In L’imaginaire des langues, a series of interviews between Lise Gauvin and writer Édouard Glissant, Glissant tells how today a writer who does not know any other language does consider when writing, even unconsciously, the existence of other languages around them. One can no longer write a language in a monolingual manner. He says, “we have to take into account the imaginary worlds of languages” (my translation - The original French text is “On est obligé de tenir compte des imaginaires des langues.”)

When people ask which language of the source language or the target language you need to know better when translating, I always respond that you need to know as many languages as possible. And I believe, like Édouard Glissant, that we all have many languages within our imaginations. I have used the verb “know” when referring to the language level, as I avoid the idea of “mastering” when discussing any type of knowledge. When you translate a text, you need many different skill sets and each work you will touch on will need a renewed version of these. Translation is an ongoing process of learning and discovering – not different than life, really. Can you translate into a language you never ever read in or engage with on a deep level? Probably not, because your imagination needs to be filled with the languages you are working with. But this by no means equates literature as being essentially monolingual. Every language comes with its own heritage and imagination, linked to a geography, a political and cultural history. These are never monolithic.

Oftentimes, I come to a translation via another language, and sometimes one that isn’t even directly related to any of the two languages I am working with within a translation project. A recent example occurred as I was translating from Dutch into English. Reading the sentence “soms ietswat gezochte” I could feel the meaning in Turkish (and please do note the highlight on the verb “feel”), but not in English immediately. I arrived at the translation “far- fetched” via the Turkish “zorlama”. This process happens to me with French too, and sometimes with another language I don’t even know that well but have heard in a song, read in a book, from a character on a TV show, or have encountered in my neighbourhood, in a café in the city I live in or am visiting.

*You can’t take the heart of us (Novi Sad, October 2022)*

Translation is at the centre of everything I do as a writer, a literary translator and an artist working across media. Outside the page, the city has over the years become an immense resource for my multilingual mind and body. I am a flâneuse, a practitioner of what is called flânerie which can be described as idle wandering, and was mostly practised by urban men in mid-19th-century metropolises. Because of its dominantly male narrative within literature, I choose to define myself with the feminine form of a flâneur in this context.Renowned flâneurs include Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel and Edgar Allan Poe, who all have provided descriptions of flânerie throughout their work. Benjamin’s collection of notes in The Arcades Project catalogues everyday life in 19th-century Paris and provides a rich material on the figure of the flâneur.

Strolling becomes engagement with public space. When I walk, I observe, get lost and find myself in the many human traces left across urban spaces. This urge to leave its mark on the spaces we inhabit is not new in the history of humanity. The flâneuse will find many results of multilingual self-expression on shop windows, street names, billboards, advertisements, slogans, graffiti, clothes, artworks, trash, traffic signage, ghost signs, etc. The moment you start to look for languages around you, you will never experience the spaces you hold in the same way.

In ‘Walking in the City’, Michel de Certeau writes that the act of walking “is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.” He goes on, offering the possibility “to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.” What interests me here is the link between language and the physical act of walking, and how, in this essay, de Certeau tells in a way that by walking in the city, pedestrians are telling a story. This physical movement is central in my own practice as a translator, which has led me to create my own project to document these experiences and process as City in Translation. The stories that unfold from my explorations through walking can be seen as an example to reclaim the stories that have been made invisible by institutions. Flâneusing in urban spaces in search of these stories is in itself an act of resistance against established structures, and also power.

As the child of immigrant parents, my reality has been rooted in movement: between places, languages, emotions. In French, the word ‘ou’ changes its definition with only one accent: ‘ou’ without an accent means ‘or’, whereas ‘où’ with an accent means ‘where’. I see this as a movement, too: getting rid of the accent to transform place—‘where’, into a choice—‘or’. To the question “where are you from” I can now very confidently answer “Amsterdam” or “Brussels” without rejecting my heritage or the city where I was born, but I will choose how I define myself in public space.

In Une autobiographie allemande a correspondence/conversation between Hélène Cixous and Cécile Wajsbrot (a book I have asked my father – who had spent his teenage years in Germany – to write a note inside, in German, about his connection to that other home of his), Cixous writes the following:

Mais Babel, là-dedans ? La « séparation », la « dispertion » ? Pour moi la séparation aura(it) lieu, si je ne pouvais me rendre à/dans l’autre langue, si j’étais privée des bonheurs de l’hospitalité, du goût de l’étrangeté, un goût d’autre, un autre goût.
But what about Babel? The “separation”, the “dispersion”? To me, separation will(would) take place, if I could not come to/into the other language, if I were deprived of the joys of hospitality, of the taste of strangeness, a taste of other, another taste. (my translation)

*Following Love (Amsterdam, April 2023)*

I love Cixous’ reference to hospitality as “a taste of other, another taste” (not “the other”). Writer Chris Keulemans has written a whole book about hospitality, titled Gastvrijheid which I have personally read as a plaidoyer for solidarity, resistance, and love. Gastvrijheid is the Dutch word for ‘hospitality’, but the English word doesn’t immediately capture the many layers of the Dutch word which, when literally dissected, translates as ‘guest freedom.’ You need to go back to the Latin origin of the English version to find the “host”, the one offering “hospice” to those in need. Xenia, an ancient Greek concept of hospitality, is almost always translated as 'guest-friendship' or 'ritualized friendship.' The German word also has ‘friendship’ in it: ‘Gastfreundschaft.’ The Turkish word is “misâfirperver” which is a combination of the Arabic word “musafir” meaning “traveller” (and it has now entered the Turkish language as “misafir” to mean “guest”) and the Persian word “parvar”, meaning “to feed, to take care or to educate” but has also another meaning which is “to adore” (as in “vatanperver: to refer to the love of the country). The Turkish word for gastvrijheid today is defined by the one who likes receiving guests.

Throughout the book, Keulemans (who is the founder of many cultural spaces in Amsterdam, such as Perdu, de Balie and the Tolhuistuin) shows – through his personal and professional experiences and encounters across the globe, meeting artists, writers, cultural makers etc. from different cultural and political contexts – how gastvrijheid is the essence of creating spaces where people can truly share and grow, without the pressure of always having to ‘pay back’... It is about opening your world to others and welcoming them into your home, your community, your context etc, so that, in turn, the people you welcome will do the same for the next person they meet, and so on. It is not about a give and take mentality, but rather about creating these spaces, “holding space”, to use Aminata Cairo’s term, for various communities to be together, on an equal footing.

It is this search, or rather, yearning for gastvrijheid, the freedom to be a guest, to be welcomed, and welcome anyone else, the so-called “other” in public space pushed me to develop City in Translation which has led me back to Glissant’s initial observation that no writer ever writes in a monolingual manner. And that is why, as literary translators, we will only but gain from allowing our multilingual imaginations into the process of translation.

“Every work of translation carries a text into the literature of another language,” writer and photographer Teju Cole writes in his beautiful essay “On Carrying and Being Carried” published in his collection Black Paper. Writing in a Dark Time. I love how he uses the verb “to carry”, which holds so much care, tenderness and effort in its definition and existence. It feels, to me, another definition of gastvrijheid in all its complexity. While celebrating translation and applauding the work of literary translators, Cole avoids falling into the trap that literature and art make us more empathetic by definition. He brings a much-needed nuance into the idea of empathy, through this act of carrying, illustrating how translation is a way to carry from one shore to another, just like a boat carries refugees. An image filled with hope and violence. An urgent plea for literary translation to exist in a multilingual imagination, and reject binary definitions of language, identity and literature. The street reminds me again of this, as I encounter Toni Morrison in Amsterdam, in one of my flanêusing on a Summer’s day in 2020, from her Nobel lecture in 1993 she finds her way in urban space, through the gesture of a reader who was passionate enough to print her words and stick them onto a wall: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

*Finding Toni Morrison in Amsterdam (Summer 2020)*

REFERENCES

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982).

Aminata Cairo, Holding Space: A Storytelling Approach to Trampling Diversity and Inclusion (2021).

Hélène Cixous et Cécile Wajsbrot, une autobiographie allemande(Christian Bourgois éditeur, 2016).

Teju Cole, Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).

Édouard Glissant, L’imaginaire des langues (Entretiens avec Lise Gauvin 1991–2009), (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2010).

Chris Keulemans, Gastvrijheid, (Amsterdam: Jurgen Maas Uitgeverij, 2021).

Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 7 December 1993.

This essay was first published in issue twenty (2024) of The Attention Span Newsletter, a Dutch version was published on the knowledge bank of the ELV (expertise literair vertalen), Op straat ontstaat het verhaal. De meertalige verbeelding en de gastvrijheid van het literair vertalen (uit het Engels vertaald door Samara Reijns).