Welcome to our 53rd issue! It is always a joy when we try something new. After publishing several dozen issues, the trap would consist in relying on what we do well, to stay in our comfort zone, to use methods that could be legitimately characterized as recipes… On July 18, 2023, we published a text entitled “Translating The Funambulist: A Commitment.” This short manifesto kicked off our plurilingual vision for the magazine, beginning with a francophone version in November 2023, moving then towards a hispanophone one, and hopefully several more after that. The common characteristic of these languages that we have in mind for translations of the magazine (French, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Chinese, Hindi, etc.) is that they are all hegemonic and were imposed onto millions of people by colonial coercion or state pressure. We live with this contradiction as we understand these languages to be what Kateb Yacine, after the Algerian Revolution, called “the spoils of war.” Nevertheless, in the spirit of internationalism, we want to dialogue with as many people as possible at the scale of the world.
As written in this short July text, “these contradictions are however only tenable if such a work is done in solidarity with initiatives aiming at writing in and translating into languages that are overshadowed (if not erased) by these imperial tongues.” This is precisely the ambition of this present issue.
Besides the usual “News from the Fronts,” the beautiful text commissioned to Malagasy author Marie Ranjanoro, as well as Kenia Almaraz Murillo’s presentation of her weaving, Eclipse, accompanying the texts of this issue and this present introduction, this issue consists exclusively of thirty translations of a text written for us by Mixe author Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil about the politics of languages vis à vis nation-states. In it, she describes the “linguicide” practiced by numerous nation-states that attempt to uniformize linguistic practices within the bounds of territory on which they rule. She argues for a de-hierarchization of languages to celebrate their pluriversality, and insists on the importance and beauty in the act of translation. Yásnaya wrote her text in her native Ayuujk, and translated it herself into Spanish, which in turn was translated into English and French. These three hegemonic language versions were used merely as vehicles to facilitate the translation of the text into thirty non-hegemonic languages: Albanian, (Western) Armenian, Bahasa Indonesia, Bambara, Basque, Bosnian, Guyanese Creole, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Inuktitut, Irish, Kashmiri (Koshur), Kikongo, Kurdish, Lao, Mapuche, Mauritian Creole, Maya, Mongolian, Quechua, Rroma, Shona, Somali, Swahili, Tagalog, Tamazight (Tasahlit), Tamil, and Uzbek.
The reasons for choosing these specific languages are highly subjective and, thankfully, do not obey only one rule. Some are Indigenous languages associated with an anticolonial struggle; some are languages spoken by millions of diasporic people around the world; some are languages spoken in regions that encompass more than one nation-state; some are creoles attesting of the Relation (dear to Édouard Glissant) produced by the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and/or indenture with millions of Indigenous or forcefully displaced people and their native languages; some have historically been minoritized by political programs invested in the hegemony of one (European or not) tongue. Some others were meant to be in this issue, but I failed to find the proper translator. This is the case for Māori, Fijian, Navajo, and Yiddish. In the latter case, I spoke to a dozen potential translators, who all shared their lack of confidence translating into Yiddish, despite regularly translating from it. Although this is merely anecdotal evidence, what it might say about the cultivation of a language is probably less than innocent. The case of Navajo was interesting too as, in this case, what created a problem was the difficulty to translate Yásnaya’s words themselves. As explained by Funambulist past contributor Geraldene Blackgoat, if the text was to be translated as such, the Navajo version would require numerous circumlocutions and would end up four times longer than the original! Absent too, are languages that rely on orality. This absence, of course, is due to our written format and is in no way a contribution to the hierarchization of languages that often marginalize oral languages under the name “dialects.”
The apparent contradiction between Yásnaya’s argument and the choice of some of these languages is important to point out here. In fact, seven of these languages are the sole national languages of, respectively, Albania (Albanian), Armenia (Armenian), Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia), Laos (Lao), Mongolia (Mongolian), the Philippines (Tagalog), and Uzbekistan (Uzbek). Yet, Albanian is also spoken in Kosovo and has constituted a rallying language in the struggle against Serbian domination. Similarly Mongolian is also the language of Mongolians living under the rule of the People’s Republic of China. Armenian could not possibly be associated solely with the relatively small territory called “Republic of Armenia,” but also in a greater one in Anatolia and the Caucasus on which Armenians are Indigenous and, of course, the diaspora. On the other hand, choosing Tagalog and Bahasa Indonesia is arguably more problematic as they embody the nation-state’s unique languages imposed on archipelagoes where numerous languages co-exist—and of course, in the case of Indonesia, this imposition was done on the occupied territories of East Timor (independent since 2002) and West Papua. This is also why Sabrina Citra, who translated Yásnaya’s words, felt appropriate to add a reflective note to her translation (see pages 72–73). It also ought to be said that Bahasa Indonesia is very similar to Malay, and as such can pretend to embody a regional language ranging from Malaya to Papua. As for Tagalog, we can add that it is a thriving diasporic language in addition to the Filipino state language.
Eight other languages are counted as official languages in their respective contexts. In the case of Bosnian (in Bosnia with Serbian and Croat), Haitian Creole (in Haiti with French), Irish (in Ireland with English), Tamil (in Sri Lanka with Sinhalese), they are associated with a dominant language following a logic of control of one by the other by these nation-states. This particular relationship between language, the nation-state, and the reminiscence of the colonial power is something examined by Marie Ranjanoro in the text “Black Plumes, White Ink,” which we commissioned from her to conclude this issue. In it, she deploys—in her usual beautiful prose, translated by Chanelle Adams—the ways through which French language has remained the language through which power (by the state or by the higher social classes) is exercised in Madagascar, in an active marginalization of Malagasy languages.
Conversely, Bambara and Shona are part of a much greater palette of official languages in Mali (with eight other official languages) and Zimbabwe respectively (with fifteen other official languages). As for Somali, it is the official language of Somalia along with Arabic, but also part of the five Ethiopian official languages. Finally, Swahili has the particularity of embodying an official language for no less than four nation-states: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda (all three along with English), and Rwanda (along with French, English, and Kinyarwanda). We can think of the relationships between these languages and nation-states as breaking with Yásnaya’s words, and perhaps we can wish for other, more marginalized languages to be featured in this issue.
As usual however, the quest for a “pure” language—which would know no hegemony at whatever geographical scale, that would have been imposed to no-one—is a chimera we should refrain from seeking. Instead, we should acknowledge and accept our own contradictions in how they can be both limiting and fruitful.
There is something quite vertiginous in thinking how the many translating decisions we regularly discuss with our translating team between English and French (Rosanna Puyol Boralevi, Virginie Bobin, and Caroline Honorien) and between French and English (Chanelle Adams) were multiplied by thirty in this present issue. The concept of “nation-state” for instance, does not necessarily have a straightforward translation in all languages and has occasioned some patient questioning for some of our translators. This beautiful vertigo can also be found in the cosmologies that these thirty languages deploy. If we are to agree that we can think through and with language, it is easy to understand how we don’t think in the same way with one language or another. Anyone who is comfortable enough with more than one language knows it in their very own experience of it. Just like Jorge Luis Borgès invited us to see a quasi-infinite universe contained within a library (fathoming the immensity of every book, every page, every word), I’d love for readers to read this issue while experiencing this vertigo of realizing how each page of these thirty translations constitutes an entrance door to pluriverse.
I would like to finish this text by thanking Omar Berrada for helping me to reflect on who we could invite to write the translated text of this issue. After a few conversations, it became clear that we would be lucky to have Yásnaya, a great thinker of language and translation, to be that author. I am very grateful to her for working with us. May this issue be a humble vehicle for her words to reach many places on the Earth, and to you readers who hold it in your hands, I wish you an inspired reading. ■