Toni in Translation: An International and Interdisciplinary Gathering

welcome to this interdisciplinary and transnational conversation on Tony Morrison's birthday celebrated as Tony Morrison day in Ohio we are honored to have an Adams and bronwin lame joining us today from both coasts of the United States no matter where you're tuning in from I hope you're having a wonderful morning afternoon or evening I'm niiko chin and I'm the program manager here at Mechanics Institute where I have the privilege of supporting our program such as our member-led book groups writers groups and instructor-led courses Mechanics Institute was established in 1854 and remains a vibrant cultural institution in the heart of downtown San Francisco we are home to a full service Library a rich calendar of literary and cultural events and the oldest continuously operating chest room in the United States you can learn more about us at Mii library.org I'm Andy telski programs administrator at Mechanics Institute I like to thank our partners at the center for the art of translation who Champion the art of literary translation through Publications events and educational programming since they're founding in 2000 they have worked to enrich the global literary landscape support translators and celebrate the cultural and linguistic diversity of our world you can learn more about their work and upcoming events at cat translation. org and Andy um I wanted to tell a story about this event so this past August I stumbled upon something unexpected and a past event listing um that was organized by the Tony Morrison Collective an initiative dedicated to preserving her Legacy at her Alma moer Cornell University as I read more I discovered that Dr an Adams one of our esteemed panelists for today was part of this Collective her work with Morrison's translators particularly in German fascinated me it made me wonder not just about how Morrison's words shift across languages but how they transform across culture histories and personal interpretations that Discovery led us to this collaborative event um today and now in a full circle moments we are thrilled to present this conversation in collaboration with the Cornell University Library sponsor of the Tony Morrison Collective what began as Curiosity has now become a gathering with new partners a space for us all to explore how Morrison's Works live on in Translation and in the ways we carry her words forward but this event is also an opportunity to expand the idea of translation itself to translate is in the most familiar sense to carry words from one language to another to find equivalents to bridge meanings but words are also polymus they hold multiple meanings and possibilities translation is not only about language but also about place a movement from one place to another the verb translate itself comes from the Latin transus meaning carried across it suggests movement across a threshold a transition even transformation Tony Morrison's work is in itself an active translation of history of memory of language and as it will be described by one of our steam panelists today of Love Tony Morrison's writing moves us rendering experience in ways that deepen our understanding of the world and ourselves and today our distinguished panelists will explore the many ways in which Morrison's work has been translated not just istically but also intellectually and emotionally in experiences in classrooms and across borders their insights will reveal how translation is not simply about finding the right words but about carrying meaning across borders of language identity and history stepping in as moderator today we are thrilled to welcome back Dr Nigel Hatton a scholar whose work Bridges literature philosophy human rights and critical Refugee studies he is an associate professor at UC mered teaching courses on African-American literature existentialism and the intersections of Storytelling and social justice his research has taken him to the web du Research Institute at Harvard to the international criminal court in the heg always exploring how literature and philosophy help us understand and transform the world around us this past fall he led a James baldwi seminar at Mechanics Institute guiding us through Baldwin Ser examinations on Race identity and belonging and the spring starting on March 11th he will return Mechanics Institute with a three-part seminar on Tony Morrison Nikki Giovani and Maya Angelou diving into the Poetry essays and novels of these Visionary writers Beyond Academia Dr hton has also dedicated decades to education in California prisons and occasionally teaches in Columbia University's narrative medicine program his work reminds us that literature is not just something we read but it is something that we live question and carry forward and we are just so honored to have him with us today so I'm going to pin Dr Nigel Hatton and have him get us started on today's conversation thank you Nico and thank you lesli and and thank you I see so many familiar faces uh and it's a pleasure to be here uh in conjunction with the Mechanics Institute once again as I thought about this distinguished panel and the important work and schol contributions that they have made uh and particularly their work on Tony Morrison I was reminded of a statement by the novelist Juma liri who uh who writes in English but now also in Italian and has translated many Works into Italian uh now that she writes in her new language but uh jum leiri uh now author of interpreter of maladies and other texts said this about translation and I want to quote her she said quote the responsibility of translation is as Grave and precarious as that of a surgeon who is trained to transplant organs or to redirect the blood flow to our hearts so she uses this metaphor of the translator as surgeon and the precariousness of that that is equivalent to that of a surgeon and one who transplants organs and she asked the question when thinking about translation who will perform the surgery so for her helping us understand that gravity our panelist today our distinguished panelist today will also help us to understand the gravity and precarity and the importance of translation and I'm very pleased to be among them as we engage in this discussion on Tony Morrison day so happy birthday to Tony Morrison uh I will say the overview of the program before we begin uh we'll have these three presentations one from each of our panelists each will share their unique perspectives on how they translate Tony Morrison's literary works and translation me and meant in its many uh forms after that we'll move into a 20 to 30 minute Roundtable discussion where each of our panelists will delve into key themes raised in their presentations and then after that finally uh we'll open up the floor for a 15minute Q&A session uh so we we encourage you to add to any emerging questions you may have into the chat box throughout today's presentation so uh we begin let let us all be present in uh as we think about translator surgeons uh our first presentation uh is from Dr Anne Adams and it is a great pleasure to be able to introduce Dr Adams Dr an Adams is Professor amida Afric Africana studies and comparative literature at Cornell University in recent years she has been devoting her attention to the novelist Tony Morrison whose ad white professorship at large at Cornell she initiated and hosted her schol work on morison over the decades uh primarily consists of Consulting for the German translators and Publishers on African-American discourse and cultural content in Morrison novels and uh wonderful to hear from Dr Adams about the morison in the translation of Morrison in Germany in 2019 Morrison has devoted much of her in in 2019 Dr Adams began to devote much of her time to the work of the faculty group Tony Morrison Collective whose mission of preserving the legacy of Morrison Cornell alumna ma 1955 has to taken the form of programs on campus and the Etha Community commemorating the 30th anniversary of her Nobel Prize in 2023 Dr Adam's passionate project uh has moved on to think about the writing of Tony Morrison's influence on how European audiences perceive us life and history uh I've have many European translations of Morrison's work in European languages in my collection so the the significance of Dr Adam's project is is is quite important and and so at this point I'd like to uh turn the the connection to Dr Adams and uh please help us to welcome her thank you Nigel um it's really a pleasure to it's always a pleasure for me to talk about Tony Morrison in fact I'm going to go off script here and uh start out by showing you my phone cover um if um it's a quotation from song of Solon where guitar was telling uh young Milkman why the why the um peacock doesn't fly the male peacock doesn't fly and um milk and uh guitar tells the young Milkman it's because of all that plumage that's why he can't fly and so he says literally you want to fly you got to give up the [ __ ] that weighs you down okay uh that's my phone cover so Tony Morrison is with me all the time um but uh and that is Off Script sorry Nico but um uh Tony Morrison was an alumni of Cornell University as Nico did say and for that reason uh she has a very special place in the University's heart and memory and uh the Tony Marson Collective uh tries to uh to to be the uh the group that that moves that um for the 50th anniversary of of um The Bluest Eye Tony Morrison uh Cornell purchased copies of um a number of Morrison novels in foreign language and I'm hoping it's going to come up on my screen because I uh I thought I had it all prepared um in any case uh the university bought uh 20 foreign language versions of of The Bluest Eye and uh I wanted to show the uh the covers of those but I the technology is not working for me too let me see if I can uh make it uh if I can get it though um uh anyway okay here I have it all right so I'm coming back um where's the zoom here uh I don't know why I I can't the screen oh Dr Adams I have I have it I have it I have it I have it perfect sorry sorry okay there we are um um so we have 20 uh we have The Bluest Eye in 20 different languages you can see those here uh I I won't name them all but you can see them we're in threes and um and for the um the 30th anniversary of of Tony Morrison's Nobel Prize which was in in 2023 uh the Cornell Library did a uh an installation of mock mockups of covers of all of the books um and I'll show you a little bit about that uh that installation now uh but before I leave uh just this slide um we have here the German um cover and I'm going to come back to that German title in my uh in my other remarks it's Z blaa aan which means very blue eyes but in any case the installation of the book covers uh which were on display and and are still in the library I'm pretty sure um uh shows uh all of the covers in their U uh various languages but also one thing that I want to point out is the base that the artist librarian Craig Mains uh chose to use it's it's the the installation is in a glass case and on the floor of the case he has um images of who is this Shirley Temple so The Bluest Eye copies are standing on uh Shirley Temple's face so to speak so uh that's that's um uh part of Cornell's um celebration of Tony Morrison um and that was as I said for the uh 30th anniversary of her Nobel Prize we bought the books for the 50th anniversary of The Bluest Eye itself okay my own involvement with Tony Morrison's Works in Translation uh dates back to 1984 when I happened upon when I was in a bookstore store in East Berlin then East Berlin part of the German Democratic Republic and uh the books the book shop had a uh a literary calendar uh and for the month of April 1984 the writer on the calendar page was Tony Morrison and I was uh very pleased very surprised and from that time on I began collecting uh Morrison's Works in German and later I uh um added uh a collection in French also so that the work I'm doing now involves her translations into English and French um in Reading those early uh German translations the translations of the first two or three that were out by the early 1980s uh I saw a few uh sort of alarming misunderstandings on the part of the translators and I wrote to the uh German publisher and I said very brazenly I'm an African-American with a PhD in German and I um have read your your uh translations of Tony Morrison and I would like to help you avoid some of the misunderstandings uh in some of these early novels and and I gave them examples of one and I want to share just one such example of the kinds of cultural information that a translator who is an expert in American in the American language might not be knowledgeable about uh uh in the African-American subculture uh in the novel Sula the second novel um the uh the young Sula and and uh uh and Nell have become friends and uh Sula makes quite a uh an impression on Nell uh and and uh changes Nell's self-perception and her self-confidence and so forth and uh digressing a bit the idea of a young black girl's self-perception as we know is the theme of the novel preceded that it is the theme of The Bluest Eye uh about standards of beauty and and and what a black girl uh what happens to a black girl psychologically uh who uh for whom those standards of beauty are are uh are Paramount and so in Sula we have a bit of that as well so Sula and Nell become friends and Nell feels uh uh more uh feels better about herself and she begins to question and to push back particularly on some of the things that her mother is bringing her up way her mother's bringing up as a prim and proper uh little girl one of which uh is the Habit that Nell's mother tried to get Nell to adopt of pulling her nose pulling on her nose when she was uh uh otherwise not using her hands and uh also uh putting a cloth pin on her nose when she went to bed now this is something that some African-Americans especially mothers did in the time that that novel was set which is the 1940s why of course because Nell's mother said don't you want to have a nice nose a pretty nose of course she didn't say don't you want to have a white nose she said said don't you want to have a pretty nose because white a uh uh was the equivalent of pretty and so with influence from Sula who is Unapologetic and and and uh uh un uh uh is unannotated uh about herself Nell feels better and so the text says that now when Nell goes to sleep she slips the cloth PL cloth pin under the pillow well what is a German translator to do with she slips a clothes pin under the pillow in a context that has nothing to do with laundry well the German translator assumed cloth pins are used in pairs and so it is in in the plural in the German translation so the German translation of that passage says now at night when Nell goes to bed she slips the close pins under the pillow okay what does a German reader think reading that so that's just an example of some of the cultural specificities of African-American uh uh life that Tony Morrison unannotated unex lingly uses uh we we have seen in some in some interviews that she doesn't write for the white gays in other words she doesn't try to explain stuff she puts it out there as it is and if you get it fine if you don't maybe read it another time and you can you can kind of it is possible to discern what that means based on the way she says it in any case so as a result of pointing out some uh um um misunderstandings in the German translations uh uh of this nature with uh uh to the German publisher we established a relationship uh uh under which I uh was a consultant and I vetted the translations manuscript uh um I would in several of the cases I sat at a table in a coffee shop with the German translator and we went over some of the the matters uh that that were problematic and so that's the only uh example that I will use but I will close my remarks by saying that that uh Tony Morrison has um uh has Tony marson's Works being read by readers in other countries read by readers of other languages because that is the sense in which I am confining myself to uh for translation in this program uh uh Tony Morrison is uh uh it has expanded uh um uh readers around the world uh expanded the uh the parameters of what world literary Classics are uh and uh as happens often with literary Classics uh her works are being being are given new translations um the German publisher for sure is is doing retranslations of some of those novels I'm not sure whether Sula is among them but uh uh uh the French publisher has done uh uh more than one translation of some of the early works as well and so I'm going to close just by uh uh emphasizing that Tony Morrison specifically because she is translated into uh other languages is enabling readers in other countries to have a more nuanced understanding of what American society is uh beyond what they see in the in the mainstream media and so forth so uh and the Very fact that the Noels are being uh uh R retranslated uh gives more uh is more evidence of their place in the world as literary Classics thank you thank you Dr Adams uh that that is a an amazing presentation and I'm so grateful that you were in that bookstore uh to be able to make that intervention because uh as someone who went to high school and Germany and who certainly does a lot of work with philosophy and has done uh has gotten a lot of Da dad fellowships in Germany uh I am in bookstores in Germany often and I always see Morrison as the author who is most prominently displayed in those bookstores and I wonder from my reading of her work how did they translate the language that I'm so familiar with right and uh to the audience to the panelist I have an example uh in my on the background behind me of a Hungarian uh translation of beloved and uh as you can see it's the red cover uh on my screen and it is a kvet and it's uh it translates for them as beloved but what it translate they have taken the word um nice so it really means in Hungarian the lovely one and uh they have you know they have used the term and they changed beloved to something else so uh I don't think the novel is certainly the lovely one but your Surgical and very uh nuanced attentiveness to language is so important for those German translations as you have also noted those French translations because all across Europe whenever the there are anniversaries of the publication of her work or her prizes is there are uh book displays and great attention and the questions that you ask about what this means in terms of how a translator rep how they represented this work and how they translated how they worked on language are so vital and uh so thank you for your presentation and I certainly have questions that I want to engage with you in the Q&A and I'm certain that the audience as well so thank thank you uh for your important work I as the the structure of the program is that we'll have our Q&A after and so I did want to bring into this uh conversation another uh form of translation or way in which we think of translation and we might see this as a kind of cultural translation uh and for this I want to introduce Dr bronwin l and I also want to note that uh Morrison's final novel God help the child which I have also a translation on this on my screen uh the German uh it it is a novel that uh winds its way into California so uh it it it um and also California prisons and so it's a novel that um Morrison is dealing with very nuanced and complex concerns and so I'm wonder about the translation of that work and into German but I want to think about this notion of cultural translation and um as I do so to introduce uh Dr Bron lame Dr lame has been a teacher an instructional coach and administrator for over 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area she has taught middle and high school in Oakland Hayward Eastside Union East paloalto and Santa Clara uh High School in the important cities across California she holds a PhD from Stanford University and English and literacy curricul I know there she studied with some of the most important educational Scholars her ma from Mills College in educational leadership and her ba in English from UCLA among her Publications she uh she she began as a liter literacy curriculum that she co-created with her students it erved around their self-narratives on the topic of love the book is titled personal narrative revised writing love and agency in the high school classroom it was awarded the David H Russell award for ding distinguished research and the teaching of English for 2017 by the National Council of teachers of English Dr lame currently lectures in the department of English and teacher education at San Jose State and has worked with the San Jose area writing project as a teacher consultant and participant for many years prior becoming the director uh it is a great pleasure to introduce Dr bronan Le and I'll turn the uh screen to Dr L thank you Nigel I appreciate that um good morning everyone it's such a pleasure to be here um I do have some slides that I'll share just so you have a visual um so let me go ahead and project those all right and I want to share a story of our translation of Tony morson's writing um into a high school classroom a number of years ago um none of us were really the same after this um and this has kind of affected my sense of self as a teacher and my pedagogy ever since um it was really a story of a translation of both her writing and her our stories about love um into our work together and when I say hour work I'm referring to a group of young people I work with for two years in a school in East San Jose um at the time they were 10th and 11th graders um I was their teacher in the sense that we were in this institution called school together so the reality really was that we were just people trying to figure out how to be in the world um and I think Tony Morrison's work really helped us answer questions that we had even though we were at different points in life um her work allowed us to be vulnerable in a way that was not really what the system is designed to do and also profoundly transformative um and I stumbled on this quote a number number of years ago um I felt like it hit directly on the subtext that so many students brought to school um so I'm just going to read it she wrote in one of her interviews I think all the time when I write I'm writing about love or its absence about love or how to survive not make a living but how we survive whole in this world we're all of us are in some major victims of something and in a world like this how do we remain whole or is is it even possible to do this I could hear under my students thoughts every day this question right what does it mean to be whole how can I feel whole is this possible where do I find Agency for that um and so this became a question that we turned into an exploration of Song of Solomon what is love um this is where we started writing um I wrote along with my students on so many things that we wrote across this book um and I think when I posed this question to them the first time what they heard initially was am I lovable right am I worthy of Love am I capable of giving love why do I push love away it raised so many stories for us and I think what we realized is there is maybe no story that cuts deeper to our core sense of self than our stories about love however internalized they may be so we really started trying to think about wait what is this story I hold about love that I maybe play out in some way every day in ways I don't even see myself doing um how is the story serving me what would it mean to start to look at that story and revise that story and this was the angle that we took into Song of Solomon and into our own stories kind of simultaneously we played too on the idea that you know we can become the stories that we tell about our lives right so how we construct a story around this is incredible important and as people we want to heal right Tony Morrison says in personal life right you have to know what happened and why and figure it out and it's so much easier to bury things and just kind of charge forward right um but we don't always really know what the work is and I think what was so powerful about her work that allowed us to have this experience with each other and sharing our stories was that it allowed us to access a conversation that we didn't always know how to access right what does it mean to heal where do you start with out where do you even begin to go and students started playing with a lot of these ideas into their own words too so Diego writes right this is just one of his papers kind of a quote buried in there it took me a while to realize why I found myself in the same situation so many times there are so many Stories buried underneath stories like a puppet master they manipulate us it's often the things we do to prevent something from happening that let it happen right so we started trying to peel off different layers of story and looking at the characters in this way as well and this is where we ended up with the idea of Stories buried under the stories and where a student named Hazel went with this idea of the Y story and what would it mean to revise that um hazel was one of the leaders she really kind of took off in a way that many of us followed and she self-identified as a writer um I came in after school one day and found this on my on my board um she had basically turned it into a giant spoken word poem um with my me right in the center of it and she was really writing about experiencing love in ways that were hard for her to recognize um themes of family themes of parent child relationships all through here fragments of memory um and she said you know this is the why me story I realized I write so much my story and why me cuz I I don't have a better story right and what we realized was okay all of us have a why me story what would it mean to kind of surface that what would it mean to kind of explore that and share that and think about how you take that template y me and shift that template to something different but also be true to your experience and just storing it through a different template this was her idea and we started to run with that this became the idea of revision and she had titled her definition of love inally I'm the reason they're gone right just really locating herself as the source of a lot of problems um and part of the Paradox of this personal narrative work was actually using personal narrative to depersonalize things that were much bigger than us right there are social forces in the world that shape how people give and receive love right and she was experiencing things she didn't know how to Story how to take responsibility for except to blame her yourself so the work really began when we hit chapter 12 and there's a moment where Milkman just he's on this journey to the South and he's trying to put things together and he's trying to understand things and he he starts to realize the nursery rhyme the kids around him are saying ties to his family story and all of a sudden something just kind of unlocks right and the way he's thinking of things shifts and he starts thinking about his parents and he's thinking wait a second you know I've always thought of my mom as this person who does certain things but what if what what might she have nothing think of her husband loved her and thinking about his dad too right somebody who struggled to give love in a way that he could feel his love but realizing that this came from profound loss right and the loss came from social circumstances in a country that didn't show love right so starting to put his parent stories in the ways that he experienced his parents's people into a much deeper perspective and this is where she went with a little bit of her y me revision so I'll just share a little excerpt with you she says my current fear of others is their fear of knowing why me I know the feeling of covering up the fact that you're scared with a more dominant controlling rebellious careless way of life that you want to betray to others I would always have trouble with admitting to the fact that I wonder why me because it sounds selfish and pitiful but it's only our nature as humans to wonder why as we look deeper into why me we find a new profound way of thinking it's like a family tree you can't escape why me without figuring out why them it would be selfish to wonder not to wonder why their story is that way why did they get neglected I was so thought on wondering why me and not wanting to find out that I never took a second to realize that my mother and father both have a why me I question why they treat me like that or why they do that I should be questioning what happened to them that transfigured them into the people they are now I understand now that the moment when I question why is a moment we all have in our lifetime and the story of why isn't all of us and this was really liberatory for her right it's not about blaming right it's about moving moving from a place of blame to a place of understanding and there's peace in that and the peace is what students were looking for the peace is what we all were looking for and we came up with a term for this called the Milkman moment right this moment of Lucidity where you're actually able to shift to a deeper story a more contextualized story about why our lives are the way they are it's not that you land on the right story it's that you open the possibility for stories you've never even considered to emerge and that lead to richer truths right which is the very last story I'll share with you um a student named Abraham um where revising the idea of Truth and his definition of love was really where his work was um narrative truth being what's true to us right what's true to us it's the truth we live by and this line from guitar in Song of Solomon this was his story right everything I ever loved in my life left me guar is the same character who is quitt on the back of Dr Adam's phone profound things in there and Abraham's definition of Love started with the words I hate the truth I Clos my heart my past is deep I can't look at a mirror I can't even sleep right and I didn't really know at this point what he was referring to but what we could figure out is that he had storied truth in a way that really kept him trapped right right so how to shift that story about love from one of self-rejection to one of self-affirmation this is where he went right and again bringing Tony Morrison's words back in constantly right she says even though there may be some incredible knowledge revealed it's it's our tendency as people to sometimes hang on to what we know even if we're not feeding off of it right even if it doesn't fulfill us but the other very rich perception May terrify us and what was so powerful about Abraham's work is he went for that rich perception and you know this is not a world that allows a safe space for a lot of my students to be vulnerable but when he started to peel off the layers of his story and share them with us and revise that sense of Truth to one that allowed him some selflove in which to ground himself there was a moment when the class just stood up and embraced him and we caught that on film and the next day when they came in I actually took that picture and I just toos it with this quote from Song of Solomon it's the moment where Milkman has that Revelation and he sees himself reflected back in the window and there's joy there there's a kind of joy that you have to work through something to get right and you know this idea that he ran back to Solomon's store and caught a glimp of himself in the pl glass window he was grinning his eyes were shining he was as eager and as happy as he had ever been in his life so I'll end there but this is just our translation of Song of Solomon and its me messages about love and everything that word encompasses into our own lives thank you thank thank you uh I could hear you tell the stories of your students and their engagement with moris and for many days uh it reminds me of morison's use of that term interior life right and uh often when she is Reading literature or even discussing her own literature and literature in Translation I'm reminded of her um discussing a translation of Beowolf right and even in bolf she wants to know about interior life uh so that when I hear you refer to the Milkman moment or the vulnerability and uh students from backgrounds in which the vulnerability and the ability to express that vulnerability is often taken from them that through this engagement with Morrison with Song of Solomon and in your classroom that you have been able to allow for that turn to Interior life and and that is Morrison's term and I and so I hear you uh and when I hear those stories of your students I'm often uh led to turn back to more since discussion of that significance um she she when she reads Hemingway she often asks what happened to the interior life right and she's so I think um I see this in your discussion of those translations that are occurring culturally with your students so thank you and uh I really do have a a set of questions that I want to to ask but uh I will um we want to uh think about is it possible uh uh is this uh astred is it yeah is it possible to hear me now yes we can hear you uh Ash are you I'm using I'm using my phone okay so uh I would like to introduce you and then uh turn the presentation to you is that okay or well I'm a little yeah let's try it okay uh great uh then right I I would I would like to uh bring to our discussion our our another distinguished panelist we've heard from Dr Adams Dr L and and now we have a uh right a renowned uh writer and novelist uh the the great astred RoR and uh in 1996 in 1966 at the age of 19 AST RoR immigrated from suram to the Netherlands she identifies herself as a Cosmopolitan writer exploring themes of race gender family and identity her poetic uh unconventional Pros stands in the tradition of authors such as Tony Morrison and Alice Walker she was awarded the distinguished PC hoof award in 2016 and the three-yearly Dutch literature prize in 2021 her Masterpiece on a woman's Madness is the English language debut and Lucy Scott's translation was shortlisted for the National book award for translated literature her nov her novel dealers doctor from 2023 was nominated for the Boon literature prize a prestigious literary award given annually to the best book originally written in Dutch and so we are extremely pleased to have present with us uh as RoR and I'd like to turn uh the stage to you asri you well what do you want me to do uh do we have your you have some you have some questions uh we have your materials on the screen and so we uh well I to tell you the truth there is a huge problem here and I cannot let me see if I can read from the screen yeah but it it it's not the English part I only see the I can't see the English so so as astred right now we are um showing your passage from dealer's doctor in Dutch so if you read that part um people can follow along on screen to that passage if you want to read that passage and talk about that passage but I you like to read it in uh English I have to I can't see it very well because I have a just a small phone but I will take the Noel of course and read from the no of course and as it's Pages 19 let me go let me go so um it's like let me see um it's a very you know writers sometimes we are in a hard situation okay um let me see um I start with um reading in Dutch okay hello where are you that's perfectly fine yes please I start reading in Dutch the metro in Amsterdam is the re and by the [Music] and even and Lea Holland me Amsterdam F the and braid and deep phas over fem dials bra and deep was was in him and what on the and STS father AMD for and and over was and inci thank you so much for sharing that beautiful reading astd um astd actually asked me to use Google Translate and do a first translation in English now this is purely just AI based translation um astred do you want me to read the English translation that I received from Google translat so that people can okay I love to please go on of course thank you and after I read the English translation um Astra is going to speak a little bit about um the sensitivity of translation and how this passage was particularly inspired by The Works of Tony Mor so I'll go ahead and read that passage in English um astred yes please of course he had longed for her especially during sex with girls who wanted to do it with him there have been many too many and he knows why his life is like the metro in Amsterdam it goes on and on and there is no view he can change places all the time sometimes he can even get out and take an unknown path in Paramaribo where he wandered around he always came back to the city river and the facades of tall mansions and the almond trees were familiar as were the street vendors with their Delicacies pararo is not a city a maroon Master had roughly explained to him pararo is just a landing place of slave masters that has expanded into a Village Center with beautiful houses and expensive shops for the privileged he experienced the city as a refuge for 6 weeks who had rescued him even though he needed a stolen wallet to do so and a sweet Dutch girl Amsterdam felt big and wide and deep fear often overtook him because deep wide big was something to avoid um it had been hammered into him in his native Village the river the jungle they were without boundaries and if you went too far you were lost in the unknown and what is the unknown he had once asked Ry when his parents were crouched at the River Bank in stared into the distance nothing his father had mumbled the unknown has no words no human language in any case mother had added Amsterdam had that for him too and thanks to the girls and women who wandered the streets he could continue to feel the boundary that was not to be crossed he was less than a woman he could feel it and also that it is women who dominate the day until the night begins then he seeks out the men at the slaver Monument to feel the blood flow to his lower abdomen abdomen again AST I'm going to um pass the mic back to you do you want to speak on um this passage and its translation and how it's inspired by Tony Morrison Well let me say first that um I'm sorry for the delay but okay um Tony Morrison once told me because my then publisher sent her a translated uh Noel of mine um a n for the leave the in DCH a name for love and uh Tony Morrison reacted to me uh reacted to me saying I understand the story but the translation is not okay because I think she said it's not a native speaker a native English speaker translated it oh okay so she said to me EST it is very important the first thing you should know when they want to translate your work is that they let it do by a native speaker and um the second thing is that you said of course there is no perfect translation we know it and we know that um you have to you must have a a standard a best uh of that moment translation so others can use it and she advised me that it should be an English transl translation of my work he said be sure that it is very very good okay my view about it is that a translation and I think Tony Morrison if she was here would agree um because I love mu music and she does at well as well a translation to me is um Arrangement just like you have different Arrangements of songs or classical pieces okay and it will never um be like the original and especially when um humans make art uh you will never ever come to the authenticity of that thing and um but I am okay with translations because when I um read Tony Morrison novel I first read it in her native language in English and I need a my English is bad so I need a dictionary to read it and it will take me a week after two three weeks uh two days finished I read it in Dutch when I read her novel in Dutch I feel her novel because Dutch is my mother tongue but because I read her in English and English is her mother tongue I have this two uh feelings about the novel so I know when where in the translation to my taste there is a hole of something is shaky or unstable at but to me it's not a problem because you can't you know the the the translator is making his of her own choices in what to articulate um in her translation okay hello yes thank you thank you as this is Nigel uh I'm I'm listening to you speak about your conversation with Morrison on translation and the two of you engaging in dialogue about translation uh as well as your comments on what it means to both okay write but then also to be a reader of more sin and to read more sin in multiple languages and the the the many copies uh that is your reading in Dutch you're reading in English and how this is an experience that uh results in different uh engagements with the text I mean this is very important for our conversation on translation and I'd like to follow up with some questions uh about your meeting with Morrison and also the discussion of translation thank thank you for read for reading from your work uh I want to uh we've had three presentations uh Dr Adams focusing on translation uh Dr lame is focusing on cultural trans translation or the use of morison in classrooms and then astd RoR a writer who has also uh written talked about the translation of her own work and then her dialogue with Morrison on the very subject of translation I'm hopeful that those in the audience have questions that they would like to ask our panelist and if you can start to think of those and uh perhaps place them in the chat as we continue the conversation but at this point I want to uh move a to a Roundtable Q&A and to have our three panelists present and then to ask them uh a number of questions generate some questions and to have a discussion that they can have uh together and I'd like to begin uh by R turning to Dr Adams and returning to that moment of Dr Adams in the bookstore in East Germany or Dr Adams thinking about those German translations and those French translations uh and your work as a consultant for uh more since German translators uh which you have discussed with us and I wonder Dr Adams if you could discuss uh what is it that translators in that situation those German transl lers what is it that they can do uh how are they to know what is underneath uh what Tony Morrison is saying as they make this these decisions about translation uh and also perhaps if you can talk about who who who who has the sensitivity to recognize these uh challenges as a translator so perhaps to uh Begin by having that as a subject that we can turn to and just as a preface I want to read from a 1994 keynote address that Tony Morrison delivered at Princeton and this is in 1994 it's later collected uh in her 2019 collection the source of self-regard and in that uh keynote address at Princeton Morrison talked about quote what happens in Translation and these are her words what happens in Translation the Liberties taken that enhance the Liberties taken that diminish and for me the alarm there's always the threat of not being taken seriously of having the work reduced to a primer of having the politics of language the politics of another language imposed on the writer's own politics end quote uh so just for our panelists if we could uh and beginning with Dr Adams talk about uh how is it that one in Translation knows what is beneath or underneath what Tony Morrison is saying and who has the sensitivity to recognize uh these concerns as a translator and I'd like to begin with Dr Adams well in terms of what lies underneath um who has the sensitivity I'm going to uh give uh or approach that with uh with an example from from my experience and uh work sitting with a a translator um [Music] who um I found that he was um he was being a little bit too or a little bit more uh um um uh conservative or timid um in in uh uh in the way he tried to uh render Tony Morrison and um and I would say and he would say but you can't say that in German and I said you can't say it in English either but Tony Morrison says it Tony Morrison has invented it and so I think and and some there some translations that show this too that that the translator uh and of course there is such a thing as translation Theory and so forth and and the question is um is the translators uh responsibility to convey as closely as possible uh the uh you know the original in his or her own life language or are they to make it are they to somehow transfer it so that it is it has some equivalencies in that target language um but as far as the as far as the choices of of of of words the choices of Expressions uh the what I was seeing with that particular German translator was that he had not just reservations but difficulty it it it pained him to go beyond appropriate German to do some of the things with German that Tony marrison does with English um uh then there are others well um uh in terms terms of who has the sensitivity to to to to say uh uh you know to say it if we take in German and in French uh as probably everybody in this room knows uh there are different registers for for addressing the second person for you there's a there's a informal there's a formal or an intimate or and so what the determines how um uh uh you know which form of that you use in German or in French when Tony Morrison you know has a conversation uh between two people let's say who are not obviously uh uh family members or something but um uh so in terms of sensitivity uh the translator um uh needs to or or you know there are many many uh uh exercises that a translator might take him or herself through in order to determine whether to use to or Vu or do or z uh uh uh in certain cases and so that is a a clear example of of of sensitivity or knowing what is you know what lies under uh you know that that expression so um I'll just close off this answer by saying that uh first of all the more tony Mar the more Morrison Works a translator reads and works with the better we hope they get at rendering her but also um in the earliest uh uh years of translating Tony Morrison's Works European translators knew black protest writings they knew James Baldwin they knew they knew um um Richard R and so forth and when Tony Morrison came along they couldn't find the protest language and so uh this is not so much uh um um translators but but reviewers sort of didn't know what to do with with this now woman as opposed to uh you know her older brothers um in literature and so so her language just uh uh and her content just Pro just brought some challenges that caught translators as well as critics off guard but uh uh as a result of Tony marson's Works more even than those of her predecessors uh School curricular have Tony Morrison's Works in them uh usually in the English curriculum of course but the point is that that school curricula in Europe anyway now incorporate uh um uh africanamerican content into their American literature course American history courses and so forth so that gradually the reading audience and of course the translators just have more familiarity with the the you know with with African-Americans and so that eventually would make uh Tony marrison a bit more accessible and uh uh and a bit uh and and give translators a bit more to uh to work with and also uh in some cases her translators talked to her and asked her you know what should I use do or Z here uh or at least I can remember that from a from a French translator um and so forth so being able to ask the writer exactly but of course that's not all always the case and it certainly wasn't the case in the beginning so that's my roundabout answer thank you Dr Adams uh uh extremely helpful I uh I mean this I'm I'm often worried write the quiet as it's kept such an important phrase in African-American life right and to know that it is translated in languages around the world is unsettling to me right and so how how does one work with such a phrase right uh so thank you I started to use that as my example piece that very sentence yeah yes um astred are you are you still on the call are you available there or okay uh will the I've just asked ASD to unmute um ASD if you can click on that audio button um you should be able to unmute yourself let's see ASD can you hear me um if if you look to the left uh left uh up uh lower corner of your Zoom screen or your Zoom app you should be able to click on a microphone and you should be able to um click on audio and unmute yourself okay well that um I I want to make sure that we have time uh and I know that um asra is joining us from suram so uh but certainly once we resolve that um do we want to move just move on to another question with bronwin rahan not uh not that you have to turn to your Educational Theory uh writings but um maybe the this cultural translation or uh this translation in which you are taking Morrison's work to the classroom uh and then engaging it in a a kind of prais uh and we if you want to turn to FR Paulo FR but I was thinking about this notion of um translation or cultural translation and and prais or uh being able to work within the classroom uh and then to think about that next to uh something that Morrison said and I'll quote Morrison here this is Morrison writing and saying that certain kinds of trauma visited on PE visited on peoples are so deep so cruel that unlike money unlike Vengeance even unlike Justice or rights or the Goodwill of others only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning sharpening the moral imagination so this is uh Morrison talking about another type of translation but I I wonder if you could talk to us about uh right this kind of translation or practice within your classroom or taking moris into the classroom and and using it in the way that you have in uh with your students thanks I can speak to that um and I love that quote by the way that's really powerful um and I feel like our Educational Systems are not they aren't humanizing right they aren't always seeing students as people a lot of the time and for a lot of young people that is profoundly alienating um so let me let me go back to guitar for a second okay um I read in one of her interview somewhere where she was talking about characters generally but guitar's name was in there her saying right they're free people dangerously free they are the salt tasters they express either effort of the will or freedom of the will it's not about meanness but a self- flatulant resistance to certain kinds of control and I can't tell you how many kids and young people I've work with at a variety of Ages who have a suspicion of certain kinds of control that is actually very healthy right by by being human we tend to put emotional distance there that trigger us right um and the classroom can be a very triggering Place how do you develop a sense of academic identity in a space where you don't feel seen where you don't feel like you have a voice right where the language of school is what's used and the language of the heart the language of our interiority is eclipsed right for a lot of kids they just dissociate from that it doesn't feel healthy it gets misread it gets misread is not being interested in school maybe not caring about school but yet so many young people will think and learn and engage deeply when they don't feel they have to compromise their sense of self to do it and you know I think about the student Abraham who I was referring to earlier um he and I had a very conflicted relationship all the time we were able I apologize as as audio is working again and I don't want to unmute her because it might be for us to unmute again but um um bronwin if you if you could just go go ahead and finish okay just being able to use the language of the curriculum to talk about ourselves as people trying to work out a relationship I mean the language of the curriculum coming from the language of Tony Morrison and the language of all of the things that her character say and all of the things that she says and just getting to that level of the most authentic conversation possible right and I think how do we translate that into the context of school it's not a system that was made for it but there's profound work we can do as Educators um in our classrooms every day so I'll leave it there thank thank you uh that that's so important I mean I I see the connection between uh the translation of language and foreign language translations uh right uh that is the work of Dr Adams and uh you know in in Germany for example American stud programs are very important at the I mean indeed the strongest American studies programs abroad are in you hear me and you would you would find Morrison's work uh there and I see that connection between both the hello hi as we hear you okay as I'm here I'm here oh great great as uh I I'd like ashd is it possible that we could uh continue with your conversation about your uh translations of your work um you you work with translators uh of your novels uh can you talk about that experience well um just like I said to me a translation can never ever be perfect because the authenticity um is not to be copied so it's always a sort of arrangement okay and the one is better than the other and Through the Years sometimes you find a a very very very good uh translation about my own uh novels um on a women woman's Madness I was so I hadn't read that novel in about TW maybe 20 years and I started reading it again in the English translation and it it moved me so much it it went to the my feelings were so um deep and deeply and I better understood than in the Dutch version why this novel uh is so important to me and why people um love this novel so much so um even though I did not know a thing about the translator but that is not a problem to me because I started reading in surum and I was very young and as we had no children books in our house so I I start to read um uh well-known writers because my my family were like teachers okay and I didn't even know that there was uh a writer just looking at the at a chair I didn't know who made the chair so I didn't know who who made the the the the novel The Book the text so I am I am still like that um I don't need to know the [Music] translator um I always ask is it a native because Morrison said it should be a native speaker and um then I wait till the translation's coming in so I said um about on a woman's uh Madness is is a great trans ation and then after they had this uh novel um of white and I I heard that two people are going to translate it I did not ask why and how because it doesn't matter to me there is something and I like the translation but there is something funny about it because they said that the main character uh is a white man but no it is a black Creole man so that is a it's a very big mistake but it's not a a mental Mistake by them it is a mistake because they being an American well this is stereotypical what I'm going to say now you cannot know that our Creole men in serum are just like white men in orand they are just the same so the transl the the translators sense that the way he is moving around it should be a white man you know so it's me as a writer to think about such things how do I never write to please readers but it's good to think about it because it is a very big mistake okay but again um the text uh uh Nico read when the text came in well you know it was just a text to me I wasn't even thinking about oh it is a chat uh uh thing it's not done by a human species it doesn't matter because I don't care about about writers and I don't want PE I don't want people to care about me I'm doing my work I give it to my publisher and my publisher is the one to sell it and even with my novels when they invite me uh people invite me to come and and and and and do something I'm telling them them I am not going to answer questions about the novel I am going to answer questions about writing okay and um talking about something else Tony Morrison when it's it's impossible for any um translator to go into the depth of Tony Morrison's um how she is asking the qu question how to survive when when you have no blue eyes or when you are very dark brown or when you're poor or when you're this and when you're that that is the main thing of her work and we can take it with us to um to the Future because that is the question to ask every time here am I this is how I look like this is what I think that I am and how is the world my habitat or the environment how is this going to react to it and what am I going to do to survive in such a place and one of the sayings is you don't have to worry about surviving whole it's okay to survive in parts and I love to hear that because that is so true did that answer your question yes more more than answered uh it provides us with many uh ways to think about this issue and I hear you speaking about what is that original uh text right that is created but then the many texts created after it that become part of the text and that continues and continues uh and you are once it is entered into that world where it goes uh for you you are not one that is beholden to it being kept to that original so I I think it's quite remarkable to hear you reflect on the translation experience and also uh this experience of multiple translators on a work which is something that happens quite often in these translations that there will be a team of translators and you can see it listed on the the title page quite often uh I know that um the work of our panelists has generated a number of questions and I I do want to make available sometime for uh questions from the from the audience and uh I believe we have some in the chat is that we do we have one from Jenifer and her question is have there been new translations of Morrison that reflect the inclusion of more African-American writers in European countries um hopefully reflecting a deeper understanding of African-American culture and so basically I wonder what kind of changes are you seeing in these new translations that be an Anne Adams question I prese absolutely oh an um you need to unmute so that we can hear you uh I was a little bit confused about the part uh are there translations of Morrison that reflect inclusion of more African-American writers um uh but in in any case I can certainly see there are uh burgeoning translations of African-American uh writers in in European countries now and and and and women particularly but uh uh I would just say that the that the r translations of Morrison the newer translations uh are indeed reflecting uh uh a deeper understanding of africanamerican culture uh the current translator German translator of Morrison uh um intends to come to the United States and spend some time hanging out in New York for what she has not and I don't think I'm pretty sure that none of the previous translators of of Tony Morrison in German had spent M had spent much time in the US um uh maybe he had come for a visit and so but this current German translator Marson wants to try to absorb some Contemporary American culture so that when she uh um uh uh when she continues to do uh new versions of the uh of the previous Works uh it can reflect uh that that uh acquaintance a little bit better thank thank you Dr Adams um uh we have um Melody Mada Melody do you want to go ahead and share your question with the panel I'm sorry I can't uh be there in visual um actually it's more of a comment I think that I'm I'm wanting to offer um in terms of you know the question around um sensitivity and who translates who does this really important work of um as we talked about at the beginning of the talk of transferring organs right and doing the surgery from one context to another um because I so I'm part of a a group I founded in in Germany I also translate into German and into English and it's a group of black translators um we founded our group in 2020 and you know a lot of us are um Scholars of afrodiasporic history and literature we have degrees in in various fields in that context um but what we're noticing often times is that we um are quite invisible when it comes to translation um that you know oftentimes we're we are told that we don't exist we talk to folks uh at publishing houses um and I think a lot of us bring that sensitivity that we've talked about right um one because we have studied and committed a lot of time and advanced degrees to looking at at African-American history and literature but also afro theoric literature and the example that Dr Adams gave is specific to the African-American context from um Song of Solomon but it's also Universal in a sense that it's common right the idea of white beauty standards uh to many um black contexts so um yeah so I think the question or the comment that I have is sort of um noticing that we're often not considered for translation of of black writers work um which I find very unfortunate because we do bring a lot of expertise uh to the subject right out of all of these um backgrounds that I just described and even post um Amanda Gorman debate which we had in Europe right which really delved into that question of who can translate who and quickly became a Deb debate about whether the people have always translated black writers can continue to do so rather um making the space more inclusive so and the final thing that I want to um add is you know the question of audience um and I'm thinking specifically of German me because I'm afro German is that the audience is also no longer uh this white imagined audience who's never thought about black people before you know 40% of the population in Germany is of color today um a good number of those are are black Germans or black people living in Germany so um you know I want I think these are all questions that have a lot to do with the of the question of translation right what what is being translated so and I often have this experience that when I'm am considered for a translation um I'm has to explain a lot you know exactly what Tony Morrison did not do so explain a lot of aspects about Black Culture um because the imagined audience remains white even though it is not in in reality so I just wanted to to offer that um as a comment to wonderful talks that you have shared with us today thank you for that I should should have said that at the beginning may I say something please EST please may I say something yes is it okay if I say something absolutely yes please the thing about um the translation conflict in Holland is was so full of racism the best one of the best poets we have they ask her to translate the ladies poetry and before she even had had done anything they said no you are not black you cannot translate a black uh person's poetry that is about racism that is about looking at someone's color or ethnicity saying you can't do something and you know I hate that so I was against it if you want an altern you could say Okay translate four or five poems and have a sort of je it was it was say about sensibility um by transl or poetry again I am a poet as well and I write novels and I know and Tony Moren knows too that you cannot come where the authenticity of the work is you cannot come there being a translator you can feel a sort of sense in your your own language about it and you're doing every time you you you move to a a certain or a paragraph there are like 10 possibilities and you have to make a choice and you have to think why you're making that choice and you have to I being a writer I'm not a Creator I'm an artist I being an artist I have to accept that doing my work in another language will taste a little bit different it's like Chinese food every where I am in the world I go for Ping uh docks okay but every every place I go it tastes a little bit different but I still sense that it is what it is but it's never the original okay and that is how I feel about translations and okay and then there are these black translators in Holland they want to translate because you don't get a lot of money but it is some money but to me I am not going to um uh say I want per say a a person with roots in serum which part of Serum atra at CRA no I want a sensitive um native speaker that is what I want okay yes thank you as that so so vely important uh and uh certainly gives us great uh material that we can think about additionally uh and uh Melody very important to know of your work I would like to um the important important question uh posed uh for bronwin and this question uh comes from Amy harkort and I'll uh Amy Brin Amy says your work with students is so important I agree uh without getting too political I'm curious about your take on the increased Banning of Morrison's work from school libraries and curricula yeah that's a fantastic question I appreciate that um thank you Amy um this is actually something I've encountered personally um working in a district in Silicon Valley last year um and running into some administrators who are not okay with students thinking in what are really just fundamentally human ways um and you know I think it goes back to the one of the quotes that I pulled in my view where she's talking about you know just plowing ah head and burying things and pretending and distorting things isn't healthy right what does it mean to actually see the work of confronting our past confronting our own like what we represent to people and confronting our own wounds and confronting our own trauma as liberatory right not as the past that kind of pounds us to death but as something that we can build a healthy relationship with and and also her point that in many cases this is just terrifying right this very concept is is terrifying and so you know I don't think my students experienced that there were always some kids for example who were like I don't really have this story I don't really want to um engage this way which is fine right we make alternate ways of engaging and they see certain work that other students are doing um but I think you know some of us choose to to live in a way that doesn't reflect right that doesn't allow for the unpacking of trauma and of wounds and I think this is where we hit a lot of defenses around an author like Tony Morrison who was inviting us to engage with her in that work who was inviting students to engage in that work in a way that feels healthy and liberatory but there's work involved right um and so I think this is where we run into trouble is is there's a resistance there um but you know I also want to just note that you know we look at fur's definition of of press is reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it right the synthesis of theory and action so that you can actually have an impact that's grounded in understanding of something um and how empowering education is in that way right it's not about doing something to please the Common Core please the teacher please a rubric or you know get a standardized test score it's it's about figuring out how to be in the world and figuring out how to live together as people um and I think right now that's not where we are but I do think that's something that young people are hungry for and I also think that's something a lot of teachers and and administrators are hungry for you know it just depends on personal choices we make about I think how to deal with our own pain and then imposing those on other people um so that's that would be my answer to that thank thank you um I do want to uh thank our panelists for today uh for giving us uh ways to think about translation and translation of Tony Morrison's work but translation generally and particularly on this very important day Tony Morrison day uh again the work of uh translators as surgeons uh and to ask that question uh by jum liri who who is the right one to do the surgery who is it that should do this translation and from Dr Adams from Dr lame and from the great novelist ASD RoR we have uh Avenues to think about the politics and also the Nuance of translation so thank you very much to our panelists I'd like to turn it back to Nico of course um I wanted to just um ask everyone who is participating today if you can manage it to turn on your cameras to just sort of wave a hello and thank you to our amazing not only our amazing panelist but our amazing moderator Dr Nigel Hatton for guiding us through such a rich and thought-provoking conversation today and I also thank you all for being so patient and sticking with us um today has been just a true Testament to the many ways Morrison's writing through translation continues to move us across languages across disciplines across Generations it reminds us that translation is not just about words but about this deep work of carrying meaning his and love into new spaces of understanding and you know I just want to kind of end on that note and you know just thank all of you all for coming together today I think it's so apt that we're talking about Tony Morrison in this day and time I won't get into the politics of it all but um you know there's a lot of underlying things that are emerging for me today and so it's just great to be in community with you all to talk about Tony Morrison