Hello, and welcome, I'm
Allison Markin Powell,
Japanese literary translator,
and former co-chair
of the PEN Translation Committee.
My co-host today is Tess Lewis,
who many of you will recognize
from our week 12 program
on Ghost Languages of Europe.
Tess is an award-winning
translator from French and German,
also a former co-chair of the
PEN Translation Committee,
as well as a co-organizer
of "Translating the Future,"
the conference you are now attending.
Thank you, Allison, and
thanks to all of you
for joining us for the 16th installment
of our weekly program,
"Language as Polis."
Language, as all of
you know in your bones,
is at the core of our identities,
personal as well as political.
One symptom of the recent
fraying of the American polis
is the increasing hostility
directed at people speaking languages
other than English in public,
and in the sustained resistance
to bilingual education.
Today's panelists will
discuss three languages
that have been threatened by this urge
to containment and simplification,
but have also developed
strength and resilience
in countering this threat.
Yiddish, Catalan, and Frisian
are languages without passports.
Each one has a complex history
of accommodating,
absorbing, and influencing
the dominant official languages
of their particular regions,
and all three are object
lessons in the richness
and value of linguistic
inclusiveness and diversity.
Today's conversation will
feature Madeleine Cohen,
also known as Mindl, who
is the academic director
of the Yiddish Book Center
in Amherst, Massachusetts,
which is sponsoring today's program.
LaTasha Diggs, a writer, vocalist,
and sound artist is based in Harlem,
and Mary Ann Newman, translator
from Catalan and Spanish,
and the force behind the
Sant Jordi New York Festival.
You can find out more about
these three wonderful people
and their illustrious achievements
on the Center for Humanities website.
Today's conversation is also sponsored
by the Institut Ramon Llull.
A Q and A session will
follow today's talk as usual.
Please email your questions
for Mindl, LaTasha,
and Mary Ann to
translatingthefuture2020@gmail.com.
We'll keep questions anonymous,
unless you note in your email
that you would like us to read your name.
"Translating the Future" will continue
in its current form through September.
During the conference's
originally planned dates
in late September, several marvelous
larger-scale events will happen.
Until then, we'll be here every Tuesday
with the week's hour-long conversation.
Please join us next
Tuesday, September 1st,
for "So-Called Classics"
with Laurie Patton,
Gopal Sukhu, and Vivek Narayanan,
and keep checking the Center
for the Humanities site
for future events.
"Translating the Future" is convened
by PEN America's Translation Committee,
which advocates on behalf
of literary translators,
working to foster a wider
understanding of their art,
and offering professional
resources for translators,
publishers, critics, bloggers,
and others with an interest
in international literature.
The Committee is currently co-chaired
by Lyn Miller-Lachmann and Larissa Kyzer.
For more information, look
for translation resources
at pen.org.
And if you know anyone who was unable
to join us for the livestream today,
a recording will be available afterward
on the HowlRound and Center
for the Humanities sites.
Before we turn it over to
Mindl, LaTasha, and Mary Ann,
we'd like to offer our utmost gratitude
to today's sponsor's,
the Institut Ramon Llull
and Yiddish Book Center,
and to our partners at the
Center for the Humanities
at The Graduate Center, CUNY,
the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
the Cullman Center for
Scholars and Writers
at the New York Public Library,
PEN America, and to the
masters of dark Zoom magic
at HowlRound, who make
this livestream possible.
And now to our speakers.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi, Mary Ann, Hi, LaTasha.
Hi, Mindl, Hi, LaTasha.
Hello.
So we have the idea to start by, you know,
each of us introducing ourselves
and saying a bit about our
relationship to these language,
and I think some first
thoughts kind of in response
to the theme.
I'm willing to be the
guinea pig and go first,
if that sounds good to folks.
That sounds great Mindl, thanks.
Okay, I'm really excited to get to be here
and have a conversation with both of you,
and grateful to the organizers
as well for putting together
this amazing session
that's brought, you know,
a lot of enrichment to
my summer, certainly.
So it's exciting, you know,
not just for us to get to talk,
I think, but to be part
of the conversation
that's been evolving over the weeks.
So a word about me, I'm
the academic director
at the Yiddish Book Center,
which is a nonprofit organization
in Massachusetts.
We're celebrating our 40th
anniversary this year,
and the mission of the organization
has been originally to
physically save Yiddish books.
And then in the decade since, you know,
to interpret that mission
in a lot of different
ways of what does it mean
to help make Yiddish
accessible to different people,
so first by making the books accessible,
but then through
different educational work
to make Yiddish culture and
Yiddish literature accessible.
And I'll say a bit more
about that probably later.
We talk about some of the
practical work that is happening
to support Yiddish in translation.
I didn't grow up speaking
Yiddish, I learned it as an adult.
I had one grandparent
with whom I was very close
who was a Yiddish speaker.
But I started studying it in
college after learning German,
and getting really interested
just in the Jewish experience,
and the Jewish role in modern European
and modern world history,
and trying to understand, you know,
how this diasporic and stateless people
continued to play such an
influential role in world events,
especially European and Western history.
And my experience once I started
learning Yiddish I think,
is the same for many people who learn it.
It's like opening a door into
a secret room of treasure
that one didn't even know
that the room existed,
and suddenly one discovers
these great riches
that speak to so many aspects
of modern historical experience
and to being in the world
today in a lot of different ways.
So I went to graduate school
studying Yiddish literature
and I've taught Yiddish language,
especially to beginners.
And I would say I have
done just a lot of teaching
that's about trying to
introduce Yiddish to people.
It's a language that has
a lot of symbolic weight.
It means a lot of things
to different people,
and people have strong
ideas about Yiddish.
And I find it really rewarding to open up
the different complexities
of language for people
who have never encountered it before,
or have strong associations with it.
But there is so much more
to learn about any culture,
and this culture for sure.
And the last thing I'll say
is a lot of my work recently
has been in support of
Yiddish in translation,
and more than even my own translation,
I've done a lot of work
as a translation editor,
which I really love.
I was the translation editor
for an online journal called "In geveb,"
and at the Yiddish Book Center I get to do
a lot of editing of Yiddish
translations as well.
So I'll make my pitch for why
translation is so important
to languages like Yiddish,
languages without state support,
languages that are kind of,
that are threatened in different ways,
or just depend, I guess, on
communities of individuals
to maintain them.
So I'll say a few things about Yiddish
in response to the theme
of language as polis,
or the idea of language as polis.
We had started talking
about stateless languages
when we started speaking
about this session,
and I'm really interested that we shifted
to this idea of thinking about, you know,
how languages organize community,
how languages give shape to community,
especially outside of the
structures of nation or state,
because I think probably
that actually does describe
the condition for many
more languages and speakers
than does the state of speaking
a national language, right.
The fact that I grew up speaking English
in the United States is
really probably an exception
for most human experience
rather than the norm,
though it's presented that way, right.
To be a monolingual speaker
of a national language is thought of
as some kind of normal condition.
And it's probably not.
Whereas, you know, Yiddish
speakers who were, by definition,
multilingual and interacting
using different languages
for different parts of their lives,
without any kind of representation
by their government,
is true for a lot of
people in the world today
and throughout history.
So I like that if we take
that framework, you know,
how do we understand a relationship
between language and
communal identity differently
than the idea of, you
know, English in England,
and French in France,
and German in Germany.
There is a centuries-long history
of Jews turning to Yiddish
to help organize their sense of community.
So, probably we would say,
you know, in the 19th century
in response to, or in
communication with the rise
of Romantic nationalism in Europe,
which meant for many different
peoples and languages,
you know, turning to
their vernacular language
to build up a national culture,
that happened for Jews in
that time period as well.
Some people turned to Hebrew,
and that's very much how we get
the revival of the modern
Hebrew language and Zionism.
And at the same time,
different people were turning
to Yiddish to redefine
a sense of what it meant
to be Jewish people, or the Jewish nation.
And in many ways this
kind of movement to build
a Yiddish national culture
was really very successful.
There are tens of thousands of
volumes of Yiddish literature
in the Yiddish Book Center at Amherst,
and they are largely a product
of this conscious ideological movement
to build a Yiddish national culture,
to create everything in
Yiddish that Jews saw
as defining national
culture around literature,
and poetry, and theater, and scholarship,
and educational systems.
Probably the biggest difference
for this Yiddish national movement,
compared to the other movements
in Europe at the time,
maybe two differences, right,
was the kind of persistent otherness
of Jews as non-Christians in Europe,
and their lack of a territory,
their lack of a national
territory in Europe.
So, while there is a lot in common, say,
between how, what Polish literature
was doing in the 19th century
as part of the movement to
put Poland back on the map,
to reestablish a Polish
nation and a Polish culture,
Yiddish hadn't been on the map
before in the way that Poland had.
So the idea of creating a Yiddish state
was something that some
people were interested in,
but I think a much more
widespread was just a desire
for national cultural recognition,
national cultural autonomy,
and that there be some recognition
by the states where Jews lived,
in their collective identity
and their collective rights
beyond just their individual rights
to exist in those states.
Obviously, all of that changes for Yiddish
in the second half of the 20th century,
that all of these efforts to kind of build
Yiddish national culture are
really dramatically interrupted
by the Holocaust and the death
of so many of its speakers.
And then the failure to reestablish
centers of Yiddish in Europe,
and then different forms of suppression,
both by Yiddish speakers
out of fear of continued anti-Semitism,
by suppression in the Soviet Union,
which earlier had supported Yiddish
as a minor national
language and later did not.
In Israel, Yiddish really
didn't receive support
because the project was to build Hebrew
as the national language.
And in places like the United States,
the pressure to assimilate or Americanize
disrupted Yiddish's continuity.
Which is not to say that
it hasn't continued,
it does survive.
It's very much a living language,
especially in Hasidic communities
around the world today.
But the question of how to,
how a community can support
its language has continued for Yiddish,
and has become more challenging,
whereas there are new challenges, right,
given that it's no longer
the majority daily spoken
language of Ashkenazi Jews
as it was in the first
half of the 20th century.
And yet nevertheless, I'm part
of this community of people
that continues to turn to Yiddish,
and continues to think it's important
in our lives today and has
things to say to us today.
And I certainly think that
translating Yiddish literature
from that period is one important way
to kind of maintain this
community and maintain continuity.
But I'll say more about that later,
and let LaTasha and Mary
Ann introduce themselves.
I think we were going
in alphabetical order.
LaTasha, would you like to continue?
Oh okay.
Well, first I would like
to thank the organizers
for inviting me to this conversation
regarding statements, languages,
and language as polis.
I'll first say that I am
a poet and a performer
who plays with language.
I have fun with language.
I get frustrated with
language, multiple languages.
And for anyone who is
familiar with my work,
I work with several different languages,
often all at the same time,
kind of making a bit
of a collage with them,
based on sound and meaning.
And as part of this conversation,
it arises at a curious invitation in 2018.
The organization, The Flemish
House deBuren, invited me
to come to Leeuwarden,
Leeuwarden is in the north of Netherlands,
also considered the capital of Friesland,
for two weeks just to
write about Leeuwarden.
I had no idea how these folks knew of me,
and why they wanted me to
come and visit Leeuwarden.
And I just said "Yeah, okay, sure."
(laughter)
And so for two weeks I was in Leeuwarden,
and wandering about,
wondering "What am I
supposed to write about?"
And this also came at
the time that Leeuwarden,
as well as Valletta,
which is a city in Malta,
were deemed, given the title
the "European Capital of
Culture" for the year 2018,
which is something that all
of the European countries participate in,
something that was
established back in 1985.
And so, Leeuwarden, being the
cultural capital of Europe,
was a big deal, so there
were all of these activities.
One had to do with creating
this "Hall of Languages,"
where they created an installation
with some 6000 plus languages
that are still spoken
throughout the world.
There were a couple of
languages that I was looking for
that were not in that Hall,
that I do know are spoken,
but that's a conversation for
later, as to whether or not
they are languages versus
pidgins versus dialects.
But that's for something else.
And as I am wandering about,
I come to this center called Affolk,
and Affolk is the official
center for the Frisian language,
and I'm going, "What's Frisian?"
(laughter)
And so I learned,
rather in pieces,
that Frisian is the
language that was spoken
by the Frisians in Friesland,
which was once its own kingdom,
before it became part of the Netherlands.
And that it has a mythical root to India,
but that's not so much the case.
It has a Germanic root,
it has a Latin root.
It's related to English.
But that, for one moment,
it was a language,
it is a language that is
considered a minority language
as well as indigenous language,
aside from it being the
second official language
spoken in the Netherlands.
So I went on a walkabout
attempting to learn the language,
which presented challenges,
because in Leeuwarden I
came across very few people
that spoke Frisian,
despite the fact that there is a center
dedicated to the
preservation of the language,
that the language is
supported by the government,
yet at the same time it appeared to me,
in my observations, not so
much of a widespread interest
in learning the language,
aside from maybe another minority language
in another remote town
somewhere in the world
with linguists there, interested in doing
some type of collaboration.
But again, these were
very, very remote places.
And so I decided to
write about my attempts
to learn Frisian,
and my attempts to learn
what Frisian identity is,
in a place where you weren't,
you were not hearing Frisian,
but you were seeing it, either
displayed on the streets,
the literal streets,
displayed as window displays,
displayed on top of buildings,
and yet nothing was audible.
You couldn't hear it.
And for me, as someone
who works with sound,
and this is how I play with language,
it became a task of trying
to find someone who spoke it
and would take me seriously
enough as a foreigner,
as a brown foreigner,
(laughter)
who was curious about the language.
And I'll wait to read some of
the work a little bit later,
but how it relates to, kind
of connects to this question
of translation, I myself
am not a translator.
But the task of then
translating my work to Frisian
exposed to me
just how much, or how little,
there are those of a younger generation,
and I may be completely wrong right now,
because that was two years ago.
So maybe there is someone
who has picked up the mantle
of serving as a translator
of a English-based work to Frisian.
And I say English-based,
despite the fact that
within the text that I wrote,
Frisian does emerge, Dutch does emerge.
Suriname Tongo, which is a language
that is more based in Suriname,
but it has its,
it has a connection to the Dutch,
because Suriname was once a
colony of the Netherlands.
To critique, and rather,
to critique this notion
of Friesland being a
multilingual location.
That within the landscape
that I was navigating,
coming across brown bodies,
whether they be Egyptian,
whether they be from
another country in Africa,
whether they be from some area in Asia,
the inability to hear their language,
in a place
that doesn't appear to encourage
languages from other
places outside of Europe
to be heard,
and that multilingual for them,
which was surprising to me,
because when I think of
multilingual, I think of brown.
(laughter)
I think of a variations of brown.
I think of variations of black.
I think of a variations of beige.
I don't think particularly as someone
visiting a place with my body,
multilingual being just Frisian and Dutch.
Mm-hmm.
You know, especially
when I am encountering
a Somalian body who wants
to engage me in Dutch.
Mm-hmm.
I don't know Dutch.
You know, and yet it doesn't appear that,
it doesn't appear that that
body wants to then switch
to maybe the language
of their origin, right?
That they are going to
continue to try to speak
in a European language
until I can understand them.
And it was like, hmm,
this is very interesting.
And then to encounter Dutch people,
and to encounter folks whose
origins are based in the North,
in areas where they are Frisian,
not interested in Frisian, as a language,
and going, "So what is that about?"
So, yeah, and I'll stop
there, because I think,
I think I can serve the
conversation a little bit more later
as we kinda flesh this out.
(laughter)
That's really interesting,
the thing about a kind of erasure, though.
For me, language is both
emotional and political.
It's both of those things from the start.
And my introduction to Spanish,
the first time I ever got
on a plane at four years old
was to go to Cuba with my parents,
'cause my aunt was working
there, with the CIA.
And so my introduction to Spanish was,
they taught me 25 words,
probably things to eat,
leche con chocolate, and arroz con pollo,
and the address my aunt lived at,
I suppose in case I got lost,
which was phonetically
(speaks in foreign language)
(laughter)
So, that was my start in Spanish.
And then I grew up in Chelsea,
I grew up in this house.
And Chelsea was a very
Hispanic-inflected neighborhood.
14th Street was called Little Spain,
and it was where all of
the emigres and immigrants
and migrants came, well,
from the 19th century on,
from Spain.
And then they, after the Civil War,
the Republicans came,
and then in the 1950's
there was more of an economic exile
and a lot of people who were not leftist
but more right wing came.
In any case, I was going
to a Catholic school
on 17th Street, St. Francis Xavier,
and that was a mixture of the
children of these immigrants
and the children of Puerto Rican natives.
It was probably, my class
was a least a third Hispanic,
or Spanish, as we said in those days.
But there was a certain, it
was my first introduction
to diglossia.
So my introduction to Spanish is
in this incredibly vibrant culture,
very exciting,
all of these new experiences.
And then I come back home,
and there is a whole Hispanic pool,
but where people are,
where the Spanish language
is not as strong as the English language.
So there's an inequality
between the two of them,
which is the diglossia
that I'm gonna refer to.
Which is the presence of two languages
in an unequal situation.
You know, as I grew,
Spanish became an observatory
from which I could look at English.
When I went to college and
started studying Spanish,
and I studied it in high school,
but when I get serious about
it, it was in the 1970's,
and I was very anti-anti-anti-American
and Spanish was the place from which
I could look at the United States.
And then I went to Spain
on my junior year abroad,
junior semester.
And of course Spain, it was 1972,
Franco hadn't died,
Franco was still alive.
And Spanish was in the position of power.
And in fact in the position of erasure,
of trying to erase the Catalan language.
So in Spain, the natural
place for me to migrate to
was to Catalan, aside from
the fact that the first time
I landed in Barcelona on the train,
it was not landing, the first
time I slid to Barcelona,
I just fell in love with it immediately.
I mean, the architecture, the landscape.
Madrid was a very, the presence
of the government of Franco
was very overwhelming.
And even though he was no less present
in Catalonia and in Barcelona,
or even more present in other ways,
there was more pushback.
There was much more resistance.
And that was the place I felt comfortable.
So, I began to informally
to study Catalan,
and in fact I've always
studied it informally.
All my Catalan is street Catalan,
with a whole lot of reading behind it.
I've never actually took a class.
I took two classes at the
Catalan Circle in Madrid,
and they were so terrible
that I didn't continue.
So I have this emotional
relationship to the language
that is also political.
The whole question of language as polis
I think is really interesting.
The first full-length book
I translated into Catalan,
into English rather,
was by Xavier Rubert de Ventos,
who was one of the great
Catalan philosophers
of the 20th century, and
he wrote this book as well,
I hope you can see it,
which is a study of nationalisms
from a philosophical perspective.
And he is responding
to a kind of cosmopolitan
dislike of people who are
vindicating their cultures.
Why are you so, why is
this so important to you?
You know what...
And there's a rejection on the part
of the language of power,
of the less powerful language.
And in understanding
that things would just be
so much easier if you would
stop doing that, you know.
But one of the things that
Xavier says in this book
is the polis, in fact, which is the city,
comes to substitute,
comes to replace the clan,
and it replaces the old customs,
and the practices of
vengeance, and you know,
having to kill the people
who have offended your family, et cetera,
and you have this more
civilized relationship
to one another.
But this requires a
certain kind of forgetting.
It requires you to forget the old rules,
and in some cases it would require you
to forget the language.
So, I think the question of polis is,
it has a positive and a negative aspect.
And I actually, I like the
notion of stateless as well,
because Catalonia has
everything to be a state
except the state.
It has the language, it has an economy,
it has institutions,
it has a constitution of its own
from many centuries ago,
from before the Magna Carta.
It's a country.
And with many, with a lot of...
It's very interesting,
because Catalan, of course,
is not spoken only in Catalonia,
it's spoken in the south of France,
it's spoken in Valencia,
in the Balearic Islands,
even a little bit of Italy.
It's a stateless language in that sense,
because it has feet in
many different places.
I'm interested in the
emergence of Yiddish,
or the reemergence of Yiddish,
because it follows a similar,
Catalan follows a similar
path in the 19th century,
there's a reemergence of Catalan culture,
after having been,
after the War of Succession in 1714,
Catalonia is absorbed
into the Spanish state
by Philip V of Bourbon.
And the Catalan universities are closed.
They establish a Spanish
language university in Seville,
a Jesuit institution.
And it takes a century for the
Catalans to kind of regroup
and begin again, to...
One of the interesting things I read
in another book by Enrico Mas,
called "Cara Castilian:
The Language Next Door,"
and he was talking about
the fact that Catalonia
was mostly monolingual
for much of its history.
I know there are other
linguists who say differently,
but it is a very convincing thesis.
And in fact, you know, what happens then
is that the diglossia becomes class-based,
whereas all Catalans speak Catalan,
but the Catalans who want to
become noble adopt Spanish,
and Spanish institutions are established
the Spanish language is imposed, in fact,
by Philip V and his successors.
But they are not very successful,
because one of the things
that saves Catalan, in fact, is the fact
that so many people were illiterate.
So they weren't reading,
they weren't going to school,
and they were continuing to speak Catalan.
And in fact, when bishops, and generals,
and people would come to Catalonia,
they would have to speak Catalan
in order to be understood.
So preachers would have to
learn to preach in Catalan,
because otherwise they wouldn't be able
to spread the Word, spread the Gospel.
A way of asserting power from
a position of what would be
seen as powerlessness, right?
That the language being
spoken and illiterate
forces these people in
positions of power to use it.
Right, that's right, and
it's the power of the people
in that case, it's more
the the demos, right?
the people who haven't
forgotten their culture
and their language,
who haven't chosen to enter the polis,
or haven't chosen or don't
have the opportunity,
but in any case, they
maintain that historic memory.
Anyway, I think,
yeah, I think I could stop there,
and we can speak to each other.
Well and I'm thinking, just
thinking about the time,
I know we each brought
some poetry to read.
I wonder if we should do that now
to make sure that they all get heard,
and then,
Sure.
more time to discuss,
does that make sense?
Sure.
Sure.
LaTasha, I would love to hear,
because I think you have
some of your own work
that you'll share with us.
Yeah, and before I do that, I
need to find the link again.
It's funny, because I wanted
to bring up the fact that,
shortly after I left,
Leeuwarden wanted to prevent
the arrival of more Antilleans,
(laughter)
which is an interesting
conversation later on.
I'm trying to find, okay...
Will I be able to share this?
I think so.
Share screen?
Mm-hmm, so let me do this very quickly.
I just want to make sure that, okay...
So can you see the poem?
Yes.
Okay, so...
"Oompa Loompa"?
"Oompa Loompa"
(laughter)
"soy aqui new tongue, can you welcome this
gaze towards words unspoken
by a cynical generation? dump
some luster of rulers, your
labor deserves plaudits, of
poempebled never explained.
just expected. yours
a root I may retain just the slurs.
general blah blah is null, so simply:
we are bipedal but we be
natural idiots. plainly, full
of ourselves. driven to
control the oceans, the winds,
adjectives. your cheese is
mean, friend. like pungent
crunch. but we knew this. skin
fished & fry up. I thought
it was the French to blame
on mayo. a deaf waitress
serves/teaches me 'espresso.'
a cashier denies me stamps. coat the roofs
w/ hert e ja e taal e mem.
no volume raised though. so
who hears if unable to read?
does this hand need be this heavy?
elaborate for me this
thing about Frisian women.
evidence of heavy unfettered traits
all leading to Famke
Janssen. bad example? so...
ferhoslen ferhalen. The Dutch
'g' estou nao meu compadre,
relatives not. coat of
honey on Spain or Arawak or
(insert African/Asian root
here) well, then we duet, a
transfer of particles
across ponds where escaped,
we collage. my skin code
switch; longing tropics,
it pales beside Waddenzee.
your oak thrives in sand as I
digress to YouTube tutorials
to catch di riddim. full of
joy. alas the shop for Clumpys
is open from 12-5. the
tallest in Europe eh? so
what about the Danes? hung
like Grutte Pier? get yours
vertical accents, damn
your staircases, scalene,
obtuse triangles of hell,
misdirected retribution
for fiending Vlisco, dump
more tea inna dey cup
please, ate mais moanna,
my lessons are this."
And I'll read just read this one.
"Agehya-Zumbi, after Stanley Brouwn.
o numero total de minhas
passos em The Bronx
watashi no suteppu no sosu Harlem
el numero total de mis passos en Helmond
watashi no suteppu no sosus Nishi Ogikubo
o numero total de minhas
passos em North Carolina
watashi no suttepu no sosu Okinawa
el numero total de mis passos
en Sao Salvador de Bahia
watashi no suttepu no sosu Taxco
o numero total de minhas passos em Tsalagi
watashi suttepu no sosu Waddenzee
el numero total de mis
trapus en Ile Yoniba
And I'll stop there.
Beautiful.
(applause)
Thank you, LaTasha, lovely.
Can I ask a question about
the second poem that you read?
Sure.
The kind of smaller English
text, how does that relate
to the rest of the text
that you real aloud?
'Cause there are some changes right,
but not the same changes as in...
Not the same changes.
It's the total number of my steps in,
is actually a straight
reference from Stanley Brouwn.
Stanley Brouwn was a
Dutch conceptual artist.
The funny thing about his work,
he dealt with measurements,
and counting how many steps
he would take from A to B,
or asking strangers to make maps,
like "How do you get to this store?"
You know, and then ask them to draw a map.
Sometimes they wouldn't know anything,
and then he would stamp it
"Stanley Brouwn was here."
What interested me about Stanley's work
was that for most of his career
no one knew his identity,
because he refused to take
photographs of himself.
There would be gallery
exhibitions of his work
and he wouldn't attend.
(laughter)
So really, nobody knew his identity.
His identity was merely
these measurements.
And then it was much
later when he passed away,
his wife wanted to make sure
that everybody knew that he was black,
(laughter)
and that he was originally from Suriname,
when Suriname was a
colony of the Netherlands,
and that he went to the Netherlands
later in his life to study art.
So it's really interesting how then,
in this one conceptual
piece that he created,
which was about the number of his steps,
you get clues as to what,
as to who he may be, and
who he's identifying as,
but you're never quite sure.
So I wanted it to be a
mistranslation of sorts,
'cause, I don't think
they're 100% correct at all.
Right?
But it's me playing with the language,
me trying to play with the
Dutch, and the Spanish,
and the Japanese, to kind
of record my identity
in this very northern, low-country space.
(laughter)
Thank you.
Beautiful.
Mary Ann, do you want to read something?
Okay, I think I have...
Where is it?
You know, I don't have the,
I don't have the text I want,
I don't have access to the
text I want to share so,
I'm going to have to stop that.
But I will read it, I
have access to it myself.
This is a poem by Joseph Cudle,
I am currently working on a,
a book by Cudle
called "Trees," and it is indeed that,
it is just a book about,
every poem is about trees.
And it is rhymed.
And in general I don't rhyme.
But in this particular case...
I don't know why I can't bring up...
Don't tell me.
Come on.
Oh.
All right.
All right.
I'm going to read a little bit in Catalan,
just so that you feel it.
Oh I can't, okay I'm sorry,
I don't know why I can't get that.
But anyway, it is called "The
Donkey and the Olive Tree."
This is a poem about trees, as I said,
and the ones where you get
the real Mediterranean feeling
are when he writes about
olive trees and fig trees.
And there's always this
tremendous kind of Old Testament
feeling to it, and also very Christian,
but it is an interesting example
of how all of these religious images
are actually part of Catalan culture.
(indistinct)
People celebrate holidays
even if they are atheists.
People celebrate the
landscape, and they have,
it's part of the language, in other words,
it's part of the memory.
So here, "The Donkey and the Olive Tree"
"Donkey fixed to the pious olive tree,
Lenient tree, sentient being.
The great tree and it's dotage of glee
Laughs at the house and
the darkening stream.
The tired donkey neither yearns nor awaits
The ancient God crowned in thorns.
His brays ring out on the crooked trail
Like the scraps of Orient mourned.
You are the two gifts of the sacred land
where the aurora appears in rosy span.
Old testaments to that lovely bluff.
Prophetic beast whom a fool would query.
How soon to read, ready to parley.
Your silver is the dust
of immortal stuff."
And I'm sorry you cannot see the original.
I can read a tiny bit of the original.
(speaks in foreign language)
Okay.
Beautiful.
That's beautiful.
I do like it.
It's the first time I've
read it out loud, so...
(laughter)
It's in progress, any
comments will be welcome.
We'd love to hear
something of yours, Mindl.
So,
We can see now, I'm sharing
the English translation
of a poem by Avrom Sutzkever
one of the most famous Yiddish poets
of the second half of the 20th century.
And I think what I'll
do, I'll read the English
and then I'm gonna read
the end in Yiddish after,
so that we can end with the addition,
you'll see the themes of translation
and why this is a hard poem
to read in translation.
"Yiddish," and it's translated
by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav.
"Yiddish"
"Shall I start from the beginning?
Shall I, a brother,
Like Abraham
Smash all the idols?
Shall I let myself be translated alive?
Shall I plant my tongue
And wait
Till it transforms
into our forefathers'
Raisins and almonds?
What kind of joke
Preaches my poetry brother with whiskers,
That soon, my mother
tongue will set forever?
A hundred years from now,
we may still sit here
On the Jordan, and carry on this argument.
For a question
Gnaws and paws at me:
If he knows exactly in what regions
Levi Yitzhok's prayer,
Yehoash's poem,
Kulbak's song,
Are straying to their sunset,
Could he please show me
Where the language will go down?
May be at the Wailing Wall?
If so, I shall come there, come,
Open my mouth,
And like a lion
Garbled in fiery scarlet,
I shall swallow the language as it sets,
And wake all the
generations with my roar!"
MARY ANN: That's fantastic.
Okay,
(speaks in foreign language)
Beautiful.
Love it.
Roar.
(laughter)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Love the sounds of the Yiddish.
It's so much a piece
of fabric of New York,
you know, you hear it,
I mean, I hear New York.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I love that, and I love that it's
a part of different
territories in as much as it is
a stateless language
or a language of exile,
that it is still, it's so strongly tied
to different locations.
Yeah.
I have a question for
you about that, Mindl,
and it's a perfect segue from
the poem who talks about,
the poet talks about,
he'll speak his language
as its setting, and in combination
with your comments earlier
about the importance
of translating the works,
important works into Yiddish
to create the Yiddish culture by the Jews
in the diaspora in the 18 and early 1900s.
How much today is being
translated into Yiddish,
and does the Yiddish Book Center
have a focus on that at all?
That's really interesting, yeah.
The Center's focus is
certainly translating
from Yiddish into English.
There is some translation
happening into Yiddish.
One of the interesting
things that happens is,
we get contacted by various
state boards in New York,
that need to translate
official documents into Yiddish
for the Hasidic communities.
There's a very important
state function, interestingly,
of translating into Yiddish
still for communities.
And there are some projects,
a colleague of mine translated
Dr. Seuss into Yiddish,
and "The Cat in the Hat"
in Yiddish is available,
and quite popular.
And there continue to
be projects like that
for children's literature,
probably as a way
to bring Yiddish into people's homes,
and otherwise, I'm sure it exists
not quite in the same way right,
'cause it did, translating into Yiddish
was a really important
part of building Yiddish
as a cultural language, right,
and that's true for many languages.
If you can translate
Shakespeare into Yiddish
it means that Yiddish is as
eloquent a language as English.
And I think that drive probably remains,
though I don't know of any very recent...
Actually, I know somebody who
just translated Shakespeare
into Yiddish this summer, so
I think that drive continues.
Yeah.
That is your answer.
We had one question that
came in from a viewer.
It has a rather long preamble.
Which because we're short on
time, I'm going to abbreviate.
This person teaches both
English and French in Louisiana,
and they're describing the sort of,
French speakers of the state
trying to reclaim the
territory politically.
So, sort of on our own turf here.
The question is,
"I'm wondering how"
and this is really to any of you,
"I'm wondering how you might consider
whether we will ever be
able to convince America,
particularly in this xenophobic era
in the larger American society,
to engage in the learning of
languages other than English,
stateless languages or not,
by expressing the pleasure and delight
of learning languages
that open other parts
of the world to them.
If so, how best do we
engage this American culture
to show them the delights
in tearing down walls, not
building them at borders?"
I mean I think you've all
sort of spoken to this
in terms of your own engagement
with these languages,
but I just wonder if you have any,
if you have a response to this viewer.
Well translation is one of the ways.
I began to study Spanish
language and literature
because I found "One
Hundred Years of Solitude"
in a bookstore.
And you know, I think
that's one of the things
that translation does.
If the Catalan texts, and
Yiddish texts aren't in English,
and God knows, if the Frisian
texts were in English,
at least people could conceivably
take an interest in it.
But I think in the U.S.,
The U.S. has a problem
just learning Spanish.
The lesser-known languages
are a next step for sure.
But the interesting thing about Catalan
is that it's relationship to
Spanish in the United States
is very close,
and most people, I would
say 95% of people who begin
to study Catalan come to it
through a Spanish department,
through having studied Spanish.
So there's an interesting
relationship there.
I wonder, LaTasha, the way that Frisian
came to you actually,
so I mean I just wonder,
since you already had so many,
your work was already multilingual,
is there, I don't know...
Well, you know, the one thing,
I'm thinking about the two
weeks that I was there.
Once I learned that
there was this language
and wanted to hear it,
the question of who would
speak it to me, right?
And one thing to make
sure that it's understood,
that there was a Frisian
movement in the 1950's,
which allowed the Frisian
language to be government-funded,
to be officially recognized
as the second language,
to be taught in primary schools,
and certain courses in
secondary education.
And then beyond that,
I think there are those
who are invested in
preserving the language,
but then, how they're
preserving the language,
and how they're furthering
the interest and curiosity
is what I felt that I was hit with a wall.
And the reason why I say that,
and I guess I'm going to try to connect it
to this how do we make
Americans multilingual,
or to be just as giddy about
different languages as we are,
very simply,
there needs to be some fun.
(laughter)
There needs to be some fun.
To encounter folks and
understand that Frisian is,
though it's not necessarily
spoken in Leeuwarden,
but it's spoken in the
towns outside of Leeuwarden,
which were part of Friesland,
and that it's now, while
it is spoken in the courts
and while you can have
someone, and you have a Bible
that's been translated into Frisian,
how do we make,
how do we invite the younger generation
to be engaged with it, to
have an interest in it?
Dr. Seuss, Dr. Seuss is it.
I mean yeah, I totally
agree, Dr. Seuss is the one.
But then after Dr. Seuss, you know,
we could continue to read Dr. Seuss
because we like Dr. Seuss,
but most folks will grow out of Dr. Seuss.
So that are there graphic novels
written in other languages?
Are there augmented reality projects
that involve other languages
that will spark a curiosity?
I know we had an earlier
conversation about how few people
are interested in learning a language
and are only interested in
learning the swear words.
And I said I'm probably
one of those people
who love learning the swear words.
Because they become a
secret language, right?
When I taught, when I
was teaching language,
I always taught the swear words.
(laughter)
They become a secret language.
They drive me crazy, I'm the curmudgeon.
(laughter)
Growing up in New York,
growing up with Dominicans
and Puerto Ricans as my classmates,
it was wonderful to learn the word "puta."
You know, and "pendejo."
(laughter)
And you can say it,
but then it became
universally known in New York,
'cause New York is unique
in that, where you did know,
you didn't have to know Spanish
to know what "pendejo" meant, right?
You knew it was something bad.
Yiddish, too.
I think Yiddish, too.
Yeah you know.
We have to introduce those Catalan words.
We have to introduce them,
we have to introduce them.
I'm sorry we're out of time,
because we're getting the conversation,
as we start talking about swearwords,
it's getting more and more scary.
(laughter)
But thank you all, Mindl,
LaTasha, and Mary Ann,
for contributing to
the conversation today,
and once again, we would
like to thank our partners,
HowlRound, PEN America,
the Center for the Humanities
at The Graduate Center, CUNY,
the Cullman Center for
Scholars and Writers
at the New York Public Library,
the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center,
and deep gratitude to
the Yiddish Book Center
and the Institut Ramon Llull
for their support of today's event.
Thank you again, and we
hope to see you next week.
