The
Interpreter’s Dilemma & The Storyteller’s Solution
I did not set out
to use fiction in my thesis. Originally, I had outlined a series of essays that
would investigate the relationship between American attitudes towards Central
American asylum seekers and the growing American pop-culture obsession with the
undead (zombies, vampires, ghosts) in the last twenty years. I wanted to write
about Central American asylum seekers in a way that would not turn the stories
of the people for whom I acted as an interpreter and/or translator during my
time working at Central American Legal Assistance into overarching voices for
the entirety of the Central American population seeking asylum or diminish the
scope of their experiences. What became abundantly clear to me during my time
working with asylum seekers and learning about asylum law is the fact that the
fundamental nature of asylum application procedures demands that the individual
seeking asylum abstract himself from his experiences. Rather than treating the
refugee as a human being and a narrator of his own experience, asylum
applications and trials demand that the applicant act as something of a
translator for his own experience. Refugees are expected to recount the events
leading up to submitting his application for asylum with clinical precision.
Inconsistencies, such as the order in which the individual received injuries
during a fight or difficulty in recounting the exact dates of certain events
can constitute grounds for dismissal of the applicant’s case on account of the
applicant lacking credibility. Applicants are not allowed to be affected by
their own experiences until the court has granted them asylum, thus designating
the individual’s life as a human life worthy of protection.
Taking these
conditions into account, I was hesitant to make use of the stories of the
individuals with whom I worked at CALA for fear of appropriating their
experiences and abstracting them in the same way that I believe the U.S. asylum
courts are guilty of doing. Thus, I was faced with a seemingly insurmountable
problem: how could I possibly discuss asylum without taking into account the
personal and particular, and how could I discuss the personal and particular
without exploiting them? I was used to functioning as an interpreter, a role
that transforms the interpreting individual into a bridge or a pathway between
people, something that should not even be traceable by human gaze. In an ideal
conversation, the interlocutors never look at the interpreter; rather, they
maintain direct eye contact with each other, as if the interpreter’s voice is,
in fact, the voice of the person conversing with them. As such, professional
interpreters are expected to speak as if they themselves do not exist. When the
interpreter says “I,” the subject is regarded as the same vocalization of “I”
that one might hear over the telephone; technically the voice the individual
hears over the telephone is not the voice of the interlocutor, it is a machine
replicating the voice of the individual. In these situations, an imitation and
replication must, by necessity, speak as if it is the original. As a go-between
or bridge, the interpreter must divorce her identity from the words she speaks.
At the same time, the interpreter must decide whether she will attempt to adopt
the inflections of the individual for whom she is interpreting: if her client
conveys something voiced with clear distress, should the interpreter do the
same, or is that overstepping the interpreter’s duties as a telephone and
edging into the dangerous territory of interpreting and appropriating the voice
and experience of another?
The problem,
of course, with approaching the analysis of a social problem from the point of
view of an interpreter is that it is fundamentally impossible to interpret for
an individual or a group of people when the interpreter is responsible for
creating the material that they would be interpreting. The interpreter cannot
be the same as the speaker; if it were possible for the speaker to act as his
own interpreter there would be no need for an interpreter in the first place.
Further, to speak for someone who has not asked for such services is to tread
the dangerous ground of the hubristic appropriation of the experiences of
others with the belief that one has the right to utilize the experiences of
others for one’s own purposes. My eventual solution was to make use of
narrative and image as gateways to further meditations on the conditions of the
asylum seeker individuals whose lives are relegated to the liminal space of the
border, such as Giorgio Agamben’s homines
sacri, individuals whose exile from society constitute the bounds of
society and give definition to the polis.
For my thesis and in order to critically examine the current plights of the
asylum seeker, it became necessary for me to actively acknowledge the complex
perspective of translation and at the same time to find a clear narrative
understanding and perspective of the issues of agency and the ownership of
experience. I came to the conclusion that there is no better mode of
comprehensively addressing problems of the objectification of human experience than
through the similarly contested language of fiction.
As one reads
fiction, the mind processes an experience and the heart engages via emotions in
an immersive experience. The beauty of fiction resides in a central paradox: it
breaks from rhetorical rules of narrative in order to simulate experience—the
reader of fiction is able to encounter the fictive world in a manner that is
both sensuous and intellectual. The reader experiences meaning and ideas as
related through the eyes of the characters as well as through the juxtaposition
of images and senses. It is in part for this reason that fiction is the only
real way of addressing the social problems and experiences of an “other” group
to which one does not belong without trivializing them. The writer of fiction
acknowledges her perspective as creator of the story and is able to appeal to
the reader in more genuine ways than might an essayist, who is fully reliant on
his assertions and arguments. The reader of fiction is not necessarily expected
to take a particular attitude or opinion as expressed within the book (though
the writer may make her own preferences and beliefs clear), rather, the reader
is expected to engage with the fictive world as fully as attentively as the
elements of the fictional world immerse the reader in the sensuous world of the
story.
In “Central Park,”
Walter Benjamin scrutinizes Baudelaire’s extensive employment of allegory as
sensuous object and reflective shard: “That which the allegorical intention has
fixed upon is sundered from the customary contexts of life: it is at once
shattered and preserved. Allegory holds fast to the ruins” (Selected Writings
Volume 4 169). For Benjamin, Baudelaire’s allegories take on the qualities of
souvenirs and cadavers: objects that refract experience and meaning. While
Benjamin focuses his line of investigation on the nature of allegory, his
observations about the role of allegory are highly applicable to the function
of fiction, as well. Fiction immerses the reader in a curated, distilled world;
in fiction, reality is stratified through elements of craft (i.e., the
implementation of character, setting, image, point of view), which combined
result in the kind of layering that feels to my mind more rich and satisfying
than rhetoric. Thus, time need not be linear, and truth can necessarily be
liberated from petrifying “fact”.
In his essay, “Dialectics
at a Standstill,” Rolf Tiedemann argues that deep within Benjamin’s writing
lies the belief that “By turning the optics of the dream toward the waking
world, one could bring to birth the concealed, latent thoughts slumbering in
that world’s womb” (Tiedemann 933). In other words, the proper use of the dream
and the surreal creates the opportunity for the intrusion of the hyper-real in
the form of the surreal. Dreams and the surreal, then, act as thresholds from
which emerge associations of images, thoughts, and ideas with each other that
can be made free from the confines of linear forms of truth that essay and
nonfiction lay claim to:
“Both [Benjamin’s turn to his dreams
and to narcotics] represented attempts to break the fixations and the encrustation
in which thinking and its object, subject and object, have been frozen under
the pressure of industrial production. In dreams as in narcotic intoxication,
Benjamin watched ‘a world of particular secret affinities’ reveal itself, a
world in which things enter into ‘the most contradictory communication’ and in
which they could display ‘indefinite affinities’” (Tiedemann 934).
However, as much as Benjamin’s
understanding of the importance of dreams is influenced by the surrealists,
Benjamin takes a key turn away from the surrealist school of thought, for the
surrealists “…had tried to abolish the line of demarcation between life and
art, to shut off poetry in order to live writing or write life…. Benjamin, on
the other hand, wanted to ‘[bring] things near,’ to allow them to ‘step into
our lives’” (Tiedemann 934). Translated into the realm of fiction, these
principles of allowing things to ‘step into our lives’ in the form of
dream-sight enables the imperatives of the real world and reality itself to
manifest itself and to intrude in a way that it cannot in the non-written
world—or in the written language of analysis, or even in realist fiction.
Benjamin’s waking surreal causes images to crystalize and emerge with their own
sets of imperatives in a way that fascinates me because it feels both true and
meaningful. Such writing suspends the reader in such a way that it becomes
difficult to determine the difference between bridges and destinations. Image
and story are allowed to exist as entities in their own rights, while at the
same time they are called upon to act as places of translation, where the world
of the reader and the world of the novel are pierced by the same pathway, the
logic of the surreal/Benjamin’s waking-surreal in a way not dissimilar to allegory.
However, unlike allegory, which is often regarded as containing something of a
coded message, in fiction where the surreal exists side by side with the
quotidian, meaning refracts from image and style in a way that each reader
experiences slightly differently, as the real world of each reader is at once
shared and unique.
Benjamin’s way of
understanding the use of the “optics of the dream” in the waking world shares a
very similar architecture to American poet Hart Crane’s “logic of metaphor,” a
term he introduced in a letter to Harriet Monroe in 1925. The “logic of
metaphor” operates with the understanding that the reader reacts and responds
to image, metaphor, and sensation in poetry in such a way that the reader’s
reactions can almost be said to retrace the pathways of language and to inhabit
them. The “logic of metaphor” is the thrumming, inherent undercurrent of
language in poetry and, I argue, all creative writing.[1]
Connections between images create stories and narratives, and the paths that
the reader creates in the formation of these narratives and associations run
like blood vessels throughout the body of the poem. They make the writing
dynamic and profoundly relevant and meaningful in relation to the non-fictive
world. In a sense, they refine the truths and sensibilities of fiction so that
they can be properly understood for the ways in which they reflect on the world
of the reader.
The “logic of
metaphor” lies at the very heart of the way that “Death in Translation” makes
meaning. “Death in Translation” occurs in a world where stones are physical
objects as well as concentrated points of memory, sight, loneliness, and
translation; where an empanada is a delicious food, the taste of home, an
artifact, an heirloom, and a displaced pocket of time and place. As objects
that contain so much more than their own material natures, such objects and
images become bridges in and of themselves that stretch out from their places
within the confines of story and pull the reader into specific avenues of
inquiry without forcibly dictating just how the reader should interpret the
story.
Fiction interacts
with the life of the reader in much the same manner that the “optics of the
dream” interact with the story in which they occur: fiction appeals to the
reader’s ability to question the solid reign of fact and reality; it challenges
the sovereignty of the factual as the only form of truth-telling. Thus fiction
and magical realism force the reader to reevaluate the reader’s own narratives
about the world. Such a mechanism and effect is crucial to the function of
“Death in Translation.”
It is easy to
dismiss fiction as merely storytelling, to invalidate the commentary found
within works of fiction because they are artificially constructed, apparently lacking
in the genuine quality of experience that lays claim to the classification of
non-fiction. However, it is exactly the constructed, curated nature of fiction
and other creative writing that allows for the writer to lay claim to truth
that is rendered inaccessible within the confines of “fact.” After all, who is
in a better position to lay out key issues for analysis than the
narrator/storyteller, whose voice is always-already a place of lively border
politics, engaging the reality of the story and the listener in the same
breath, and identifying points of critical inquiry which are of the same import
to both the inhabitants of the story and to the story’s listener/reader? My
understanding of the language of the border has always been informed by the craft
of storytelling, and so it seems fitting to me that my intensive meditation on
border life should be conducted through the medium of fiction.
***
The
Place of Fiction & Storytelling in Border Life
For much of
my childhood, my father worked as a grief counselor at New Mexico’s Office of
the Medical Investigator (OMI). He provided therapy for families of the
deceased and took part in autopsies of the deceased’s remains. While my father
tried to keep his work separate from his home life, I still have strong
memories from my childhood of sitting at the kitchen table and listening to him
tell my mother about what he had seen at the office that day and questions he
had to field. One such story stands vividly in my mind. A woman wanted to know
if her son had been afraid when he died. My father tried to explain to her that
he had no way of knowing, but she was persistent, demanding, “But his face, did
he look frightened? Were his eyes afraid?” My father had to explain to her that
the dead do not retain expressions on their faces or in their eyes because of
the ways that pupils expand after death and the corpse becomes rigid.
I was
fascinated by my father’s stories, and grew more interested in them as I got
older, but I was also terrified of death. I was afraid to go into my father’s
office at home because it was full of books about the dead, and I couldn’t
shake the feeling that maybe some of the dead people he had encountered
inhabited his heavy bookshelves, bound there by his stories and his contact
with their corpses and their families. It seemed to me impossible for a dead
person not to become attached to someone like my father, who was such an
attentive student of the stories of the living and the deceased. After all, complete
strangers, even grocery store clerks had a tendency to stop my father and tell
him the troubling details of their lives.
My life
gained meaning through my ability to participate in and listen to stories and
narratives. In that respect, I am very much a product of the state where I was
raised. New Mexico has the character of a small town stretched to fit an
entire state. New Mexican time can run anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours
behind standard time. Growing up, I can’t recall hearing a driver honk at a
fellow commuter. Turn signals are more of an accessory than a dependable
protocol (meaning drivers can go for miles with their turn signals on, or to
make sudden turns without flicking their lights even once). You can stop and
ask someone for directions pretty much no matter where you are, and though your
director might not know where you are going, he or she is typically more than
happy to spend fifteen minutes chatting with you. If you leave the house, you
are almost guaranteed to run into someone you know. Perhaps the most important
side effect of New Mexico’s laidback pace is the way in which the state breeds
stories and storytellers. A relaxed relationship with time, a complicated
relationship between family and state history, and eyes that have been filled with
sweeping vistas are three of the key ingredients necessary for the making of a
storyteller. However, I believe that storytelling holds such a prominent place
in New Mexico not just because of the state’s slow pace, but also because of
the complex nature of inhabiting a border state with a history of conflict
between the narratives of three of the state’s largest populations (individuals
of colonial Spanish descent, Native Americans, and Latinos).
According to the
2012 New Mexico State Census[2],
47% of New Mexicans identify as Hispanic or Latino. Many of my classmates in
high school were either directly from Mexico and living in the States illegally
or were born in the U.S. as anchor babies—children born in the U.S. so that they can
have U.S. citizenship and can eventually petition for the granting of legal
status to their family members. According to the same census, 10.2% of
individuals living in New Mexico identify as American Indian or Alaskan Native,
compared to 1.2% of people nationwide. Further, 36% of New Mexicans ages five
and above spoke a language other than English in the home at the time of the survey.
These statistics etch a basic outline of culture in New Mexico. New Mexicans
live in a society where borders are constantly looming (many individuals have
family members who have been deported or can recall their own journey into the
U.S., legally or otherwise) and at the same time where borders are culturally
blurry.
New Mexico’s state
title is “The Land of Enchantment,” but many of the residents refer to it as
“The Land of Entrapment.” Entire generations of families who have never left
New Mexico because they cannot afford to move, or unable to attend college
outside of the state, if they are able to afford college at all. The tradition
of storytelling enriches family experience and the resultant folk stories saturate
the land in such color that it remains intimately familiar while at the same
time taking on characteristics of the unknown in the tradition of Freud’s
“uncanny,” or “heimlich-unheimlich”[3]
phenomenon. Storytelling helps New
Mexico’s residents to grapple with the state’s relative cultural and social
isolation from most of the U.S.
During the
semester I spent in New York working at Central American Legal Assistance as an
intern, I was shocked by the number of times that I was congratulated on my
impeccable English skills by new acquaintances, all of whom were U.S. citizens.
It seemed ironic to me that, during the time I was working as an interpreter
and translator for a nonprofit law agency that specializes in helping Central
American asylum seekers, I myself was frequently regarded as a foreigner by
fellow classmates and U.S. citizens.
Driven by the need
to press the limits of irony, I once told an acquaintance about growing up in
“Mexico” where I learned from my short, dark, Mexican father how to shoot
buffalo with a bow and arrow. My interlocutor eagerly engaged me in
conversation about the relative merits of different arrowheads, a subject about
which he knew nothing. I had chosen the story to be as fantastical as possible,
but my companion seemed to have no doubts about the credulity of my story, even
when I told him that the reason my English is so good is because my mom was a
U.S. citizen whom my father had fallen in love with and abducted from across
the border. She had eventually learned to love him, I assured my avid listener.
He nodded eagerly. I was completely stricken because I couldn’t dismiss his
credulity as simply being the result of being gullible—stories that play on
such extreme stereotypes and that are so blatantly fantastical cannot be
believed unless the listener goes into the story already holding on to such
beliefs, particularly when the details of the story are so blatantly
contradicted by material evidence. Though I am half Japanese, I don’t fit in
when I go to J-Town with my mother in L.A.—my skin is the wrong kind of pale,
my breasts are too large, my eyes are green and only slightly slanted, my hair
is brown and, while thick, is significantly finer than my mothers coarse, black
hair—and yet even when I filled my story with the blatantly ridiculous and
invented genetics of my “father,” my companion failed to catch on to the joke.
My clients at Central American Legal Assistance, however, had a very different
reaction to me. I was frequently asked what my parents’ racial backgrounds were
and, when that failed to turn up satisfying answers as to how my accent seemed
not quite gringa, they would ask
where I was from and where I had learned Spanish. My explanation that I was
raised in New Mexico and grew up being called “mija,”[4]
even before I learned how to speak Spanish seemed to satisfy them.
***
Setting,
Stones, and the Three Glasses
“Death in Translation” follows
Nicolai Senba Santos, a young boy growing up in New Mexico, through his
struggles to deal with the disappearance of his mother, Koharu Senba, during her
sabbatical in El Salvador. Nico’s childhood is a childhood shaped by paradoxes
of presence. His abuelo is a refugee from El Salvador who was able to secure
U.S. citizenship for himself by marrying Nico’s grandmother. But despite his
abuelo’s security in the United States, the old man was never able to leave El
Salvador behind him. As such, Nico grew up hearing stories about the taste of
El Salvador, a country that Nico had never visited, and which eventually became
responsible for Nico’s mother’s disappearance.
As the youngest of three siblings
and the only boy among them, Nico has always had to contend with a degree of
distance between himself and his family. His oldest sister, Scarlet, has
already left the house to attend college in New York by the time Nico is eleven
years old, and his second oldest sister, Iris, follows suit four years later.
Thus Nico is left to live with his father in a family home that is empty of
family but very much occupied by the auras[5]
of its migratory inhabitants.
Place and setting are two of the
most important keys to reading “Death in Translation,” as they connect the
world of the story and the world of the reader. Even within the story, a
dichotomy exists between the familiar world of the living and the distorted
mirror of the underworld. In both places, the tension between the two worlds
becomes the locus of analysis and translation. All the landmarks, street names,
and other identifying characteristics of the land found in the story appear as
they do in the real world, with the same names and physical locations as on any
map of New Mexico. This “realness” allows for the fictional and real world to
parallel each other, and to be subject to the same punctures and lances of the
waking surreal. However, even more important to the reading of “Death in Translation”
than landscape are the stones that appear throughout the story.
Stones, pebbles, and rocks in “Death
in Translation” act as hubs for translation vision. Stones are condensed memory
and externalized “I”s and eyes. Stones capture the emotions, sensations, and
experiences of the individual and externalize them so that they become objects
estranged from the person to whom these experiences belong. The various pebbles
that appear throughout the story permit (and sometimes even force) translation
and interpretation to occur. They enable Nico’s thoughts to be expressed
through the voice of a parrot (the interpreters of the underworld) and ground
Nico within himself as he ventures farther and farther from the familiar. That
being said, Nico’s stones are not the only rocks to make an appearance in the
story; the reader, too, is brought into contact with sight-stones throughout
the course of the story in the form of footnotes.
Footnotes, for
the reader, function as bridges and extractions of narrative and experience.
Their slight removal from the body of the story requires the readers to form
their own ideas of what fills the gaps between the stone and the content of the
story. In this way, the reader must interpret or translate the stones when
encountering them. Thus, the reader of “Death in Translation” receives the
author’s own translations made through implementation of the “logic of
metaphor”” while at the same time authoring his own translation of the text in
the very act of reading it.
[1] (Letter to Harriet Monroe)
[2] (United States Census Bureau)
[3] literally: “homely-unhomely”
[4] A term of endearment translating to the
equivalent of “my daughter” or “my girl” that is often used by older women when
addressing younger girls for whom they hold great affection.
[5] Walter Benjamin explains the phenomenon of the aura
as related to the object’s physical markers of history and experience, which
cannot be reproduced, and which give the original version of an object or work
of art authority over its copies. Aura is a tangible manifestation of
experience, it is “…presence in time and space, [the object’s] unique existence
at the place where it happens to be…. the essence of all that is transmissible
from [the authentic object’s] beginning, ranging from its substantive duration
to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (“The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”).
