Ronkainen, Jonika -- 1/24 Reading Comments

The article Why do Americans Read so Few Books in Translation to me seemed to follow a bit the form of the question “Why don’t they/we engage the “other?” (Why do Americans read so few books from non western-european countries, essentially) which invokes a kind of tautology – it was an article where, aside from the specific numeric details, it felt like you might be able to guess rather closely what the article would say from the title. I thought Page-Fort had a great subtitle however in “We Live in a Globalized World – It’s Time to Start Acting Like It,” I wished it would have interrogated the act a bit more/had come down on something a bit more specific. I think it wants the article wants to say that reading more works in translation means “cultural cross-pollination” and increased “compassion” and connection, which I think in turn kind of flattens the value of foreign literature to simply being foreign, playing precisely into what Gitanjali Patel and Nariman Yousseff talk about in All the Violence It May Carry on its Back: A Conversation about Diversity and Literary Translation – if something valuable about the literature is contained in the form of its being translated, then I think the question should simply be why is the act of translation undervalued (not for its product, but for what’s gained in the act) instead of why don’t Americans want the products. I think it's unquestionably correct that the miniscule number of translated works Americans read indicates a problem, I just don’t think the inversion (the case that Americans read more translated work) tracks to a resolution. 

I think the quoted line in All the Violence It May Carry on its Back, "I grew up bilingual and can't relate when people say translation is a bridge. How can it be, when for me both languages reside in the same place?” gets well at the problem in thinking of globalization as kind of an aggregation of localities – that it avoids grappling with contradictions in favor of finding oppositions, similarities, and differences. The Book That Taught Me What Translation Was by Jhumpa Lahiri was definitely my favorite of the articles we read where it brought up the contradiction of substitution/standing in – that, as is present in the line “Invece invites one thing to substitute for another,” the original already accounts for the substitution/has within it the predicate conditions for the copy, and further in capturing a form which is transformed the instance it is captured (“How easy it is for words to change the shape of things”) and yet this changed form evoking a better sense of the original ("That forma takes us straight back to Ovid, and to the opening words of the Metamorphoses"). 

These are the first things I’ve read about translation, so overall this was a really interesting introduction! 

– Jonika R.