Reflections (week of Jan 31, 2022)

One question Page-Fort asked during the lecture on Friday stuck with me in particular: with what should we replace the term “native speaker”? Page-Fort asked our thoughts about the word “fluent,” and then the lecture quickly diverged into a conversation about the words often used to describe translations and which words we like or dislike. My gut reaction is to say that I don’t want the notion of “native speaker” replaced by anything at all. The notion falsely suggests to language learners that there is a point at which one becomes perfect, but that point is forever out of reach if you were not born in the “right” place. It keeps intelligent, thoughtful learners, translators, and teachers from doing certain projects or jobs. As the world grows increasingly bilingual, it leaves many lost as to which language really is their so-called “native” one. I wonder what alternative words there are, but mostly, I wonder: Do we really need this notion at all? Could we think not of an alternative term but rather an alternative approach altogether? 

Page-Fort also mentioned the Netflix series Narcos and talked about how its international success spurred Netflix to invest more in the production of “foreign” series and films. She pointed to how this might spur the translation of more books in translation (if people like a “foreign” series that is based on a book, for instance). In Esther Allen’s article “The Crazed Euphoria of Lucrecia Martel’s [film] ‘Zama,’” she touches on a somewhat similar idea, writing: “Taken together, book and film bring new understanding to one another, and come to form a single work of art.” Often when a book is made into a movie, people will ask: which was “better,” the book or the movie? I like how Allen eschews all comparison here and says instead that the two works inform and complement one another, even becoming one. On top of that, I like how translation here is not limited to translation of written text: translation can be moving from one culture to other cultures, one language to another language, one medium to another medium.

Finally, I hope that Esther Allen will talk more about silence in her upcoming lecture. She discussed the importance of silence in Di Benedetto’s work in the articles we read this week, but I wondered how she would actually translate silence. I see how silence is built into “Ace:” the girl, Rosa Esther, keeps quiet for her safety, and the man who teachers her chess and his daughter speak minimally to each other, a sign of their strained relationship. Dialogue throughout the story is brief and unaccompanied by any “he said” or “she said” clauses. Still, I’d like to know more about the ways in which Di Benedetto and Esther create and translate silence in writing.

-sharon