113: How Translation Reveals the History of a City

February 10, 2021

34:47

Matthew Cottingham with Dr. Sherry Simon

In episode 113 of Globally Speaking, we talk to Dr. Sherry Simon, Distinguished University Research Professor at Concordia University in Montreal, about the role of translation in shaping a city’s history. We look at how people’s perspectives of cities change depending on language, the traces translation leaves on cities and how a traveler should seek to understand a city through ‘ghost signs’. Tune in to hear all this and more.

Download episode

Show transcript

Speaker	Transcript
Matthew	Hello and welcome to Globally Speaking. I’m Matthew Cottingham. I am a Program Director for Content Production at RWS Moravia. Today I’m talking with Dr. Sherry Simon. Dr. Simon is an expert in translational spaces—physical spaces such as architecture, cities, and landscapes—and how we can learn from them. I was particularly interested in Dr Simon’s perspective on what it means to think translationally, especially in the built environment around us. This has implications for travelers, students and people who simply want to be more aware of how translation is buried all around us in the everyday world.
Matthew	Dr. Simon, would you give us a quick introduction of yourself as we get started here this morning?
Sherry	Sure, sure. Hi. I am from Montreal. That’s a very big element of an introduction to me, because Montreal is where my research begins and the feeling and understanding of what it is to be from Montreal is very much what my work is about. I teach at Concordia University in Montreal, and I have been doing so for many years. I teach in a French department in an English language university. We have French language universities in English language universities, so I’m in a French department in an English language university. I grew up in a city that has English language and French language neighborhoods, and much of my adult life, I have spent in a neighborhood that sits in between the English and the French side. So that also very much defines who I am.
Matthew	Thank you. So maybe we could start by talking a little bit about translational cities and maybe you could give us a definition of what a translational city is.
Sherry	Sure. Well, in fact, all cities are translational in the sense that all cities are multilingual, and all cities have communities that communicate with each other through translation. So all cities are translational, but I have come to define some cities as more translational than others; that is cities whose sense of themselves, whose identity is clearly bound up with questions of language and the relations of language communities, one to each other. So, I define translational cities in contrast to the idea of bilingual. We think we know what a bilingual city is: it’s a city with two languages that consider themselves very much on an equal footing, or let’s say in competition, but I’ve found that the notion of bilingualism is very limited, especially when you talk about cities, because we think of bilingualism as a fairly symmetrical and peaceful relationship, and that is not so. As soon as two languages find themselves on the same territory, they are in conflict and they are in competition; they are in competition for territory. And the relationship between languages on the terrain of the city is one of interrelations, interrelations that can be conflictual, that can be creative, that can be productive, but they’re relationships. So, when we talk about bilingual, we think of side-by-side, but it’s not side-by-side, it’s incorporation, it’s interweaving, it’s ideas of how languages come to interact with one another. And very often, as I said, it’s a question of competition.
Matthew	I’m fascinated by the conflict and creative piece of this. And I’m going to get into this by using a quote from your essay The Translational Life of Cities. Right? So, the quote is, “The interplay of languages within the city contributes to its distinctive feel; in particular, sensibility to the ways in which knowledge in and of the city is shaped.” So, I think that that’s a really interesting… When we think about the feel of a city and the relationship of conflict and creativity and cooperation or competition, how do you see that playing out in the cities?
Sherry	Okay. So, let me just name some of the cities that I’m talking about. So, I’ve mentioned Montreal. Another very important city for me is Barcelona, whose sensibility is very much defined by the contrast between Spanish and Catalan. Another city that I have studied in detail is Trieste, a city in northeast Italy, which, for a very long time, was a multilingual city with an important translational component. And also Calcutta. I was very interested in the Calcutta of the late 19th century. So, the feel of the city is very important to me. So, when you go to Barcelona, you cannot not be aware of the fact that when you’re on the street corner, you can hear these two different languages happening. The same in Belgium; Brussels is another city, Montreal… The way a visitor or a native experiences the city is to hear these languages as they meet on street corners or in buses or on the Metro. And, I was so struck by the fact that cities is a very important area of academic interest, as you know, for sure, since the 1980s. Cities have been written about so much, and yet, amazingly, this aspect of the sensory component of cities, what you hear when you’re on the streets, how the particular histories of the cities play out in daily life, is so often neglected. I mean, I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read about Barcelona that don’t even mention the fact that this, you know, very important element of city life, the fact that, you know, the Spanish and Catalan have been battling it out on the streets of that city for centuries is completely neglected. Because people talk about Barcelona as a great city of architecture, which we’ll get to, or of, you know, of city planning, or of a certain kind of modernism. And these are the aspects that are spoken about, and not the question of language. The other thing that struck me so much about city and language is that what you know about the city, as the quote you just mentioned, what you know about the city comes to you through a language, and you will know a city through that language. For, and let, let me take in as a fairly extreme example, like Calcutta that I was speaking about, of the 19th century, if you know Bengali, and you can read the Bengali sources, of the same period, you’re going to have a very different vision of the city, because you’ll be reading about it from a very different perspective, sort of not only the perspective of the language, but the historical perspective, the colonial side that you’re on. So, knowing about a city is a very complex thing. Knowing about a city is how you experience it as you walk down along the streets. It’s also how you know about it and what you read about it, which myths you read. So, same thing about Montreal. If you read about it in English, and from a long historical English perspective, you will see the city in certain ways, you will read it in certain ways. Whereas if you read about it in French, it will be different.
Matthew	Sure. Sure. So, when you think about this, how does it manifest itself physically? You talk a little bit about street signs, you know, the changing of the names of streets, or the changing of the names of buildings. How also does it manifest, maybe in the actual layout of the city or the chosen styles of architecture in the city that’s related to that language or the competition of those languages?
Sherry	Sure. Well, that’s where certain cities, because of their particular histories, are actually made up of layers of languages. So that… one very particular manifestation of that layering, where a city is like a palimpsest, which was, a, you know, one of those images that was used for such a long time that was very popular. The idea of the palimpsest being layering of paint over each other. But at some point, there’s a clearing or there’s a gap and you see down, and you can see through the layers. Well, the same thing happens with cities. So, if you take a city like Montreal, which has had a linguistic layering, so it was a primarily English city for a long time, and now it is become a primarily French language city because of the political evolution of the city and which political class has power. So, physically, this manifests itself in very sometimes comical ways, where signs, let’s say store signs, which have been painted over, because there was a law at the end of the seventies that said that all commercial signage had to be in French. So, signs would be painted over in French, and then the paint would peel away, and you’d see this kind of pesky, ghostlike apparition of a time past. The same thing would happen on brick walls, you know, where you’d find 19th century signs all of a sudden reappearing after years of being covered over by layers of paint. These are called ghost signs in Eastern Europe, which has a particular dramatic history of language overlays, because it was such a multilingual area with, with moving borders and then two World Wars and communism and such a conflictual history, each layer often being represented by a language. So, you’d have a city like Chernivtsi, which would go from German language to Romanian to now it’s Ukrainian. So each of those layers is represented by a language and architectural styles, street signs, vestiges, which are sometimes conscious and willed, and other times, as I say, these fragments of language that just peek out, from under some cracked paint or a broken brick, and remind you of the way in which these layers have come, one after the other.
Matthew	As I think about people who are occupying cities and their identity in that space, how does the translational city impact those identities?
Sherry	Certainly there’s a huge impact. One cannot live in an environment in which languages are so ideologically often coded, socially coded, so one moves through languages as one moves through one’s daily life. And I often think of cities where languages have this very important physical and psychological presence as having a kind of benefit, a kind of a cognitive benefit, that you experience difference on a daily level. You’re always confronted by difference. Sometimes if you’re a translator, for instance, this difference can be… what can I say? It can be totally immersive. So, you can’t not look at language and see it as translational, as actually literally in translation. So you’ll be at the gym, and you’ll see a sign that says, you know, you can only use the machine for 30 minutes, but you see it in French and you think, “Hmm, I think that’s translated from French, from English. And I think it’s a bad translation.” You spend all your time seeing bad translations and being preoccupied by bad translations, but it becomes a kind of an existential way of being… There’s a poet: Anne Carson is a very well-known internationally-known poet now. And she talks about living in a world of right-hand pages, because she grew up, she’s a, a classical, scholar. So, she sees bilingual editions all the time. And the left-hand page is the original, the right hand page is the translation. So it’s like living in a world of right-hand pages, except, she says, the left-hand page is absent. There is no original. So, living in a translated city is like living forever in a translated world, where there is no original. You’re always in this fraught territory of mixtures. Trying to separate them out is sometimes a futile activity, but there is this cognitive benefit. And the cognitive benefit, I’d call it attention. You’re obliged to pay attention to language, to pay attention to the world around you, to see the world around you with this element of doubt always in your mind, becomes a kind of a metaphysical way of being. It’s also living in a world where you’re always obliged to engage with difference. So, I take difference as a positive thing. I take the fact of living with difference as being something that one desires. You know, there’s a movie that I love to hate, Lost in Translation.
Matthew	I know it well, yes.
Sherry	Yeah. And I hate that movie.
Matthew	Why do you hate that movie?
Sherry	I hate it really desperately because it shows these two American characters in Japan, and their engagement with this Japanese world is… They don’t really want to deal with Japan. They’re stuck there. They live in a kind of very self-absorbed world and the movie has nothing to do with translation. The movie has nothing to do with… I feel that it’s robbed the idea of translation, because translation is wanting to be involved in difference. It’s moving towards difference. Whereas these characters, and I won’t go into my long diatribe on Lost in Translation, but these characters are sort of melancholic and depressive characters who find Japan to be kind of like it’s invading them. They’d rather just be within themselves. They’re not seeking to engage with Japan there. I feel that translation… To me, translation is the desire to engage with difference.
Matthew	I know that movie well, right. And so it’s almost like other is oppressional in that context, rather than, you said, trend, you know, difference is positive, and that, it’s sort of this oppressive, you know, whether it’s the Pachinko machines or the karaoke bars or whatever they’re experiencing, it’s something that they have to deal with rather than engage with.
Sherry	That’s exactly it. So, to me, translational cities are an opportunity. They’re an opportunity to be engaging with difference, whether that’s difficult, which it often is, or whether it’s exciting and something that we, you know, we find great delight in. But, I think the idea of differences that live on the same territory. So there’s a, to me, a difference between the traveler who travels abroad to engage with difference, to whatever degree, but who chooses to go abroad, and living in a translational city where one is at home, and yet living with difference on a daily, on a daily basis, always confronting this difference. Languages are often surprisingly neglected in terms of the histories of places, of learning about the histories, of knowing. One travels to Spain. I remember our very first time; I was on a train going to Barcelona, I think, and then I was hearing this strange language and I said, “What could that possibly be?” And then, “Oh, of course.” I knew about Catalan, but I was absolutely not prepared for it. It wasn’t in what I was reading about. Languages are just… they are neglected in very deep ways, and they’re neglected in terms of the memories and signage and posting of about places. And it’s not as incidental as it is sort of a deeper kind of neglect, as if we don’t memorialize language. We don’t have memorials. “Here lived the Catalan language and it no longer does,” or “we don’t have signs. We don’t have images for it. We don’t have soundscapes. “ I mean, more and more city tours, for instance, try to give you a sense of what languages you might have heard on the streets. If you go to the Lower East Side in New York, I’m sure there’s a language when your guide will try to restore for you some sense of the languages or the soundscape you might’ve heard. But the memory of languages, like sound. It is very ephemeral. And we do have to find better ways to try to think about understanding language when we travel, but also understanding the language histories of places. So, often it happens that you’re at a site, and, you know, here I’m speaking of some of the translation sites that I’ve talked about. You enter a site; it can be a memorial, it can be a church, it can be a, you know, an opera house, and you are aware of a kind of uneasy, unsettled feeling. There’s something going on here that you have a sense of, but aren’t quite sure. And it has to do with the fact that this place once was something else. And here we get back to the ghost signs I was mentioning at the beginning, but it’s in different way. It could be kind of, it could be some signals, some, or it could be the knowledge you bring with you, and you become aware of this place as a place that has had a history of overlapping or intersecting or suppressed languages. It’s an interesting moment. It’s a moment that ignites your curiosity and you want to know more. There’s one particular site that I’d like to just evoke here, and that’s in trying to bring back languages, or in trying to give them their place in cities where they once lived. And this is a site called The Space of Synagogues, in Lviv, which is today in Ukraine, but this used to be the city called Lemberg, which was a very important Jewish city in what was the former Galicia, which was Hapsburg empire. So I’m already giving you an idea of how complicated that history is, from German to Polish, to today, Ukrainian. And here there’s a deliberate effort in this space to bring back languages, to show the languages that once lived in this space. And here I’m talking about the Holocaust in particular, which is a particularly, of course, dramatic and tragic kind of history, but in this monument that has been set up, it’s not simply the idea of showing images or names. Of course, names are important indicators of memory, names and histories, but the languages. So, the installation is an artistic installation which uses stones that look like tombstones, so we are in a memorial mode, but on each of those tombstones is a story, is a story or a citation or a memory written by someone who was part of that history. So, we go back to their lived history, what it was to live in that time; more important, it’s written in the language in which that person would have spoken it and then translated into a number of other languages. What I find is really lacking so much in so many other kinds of memorials or attempts to illustrate the history of places, to show that the history was not only a lived history by populations who are no longer there, but to show it through their languages. And also to show how those languages have become involved in a new history, which is the history of a translation of those languages into other languages. So just to give one example: so, if someone had written, lived that experience in Yiddish, Yiddish is there, but it’s then translated into French because that’s where that person now lives, that’s their diasporic language, but also translated into Hebrew because that’s the language that many of the tourists who come to that place will be speaking, and also translated into Ukrainian, because that’s the language that the people of Lviv now speak. So, that sequence of languages shows you how that memory lives on through its translation into those many languages.
Matthew	Yeah. I love the idea of the ghosts, right? The ghost signs, and the ghost languages. But I also think about language itself, having the bones of other languages in it, in the roots, so if you think of classics, and the, you know, etymology…
Sherry	Right.
Matthew	… where, where the word comes from. It can move from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to German to English, and be in use in English, and who knows where it goes next. Right?
Sherry	It’s true.
Matthew	But those, the roots are still there, right? And, to understand, for me anyway, getting an understanding of what the word means now, going back and seeing the long tail of where it’s come from, helps. It’s an illuminating piece of today for where it’s been, right?
Sherry	Yes. No, but that’s a very interesting idea, that languages carry their own memories, within them, their own history, because languages are accretions of history and translation. Within themselves, languages carry history and the evolution always going forward into new meanings.
Matthew	Let’s talk a little bit about outcomes. So, when we think about your work, so when you think about your work, and your teaching, what kinds of outcomes would you like to see your students come away with? So, is it a change in perspective? Is it a change in activity?
Sherry	Well, on the one hand, there’s the question of the traveler, and how the traveler can be a better-informed traveler. And that, I think, is very important to me, that, that we become more aware of these layers of history, become more attentive to them. And more understanding of the importance of translation and the traces it leaves in the world. So, translation, we know, is an important activity, and, you know, translation makes the world go round. As translators, we know this. Without translation, there would be no world as we know it today. Contact and the interaction between languages is what allows us to have planetary communication. But we’re often so ignorant and indifferent to the work of translation, to the difficulties of translation, to the fact that translation leaves traces in the world. So, I guess one of the main objectives, or my main hopes through my work was to make all of us, whether it be translators or non-translators, more attentive to this work, and to the way that difference is what makes the world, ideas, thinking, move forward. So, translation is often decried for the fact that it does not reach perfect equivalence, that translation is not, you know, the same as the original, but, well, what if we take this idea and say, it’s because there is no sameness between original and translation that ideas move forward, that history moves forward, that in the space between the original and the translation in the way that a movement moves across the ocean, in the way that feminism moved from the US to France, and then back again, in the differences that were generated through these translations. That new ideas came to the fore, and that the interactions and the differences among us are what most stimulates us, in fact.
Matthew	True. True. So, the gaps, we tend to think about them automatically as negative, negative space, right? Unbroachable, binary sort of space. But if we examine the opportunity in that space, then it becomes very inspirational, right? That’s where creativity can happen. If you examine it as not, maybe not even a good nor bad thing, but something that is and can be taken advantage of.
Sherry	Yes. I like the term productive dissonance. So, where dissonance or difference becomes productive. And to go back to the cities, what I noticed and what most interested me in the histories of some of the cities, like Barcelona, like Trieste, like Calcutta, is that the moments of greatest tension across languages were also the moments of greatest productivity and creativity. So Trieste around the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, was tremendously productive as a city where the traffic between German and Italian was elevated to enormous heights, through the fact of psychoanalysis, moving from Germany to Italy. It was through this dissonance, through this difficulty of the relationship between German and Italian, that there was this terrific flowering of literary and intellectual life in the city. In Calcutta, there was the encounter between English and Bengali, gave birth to something that’s called the Bengali Renaissance, which was a fantastically, again, creative moment, productive in the history of science, in the movement of ideas, in poetic forms again. So, over and over, we find this. And of course, I have examples from Montreal, over and over, we find this as the idea of difference or the gap, as you just said, as sparking something really exciting. And often, you can trace the movements of translators through space. You can watch them, you know, look at their histories, at their stories, the stories of translators, and see how their movement across the city, the fact that they left their home, neighborhood and moved into the neighborhood of the other city, of the other language, how that sparked something. The, the life stories of translators can be fascinating and so revealing of the kinds of ways in which this, you know, excitement is generated. I have one terrific example of this British missionary, of all things, called James Long, who moved to Calcutta in the 19th century, who made the city his own, who walked every lane and byway of the city, and became the most important translator from English into Bengali, even though, I will say, he was a missionary, but he was a, he also invented the social sciences in Asia. So, he, he was a fascinating guy. So to look at the history of translators as people who live in cities, who move through them, who understand the sensibility that we were talking about at the start of this conversation, the sensibility or the kind of the special music of cities, in the way that they’ve evolved and come to be, these are keys. These are ways into history that we don’t otherwise see.
Matthew	I’m interested in your take on appropriation. So, you’ve talked a little bit about the positive nature of language, and I think about the way people could talk about appropriation of others’ language or culture, and how that plays in with what you’ve been talking about.
Sherry	That can be a very, very interesting topic. Certainly, you have the appropriation, I think, you’re talking about power relations, what are the differences when you’re translating? There’s been a distinction, very interesting work on the difference between translating up or translating down, translating it to a more noble, what was once considered a more noble language, like sacred languages, or translating down into vernaculars, when we had this idea of more important or less important languages, more powerful, less powerful. We think today about minority languages, languages that are limited to their space in geography, it doesn’t have the same kind of range, languages of lesser and greater diffusion. So there’s always a differential. Translating is rarely among equals. I mean, starting with English, we know that the whole story of, of the power of English today and the fact that translating into English is often a kind of translating up. It’s certainly translating into a broader geographical scheme, that’s for sure. These questions can be very fraught. I was struck with a particularly wonderful example of how up and down can be disturbed in our indigenous languages today. First Nations languages have often been so neglected in translation, so neglected in our public spaces. So, recently, two or three years ago in our National Gallery, our main Canadian art museum, in the capital of Canada, Ottawa, there was a new display of our art, which, showing indigenous art as the beginning of Canadian art altogether, and using First Nations languages as the language for labeling these artworks. So, this is something different. You’ve never seen this before in a museum, to have labels in First Nations languages and translations of these labels into English and French. So that’s a way of translating; I’m not gonna use up or down. It’s off. It’s a different angle. It’s showing how translation can give public space to another language, can show it in a different light, by displacing languages, by putting them in places that we’re not used to seeing them. All of a sudden, things look different. And these, of course, questions of appropriation have to do with who is translating, who is translating whom, who has the right to translate, who doesn’t have the right to translate. These have become issues that are very much discussed today in translation studies, because they’re very important.
Matthew	Yes. I love that.
Matthew	So thank you, Dr. Simon, for being with us today, it’s been-
Sherry	Oh, it’s been a pleasure.

Guests

Dr. Sherry Simon

Dr. Sherry Simon is a Distinguished University Research Professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She’s an expert in the effect that translation has on our cities and landscapes. Dr. Simon has won several notable awards for her work and writing and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In her 20+ years as an educator in language, she has held visiting positions at universities in Mexico, France, Italy, Puerto Rico, Belgium, India, Sweden, Austria and the US.

Hosts

Matthew Cottingham

Program Director

Matthew Cottingham is a Program Director at RWS who focuses on content streaming, quality and publishing for large enterprises. A self-proclaimed ‘Storyteller at Scale,’ he has touched the lives of many through exceptional content.

With 20 years of industry experience, he is passionate about the opportunity to develop a range of software tools, products and services for his clients. His long list of achievements in help systems, developer support, streaming entertainment and consumer marketing, among others, have been developed and deployed on a global scale.

Matt lives in Kirkland, Washington, and is owned by a yellow dog and a black cat. In his free time, he is a script-writer.