenger Dramane/Sissako, as the latter navigates with the help of a classic Falk street map of Berlin through industrial areas to Karlshorst (Sissako 1997: 56:20). Once again, the mutedness of the final scenes produces two effects.
On the one hand, it makes space for a new gaze, and for the presence of a new visual interlocutor: the landscape. The spectator gazes across the driver’s and Dramane/Sissako’s shoulders, through the windscreen and the side-windows at the East Berlin urban and semi-industrial landscape, replicating the same device that has been used repeatedly in the scenes of the long journey from Mauretania down the West coast of Africa to Angola and through the countryside between coastal Luanda and southerly inland Huambo and Humpata (see Adesokan 2010: 152). Several things are visually ostended here: the mediated gaze of the director, translated via the camera lens and the car windows; and the landscape itself, whether rural or urban, that ceases to be mere setting, and advances to the status of a character within the film. As Adesokan (2010: 147) notes, ‘in Sissako’s films the open desert or despoiled landscape is not only inhabited, it also draws attention itself through motion and quest’. Indeed, this landscape, at least the urban one we see in the final scene of Rostov-Luanda, is sometimes even endowed with its own language, as in the street sign or the scribbled nameplates on the doorbells of Baribanga’s block of flats. Such inscriptions of the natural or built environment once again blur the boundaries between the observing-semiotizing world of humankind and the observed world of nature which, as we shall duly see, is engaged in no less creative semiotic practices.
On the other hand, the mutedness of the final scenes contribute to a strange sort of hollowing out of the ‘national’ site, if not its visual incarnation, that provides the film’s diegetic ending and point of arrival. Germany is shown here almost entirely devoid of Germans—and of German. This means that in Sissako’s film, German and Germany have an eminently paradoxical status. Germany is the (almost) culminating moment of a postmodern Global South quest narrative—yet this status is neatly undercut when the final scene announces an imminent return to Angola, thus diegetically displacing Germany as the mimetic point of arrival. At the same time, German is also present throughout as a visual translative target language in the subtitles of a film that has been co-produced with the German ZDF (Das Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen, or Channel 2). Indeed, the film was originally produced as part of a series of documentaries made for the Documenta X bienniale in Kassel in 1997. In an interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sissako has narrated the various encounters with fellow African filmmakers in Zimbabwe, in Luanda, a request from the Documenta organizers, and several visits to the locations in Angola, that variously ‘enabled’ the film and led to its final creation (Appiah 2003: 147-8). German institutions and actors, in the form of the Documenta X director Brigitte Kramer, and ZDF, were essential parts of the network of ‘affordances’ that also include the Global South participants and even the African landscapes that serve as putative ‘settings’ or ‘backgrounds’ (a misnomer if ever there was one, as this book sets out to show) for the film’s quest narrative and its translative work.
Yet despite this centrality, German and all that it stands for is curiously marginal in the film, working as one of the ‘absent causes’ (Jameson 1981: 102) within the text. Sissako thus banishes Germany and German to a peripheral threshold position that I will term in this book a translative ‘contact zone’. It is a place that cannot stand alone, in any sense of the word. Rather, it is one that is defined by interdependence: it is dependent, diegteically, linguistically, even semiotically, on various neighbouring elements or entities (as they, however, are also dependent upon it). Significantly, the decisive verdict on Germany—turning one’s back on the country and on the language—is delivered in Russian. Russian is a language once hegemonic in Karlshorst (where the Russian occupation forces were concentrated) but now residual in Germany except as a significant ethnic language, although it functions as a bizarrely diasporic and anachronistic lingua franca within the film’s own fictive time-space. In summary, then, Germany and the German language are both crucial, ubiquitous sites and linguistic media, yet simultaneously pushed to the edge of the verbal and visual text: Germany is pinned precariously at the end of the film, and the German language is present not as a spoken medium, but rather, clings to the bottom margin of the screen as a late scriptural addition of an almost cosmetic sort. But for artists such as Sissako, peripheries are not the end of the world: rather, they are the ‘contact zone’ par excellence.
German as contact zone
For, lest we understand this as a ‘demotion’ from the status of a global language, it is worth considering once again the double nature of Sissako’s centre-margin operations. Centre and periphery are categories that Sissako is constantly inverting, subverting, entangling and complicating for every entity, language, culture, or even ‘nature’, in the film. In this way, Germany and the German language appear here on the dynamic generative margins of a wonderful tapestry of cultures and languages, where translation is constantly taking place between the protagonists and the spectators.
Sissako’s decentring of German and Germany within the fabric of Global South cultures might be taken as a ‘decolonizing’ gesture, except for the fact that clearly both the Soviet Union and, by extension, the German Democratic Republic functioned in this historical narrative as bearers of anti-colonial hope. Both the USSR and the GDR were powerful embodiments of and sometime facilitators in the project of forging the ‘futures past’ of socialist-supported anti-imperial liberation struggles in the then Third World (Piot 2010; Scott 2004: 210). The ‘Oktobermorgen’ of the final meeting also alludes to such socialist temporal utopias—enshrined in the title of a 1993 film by Sissako, Oktyabr. Perhaps not only Russian, but to some extent German as well, was what the film calls a ‘Sprache unserer vergangen Illusionen’ (Sissako 1997: 57:29-47) [a ‘language of our bygone illusions’] (for the Namibian context where this seems to have been very much the case, see Schleicher 2006).
Moreover, far from diminishing the German language, even as it renders it mute, this film elevates the German of the subtitles to a translative participant in a network of bizarre meetings and constantly surprising dialogues between reciprocally communicative foreigners. In effect, Sissako’s film quite literally reframes the German language, displacing it from its current status as a secondary language of global (economic) hegemony and domestic gatekeeper in struggles for access to socio-cultural privilege. Rather, by constantly turning the borders of the language ‘inside out’, as Sissako persistently does, the film enables us to rediscover the German language and its concomitant geographies and cultures as peripheral translation zones that butt up against many other languages and cultures. These translation zones are of course linguistic in character, but they are also far more than that. As suggested by the final mute moments of double spectatorship from the taxi (the last of many in the film that have metapoetically ostended travelling, questing spectatorship, the landscape, the world of nature, things, material processes) language is a powerful interlocutor that participates in multifarious non-linguistic translative processes.
The natural world may well be perceived as an ‘outsider’ from our human point of view, as the taxi-scenes imply via their orchestration of inside and out. But the final moment of the quest inverts this relationship. We see Dramane/Sissako climbing out of the taxi and striding towards the building, ringing the doorbell and crossing the threshold into the shabby block of flats (Sissako 1997: 57:15). Concretely, at this point the protagonist crosses over into an interior that is outside of the film’s visual range and thus located at several degrees of exteriority to the spectator’s implied position. Dramane/Sissako also transits, at this moment, into a future that is thoroughly beyond the temporal reach of the filmic diegesis. The film thus marks, at the moment of rehearsing its own temporal-diegetic conclusion, the translative crossing into the ‘real’ or ‘outside’ world that is, after all, as much its object and goal as its own autotelic and internal poetic coherence. In the last of so many ‘inside-out’ inversions, the film situates itself within the larger world, a world that the doorway marks as a network of thresholds, transitions, transports, transfers—in sum, as a network of translations.
Yet perhaps the door is only one visual metaphor for the translative threshold: more apposite, given the Global South provenience of this work of art, might be the balcony—that crumbling para-domestic structure over whose balustrade Baribanga briefly glances before waving, and turning again to the interior to welcome his just-arrived guest (Sissako 1997: 57:35-40). In its twin and avatar the veranda (etymology: Indian English veranda, from Hindi varaṇḍā, from Portuguese varanda ‘railing, balustrade’) this hanging structure is a translative space. The veranda or balcony both belong to the domestic domain but are not part of it. The veranda is a threshold structure that originates in the Global South, but, via multiple linguistic translations and architectural migrations, shuttles back and forth between north and south and between south and south. In postcolonial Africa, the veranda comes to stand for a certain type of clan-based politics of patronage and clientism whose redistributory logic is located on the threshold between the domestic space of a powerful ‘big man’ and the adjacent territory (Terray 1986). In some cases, the veranda becomes a metonym for Global South geography per se, as in Australia’s populous East Coast ‘veranda’ between the arid inland and the Pacific Ocean rim (Drew 1994). It is significant that Baribanga, the goal of the film’s quest, appears on a balcony whose dilapidated state transforms it into a displaced veranda. It is no less significant that his appearance is ephemeral, thus heralding an encounter at the door. The threshold is not merely a place of meetings—it is a time of futurity and promise. Logically, the meeting that the final scene records takes place before the film has been made, so that it functions as the exact opposite of the inaugural murder that powers the back-to-front action of the detective story (Todorov 1980: 9-19). Here, the threshold space of the veranda is the metonymic site for the mobility that generates life-giving encounters. Its terminal position in the film transpires, retrospectively, to have powered the journeys and meetings leading up to it. To that extent, the final meeting point of the film opens out, via the figure of the veranda as much as that of the door, onto what Rilke (1975: 49; 1978: 71) calls ‘das Offene’ [‘the Open’]—the limitless expanse and the open-ended time of unceasing natural transformations, a cosmic ‘contact zone’ of physical, material ‘translations’.
Generalized translation
Under the sign of ‘das Offene’, this book begins with a speculative wager that may be very much like the sort of quest that Dramane/Sissako undertakes as he goes in search of a friend he almost doesn’t find—thereby producing a film which is much more, at the end of the day, than the quest for a single person. The individual search cedes to the discovery of a community and a natural landscape. What is the wager-like interrogatory quest that this book embarks upon?
It runs as follows: What if we were to approach translation not only as a linguistic activity that has produced, in the last decade or two, a large body of imaginative and stimulating scholarship using translation as a (sometimes overstretched) metaphor—but rather, as a generalized process of creative dynamism informing the entire fabric of life—of which linguistic translation, therefore, would be one limited exemplar? In other words, what if we were to take translation as a metaphor seriously—even over-seriously? What if were to take the ‘transport’ (in modern Greek, you catch the metaphor to get to work) of ‘translation’ across the vehicle/tenor border, into foreign semantic fields not merely as a creative abuse of language—but as a symptomatic revelation of translative operations that have always already been going on in all the fields of natural activity, obfuscated all too often by our obsessive focus upon linguistic translation?
We might discover that linguistic translation, far from being the ‘purest’ (non-metaphorical) form of translation, putatively contaminated and conceptually weakened by modish similes and conceptual derivatives, would itself be merely one participant in a gigantic network of metaphoric-metonymic transitions, transformations and metamorphoses to which one might assign the label of bíos, following the affirmative biopolitical project undertaken by Roberto Esposito (2008). Such a project has been assayed by Michel Serres’ Hermes III: La Traduction (1974) [Hermes III: Translation], a remarkable transdisciplinary essay that ranges across the fields of genetics, thermodynamics, politics, philosophy, painting and literature, showing how each of these areas displays operations that can be regarded as translation. Translating widely in the very hubris of its scholarly scope, Serres’ book offers a panorama of processes of translation in the broadest sense possible, of which literary-linguistic translation (and the human nature it supposedly demarcates from the natural world) is merely one realm of productivity.
This book seeks to take this idea seriously, investigating translation into (and occasionally out of) German literature as an exemplar of the ways in which translation might be seen as an index of larger process of cosmic and social creativity. Indeed, from this point of view, the German language itself would be seen as one strand in a bundle of languages linked by translative processes and indicative of social creativity. The German language thus comes to be understood, within this book, as a ‘contact zone’: a sector always already polylingual in itself, and blurred around its many borders at the points where it meets other languages. The notion of the ‘contact zone’ comes into the literary humanities via Pratt (1992: 6), who ‘borrow[s] the term “contact” … from its use in linguistics, where the term contact language refers to improvised languages that develop among speakers of different native languages who need to communicate with each other consistently, usually in the context of trade.’ In this book, I redirect it to its original socio-linguistic context, and the ‘original’ historical situation to which it refers, that of ‘exchange’. It is striking, however, even weird, that among the ‘literate arts of the contact zone’ listed by Pratt (1991: 37)—‘[a]utoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression’—translation does not figure, though her ‘transculturation’ might be a rough approximation. (In a similarly bizarre fashion, Genette [1997: 405] mentions translation as one of the ‘paratexts’ that he declines to deal with.) Alternatively, one might premise that ‘translation’ is absent from Pratt’s list because it is the all-encompassing, and thus invisible term that embraces all her ‘arts of the contact zone’. Such a lacuna is filled by Apter (2005), who converts the ‘contact zone’ into a ‘translation’ zone in reference to an emergent field of studies at the intersection between translation studies and comparative literature (compare Bassnett 1993: 138-61). Translation is the dynamic nexus of such interdisciplinary undertakings.
Following Apter’s example, I import the term into the very heart of German national identity, the language itself. As a ‘pluricentric’ language (Muhr, Marley, Kretzenbacher and Bissoonauth, eds 2015), one that is also plural at its centre, I regard German as a ‘contact zone’, a realm of constantly productive translations hitherto understood as irritating interferences and impurities to be suppressed rather than embraced and fostered. Pratt (1992: 6) notes that ‘[l]ike the societies of the contact zone, such languages are commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure.’ Even though the German language is usually characterized as highly structured, Pratt’s comment is immensely relevant, because ‘chaos’ can be read here not in its customary negative sense, but in the sense of non-linear material creativity known to ‘chaos theory’ (Ruelle 1993). In the latter usage, ‘chaos’ describes the unpredictable and therefore creative development of structures and systems as they interact with their environment.
We need to pursue this logic of the ‘translative contact zone’ further, however, turning it back upon the notions both of the ‘contact zone’ and of ‘translation’ themselves. In recent decades, scientific discourses have come to be seen as a subset of larger social, indeed geopolitical discourses, as in Bruno Latour’s Les Microbes: Guerre et paix (1984). But the frames for the sociological study of the sciences have shifted significantly in recent decades, taking in a larger, even planetary horizon today, and it would now be more accurate to see the planetary processes of creation as the total set, with geopolitics and its attendant discourses operating on them, to be sure—but more importantly, always within them (Rees 2018). Thus, by the same token, the translative operations worked within language would not stop at the borders of language, but would continue along multiple ‘lines of flight’ and ‘desire lines’ into manifold outlying regions of the natural world. As the gaze broadens to take in these extra-literary ramifications, however, a surprising inversion may become evident. In a recurrent ‘turning inside-out’ that is central to the vitalist re-envisioning of the world (Esposito 2008: 157-94) it transpires that the natural world is not the ‘outside’ of the ‘real’ business of translation. On the contrary, linguistic translation, significant though it may be within human history, turns out to be a province of cosmic creation, a secondary translation of primary translations of epic proportions.
The book addresses these issues by opening with the film I have just discussed, then turning to half-a-dozen examples of the translation of literary texts, before reflecting upon the very pragmatic space of the literary classroom, and finally returning to a visual example, a public-art mural in the form of a street-blackboard in Johannesburg, South Africa, to conclude its argument.
The final turn to pedagogy is one that is pre-empted by Sissako’s usage of the motif of a photograph showing the erstwhile Russian class in Rostov-on-Don—a semiotic marker so important in the film that, after numerous recurrences, it provides the closing image before the credits (Sissako 1997: 57:55). The photo of the class is evoked verbally for the first time during a telephone conversation between Dramane/Sissako and his teacher Natalia Lvovna, when he asks her to send it to him as an aid to finding Baribanga (ibid: 5:55). The first glimpse of the photo comes five minutes later (ibid: 9:05) and recurs on dozens of occasions subsequently (e.g. ibid: 12:38; 13:9; 18:15; etc.); it even figures in one of the shots taken over the shoulder of the driver on the trip into rural Angola (ibid: 18:56). The photo is a visual shifter that accompanies the protagonist on his search. The classroom, connoted metonymically in this manner, constitutes a peripheral but mobile translative community (made up of Cubans, Angolans, Philipinos) anchored in the landscapes—Saharan, then Siberian, and subsequently Subsaharan—that form the visual background to the inaugural voice-over telephone call and the subsequent multiple iterations of he socio-pedagogical deixis effected by the photo. The translative classroom is a translated, transported space of translation that frames but also pervades the film, thereby inflecting its closing repositioning of the German language itself.
There are in effect four intertwined ideas that underpin the argument. The four ideas are evident already in the four parts of the title of his book, and are sketched in the brief account of Sissako’s Rostov-Luanda given above. For the sake of clarity I reiterate them once again in schematic form:
The book reads German as a ‘contact zone’. This strand of theorization approaches the German language as a ‘pluricentric language’ and thus as an extroverted structure. It imagines German not as a singular entity but as a network of languages that is formed not from centre but rather from its peripheries, or suggests, alternatively, and more radically, that at its centre, the language is always already peripheral. The German language thus comes to be conceptualized not as a centripetal linguistic ‘Heimat’, but as a centrifugal meeting place, a contact zone whose tentacular expanse inevitably colours its putatively core regions. In Sissako’s film, one of these core-peripheral regions is East Berlin—a site that makes the national language (as once was) as an ineluctable zone of transition, negotiation, and of course translation. This, however, is only the first ‘provincialization’ of the German that we shall see at work here; it is caught in the tug of a larger, more fundamental ‘provincialization’ of language itself (Kohn 2013: 38-42), which is the gist of the second guiding idea.
The book suggest that linguistic translation is in fact a manifestation of ‘quantum’ processes, that is, the processes by which the entirety of material reality is on the move. Reality is not static, but is mobile and processual. At the smallest scales of the material universe, minute packets or ‘quanta’ of energy engage with each other, meeting in transformative encounters which ceaselessly generate new material structures. Out of each encounter a ‘translation’ ensues which becomes the next step in the dynamic process by which matter exists in a constant process of transformation. We must imagine something like Law’s (2007) ‘material semiotics’ in which actants interact with each other as meaning-bearing participants in transformative co-encounters that constitute a network of incessant translations. Translation is not a metaphor here, because each encounter actually is a transfer of information—a semiotic exchange—that transforms the (material) information itself and in turn perpetuates a transformation of the physical world: ‘One way to think of … a causal universe is in terms of the transfer of information … Each event is something like a transistor that takes in information from events in its past, makes a simple computation and sends the result to the events in its future’ (Smolin 2000: 55). Each quantum event is an encounter in which information is exchanged and changed, thereby provoking further change and further exchange.
Translation (in its minor, provincial interlinguistic sense) works in the same way as quantum processes, and this for two reasons. On the one hand, because it resembles those processes morphogenetically. This may appear to fly in the face of reason, because material processes and linguistic processes would seem to be fundamentally different from another, eschewing any possibility of comparison. But such fundamental differences are merely the attributions of a ‘separatist’ logic that is the hallmark of Enlightenment thought. This mode of thinking can be seen to emerge at the moment, for instance, when the topos of ‘copia’ gives way as a figure of thought to binary thinking (Ong 1958; West-Pavlov 2006: 57-9). From that moment on, the jumble of interrelated things cedes to a world of clear demarcations between this and that, here and there. Objects begin to emerge more clearly out of the distinctions that mark them off from other objects. Half a millennia of thought based upon the normative notion of discrete entities and concepts makes it almost impossible to think in terms of an interrelatedness of all things—a notion, however, that the massive, and increasingly terrifying evidence of climate change is slowly bringing back into the forefront of our consciousness. Isomorphic processes resemble each other, and are linked. Translation does not merely transfer a text from one domain to another, as the ‘transport’ metaphor suggests, because original and translation are not the same object. Rather, the entry of the text into another space involves an encounter between two cultures that generates a new text and thereby transforms the ambient cultural environment, contributing to its ongoing life. Thus, translation as a general linguistic operation, which the first argument located within, rather than only at the borders of the German language, is itself a subset of a broader cosmic process of material information exchange and ensuing reciprocal transformation at the adjacent borders of living entities. This broader cosmic process operates from the quantum level upwards, all the way to that of the universe itself, so that in effect it is coeval with the dynamic of life itself. Whence the second reason for the linkage between material processes and translation. They are linked concretely because they are fundamentally part of the same reality. One could cite manifestations of this idea of environmentas a base mode of connectivity across a range of disciplines and genres of thought. At one end of a spectrum of ‘scientificity’, contemporary Indigenous philosophies conceive reality as a single continuum of interactions: ‘Animacy … is the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence’ (Ingold 2011: 689). At the other end of that spectrum, contemporary science is similarly characterized by a wide variety of field theories that have imposed the networked view of physical reality (Capra and Luisi 2014; Hayles 1984). Such ideas demonstrate the pervasiveness of notions of the infinite interconnectedness of the material world as a whole. Thus, material transformations are related to each other in a ‘fractal’ manner; they are isomorphic with one another in their operations at differing scales of reality because they are linked to each other by a myriad of intervening processes; across these fractally similar processes, translation produces transformation but also displays invariance.
Far from being an invention of European mathematics (Mandelbrot 1983), ‘fractal’ multiscalar replication and productivity is at the heart of much indigenous design from the Global South, ranging from textiles to architecture (Eglash 1999; see also Zaslavsky 1973). As my inaugural and terminal examples, all my case studies, and the provenance of much of my theoretical material suggests, the Global South plays a central role in driving the impetus of this integrative, anti-segregative project of quantum translation. De Souza Santos (2014: 223) sums up neatly by saying, ‘The modern history of unequal realtions between the global North and the global South is such that questioning and challenging the contact zone as it presents itself must be the first project of translation.’ The Global South has been, already well before the incursions of European colonization and at the very latest during the long imperial epoch, a ‘contact zone’ between cultures and their attendant epistemologies, as Pratt’s (1991, 1992) work on South America shows. The inclusive, eclectic and even promiscuous cosmic communities envisaged by non-European epistemologies and ontologies persisted in the interstices of European ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak 1999: 277) and provide fundamental impulses for a notion of translation that is integrated into the ceaselessly transformative dynamics of the cosmos itself.
Bringing together these four central ideas, the notion of the ‘contact zone’, which I take from Pratt (1991, 1992), serves as a common denominator between these levels of dynamic, productive, and transformative interaction. Each quantum event that occurs as the dynamic building block of material reality is a ‘contact zone’ between two or more quanta of gravity. Without the interactions between quanta, there would be no world. In fact, there is no world before these interactions occur; the world emerges out of these interactions. Relation precedes material existence. Pratt’s (1992: 7) definition of the ‘contact zone’, though pitched at the human scale and context of colonial and postcolonial encounters, neatly replicates the constitutive nature of such interactions already active at a much smaller scale: ‘A “contact” perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats [such] relations … not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices.’ Every act of interlingual translation between two linguistic-cultural domains takes place in a specific local ‘contact zone’ made up of its own material contact zones. Finally, the entirety of a language can be imagined as a ‘contact zone’ of ‘contact zones’, an immense fabric of acts of dialogical interaction between speakers whose use of the language is inevitably different from one another—from the minute variations of idiolects to the opacity of dialects or major language variants to one another. A ‘contact zone’ emerges at every point on a multiscalar material reality at which an exchange of information takes place between dynamic actants, with transformative, generative results. Better than anywhere else, the epistemologies and the translative practices emanating from the Global South demonstrate an intuitive understanding of such all-embracing ontologies of transformation.
What I am proposing, via my inaugural but patently decentred reading of Rostov-Luanda that focuses upon the almost complete absence of its elided third term (Berlin), is the centrifugal displacement—the expatriation—of German and Germany itself. The film is all about language, but at the end, language becomes mute, and takes its naturally subordinate place within the material world that is the other major subject of Sissako’s filmic gaze. This shift of emphasis does not merely work to alienate and denaturalize human language—but rather, in the final analysis, to renaturalize it and to place it in networks of productive translation. Such networks of renaturalized translation are inevitably obfuscated, tamped down and controlled by the nation state and its attendant national languages in the first instance, and by extension all language that is conceptualized as the marker par excellence of the human. The post- and dehumanization of language leads ineluctably towards the re-naturalization of language as translation within a larger framework of universal translation.
Plan of the book
This book is divided into three parts: one part devoted to ‘theory’ and two parts devoted to respective versions of ‘application’: the first in the area of literary interpretations, the second in the area of teaching methodologies. In fact, as will become evident as the reader progresses through the book, none of these parts really fulfils this idealized hypostatization of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ respectively; and even ‘practice’ falls into very different forms of ‘doing’ literary or cultural studies. All three parts are in fact hybrid undertakings, intertwined with each other. Each section thus constitutes a ‘trading zone’ between theory and experimentation (Galison 1999) that in many ways is structurally analogous to the ‘contact zones’ that are everywhere explored—and performatively opened up and populated—in the book. Thus the theoretical sections of the book make no claim to exhaustive documentation or neutral scholarship. They are in reality a polemical and essayistic exploration of the intuition that apparently separate activities such as ‘translation’ and the ‘material reality of the world’ are in fact very close to one another in their underlying dynamic. They therefore seek to translate ‘translation’ into the foreign semantic field of quantum theory. In these chapters, translation becomes ‘quantized’. This section of the book is iconoclastic rather than soberly scholarly in its tenor, seeking to infringe consecrated boundaries both in form and content. Likewise, the second part of the book, which proceeds to case studies of individual translations, aims to ask about the ways in which the German language, as a source or target language of literary translation, can be seen to become ‘quantized’ or to ‘quantize’ itself within the translation process. Thus the translation of language, no less than the language of translation, also finds itself ‘translated’ into the bizarre world of quantum gravity processes. The third part of this book re-translates this translation of translation into the world of the classroom, a place of interactions and exchanges that microcosmically maps the larger social world and perhaps, as I will suggest, the natural world as well.
Thus, to summarize again, in the chapters that make up part 1 of this book I lay down the lineaments of a theory of quantum translation according to which a quantized German would function as a ‘contact zone’ at the interface with other languages and cultures. In part 2 of the book I explore what this notion of quantum translation might look like once translated into a translative practice in which German is the source language (Sebald, Hölderlin) or the target language (Mujila)—or in one case, both at once (Eich/Vladislavić). In part 3, I turn to a further ‘translation’ of ‘translation’, that of the transposition of translation into the classroom.
Part 1 opens with a chapter devoted to the exemplary moment of the ‘translative turn’ in cultural studies and suggests that this moment may be scaled up to prise open the closed box of interlingual translation ‘proper’. The cultural turn in translation studies, which had hitherto been a largely technical and instrumentalist discipline, was followed by a translative turn in cultural studies. These incremental shifts away from a narrow notion of translation as an exclusively linguistic notion of semantic transfer between natural or even national languages were registered with increasing disapproval by the guardians of disciplinary purity. Chapter 1 exploits that moment of resistance as a heuristic device to interrogate the very notion of a translational border and point to possible ways of overcoming it in an even more radical manner.
Following this inaugural gesture, chapters 2 and 3 orchestrate a contractive movement that suggest that human language is actually only a very minor part of the larger cosmic business of the exchange of information. Here, I examine anthropological theories by Kohn, Viveiros de Castro and Ingold. Chapter 2 addresses Kohn’s anthropological notion of ‘provincializing language’ and demonstrates the limitations, but also the necessity of a fundamental paradigm shift within the anthropological sciences. There, the anthropologist is a translator who can only with great difficulty abandon his position as the adjudicator of language as the marker of humanity. In chapter 3 I turn to the work of Viveiros de Castro and Ingold for more generous versions of the anthropological translator. Here, the translator as shaman is better equipped to open language up to a broad and inclusive community of nonhuman actants. The translator-shaman does not translate between cultures as the translator-anthropologist does, but rather, translates the multiplicity of the heart of all things, whether human or non-human, cultural or natural. The shaman presides over local nodes of a universal process of translation. Indeed, language itself registers this universal transformation, in Tim Ingold’s notion of the verbs that describe beings in the circumpolar world, by becoming a ‘languaging’—language permanently in a state of translation because it is part of a world-in-translation.
Following these preparatory moves, in chapter 4 I rehearse a contrary expansive movement that elevates translation from a restricted linguistic operation to a universal operator of information exchange. I call upon the work of Michel Serres and Juri Lotman to explore these ideas. Serres treats a wide range of intellectual practices across the natural and human sciences as practices of translation. What they all have in common is that they identify and formalize exchanges of information. Translation as the exchange of information is the underlying operation that can be found everywhere in the cosmos, and the production of invariability via variation is its leitmotif. Serres’ approach to translation is an all-embracing one that includes Lotman’s notion of translation as a basic cognitive operation. Because Serres reads all exchanges in the natural world as exchanges of information, cognition spills across the border from the human world of culture into the nonhuman world.
Building upon the double, countervailing movements of chapters 2, 3 and 4, a third moment in the argument (chapter 5) uses the same double scaling of great and small to introduce a quantum theory of translation. The chapter suggests that such a theory would stress that the linguistic process of translation is part and parcel of all the processes that quantum-gravity theory deals with, from the very precisely identifiable mega-nano-dimension of the basic building blocks of gravitational quanta upwards. Proceeding from the generative nature of all cosmic processes constructed out of quantum-gravity attractive pulls, a quantum theory of translation would also emphasize the non-linear, ‘probabilistic’ character of translation. Radicalizing Quine’s ‘indeterminacy thesis’ and the work of Berman on the creativity of translation, the chapter harnesses the quantum theory of translation to show how translation produces new versions of reality in the multilingual borderlands between specific local semiospheres.
Finally, in chapter 6, I turn back to German as a national language to ask what a quantum theory of translative linguistics might do to our conception of civic subjecthood informed and infused by a particular natural language. Drawing above all on Bakhtin’s writing on heteroglossia, Peirce’s on semiosis, and Adorno’s postwar work on foreign loan words in German, I interrogate the manner in which German may become ‘quantized’ by mobilizing the translative procedures always already at work in a living language.
Part 2 exemplifies these ideas of by offering four concrete case studies of quantum translation at work.
Chapter 7 reads W. G. Sebald’s Ringe des Saturn by laying bare the ambivalence of the trope of fragmentation that dominates the text both in its content and its form. At the level of content, fragmentation indexes the destruction of the natural world in the wake of the separative paradigm of the Enlightenment. At the level of form, however, Sebald’s fragmentary and associative compositional method employs collage to suggest secret connections between apparently disparate regions and epochs of a global history of catastrophe. Sebald’s project thus embraces the translative connectivity articulated in part 1 of the book. In order to imbricate these concepts with the specific work of interlingual translation, I focus upon Michael Hulse’s translation of Sebald’s translation of Joseph Conrad and a proto-Global South context to exemplify this ambivalent translation of generativity. The three levels of translation display a complex interplay of fidelity and infidelity, with Hulse often translating the original Conrad back into his English translation of Sebald. In this way, the work of translation restores—and sometimes invents—connections under historical conditions in which the distending and disruptive force of history appears to pull elements of the natural and human world further and further apart. The non-linear routes of faithful and apparently non-faithful rendition or transformation of texts thus make up a ‘quantum’ translation history that displays resilience in the face of historical destruction.
Chapter 8 examines the South African author Ivan Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative in its German translation of the same name by Leipzig-based translator Thomas Brückner. The chapter focuses upon a famous catchphrase from the postwar radio-play writer Günter Eich—‘Seid Sand, nicht Öl, im Getriebe der Welt’—in German in Vladislavić’s text, and the ways it shifts its valencies as it transits from English original to German translation, where it no longer figures as an ostentatious foreign body in the text. The chapter correlates this fluctuating form of translation with the valencies of political resistance and complicity that accrue to the literary work in two transitional (translational?) polities (pre- and post-1994 South Africa and pre- and post-reunification Germany respectively). At the same time, however, the ‘sand’ image that resides at the centre of the translative negotiations between resistance and complicity also figures the ‘enabling constraints’ that characterize both the transactions of quantum generativity and the compromises of interlingual translation.
Chapter 9 interrogates Australian poet John Kinsella’s ‘transversioning’ of Hölderlin, a German Romantic poet who often worked with translations from Greek Antiquity as his basal material, and was embarked upon the ceaseless ‘translation’ of his own work in an ongoing process of self-transformation. Kinsella, an Anglo-Australian poet of Irish provenance, writes from Noongar country in South-Western Australia, but is also an itinerant academic, having spent much time in Tübingen, the university city where Hölderlin spent the later part of his life. These stays inform Kinsella’s palimsestic ‘reversionings’ of Hölderlin filtered across Michael Hamburger’s English translations and infused with ecological issues from the Noongar country that is today’s severely degraded Western Australian wheat belt. Kinsella’s ‘reversionings’ stand in close dialogue with Hölderlin’s own poems-in-process and in particular with their subsequent translations and retranslations across a fifty-year period by Michael Hamburger. These poetic interventions are engaged in a close dialogue with their respective landscape contexts, all of them endangered by ecological destruction and the threat of ongoing wars, from the Napoleonic Wars to the current conflict in Syria and the European ‘war’ on refugees. Together, however, the constantly retranslated poems constitute a long process of incessant transformation that resonates with the environment’s deep-seated resilience and regenerativity.
Chapter 10 embarks upon a close reading of the temporal models proposed by the Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s frenetic novel Tram 83 (2014). The reading suggests that Mujila provides a template for a temporal regime apposite for Global South polities in semi-institutional collapse, typical of the post-Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) and post-civil-war polities of some parts of Africa (Mujila is de facto describing post-2000 Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC] whence he hails). Mujila’s project mobilizes a form of temporal translation that is highly relevant not only for the post-apocalyptic polities of the Global South, but also for the pre-apocalyptic societies of the Global North, for whom, according to some readings, the South provides a grim future roadmap. The temporal template Mujila’s prose embodies is effectively and affectively very close to that described by quantum translation. In the light of this temporal template and its translative resonances, the chapter critiques the German translation of Tram 83
