Tag Archives: Brazil

Spring 2020 Issue XV: Interviewing Translators

Translating indigenous verbal art: Kelly Lincoln interviews Malcolm McNee

Malcolm McNee is an Associate Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Smith College.   He is the author of The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art, and and the translator of Eden-Brazil by Moacyr Scliar. He is currently working on an anthology of Brazilian environmental writing in translation.

When did you feel qualified to translate, and especially when did you feel qualified to translate professionally?

That’s a good question. I still don’t know that I feel qualified. I feel like I can read closely; I feel like I’ve been working with the language and traveling in Brazil and in the language, and I’ve been reading widely for over 20 years, and so in those senses I felt qualified. In translation theory, in some of the mechanics and decisions that if you do translation studies you think about – totally unqualified.

When and how do you know if a student is ready to translate?

I don’t have a good answer to that. I think that it really depends on the student, and it has to do with interest and motivation to a certain extent. I think a lot of it has to do with how strong of a writer they are, in English, and also developing those close reading skills. They need to recognize when they are uncertain, and then have a sort of openness to figuring out what to do with that uncertainty. So I think that comes as an individual thing.

Lots of people have metaphors around how they view translation; how you feel about the process of translation?

I find the process can be extremely gratifying in the sense that translation has a tempo that is disruptive of the typical tempo in which we tend to operate. In some ways, translation forces me to read in a way that I often don’t feel like I can read as much as I would like to; it compels a sort of close reading. If I had to give a metaphor for it, translation is one access to a meditative state within my work. That flow state. When it’s good, it’s fully absorbing and you lose that dominant sense of temporality.

How do you know if a translation is done?

Hmmmm. As related to the anthology project [my     current work, being done in partnership with Rex Nielson of BYU], this is going to be a hard question. Because I can make a decision about when my own translation is done, but when it comes to somebody else’s translation work, and where I’m going to restrain myself from imposing choices that I would have made that they didn’t make, that’s going to be tricky. But with my own work, I do have a sense of; if I go through it, what are the decisions that I’m uncertain about? It’s done when I’ve come to a certainty about the decisions or else I understand the limitations of my decision, like in the case that there isn’t a better option. I’m not going to discover a better option. You can read through and tinker, but it’s done and ready for final copy editing when I’ve solved those problems for myself in the text.

Do you ever find yourself, after your work has been published, still wishing you could change things?

Yeah. Within my scholarly book, there was a lot of translation involved because the book was written in English but about, at least in part, on Portuguese language poets. In citing their work, I would include my translations for those passages. So as I went back to some of those poets to think about translating them for the anthology I’m now working on, I made a fair amount of changes to those translations and found stuff where, knowing what I know now or just looking at it again, I would make this change and come up with a different version of it.

Is that frustrating or exciting that you can continue to look at it and still find new things?

I think it’s both. I think sometimes it’s like oh bummer, I shouldn’t have made that mistake, or like wow, what was I thinking. But I think it’s also kind of exciting that it depends to a certain extent upon the purpose of your translation. For the translation within the context of critical commentary, I needed to do it in some way so as to tie it with that commentary. Because the translation is more illustrative of my own argument, which maybe is putting things backwards, but I think it’s to a certain extent inevitable. That’s driving your translation, because a translation in that sense is very tied to interpretation. Redoing those for a different context, I might not want to be making so directly a critical argument with my translation. I want to be a little more attentive or sensitive to other possibilities, about sound or some other aspect. So that’s exciting, but also sometimes as I think about that, I get a little uncomfortable about that authorship of the translation. I know that in translation studies theory, there is the ad absurdum “there is no bad translation.” I don’t really buy that, for myself. There are mistranslations. I have a bit of healthy skepticism about that, I can do whatever I want with this text; it’s serving whatever interest I have at the moment. There is that bit of caution or anxiety or discomfort with that fact, but also I think that it is exciting just to understand that the translation can be done in different ways because it serves different purposes.

How do you hope your work will progress? How do you want to change as a translator? How has it progressed over time?

I guess it’s progressed as my proficiency with Portuguese has progressed. I feel like translation pushes you into new realms of the language. There are always these new lexicons that you’re having to grapple with, that help you start to become aware of your limits in the language. So from the beginning of my practice with translation, it’s been tied to a desire to push my proficiency in Portuguese into new realms. A desire for the future. I don’t see that as a transformation, but just a continued unfolding in that relationship between translation practice and continuing to deepen and broaden my proficiencies in Portuguese. I guess the other question- this is a little more concrete- would be with a subset of translation that’s related to the anthology, which has to do with the translation from pivot language translations. ( A pivot language is a third or intermediary language used to assist translation between two or more other languages.) I have a concrete problem to figure out involving the translation of Indigenous-language verbal texts for inclusion in the anthology.  I’m translated from Portuguese-language translations, which themselves use a combination of existing translations (in Spanish or Portuguese) and original language transcriptions. So, the issues involve source text attribution and permissions.  They also include the question as to whether to base my own translations on single source texts and their approaches and decisions, or to reach beyond them in order to do translations that may somehow better fit some aspects of the vision of the anthology (recovering some socio-ecologically specific terminology or references, for example). We want to include translations of selections of Indigenous verbal arts in the anthology, but in order to do so, we will have to successfully address the above challenges, including, fundamentally, the issue of permissions, so that’s something that I hope to figure out and continue to engage with others who are thinking about those questions.

 

Kelly Lincoln ’20 is a senior at Smith College, double-majoring in Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature with a concentration in translation. She is a student fellow at the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute for the project TranslationS, where she is researching dance and translation.

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Spring 2018 Issue XI: Every Picture Tells a Story

Dr. Martens: like a Fênix

We left Rio de Janeiro to travel to Belém, then to São Paulo, to Los Angeles, and to San Francisco. We thought that, together, we would go back to Rio within three months. We never did.

An unexpected sense of freedom extended our stay. San Francisco turned into a sanctuary, an ocean in an infinite state of intensity. Our new experiences, from a Bernal Hill first kiss to a camping trip to Big Sur, brought us deep feelings we could never imagine before. Each step taken was a new self-discovery. In 2014, we got lost looking for something we could not name. We fell in love with the rainbows from Castro street.

Oh, San Francisco! We didn’t know you would treat us so well. We challenged the capitalist systems that almost kept us away from the most important explorations of our lives. We challenged the people we left behind, our família, and our own belief system. We could not go back; we had to stay.

We learned English.
We learned that intimacy with a woman is what we have wanted the most.
We found our most valuable resource: therapy.
We went to our first gay pride parade.
We worked as an assistant producer for a short film.
We took placement tests.
We signed up for real college-level classes.
We took acting classes.
We were afraid of taking a risk bigger than ourselves.
We worked hard.

We learned about sexual health education, social psychology, neuroscience, and HIV prevention. We learned how intersectionality impacts the sex-gender system. We worked as a social media manager, sex educator, and English tutor. We read Anzaldúa, Lorde, hooks. We worked for a moving company, dog sitting, and tutoring a high school kid.

We faced the ups and downs of being an activist and dedicating our life and soul to a cause we believe in. We were called white, brown, you belong, you don’t belong. We were excluded when all we wanted was to fit right in. We felt alone around many people. We felt overwhelmed by ourselves.

We achieved the unachievable. We broke the unbreakable. We graduated from a community college as the commencement speaker of our graduation. We earned a full ride to an elite American college. We were homeless, jobless, feeling-less for a whole summer. We explored the complexities of our identities. We started to understand the injustices of this world from multiple perspectives, including one of experience.

We started a new life on the East Coast. Who would have thought we would end up in New England? After questioning all of the consequences of colonization and refusing to be part of the colonizer’s legacy, we ended up in the colonizer’s land. Church, church, church, church.

Hi, Massachusetts! Within all of your amazing opportunities, we felt lost. We struggled. We cried one, two, three, uncountable times. We were scared. We are still scared. We met a lover who made us believe in the most genuine feeling that can ever exist. We got to see the leaves turn: the fall season and all of its beauty. We went biking, we explored Western Massachusetts, and sometimes we forgot that we came from Rio. From Belém. We felt the snow.

We, my pair of white converse sneakers and I, crossed a milestone. We crossed the borders of the state, of love, sex, intellectuality, and intimacy. We found the transcendental. Three months turned into three years. We never went back. We don’t want to.

Is it a new era? Is it an end to a beginning? Is it a change of the seasons?

The rain takes away, refreshes, and cleans everything in the purest way.

It’s 2018 and my steps are still an exploration. A new one. A pair of black Dr. Martens: like a fênix.

 

Marcela Rodrigues is a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar and a Neuroscience student at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. As a sexual health educator and a human rights activist, she aims to combine science and social justice in order to create meaningful changes and a more just society to all.

 

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Fall 2016 Issue VIII: Notes from the Field

Knowing and Understanding

When I spend a long time in one environment, my ego starts inflating until it reaches an unsustainable level and suddenly bursts. It then inflates again and bursts again, each time taking longer to complete a cycle. I’ve come to believe that this is my comfort-challenge cycle. I think better and better of myself as I get more and more comfortable, then I realize that something is not as I understand it and that forces me to become more humble. As my perception of what’s around me complicates, the process slows down.

I love the two poles of the cycle: the ignorant satisfaction of complacency and the sobering wisdom of humility. I feel like I need them both to grow and mature and flower. And I’ve noticed that putting myself out there allows me to experience the cycle (which I can only affect unpredictably by choosing my environment) more often.

Favela not far from Copacabana. Leon Petrosyan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0
Favela not far from Copacabana. Leon Petrosyan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0
Studying theory makes me feel like I know stuff. I knew statistics that show most favelas in Rio de Janeiro did not have drug trafficking; I knew that residents of occupied buildings in Sao Paulo’s city center were not criminals; I knew that the Muslim Brotherhood organization in Yemen is the most charitable group in the country. Look at me, so knowledgeable and well traveled. I must be an asset to any community or organization. If only they knew how special I was… maybe not.

I do believe that I’m an asset, I have a lot to offer and I’m sure the places I worked at have benefited from my presence. Nonetheless, I can’t think of any environment to which I gave more than what was given to me. I knew the statistics about favelas, but I didn’t understand them. Interacting with people from favelas, loving a few of them, seeing them celebrate helped me understand. Residents of occupations did the same for me, and the Muslim Brotherhood folks too. It is harder and more rewarding to understand something than it is to know it. Understanding expands horizons, and it humbles.

It humbles me when I understand something because I feeeel it. Being away from Yemen for many months in the past, and presently for years, has allowed me to distance myself from the country

Sanaa, Yemen
Sanaa, Yemen

enough to forget realities I was once intimate with. It could be a coping mechanism because I can’t feel good about myself if I understand (and thus feel) the unjust difference between my reality and that of my countrymen. I am certainly not special enough to deserve what I have, but it doesn’t matter. Beating myself up over it will not change anything, I have to cope, to convince myself of something else. I understand how unjust this is. And I hate it. It makes me feel like a brat, and it doesn’t matter. Understanding takes time and reinforcement: it’s a moving experience, sometimes too moving and scary, but I believe it’s good and necessary for progress.

I find that the internet is great for knowing and so is theory, but for understanding, human interactions, literature, and experiences are necessary. College, even Smith College, has flaws, but it allowed me to experience both acquiring knowledge through classes and acquiring understanding through praxis, other humans connected to Smith, and study abroad. I am so grateful, and I only wish that more Smithies would seek to understand others and let the world move them (hopefully to action but a change of perception is real too) like it sometimes moves me… pat on the back.

 

304412_530669750280351_1151180908_n(1)Born and raised in Yemen, Nashua Alsharki left the country to attend a boarding school in Hong  Kong (UWC) when she was seventeen.  Two years later, she came to Smith, then left for a year to study abroad in Brazil.  She is now back at Smith as a senior carrying baggage from everywhere she’s lived and with no place to call home. But the odds are in her favor.

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Fall 2014 Issue II: Adapting

The Come-Back Kid: From Salvador da Bahia to Northampton

I’d always known that a year abroad would be a part of my undergraduate experience.  But what I didn’t know, and certainly hadn’t expected, was that following a year abroad in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, I would be sitting in a Main Street pizzeria explaining to one of my best friends at Smith that I had changed, and having that not be enough to describe that I had fallen in love with a place, with a people, with a person, and most importantly with a way in which my life could be potentially other. I had, indeed, been irrevocably changed.

I thought I was somehow exempt from a process of adapting. My JYA term in Salvador da Bahia was not my first experience in Brazil, nor was Portuguese a language I casually picked up during my first years at Smith. I was the proverbial know-it-all and I thought, despite my mediocre language skills and vast generalizations of a diverse and varied culture, that I was going to dominate in my new environment.

But, life is nothing if but a never-ending exercise in humility. And I was quick to discover that I had ample room for improvement not only in my capacity for conversation, but also in the understanding of the rich cultural and topographical landscape unfolding before me. It took me almost six months before I felt comfortable engaging in real conversation or had the intuition to decipher jokes, music or television references, and even signs of affection.

Ilha dos Frades, in the Baía de Todos os Santos. © Chloe Hill. All rights reserved.
Ilha dos Frades, in the Baía de Todos os Santos.

I cannot deny that my abroad experience was invaluable in the immersive opportunity it provided. My knowledge and use of the Portuguese language continues to flourish every time I return to Salvador da Bahia. However, it was definitely not the most academically productive year of my life. I felt, as a foreigner, that I was anonymous on campus. And because of that anonymity, I didn’t feel like anyone expected me to show up.

So, I frequently skipped class to take trips to a nearby island with my boyfriend at the time, or simply sleep in. I didn’t dedicate the same energy and care to written assignments because I thought, “this isn’t my real school.” As a result, when I returned to Smith, after a year of half-hearted and lackadaisical academic participation, everything from my attendance to my grammar suffered. And my heart, too, yearning for that other life I had merely glimpsed, suffered from what the Brazilians call saudades; an untranslatable word for an implacable longing.

I can’t pinpoint exactly what shocked me back into reality. Perhaps it was a professor’s email letting me know she’d been keeping track of my absences or the disappointing grades I received in areas where I had previously excelled. But, suddenly I realized, stripped of the anonymity I’d spent a year fostering, that I had allowed a pervasive ennui to take the reins of my academic career. I never felt more humble than the week I resolved to meet with my fall semester professors to discuss my poor performance. The magic of Smith is its inherent network of support. All of my professors knew I could do better and were glad to know that I was finally taking stock and responsibility.

With reinvigorated determination, I was able to focus my efforts on two exciting projects concerning Brazilian women writers. One, examining the endless mysteries of Clarice Lispector, arguably, Brazil’s most renowned woman writer of the 20th century and her self-conscious narrative writing. And the other, exercising creative prowess, translating a selection of poems by mystic poet, Hilda Hilst. I presented my senior seminar paper on the role of the author and Lispector’s The Hour of the Star to receptive classmates and professor’s praise. I shared my Hilst’s translations and all the struggles and small victories bound up with translating them on a Collaborations panel. And with these projects as a foundation, I applied for, and was honored with, a Fulbright research grant to translate the poetry of major Bahian literary figure, Myriam Fraga.

It’s been three years since my abroad experience and my grant period is coming to a close. I always come back a little bit sandy and a little bit sad. These adapting, and consequently, humbling experiences have taught me to dust off the sand, push through the sadness, to harness that new knowledge into fascinating and rewarding work on the road to a life of distinction.

Photo © Chloe Hill. All rights reserved.

Hill bio photoChloe Hill is a Portuguese-English translator and literary researcher currently based in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. She holds a BA in Portuguese/Brazilian Studies and Comparative Literature from Smith College. Her work emphasizes Brazilian women poets, with translations of Hilda Hilst’s poetry published in Metamorphoses, the Five College Literary Translation Journal, and her current project translating Bahian poet, Myriam Fraga as part of a Fulbright research grant. Her writing has also appeared on Dispatches, the Words Without Borders blog. She was the 2011-2012 student correspondent to the Smith College Alumnae Quarterly, and has previously worked at the Brazilian Endowment for the Arts in New York City as Assistant Literary Events Coordinator.

 

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