by Emily Mercer
As a translation student at university, “ludic translation” was a foreign concept to me. I had viewed translation as a primarily linear process resulting in a written work, a finished product. It was only when my tutor introduced me to Lee’s revolutionary ludification approach (see Translation as Experimentalism, 2022*), that I began to understand that translation can transcend the pages and invoke a multisensory and immersive experience for both translator and spectator.
* reviewed on this blog in Sep. 2022
Ludic translation “subjects an original work to experimental play”, drawing upon extra-linguistic modes of communication and “performative resources for aesthetic expression” (Lee, 2022: 2). Clive Scott’s renowned ludic translation of French poetry demonstrates exactly this; his work incorporates several layers of annotations, crossing out, different typefaces, ink, and photographic fragments (Scott, 2012: 30), resulting in a polysemous interpretation of the original text that illuminates the translation process.
Not only does this technique allow the translator to creatively respond to the text, but it also has the potential to give centrality to voices that are often silenced in translation.
The use of nonverbal elements means that “no (language) is permanently on top, no (language) is permanently at the bottom” (Rafael 2016: 19). Such voices may belong to Indigenous communities across the globe, in which attempts at translating Indigenous languages into a lingua franca such as English or Castilian Spanish risk actively reinstating colonialism (Spivak, 1992). Consequently, the Indigenous language and the identity of the colonised are suppressed. A primary example of this is Netflix’s controversial subtitling of the film, ‘Roma’ (Cuarón, 2018), which translated Mexican Spanish and the Indigenous Mixtec dialogue into Castilian Spanish, re-evoking Mexico’s colonial ties to Spain.
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As a Spanish-English translator, I decided to put ludification into practice with the Spanish/Aymara poem “Wila-wila Manta” from the book Erotica: Yarawis Aymara (2018) by Indigenous rights activist and poet Sandra Condori Mamani. The poem is a form of erotic transborder literature that narrates a sexual encounter between a white middle-class woman and a brown migrant woman of Aymara descent living in Buenos Aires. I view the poem as a form of Indigenous reclamation that aims to destabilise hegemonic narratives of Indigenous and LGBTQ+ peoples from Andean territories. In the poem, the dominant Spanish language is disrupted by Aymara, a language spoken by the Indigenous people of the Bolivian Andes, to convey the poet’s aim of contra-hegemonic empowerment. During the initial translation process, I was fortunate enough to speak to Mamani herself, who expressed the importance of preserving the Aymara language in the translation, so this remained a priority.
Similar to Scott’s palimpsest aesthetic, I typed out English translations of the Aymara words, then crossed them out and re-wrote the original Aymara using a mixture of soft crayons and pen to illustrate the poetic narrator’s reclamation of their Indigenous identity (Figure 1).
This technique was repeated with all other Aymara words that were provided with a Spanish translation in the poet’s glossary (Figure 2). Simultaneously presenting the original and its translation “prevents any particular power relations from congealing” (Rafael 2016:19), providing an aesthetically viable solution that incites a ceaseless displacement between Aymara and English.
Continuing to experiment with extra-linguistic materials, I focussed on the title, “Wila-wila Manta” (Blood-red poncho). The tourist website ArgentinaXplora.com, explains that in several Argentinian villages, “Manta”, a poncho-like garment, is “a symbol of identity and survival, [whose] pre-Columbian origins are rooted in pre-Incan times”. The climactic point of the poem describes “advancing-uniformed-vultures”, evoking colonial undertones. They steal an Aymara woman’s poncho in an atrocious ordeal which is exemplified by the “horizontal blood-red gushing” that floods the streets. I thought that the use of red thread seemed fitting as it is a polysemous device; it symbolises the blood-red imagery and resembles the material used to make ponchos. I chose to use red thread and gold pins to connect the atypical tourist destinations mentioned in the poem: Bogotá, Campana, Esquel, and Cuenca, to their locations on a printed map of South America, which contextualises the poem for English-speaking spectators whilst underscoring the blood-red symbolism of oppression that streams across the display (Figure 3).
Ludic translation can be said to counteract the notion of “untranslatability”, a concept that Venuti rejects, instead insisting that translation is an “interpretive act that can be performed on any source text” (Venuti 2019:175). The poet herself observed that some Aymara words are seemingly untranslatable due to the linguistic and cultural disparity between Aymara and English. Translators often struggle to accurately translate Indigenous languages from Latin America “given that […] grammar books and dictionaries are scarce” (Messineo and Tacconi, 2017: 94). In light of this, I considered using audio-visual platforms to allow the “Aymara-ness” to live through the translation.
For example, the poem alludes to a folkloric Andean dance, “kusillo” (Dictionary of Americanisms, 2023). After searching for a YouTube video of this dance, I was able to generate a printed QR code (Figure 4) whereby holding one’s phone up against it directly takes the spectator to the video. In transcending the written page, the spectator actively engages with the translation, and it allows the original to authentically exist, in turn deconstructing hegemonic narratives of Indigenous communities.
My work hopes to inspire the spectator to engage with translation in a multisensory way and to demonstrate that translation can take on cross-border forms and expressions creatively. That translation can, and perhaps should, reflect the journey, and not the final piece. In doing so, translation remains transparent and allows the original language and culture to remain present.
I would like to thank my tutor Anna Milsom for introducing me to creative translation and for her continuous guidance as this project was developing, and to Sandra Condori Mamani for supporting my creative approaches to translating her inspiring poetry.
References:
- ArgentinaXplora.com (2023). “manta”. Available at: https://argentinaxplora.com/activida/artesano/artextil.htm
- Condori Mamani, Sandra (2018). ‘Wila-wila Manta’ in Erótica: Yarawis Aymara. Buenos Aires: La Marronada Cuir.
- Dictionary of Americanisms (2023). “kusillo”. Available at: https://www.asale.org/damer/kusillo
- Lee, Tong King (2022). Translation as Experimentalism: Exploring Play in Poetics, Elements in Translation and Interpreting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Messineo, Cristina and Lucía Tacconi, Temis (2017). ‘Issues and challenges in translating indigenous languages: the case of Toba and Maká of the Gran Chaco Region (Argentina and Paraguay), in Cadernos de tradução, Vol.37 (3), p.92-116. La Rioja: Fundación Dialnet.
- Rafael, Vicente L. (2016). Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Roma (2018). Directed by Cuarón, Alfonso. California: Netflix.
- Scott, Clive (2012). Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1992). ‘The Politics of Translation’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
- Venuti, Lawrence (2019). Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Experiential Translation 