When Vanessa K. Valdés finished from Yale and went to Vanderbilt to get a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese, it was with an awareness of the multicultural history of the Americas. It was 2007 and she was a Black Puerto Rican woman from New York City, with an undergraduate degree in English “bifurcated by imperial canon” — Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Donne — but with a bulk of African American literature: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison. She had seen the dangers of hegemonic U.S. Blackness, the lack of interest in America in other Black people around the world, and how it connects to, and is sustained by, the networks of empire. Her academic fields of interest had traditionally not made space for people like her, and she wanted to use her learning to intervene in a recession of continental Black awareness in the Americas, and, importantly, in the recuperation of Afro-diasporic contributions to culture. Valdés had a habit of keeping up with the work of peers, so she connected on Twitter with Nathan Dize, a translator of Haitian and French literature, and they met at a New York conference.
Growing up in Maryland, as a white man taught French by Black women, Dize had a wide perspective and a wider appreciation of his influences. He proceeded to Vanderbilt, for his own PhD in French. When a Vanderbilt French alum, Annette Joseph-Gabriel, published her book Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (2020), Dize wrote a review. Joseph-Gabriel had graduated the year he matriculated, but it was later, in the field, that they met for the first time. The world of Francophone Caribbean academia is a tiny but not insular one, so Valdés, too, was an admirer of Joseph-Gabriel’s work.
At the time, Valdés was a reviewer for Northwestern University Press, working with the then editor-in-chief Gianna Mosser. After Mosser moved to Vanderbilt University Press, Valdés texted her: I really want to work with you in some capacity. They met, and Mosser pitched a translation series to highlight Black translators and culture. Valdés spoke to Dize, whose translation of Makenzy Orcel’s The Immortals she had published as series editor of SUNY Press’ Afro Latinx Future Series. The two talked to Joseph-Gabriel.
Last February, Vanderbilt University Press announced Global Black Writers in Translation. The goal: “to amplify a body of writing that introduces anglophone readers to the range and complexity of Black literary and cultural production, history, and political thought.” The series, open to all genres including fiction and graphic novels, will “expand existing literary canons and stretch them beyond their current national, geographic, and linguistic limits,” publish bilingual editions “to foster cross-linguistic conversation,” “aims to increase the number of Black translators, addressing their historic underrepresentation in the field,” and “foreground global diasporic Black writers,” all while putting “emphasis on potential classroom use.”
Joseph-Gabriel and Valdés have produced books centering Black women in the trajectories of empire. In addition to Reimagining Liberation, Joseph-Gabriel, the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, is the co-editor of Shirley Graham Du Bois: Artist, Activist, and Author in the African Diaspora, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press, and author of another book under contract, Enslaved Childhoods: Survival and Storytelling in the Atlantic World.
Through a host of administrative roles — as Interim Dean of the Macaulay Honors College, as Director of the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York, where she was also Associate Provost for Community Engagement — Valdés wrote books covering North, Caribbean, and Latin America, including Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017), and edited others, including The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012) and Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020).
Dize, an Assistant Professor of French at Washington University in Saint Louis, has worked mostly in the digital humanities and in translation from French and Haitian Creole, reproducing novels including Makenzy Orcel’s The Emperor, Kettly Mars’ I Am Alive, Lyonel Trouillot’s Antoine of Gommiers, and Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey’s Duels, and poetry and short prose by Jean D’Amérique, James Noël, and Évelyne Trouillot. He is now working on two book projects, Follow the Translator: The Legacies of Black Translators of Francophone Literature and Resting Places: Haitian Literature and the Practice of Mourning.
“It’s really a collaborative process, and we all at times have questions for one another,” Dize said. “We’re not making decisions based on profit. That’s not always the case in publishing. We’re about meaningful exchange of knowledge and ideas, because that’s ultimately what sets us free.”
Valdés agreed. Global Black Writers in Translation “is an acknowledgement that Black literature, irrespective of the languages, is the least translated literature. It is an outlet for global literatures that are not on any given lists of ‘Top 10 Translated Novels or Poetry,’ where we almost never see writers of color, peoples of African descent, even if they are publishing in Spanish or French or Portuguese.” The Francophone world, she noted, “is way more organized than the Hispanophone or Lusophone ones. We need these works so that we can learn and stop the erasure.”
The series’ first two books — Workshop of Silence: Poems by Jean D’Amérique, translated by Conor Bracken, and Camille’s Lakou by Marie Léticée, translated by Kevin Meehan — will be published in July.
Valdés and Dize spoke with me on Zoom, and Joseph-Gabriel gave her replies over email. In our hourlong conversation, in which I posit scenarios, their responses show a theoretical and practical grasp of the prospects of the series. It is preparedness and immersion in the context of their work.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
OTOSIRIEZE
What was your first encounter with a translated text? How did you get into translation? Whose work shaped you?
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
Oh, Nathan goes first, because he’s the published translator, so I will defer.
NATHAN DIZE
It’s interesting. I was thinking about it today. I remember in high school, a friend of mine was talking to me about an [English] translation of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), and she said that the translation was weird. And I was, like, the book that you have in your hand? How could the translator affect the overall feel of the book? For the next couple of years, I became really interested in learning French, particularly studying Afro-diasporic literature in French, and I took a course at the University of Maryland, where we read sort of, I guess, the translated canon of West Africa and the Caribbean, including texts like Ferdinand Oyono’s — translated as Houseboy but in French it’s Une vie de boy (1956) — all while never questioning the work that the translator was doing, even as translation was the way that we were able to read this work. And that was very intriguing to me as somebody who then went to study French and started reading them in the original language and wanting really to share my reading with the people close to me. I can’t have my friends learn the languages that I need them to learn to read the work that I’m reading, so I became very interested in what it would look like to start translating the work.
And then I got involved in translating historical documents from colonial Haiti as an undergraduate, right before I began my graduate work in French Studies. And I think it was important to start my translation journey by translating colonial dead white men and people of color, but who were part of the plantocracy in a French sugar colony, Saint-Domingue, which became Haiti. And once I started spending a lot of time with these voices who had a lot of power, I sort of started to see how translation could intervene, sharing histories that had not been shared, the “official record.” And after doing that project, I became very interested in exploring translating literature, particularly Haitian literature, because that’s the literary background that I have the most familiarity with, and the cultural context that I have the most familiarity with as a reader of Francophone literature. And, yeah, I just, I started doing it for myself. I started doing it to share my reading with other people, with people I care about, and in the process, it became really an artistic expression for me, but also a way of collaborating on a work, creating a new work that is in part an original work. Sort of, there’s a way we can bring newness to it, the author and I, by, say, including a paratext, by adding some context for a new audience. I think that’s one of the things that I really enjoy the most about translation. So that’s a bit of an origin story for you.
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
Okay, that’s the fun part. Nathan, I think you had written that you came from a monolingual household, right? I came from a bilingual household where Spanish was the adult language. And so, as children, we didn’t enter that realm. I was an English major in college, and I remember I was invited to apply for a Spanish PhD program. And as an English major, I did not, you know, I had taken Spanish in high school and in college because that’s my family background. But I also had the attendant guilt that came with not speaking this language of my heritage. And so I got into the program. I was playing catch up with folks from Spain and from Latin America and from young white students who had majored in Spanish. And I could not enter Cervantes’ language. There’s a register at which canonical Latin American literature is written, right? So I’m playing catch up, reading all that I could, and that is when I really came to understand the bulk of these literatures that have not yet been translated. And then when I found Puerto Rican literature, it was, like, oh, there you are. And I heard the language that my family speaks. I would always make the joke that I had no interest in writing anything about Cervantes or being that kind of canonical Latin Americanist or Hispanist. For me what was always more interesting was more recent Latin American and Caribbean literature, and knowing the extent of how much work isn’t translated in Spanish even.
Then I started learning Portuguese, and as I was studying these languages and these literatures, my focus was, like, wait a second, I’m seeing tropes and metaphors in common with African American writers. So Blackness and the experience of the African diaspora going beyond national imperial languages was what I suddenly understood in a more visceral way. And so that is when I became a hemispheric Americanist. As I was learning Portuguese, I would be translating from English to Portuguese, just for myself. My first exercise was translating Maya Angelou’s Phenomenal Woman (1995) and that was the one where, with word choices, the rhythms of the meter, I wanted to capture what I heard in English.
When I graduated and wrote my first book, Osun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014), a mentor of mine called attention to how many citations I had in both Spanish and Portuguese. In that book, I’m looking at work from Cuba, from Brazil, from the African American tradition and Afro-Caribbean tradition in the United States and U.S. Latina tradition. And she was, like, “If I were you, if I had that dominance over different languages, I would put the quotes within and translate them myself rather than counting on whether they were published or not.”
ANNETTE JOSEPH-GABRIEL
My thinking about translation was initially shaped by Ngugi’s Decolonising the Mind (1986), particularly his reflections on language as a carrier of culture. It was my first look into the world of translation as a site of political engagement, a place from which a writer can undertake an act of refusal and still have their work be accessible. I am thinking particularly about Wizard of the Crow as a novel I could only come to in translation. More recently, writings by Kaiama Glover and Brent Edwards help me think about all the fits and starts of ferrying meaning across language, as well as the work of Black translators in the African Diaspora.
OTOSIRIEZE
There have been historical instances when publishers refused to have a text translated into English, because they feared that the local language edition would lose readership. That was the case with Omenuko (1933), the first novel written in the Igbo language. It’s a capitalist stance but also a protectionist one, and in a good way. In Africa, the orthographies of most local languages are still in development, and yet those languages suffer from an Anglicization of their stories. How do you, as cultural and lingual historians, work through the ironies of translating and taking from African languages – taking from them to spread their relevance?
NATHAN DIZE
Since we’re just at the beginning, we haven’t necessarily come across that specific issue, but it’s one that could come down the pike. One of the questions about how to approach that work is evaluating the translation to begin with, to understand how to receive that work, where that work’s coming from, who’s bringing that work to us. One of the things that, as we were setting up the series and coming up with our description for what it would look like, we all had to have a moment where we’re, like, what do we not want to publish? What are our major priorities here? What are our preoccupations? What are we dedicated to? What are our goals and what’s our mission?
I’ll also say that, as somebody who studies Haiti and Haiti’s history, the development of Haitian Creole orthography and the way that the language was standardized was a circuitous path, one that also intersected with empire and dictatorship, and that these are really difficult questions, and my impulse is to regard extraction as extraction and to contextualize it and understand the power workings there, and that translation publishing can play right into those power dynamics and reinforce them, or it can recognize them and move around them. But you have to be able to observe and understand what’s going on and be very clear about that.
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
I’m glad you used the word “extraction,” because for me, also, I have the sense of “We are not going to people’s homes and wrangling something that they do not want to be published,” right? I also agree with the protective stance in certain instances. I mean, we’ve had internal conversations about sacred texts being translated. For example, there are religious traditions in the African diaspora that come from the continent where there are oral traditions that then get translated, and we have to be very clear about that. And, quite frankly, my default stance is: no, we’re not translating that. Because there is a sense of exploitation. I have a family member who, when we speak about whether it’s Vodou or Lukumi or Candomblé, any of these religions, they say, “You know, we don’t know what the Buddhist rituals are to be a monk. We don’t know what the rituals are in the Catholic tradition to be a nun or to be a priest.” And yet people have this, again, this exploitative Columbus instinct to put on YouTube the initiation processes of these Black religions, right? And it is, they don’t even understand sometimes that they are interacting with the sacred.
And so no, our impulse is not extractive. Nathan has been instrumental in my understanding of how translation has been used as a tool of the imperial state, whether it’s the empires, whether it’s the United States, and, you know, under a supposed diplomatic apparatus. But for us, it really is the impulse, the mission of this, the intention of this, to have a platform whereby writers who may not have other outlets for their publication find a place. We don’t pretend to be the only game in town, but it is important to have another space in the realm of publishing for this.
NATHAN DIZE
I think, too, by being clear about what guides our decisions and the way we run our series and the project that we put forth, by being very clear about that and being very public about that, it also exposes some of those questions that other publishers should be asking themselves.
I mean, I think about my context for learning Haitian Creole. A lot of the textbooks, the early textbooks, were written for white people. They were written for missionaries. They were published in partnership with churches, whether Catholic or Protestant. And so even in the work of my acquiring the language, I can’t not acknowledge the roots that are laid bare there. And so something that’s been posed to me a number of times, especially as a translator of Haitian literature, with Haiti being in the news, is that I should really start striking while the iron’s hot, meaning that publishers, especially the big-name publishers, should want to publish Haitian literature and translation now that it’s constantly in the news. And I find that a deeply frightening approach to learning about another person’s culture or its art.
OTOSIRIEZE
In the same way that most developments about arts and cultures are political byproducts and have nothing to do with knowledge. Yeah. So I have a question here that you’ve partly answered. How does the series anticipate dealing with the problems of what I call trilingual ferrying: where a work in English, translated from the French, which in turn was translated from, say, Wolof, might have suffered from over-intervention that strips down local colour? What happens in situations where these re-translations have been done over decades, which means that they might lie effectively beyond your intervention to guard against this extraction? What happens when the extraction has long happened, and you have just received this? How will you deal with that if it happens?
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
My first thought is that only a person who can read all three languages would be able to detect it, sadly. Which is an unsatisfactory answer. I think about the proposals we’ve already received, which have been fascinating, and I don’t know that we can guard against that. The three of us read these proposals and I think we all come with different sensibilities. And so we come on a level of a technical aspect, the language flow, and we are captured by the subject matter, captured by the prose, and sometimes we’re not. Sometimes there really is a grading that’s happening. And that’s when we question, oh, is something wrong on a linguistic level? We may not even be speaking the language, and yet we know that something’s off. And so again, it’s not science at this point. We are very early in the life of this series. We want to publish something that the three of us are enthusiastic about.
NATHAN DIZE
And if I could also say, and maybe this is a way of amplifying one of the works that we’re putting out as the first two books of the series, there’s Camille’s Lakou by Marie Léticée, translated from the French and Guadeloupe and Creole by Kevin Meehan and the author herself. And in Kevin Meehan’s translator’s note, one of the things that he mentions is this journey of trying to figure out how to translate Guadalupe and Creole into English, whether it passes through an Anglo Caribbean patois or vernacular or whether Guadalupe and Creole has pride of place in that translation, and the sort of negotiations and conversations that went on between himself as a translator and Marie Léticée herself to ultimately come to this. Guadalupe and Creole absolutely have pride of place and do not need to pass through an Anglophone Caribbean space to be in English, or to be read in the United States.
So as a way of leaving a trace of that third language, I like this idea of ferrying. There’s a, particularly in Mayotte, in the Indian Ocean, the Comoran archipelago, there’s a type of boat. It’s an improvised boat. It’s called a kwassa kwassa and it refers to boats that make the crossings between the islands, and it leads to a dispersion of people as well as languages. But there’s always this ferrying within the spaces, there’s always a movement back and forth. Another work would be The Epic of Sundiata, which I read in French, ferried over from the [Malinke] oral tradition, but also the oral traditions have not been a very neat one. I can only access what I’ve read in French, knowing that there is a root, and then reading the English translation of that from French — this would be a perfect example of all three of these coming together.
You’re helping us imagine questions that we might pose to ourselves if we’re to face a work like that, and I think that’s extremely important to keep in mind. I don’t know, I hope that other publishers ask themselves these very hard questions, but my experience as a translator would be to say they likely do not, not as much as they should.
OTOSIRIEZE
I expect that they don’t. If they did, I’d be surprised because it’s a new thing that you’re doing, and so the questions that you’re dealing with are not questions that other people who are building on tradition have to deal with. Which is related to another question that I have. The three of you translate from the French, Spanish, and Portuguese, but it is English that dominates in a post-colonial world, and it is English that has assumed centrality in most literatures of Black peoples. What framing does working within the three other colonial languages provide the series in dealing with the centrality of one, the English?
ANNETTE JOSEPH-GABRIEL
I am uncertain about the premise of this question, to be honest, because where the center is shifts depending on where one is located. I hesitate to think of French, Portuguese, and Spanish as marginal to English (numeric or statistical significance is not the only way to think about significance) because I think of them all as languages implicated in and wielded for the purposes of empire. What I understand our series to be doing is to perhaps be continuing in the tradition of multilingual conversations such as those fostered by Paulette Nardal in the pages of La Revue du monde noir that, in juxtaposing writing in English and French, also called into question the very power of those languages through texts that placed Black life at the heart of an intellectual and cultural project that rendered those languages less stable.
NATHAN DIZE
I think about this in terms of Haitian literature and history. There’s a work you may have heard of, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and one of its main arguments is that the Haitian Revolution has been silenced in the historiography of the age of revolutions in the Western canon, particularly in the French historical canon. All the while, in Haiti, there were historians, poets, writers, playwrights, who had been telling the story of the Haitian Revolution, and they were doing it in French, in Creole, in Haitian French. The first Haitian historians were drawing from oral histories without necessarily doing the documentation that oral historians do nowadays. All those ideas exist within a tradition that is outside of France’s colonial presence and France’s language as operating over colonial territories ever since Haiti is free in 1804, and so there’s the shift of this into the oral sphere and storytelling tradition in Haitian Creole, which takes place not around the intellectual table but in the field, in the market, as market women are talking to one another or telling stories about what is happening or even the history of the country to get that scale.
So I think by studying language and studying black people using that language to tell black stories, we get to this dismantling of the colonial positioning of the language or even the colonial use of the language. Because, as Vanessa said, the French publishing industry seems very organized than the Lusophone or Hispanophone, because it can be used as an arm of colonialism, it can be used as a way of saying, “Look how important French is to book publishing worldwide,” and they have every interest in making sure that their presence is as amplified as it can, because that is a part of their colonial impulse from the beginning.
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
Yes, I think that there’s nothing postcolonial. I think that the postcolonial framing and the postcolonial theory, all of that was never spoken to me as someone who — again, my family is from Puerto Rico, which is a colony of the United States. Latin America has been under this sphere of influence since [Presidents] Monroe and Jefferson. There’s nothing “post-” for me. All that I do as a scholar, to make space for intellectuals who do work from within Spanish canonical doctoral studies.I mean that other series that I do, in which Nathan is a part of, is to make room because Spanish is an incredibly conservative field, as French is, and so I’ve always looked at and centered Black scholarship in these spaces.
For example, I worked on a book on a man called Arturo Schomburg [Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg], who was born in Puerto Rico and who becomes one of the forefathers of Black history in the United States. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is named after him. I wrote that book because his birth in Puerto Rico was seen as incidental within an African American context and the perspective from white Puerto Ricans was one marked by a sense of betrayal that he had focused on Black people. And so, as a Black Puerto Rican woman, I was like, oh, here is a perspective that is not represented.
I’ve just co-edited a book about [Joaquim Maria] Machado de Assis, the most canonical Brazilian novelist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and my co-editor, who’s my mentor Earl E. Fitz, was trained in a certain way about Machado, and the people who have written the scholarship on Afro-Brazilians often are not Afro-Brazilian. Somebody comes in, and they observe, and then they posit things, and because they have letters at the end of their name, it’s automatically given authority.
So when I read, it’s: how is life being depicted here? What is the input? What is happening in these texts? And I get incredibly frustrated at large-scale fields where somehow Blackness remains at the periphery when, in fact, real life is that we’re talking about millions of people. There are more than 200 million Afro-descendants in this hemisphere, and that Brazilian Portuguese is considered an exotic language is ridiculous to me.
One looks at the sheer number of people who are practicing African diasporic religions, who are learning, the people who listen. We are all engaged in Black culture, Black literature, Black histories, Black writ large, not hegemonic U.S. Blackness, and so if what I can do in my life’s work is to illuminate that which has been erased, that which has been overlooked, that which has been ignored, then that’s what I do. We as Black peoples are at the foundation of all these countries and all these histories and all of these cultures, and I will do my best to enlighten that.
OTOSIRIEZE
I’m feeling like we should have had a festival panel.
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
Listen, we are open.
OTOSIRIEZE
Yeah, because there’s so much here, and you each come from completely different experiences. And I come from Africa. And illumination was not one of the things I expected to do when I came here. You said hegemonic U.S. Blackness, and it reminds me that I have had to point out to people that, all over the world, there’s almost eight different groups of Black people: American Blacks, British Blacks, Caribbean, South American, African, South Asian, Australian Aborigines, and there are other European Blacks who are not in the British system, and everybody has a different way of thinking. And I have to explain this to people who are playing Beyonce.
So I took a class in translation, and one thing that struck me was how an inordinate majority of the texts, by white theorists, that purport to give “global” surveys exclude Black and African translations, but also South American ones. I read Matthew Reynolds’ introduction to his anthology Prismatic Translation, and of the 19 essays and contributors, none focused on contemporary Africa or Blackness. The only representation was — and I thought it funny — ancient Egypt. I thought: does it mean that he couldn’t find a single African tradition to cite? I didn’t want to check who was Black among the contributors or translators cited because then I’d be heartbroken. It brings me to this question of how much of translation studies neither cites nor acknowledges African and Black production. What is the true extent of this problem, for someone who doesn’t know? And how can translation address it?
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
Oh, the erasure of African contributions? I will say that I am trained in a canonical, imperial field that ignores not only the long history of Africans on that peninsula, the Iberian Peninsula, but, even to this day, that Morocco was a protectorate of Spain, that Western Sahara, that Equatorial Guinea was a part of Spain. Africa is not at all a part of Spanish canonical studies. I co-curated an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year, and I found myself educating Spaniards about their history, and they’re looking at me, like, why are these Americans doing our work? And I go, that is a question for you and your government to figure out what is happening.
And so no, it is deep and vast, the ignorance of the histories, the long histories, pre-enslavement, because African history here is taught post-Columbus, and the Hegelian idea that Africa has no history, and when it is the nomenclature of “modernity” being placed on the African continent. What is modern? What is pre-modern? What is postmodern? People don’t question those things. So I think for us, it is very much front of mind, the idea of disrupting those narratives, or even just educating people, because God knows, it is deep and vast.
ANNETTE JOSEPH-GABRIEL
All our translations are accompanied by a critical apparatus that ranges from a translator’s note to a more robust framing that might include archival sources, interviews, etc. It all depends on what the text in question demands and what intervention we hope it can make in the world. In our series, intellectual production from the African continent is certainly a part of this larger apparatus that surrounds a text.
NATHAN DIZE
To draw a little bit on my personal story, I never had a white French teacher until I got to college. Growing up in Baltimore City, I only took three years of French in high school, and I had two teachers, one was African American and grew up abroad as part of a military family, and the other teacher was from Martinique. And the way that they taught French was, especially for the student population that they were teaching, was to emphasize the presence and importance of Blackness and Black people using the language that they were learning, because that was a way to make sure that students saw themselves in the curriculum, that they felt affirmed and not ostracized by learning. Only for me to come to university and find that, if one is lucky, there will be one faculty member tasked with teaching the entirety of France’s colonial history and its former colonies, which happen to speak French, among other languages, now. Part of digging into that past, my own past, is to look at where Black teachers of French had been doing this.
My experience is not unique. In the United States, as soon as the HBCUs were founded, Black teachers started teaching foreign languages to Black students in ways that affirmed Blackness rather than rejected Blackness, because the rejection of Blackness would not allow for their students to continue learning. And you have things like Frederick Matheuss and Napoleon Rivers adapting an Alexandre Dumas novel, Georges, to be an intermediate French textbook in the 1920s, so that you have an Afro-descended author being read in French by Afro-descended students Marlene Daut has called Georges a race novel in the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance, even though it preceded the Harlem Renaissance by 70 years.
So two Black instructors of foreign language came together and adapted this so that their students would not have to endure an entirely white curriculum. And so understanding that Black people learning French and colonial languages writ large also has a history that is pushing back against whiteness or coloniality is also an important part of this story. And that finding ways to make translation de-colonial has its roots in that, too, in language learning and acquisition. A book you might be really interested in that I’m just delving into now is by Ruth Bush, [Translation Imperatives: African Literature and the Labour of Translators, 2022], and it’s about who’s doing that labor and how we can make it visible, and how we can see either colonial or post-colonial or even de-colonial activity within that labor.
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
I just want to say two quick things because I know you have more questions. One is when I first learned Brazilian Portuguese: it rang my ear as related to Puerto Rican Spanish, and that was my first clue to be, like, what do these spaces have in common? And I was like, oh, Black people, right? And literally, it was just like that was a whole different way. So that by the time I learned Portuguese with a Portuguese accent, I was like, yeah, I can understand it, but that wasn’t my entry. In linguistic terms, there are folks who are, like, oh, African retentions, and it’s, like, no, there’s a whole thing of how we use our languages, certainly in the Spanish Caribbean or Hispanic Caribbean or Latin Caribbean. It is at the very center of how we use the languages that we use.
The second thing I was going to say is all of us have been language instructors as well. I know when I taught Spanish to my class of working class, first-generation college students in New York City, I used a Spanish textbook that, at the end of it, has a cultural moment and it’s, like, Mexico, Ecuador, whatever, and I always included Afro-Mexicans, Afro-Ecuadorians, Afro-Peruvians, and my students lit up, because there was a history that they didn’t know. When I taught the survey of Latin American history, it was always African diaspora in the center of it. And to my students who had heard, for example, about Simón Bolívar, I started saying, well, there was enslavement happening in Gran Colombia and Bolívar goes to [Haiti president] Alexandre Petión and asks for money and Petión said, “You have to free those people.” Like, that’s a whole different narrative that my students had never heard of. And now they’re questioning, why didn’t we know this? Why don’t our systems from the countries we come from, why don’t they teach this? And so the questioning of the official narratives is deeply important to me. And it is making the space for those kinds of questionings that’s really, really important.
OTOSIRIEZE
I want to ask about your translation processes. So I speak English, Igbo, and Pidgin, but when translating from Igbo to English, it feels like a three-way negotiation between Central Igbo, my casual Igbo, and English. Do you wrestle with this mental bifurcation of your source language? How do you each translate?
ANNETTE JOSEPH-GABRIEL
Since we have an illustrious and prolific translator amongst us, I’ll lob this question to Nathan whose response I am very eager to learn from.
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
Nathan.
NATHAN DIZE
So I’ll take this. First, I love the way you started in terms of acknowledging the languages you have in your background and the ways that they weave together. And recently, I put it this way to my students in a class I’m teaching on the Francophone Caribbean: I acknowledge that my French has interference with English and with Haitian Creole, and at times they slide in there in ways that might not be the hexagonal mainland French. But I think this also comes to the question of what I hear when reading, what I’m translating. In this book, I Am Alive by Kettly Mars, she uses this word all the time in the book, it’s“la cour” or “the courtyard,” because the family lives in a compound and everybody has their house. I don’t know what the shape is: it could be a rectangle. In Haiti, there’s a system called the lakou system. It’s part of Vodou and spiritual life in the countryside, but also a compound can be called a la cour. So when I hear “la cour” in French, I also see “lakou”in Haitian Creole. I can’t not acknowledge that interference as a translator. That’s the stuff that translator’s notes are made of.
With translation, the author of the work is really giving me a map and my job is to follow that map. But I also take it upon myself to ask the author questions, rather than over-interpreting the map. And I know the map can be a troubling metaphor, but, for me, it’s helpful in knowing that, sometimes along the way, we do need help. I think, when coming up with translation quandaries, where you’re wondering — Is the author telling me this in another register? Is this Haitian Creole under the guise of French? — then that’s a point where you can ask the author. And I would encourage people who are working with deceased authors: do your best to read that author’s work as closely as possible, which might also mean translating. So that you can understand the resonance of individual words or constructions to best devise a way of rendering that.
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
I was having a conversation with a former student of mine who is Brazilian, a Black Brazilian woman from near Rio but educated in the United States, moved here in her teen years, was in Atlanta, Georgia. So she has very specific regional Black cultures. And so she can hear things that other people, if they’re just studying Portuguese or English from a book, are not going to pick up on. So she’s hearing African-American vernacular English. Those are specific things, languages, dialects, that don’t rise up to “canonical.” And so it is, I think, the task of the translator to follow the map, to be attendant to those specificities.
I can almost always tell where people are coming from by how they’re writing about the given subjects. When it comes to cultures having anything to do with Africa, the African diaspora, you can tell. What are the verbs being used? Are these cultures being objectified? Is there a pejorative? Is there a denial of the richness of these cultures? How does this sound? I think sounds play a very big part for me in all of the languages that I read and write. I try to read aloud and see if I’m capturing the rhythm.
So in preparation for this interview, I, too, had to come up with my theory. I realized that a lot of what I do is incredibly intuitive. Paying attention to details, to rhythms, and if you don’t know it, trying to find folks who do, whether it’s the author themselves or folks from the culture.
NATHAN DIZE
When I teach translation, we deal with failure a lot, or at least the guilt that comes with the idea of failure. One way out is: How did you do it? Can you articulate how you arrived at that? Because then that’s not a failure at all. You’re learning then. And you may do it differently another time. There’s always room for revision. In translating some authors, I’ve put Haitian Creole words into their books that were not in the French version, and I ask if that’s okay, and I’ve gotten the response: “No, I don’t want you to do that.” Because it’s their work. Because someone has a language as part of their background, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they want it in their work. They’ve conceived the work in a way that they want the translator to translate, not to render the work more opaque. But if they’ve rendered something opaque, figure out a way to keep it opaque but to make it artful as well.
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
I think you are picking up on the exigencies of publication that writers deal with, right? And here comes another level of mediation. It’s: what has that person had to go through to get that work published? And maybe don’t disturb that system. They’re saying, wait a minute, I did X, Y, Z to get here, so please respect that.
OTOSIRIEZE
Vanessa, your work is in comparative studies of Black and Hispanic literatures of the Americas. Annette, you look at race, gender, and citizenship in France, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nathan, you explore the digital humanities and intellectual culture of the French Caribbean. How do your respective considerations of translation – the successes and pitfalls of the craft – factor into your researches and documentations of political and cultural histories?
ANNETTE JOSEPH-GABRIEL
In my [Duke] course “Black (in) Translation,” we think about race and translation in two ways. One is to consider the work of Black translators, the nearly non-existent support alongside the stakes of that work. The other is to reflect on how varying ideas about what it means to be Black move from one language to another across time. What translates and what doesn’t? And what fraught, difficult, marvelous, and inventive ways of being in the world emerge at those points of tension or even of fracture?
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
I am a hemispheric Americanist, a diaspora specialist. If people do a closeup on a certain country, I do the wide shot on the hemisphere. There are certain cultural forms that certainly influence each other, or are influenced by migration, by movements, by deterritorialization, by being uprooted. That can be everything from the popularity of reggaeton to the influence of Afrobeats.
So when we’re talking about the U.S. hegemonic Blackness, the idea that people in this country do not think there are other Black people — they don’t know what to do with a Tyla, who’s not denying her Blackness but just saying there’s a category [“coloured”] that exists in her country. The United States is incredibly good at their jingoism and patriotism, this idea that “We are the number one, we are the exception.”
OTOSIRIEZE
I call that inability “Americanness.” Sometimes, if you are a Black African, before you could relate to a Black American on your shared Blackness, you’d have to surmount their “Americanness.”
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
Yeah. I had an African American student who went to Ghana, and was heartbroken when the Ghanaians were, like, “You are not one of us.” And he’s, like, “What do you mean?” And they used for him the word for foreigner, which is white, right? He had to settle with that.
I would tell my students all the time, Latinos don’t exist outside of the United States. And they were, like, what do you mean? In other countries, they are that nation. You’re Colombian in Colombia and Guatemalan in Guatemala. It is this country that has constructed this thing and not everybody fits in it. It’s just the questioning of these categories that serve some political expediency. At the end of the day, it’s not how people have lived. I’m gonna pause because I feel like I answered that first question. Nathan.
NATHAN DIZE
I feel I am most doing my best when I’m translating. I come to most of my work by way of translating. I’m working on a book right now, where the main thrust of the argument, or at least what I see as the key chapter of the book, came about by virtue of working on the translation of The Immortals. There’s a book that’s mentioned: In the Flicker of an Eyelid by Jacques-Stephen Alexis, in French it’s L’espace d’un cillement (1959). In the book, as being one of the character’s favorite books, it helps her imagine a future for herself that might never come to be. And it was only by encountering that work there, through translation, that I even came up with the argument for the dissertation that became my first book, is becoming my first book, Attending to the Dead: Haitian Literature and the Practice of Mourning, which is under contract with Vanessa’s series at SUNY Press.
I think you noted that we’ve both been in the classroom space, doing some of this work of unthinking hegemony and making sure that students can understand that the works we’re reading in class involve people who are living today and realities that may intersect with their own. When Haiti was mentioned in the first presidential debate, by way of a very violent, metaphorical, and just fake narrative that was proffered by a lot of Internet strangeness and then propped up by J.D. Vance and Donald Trump, it was bringing that into the classroom. We needed to examine that within the context of learning, that students can understand that there’s something being translated that doesn’t fit the stories that they were learning about Haitians in my classroom but fits the way that Haitians are being portrayed in the news.
Similarly, as we’re reading things about colonial Martinique or even present-day Martinique and Guadeloupe, we can bring in news items about hyperinflation that France is subjecting Martinique and Guadeloupe to, by virtue of them trying to have free trade with France and Europe, because they are still colonial possessions of France.
VANESSA K. VALDÉS
I think the exercise of translation is beyond the literary, the linguistic. One can expand that to be the metaphor of making legible for each other what our truths, our histories, our cultures are. I am very attendant to the amount of mediation I do in terms of how scholars have addressed the works that I’m interested in, and that is an act of translation. There are some things that, when I’m taking notes, I’m, like, this is bull, I don’t agree with this. It is because I am certainly within Latin American and Caribbean studies and my work is one of recovery, recuperation, excavation, recovering histories of Black peoples making intellectual contributions to this world.
What we choose to show, what we leave aside, we all are engaged in this — and we don’t think of it as a demonstration of power. The ramifications are heightened when we’re talking about continental histories and the reality of white supremacy and racism and discrimination. So there’s an urgency with this work.
I took out Trouillot’s book [Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History] to be next to me during this interview and Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010), because both of those speak to what we’re doing. It is the idea that, whereas the Western tradition teaches that the creation of the novel came as a leisure activity in middle class salons in Western Europe, for many of our peoples, it is an act of survival to write our histories, to create.
OTOSIRIEZE
There is a general problem of crediting translators in publishing, and little progress was made between the PEN Manifestoes of 1969 and 2023. You have put emphasis on elevating translators, and, by extension, the original authors. Is there anything you want to do especially for translators, in crediting them in a way that foregrounds their work?
NATHAN DIZE
I think it is really important, especially as a publishing translator who’s now an editor of a series, to figure out ways to make sure that translators know that they are being acknowledged on the cover of the book, that their labor is being compensated, or that they’re also being involved in the process of creating the book. An understanding of the translator’s role as a central player in the creation of a book is important, especially as you’re working with translators who may not have as much experience. It was very shocking to me that I would be involved in picking a cover for a book, and that I could bring the author in on that discussion, if the publisher was not already naturally doing that.
And so, as a part of what you were saying, that the author gets elevated by the translator being elevated, I would encourage the translator to re-involve the author in the production of the colonial aspects or extractive aspects of translation. When we were coming up with the cover for I Am Alive by Kettly Mars, the French cover features a house, a sort of a gingerbread style house in Haiti, and the picture isn’t even of Haiti. I asked her: “What would you want for the cover for the English edition? Would you want another house?” And she’s, like, “Actually, I’d love it if we could feature the artwork of my daughter, Tessa Mars, who is a visual artist and has two works in particular that I would like for the press to consider for creating a cover.” To me, that was the much better way of creating a cover than having me guess based on what the French publisher had done initially, which had been misguided and never involved the author in the discussion anyway. So you see how translation can also be a way of repairing past wrongs or at least reconnecting with the author at a moment when traditional publishing just cuts the author off.
OTOSIRIEZE
From your responses, you are keen on re-engaging with the author, on accuracy and not extraction. I want to ask about this divide between theory and practice in translation, where some see the translator as a co-creator and others say there’s nothing wrong in the translator being a supporter. What do you think about that?
ANNETTE JOSEPH-GABRIEL
I don’t see theory and practice as being in tension but rather as deeply entangled. I think the relationship between author and translator is negotiated with each work to be translated. I think one of our hopes for the series is that that relation is not hierarchical. Citation conventions are what they are, but we also hold space for translators’ voices in the different forms of critical apparatus that accompanies each book, ranging from a brief translator’s note to a longer prefatory essay to archival documents that the translator brings to the text to augment the reader’s understanding of historical and cultural context.
NATHAN DIZE
I think that not every author wants to be involved in the translation of their work or has the ability to. There are authors I translate who cannot read the English but perhaps they would like a friend to read it and then talk with them and engage with it. So I think that reaching out as the translator is always a good first impulse. I do believe that the translator is a creator, a creative.
That said, I also think that if the translator is put on a pedestal, then I wonder whether that is essentially reinscribing power dynamics that lead us down paths where the author is disempowered, where the work itself might get out and the context of the original work is misconstrued. Or the work that the original language publisher had done to market the book is being privileged over the way the author might want, or the way the literary tradition the author hails from might have it, or even the literary community that they’ve built for themselves through intertextualities and other things. So I think, in figuring out that, for instance, the cover of Je Suis Vivant (Mars’ I Am Alive)in French had nothing to do with the author herself, that it was not her choice, and that there are editorial choices made about her work in a French publishing sphere in Paris that she would not choose to do if she were given the choice — that tells me that the translator can also intervene and sort of channel that power back to the author and just ask questions.
Everybody needs their creative space. Translators can’t have authors in their ear all the time because they have to create the work anew. But there comes a time where the author is essential in the creation of the new book, and what I want is for authors not to feel disempowered by that, otherwise the dynamics start to resemble harm rather than sharing or collaborative knowledge production. ♦
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- Workshop of Silence: Poems by Jean D’Amérique, translated by Conor Bracken
- Camille’s Lakou: A Novel by Marie Léticée, translated by Kevin Meehan
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