(E)co-Translation: Toward a Collective Task

Abstract

Combining theoretical and personal reflection, this dissertation situates my experiences as a translator-activist within the emerging scholarship of eco-criticism and eco-translation. Playing upon the prefix “co-” in Michael Cronin’s theory of “eco-translation,” I suggest how literary translators might work collectively to bring about a more avowedly ecological practice. I also extend the concept to the broader political conditions in which translators perform their labor across distinct socio-linguistic contexts. The collective task of (e)co-translation, I propose, is to build alternative communal structures in which the practice of translation reflects and addresses ecological and political crises.

The essays that comprise this dissertation map several relations between translational, ecological, and decolonial discourses. Chapter One explores how a process-oriented translation practice challenges translators to build solidarity with established and potential collaborators, in order to cultivate what Anna L. Tsing calls "refugia": spaces that stage transformational, cross-species encounters in order to deepen our sense of entanglement. Refuge, in this sense, evokes two particular lines of the thought that animate this dissertation: a sense of “comradeship,” or shared cover, that collectivities facilitate, and the need to prepare climate refugia in a world of advanced environmental breakdown.

The next two chapters reflect on specific examples drawn from my own practice of translation. Chapter Two gives an account of translating Cristina Peri Rossi’s 1968 novella Strange Flying Objects into the contemporary context of climate disaster. Chapter Three describes the process of designing and leading a self-translation workshop for English-language learners at a high school in Ypsilanti, Michigan, within a moment of increased climate migration. The appendix includes a Risograph publication of student self-translations, titled Everything You Fight for and Gain.

The remaining chapters expand my focus to reflect on various forms of collaboration through literary translation. Chapter Four meditates on the challenges and felicities of co-editing the 2019 special issue of Absinthe: World Literature in Translation on contemporary Catalan writing by women. Chapter Five documents (including a series of interviews in the appendix) the recent founding of several translator collectives in the Anglophone sphere, and the promise they hold for developing alternative structures for communal translation and publishing. Chapter Six develops a theoretical framework for approaching translation practice within discourses of ecology by examining translation that prioritizes incommensurability as an invitation for many-bodied collaboration.

Finally, the speculative coda imagines a day in the life of a translator who lives according to the principles introduced throughout the essays, in order to flesh out translational practice within an emergent “care-work economy” of the future. Translation emerges as a form of care work—a careful practice of tending to the text that, in turn, permits us to cultivate community as well as broader ecological refuge.