"It is the opposite which is good for us." –– Heraclitus of Ephesus
I grew up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, in a country that was afraid that its citizens would leave and wary of foreigners somehow contaminating or stealing something from the homeland. As we were preparing to leave Moscow forever (we thought) in 1978, my grandmother's little brother, whom she had raised back in the shtetl, a rail engineer who had been briefly jailed under Stalin on suspicion of sabotage ("wrecking," it was called), called from Vladivostok to condemn us for abandoning our motherland.
We could not bring rubles with us and were obliged to buy vast quantities of tchotchkes that we could supposedly sell abroad. For three months in Italy and for many years in Miami, we lived surrounded by Russian folk kitsch that nobody would buy: lacquered chess tables and chairs and coffers, infinite nesting dolls, wooden motion toys consisting of bears roasting mushrooms or playing tennis. After a while, getting rid of them became unimaginable. The bears would hoist their little wooden buckets to remind us of who we were and who we weren't: not Russian enough for Russia, and forever Russian in America.
The Soviet Union was a fortress, a place embodied by its border guards. It even policed the domestic travel and migration of its own citizens. In the correspondence between Stalin and his chief henchman Lazar Kaganovich, one finds the following remarkable response from June 23, 1923: "1. We should limit ourselves to establishing one more Donbass district in Ukraine. 2. Regarding the grain exports, our recommendation is to reduce sharply the Rozengolts plan (for the third quarter). 3. In my opinion [Isaac] Babel is not worth our spending hard currency on for his trip abroad. — I. Stalin." Such was the profound concern of the Soviet state for the travel plans of individual citizens.
One of the first things that struck us about the United States was its relative lack of borders. If you had an American passport or green card, you could pretty much come and go as you pleased. Visiting Canada was perfectly banal. We even visited the Soviet Union in 1989; it seemed that nearly everyone there at the time, Jewish or not, wanted to come back with us. After each trip abroad one would be welcomed back into the United States with a smile, or at least without any reproach about whether you liked it better somewhere else.
Of course, this wasn't true for everybody. Never true for Haitians or "economic" refugees from Latin America–and before that for Japanese Americans interned during World War Two. But still, compared to the world's many fortresses, the United States could still lay claim to being a gateway, a window, a country of immigrants and free movement. After 2001, however, the balance began to shift towards Homeland Security, and after the 2016 election, it is clear to me that we are quickly becoming a nation ruled by Customs and Border Protection. For now, we can still leave, but we are now treated a bit shabbily when we return. Flying into Miami or JFK from abroad, one is confronted with the multi-step, biometric, hi-tech, low-tech disaster called Customs and Immigration, in which CBP personnel herd the disembarked into a bewildering labyrinth of queues as though this is the first time they have ever done this––as though you are really putting them out by trying to re-enter the country. Look at you with the fancy passport! You went abroad, and now you want back in, huh? Sad!
The walls of the fortresses are rising. It's a good time to be a border guard. Only 36% of American citizens have passports for foreign travel, shockingly low for a developed country, so perhaps this shift towards nationalism was inevitable. 200,000 Salvadorans and 47,000 Haitians now face deportation after years of temporary legal status in the U.S. The Department of Homeland Security has referred 1,600 cases to the Justice Department as part of Operation Janus–an effort to revoke the citizenship of immigrants whose naturalization is deemed retroactively illegal. Iran's leader Ali Khamenei, faced with a fresh wave of protests, has banned English instruction from primary schools, decrying "cultural invasion." The United Kingdom is Brexiting its way into disunion. In a throwback to the Franco years, the Catalonian government is in exile again, threatened with arrest upon return to Spain.
How is a translator and teacher of literary translation supposed to feel? As I said in my introductory remarks at the Open Forum on Literary Translation, Publishing, and the University last month at The New School, I have been fortunate to find a refuge in the translation workshops I teach. What makes the experience of the translation workshop so unique in this historical moment so fraught with respect to the ability of language to conjure any kind of experience held in common? We are living in a strange moment when everybody feels they can mark off and assume their own set of facts and ignore facts that they don't like or understand. At the same time, literature is being taught in American schools in an increasingly literal-minded way, as though it is identical to experience or testimony, held as truth transparent, as though fiction were really just fancy non-fiction with a message. This world strikes me as being very different from the microcosm of the workshop, which brings together people translating from a wild array of languages and texts, translators coming from different gender, religious, cultural, social and political backgrounds and assumptions–all of which are at once made visible and then sublimated in the purely practical and collaborative process of understanding what a text is saying, from the inside out, and how this may be conveyed in English to as many different kinds of readers as possible. What are the relevant contexts and subtexts that reveal its meanings? How and why do different languages allow for different ways of meaning things? In the age of Customs and Border Protection, the workshop celebrates difference, opposition, obstacles, and weirdness as material that are transformed into the bridge that is literary translation.
Final reading of the Fall 2016 New School Literary Translation Workshop