Isabel Gomez: Against Invisibility

Isabel Gomez: Against Invisibility

Dina Famin

 

My appreciation for Gomez’s introduction to Cannibal Translation was only heightened by hearing her lecture, and speaking with her before and after the talk. Her challenge to French- and German-based western translation theory by amplifying Latin American theory is a valuable task that highlights our comfort and the linguistic and cultural hegemony that arises from a fidelity-based translation practice. Aiming for fidelity, western translators can and do trick themselves into invisibility. However, any translated work bears the mark of its translator—if you know where to look. An invisible translator either domesticates or foreignizes a work in the name of preserving its “originality,” but either choice is a mark of the translator. Furthermore, the paratextual elements of the translated work—the presence of an introduction, footnotes, foreword, afterword, title, cover image—all indicate other hands that, if we aim for fidelity, “meddle” in the final product.

Two questions asked after the lecture took the idea of cannibal translation from theory to practice.

The first, asked by Professor Morse and refined my Gomez: “How can we find a beneficial pathway into translation with this method? Can you do a cannibal translation into a hegemonic language or culture?” Cannibal translation in its Latin American sphere adopts works and challenges the supremacy of the original. The opposite into a language like English cannot work. Instead, Gomez says that the question, instead of “Can you do a cannibal translation into English in the same way it is practiced in Latin America?” is: “How can we use cannibal translation to show that our translations (or our translation culture) are hegemonic?”

This can be done by making the English “less smooth and less self-contained.” Instead of aesthetically making a work make sense, cannibal translations into English must highlight, as Lawrence Venuti argues, that they are translations. They should not be absorbed into English literature outright. Cannibal translations into English should show the power differential between the works, as we learn how to translate discourses and culture-specific phenomena. Also, cannibal translation can be creative in its medium, such as with digital publication.

The second question is similar, and was asked by Maria: How can we make our own translations more like cannibal translations?

Again, Gomez recommended working against the instinct to smooth out language into a false neutrality. She suggested taking the work a little bit less seriously—not in effort, but in how we approach the whole idea of translation. In footnotes, for example, she suggested (first of all, suggesting footnotes it itself a challenge to American norms!) to leave little jokes for ourselves as translators, or to take pride in more daring choices, such as the translation of a pun, that would be visible to translators but maybe not readers. Re: footnotes, Gomez described a poetry translation (I unfortunately forgot the authors) where the translator used coconut emojis to indicate endnotes: the translated poem by itself made sense, and the discerning reader would know to flip to the back of the book for the entire context of the poem and the translation that went into it.

Above all, cannibal translation is a deliberate theory and practice that centers the history of a particular translation, calls out violence and colonialism in the acts of writing and translation, problematizes the idea of originals, and implicates the target culture as a producer of literature.

The teethmarks that Gomez says a translator leaves on their work can be seen as violent. But don’t we all walk past the leg of a couch that a beloved pet has chewed, and smile to see a permanent imprint of their presence?