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RB: I’m fascinated that you’ve mentioned translation in this context. Myself being interested in hybrid cultures, I had never connected together my fascination with Toledo as a historical city of translation.
HB: Absolutely. So that’s one of the things I’m very interested now in my own work, in pursuing in thinking about the whole question of cultural translation, figuratively and metaphorically, as a way of describing global experience. Because you know, translation, and again for this purpose this is going to be more a conversation for us than for the article, translation is a process that makes you think about transition not just about transformation.
RB: This is a very current topic because we’ve just had this question at the EU about reducing the number of official languages, and how translation occurs, literally and figuratively.
HB: The danger there of course always is that certain languages become the dominant languages of translation. French as the diplomatic language of the 19th century, English as the lingua franca of the 20th. And that really means that the languages of difference if I might put it like that somehow get absorbed into these languages and cultures, languages and groups have to speak in those terms, so when you have those great language groups that dominate the process of translation, you do get certain moral, political and ethical norms that are part of the process of being translated, so I think that to the extent to which you keep alive the notion of being “lost in translation”, that translation is productive because it’s not a swift transmission from one language to another because that can dominate you, homogenise you, but that being lost in translation is always an interesting process of disorientation, of trying to encounter what is different and what is new, that translation always goes two ways, that the language that is being translated changes but that the values of the language into which you are being translated must change at the same time. Walter Benjamin in his great essay on translation once said — he was quoting the linguist Pannwitz and he said the issue is not how to render Hindi into German but also how to make German more like Hindi.
RB: This makes me think about narrative and truth and reconciliation councils, whether people are able to tell their own stories in their own languages and how that is then are translated. You’ve been involved in that…
HB: Well, I’ve been very interested in this. My interest in this crystallised around the Wellek lectures that I give at the University of California around the idea of the ‘right to narrate’, and I’m in the process of completing two books at the moment, and one of them will be called The Right to Narrate, I think. And the right to narrate, you’re absolutely right, is a significant and potent political force today.
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, the International Criminal Court, the Gacaca trials in Rwanda, which in a way, have moved away from the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, because individuals involved in those communities in Rwanda wanted to use local forms of testimony and local rituals of narrative to actually talk about their experiences. So I think we do see something very interesting and very paradoxical, these great global institutions of governance on the one hand and as part of that globalisation of governance, the revalidation of groups, individuals, localities in telling their own story and the interest in narrative.
What is so interesting about narrativity is that it always moves between some legally, institutionally, politically defined set of norms and other norms if you like or customs more related to the individual’s experience to the whole emotional and affective world of political trauma which is often neglected. But when you talk about narrativity, you have to talk about that because the way you see reality is so related to the way you experience it, your sense of loss, your sense of mourning, your sense of depression, melancholia, anxiety. Not simply as private emotions but as public emotions.
So it’s very interesting that these enquiries, these global, governmental enquiries have revived the value of narrative. And narrative is now showing us the way in which the public and the private, the personal and the collective, the institutional and the individual work together and need to be attended to, both these different levels need to be attended to continually in arriving at our judgements [unintelligible].
RB: You’ve talked there about the conflict between the International Criminal Court’s version of how this narrative is structured and how the Rwandan people felt…
HB: Let me just clarify that. There was a conflict but it’s a complex situation. It was that the ICTR, people have rubbished it but it’s a very important initiative that the United Nations should get involved at that level. I think what was felt was that for a while it was in Arusha, it was set somewhere else, the local people couldn’t get there. On their side, the United Nations and those people who were setting up the tribunal felt that they really had to make a responsible judicial process, they had to set things up in the proper way, they had to gather evidence and then after three years, they prosecuted only three cases. Now to talk about translation, I think that out of the three judgements that they made, only one was ever translated into the local language. You can look that up, I’m not sure. There was a real issue there. At which point I think people felt that they wanted to set up these new Gacaca trials that were mostly rural, using these Gacaca leaves on which the village elders used to sit. And by sitting on those leaves they gave themselves authority for the tribunal. And the people came there and confronted each other, there was kind of a face-to-face confrontation of what was going on. So yes, there is a kind of difference of emphasis, and in what we have at the moment are the Gacaca pre-trials, they’re listening to the evidence of lots of people to decide who initially to let off and who to proceed with, in the trial. And of course it’s very different, because the United Nations trials, for good reasons are set out in that kind of formal international juridical practice; Gacaca trials are much more about, like the French word for a trial, you know, a procès, it’s much more of an enquiry into what happened set back into the context of community life and every day life.