Welcome to translating COVID 19. This is a series of Skype recorded video conversations which explore fontes methods
and practises of translation in the context of the current global health crisis.
My name is martyrdom. Nidhi and I am an Army Research Fellow at the Queens College University of Oxford.
If you wonder what a beautiful image in the background is,
that is the Queen's College or library, and I thank Claire Hooper for providing this picture.
Today, I have the privilege and indeed the pleasure to join in conversation.
Nicola Gardini, professor of Italian and comparative literature at the University of Oxford.
An exquisite painter and the author of award winning novels, essays, literary monographs, memoirs, poetry collections and translations.
In this video, Nicole and I will reflect on the role of translation in the midst of the pandemic.
But before starting, please let me think first of all, Nikola, without whom this conversation would not be possible or the speaker's colleagues
and participants who in various ways have contributed to translating illness,
which is the brother project, which is translating COVID 19, belongs.
And last but not least, I would like to thank the funders of this project.
The Queens College Welcome to tionaL Strategic Support Fund and your five fund at this university, Nikola.
I would like to break the ice with a question that is as obvious as it's challenging.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, I have been approached with mixed words of encouragement and provocation.
So on the one hand, given the transnational dimension of these crises,
people have thought that they could not have been a better time to bring together the two seemingly unrelated words of translation and disease.
On the other hand, however, others have been more sceptical or rightly cautious by pointing out the many people died
and therefore that the imperative of research right now is very clearly to save lives.
Translation these people fear is not going to serve this purpose.
So how exactly is at all?
Do you think that translation can help us be allies or keep allies in the current
circumstances and that Sound Nation actually play a role in fighting illness and death?
Or is it just destructive form of entertainment in the face of absurdity?
Yes, very good, thank you very much, Martha, for this invitation.
You know how interested I am in the language of illness, as you mentioned, I'm a translator too.
And and thanks thanks to you, these two terms in this translation are receiving one attention, one unifying focus.
And I feel very, very, very proud to be here because illness is a mysterious text.
Illness asks us to translate this extreme experience, which most of the time we do not understand into something comprehensible, something shareable.
That's an act of translation, indeed. Why do we need translation? What do we need it for?
Well, to make to make sense sharable know there is a language for for this kind of disease COVID 19.
And it's the science of sorry, it's the language of science.
It's the language of politicians. It's the language of statistics.
But is it really a language that is? Isn't it just maybe a lingo or, you know, a dialect more than a language we can all share and participate in?
I do think that translating illness, translating COVID is not just entertainment.
It's indeed a primary activity we all should take part in by fun through finding words to make sense of what's going on.
Of course, it also, as you said, it's it looks absurd.
We're facing absurdity. We're facing something we never even considered possible.
I mean, until October or November, who could have thought that in a matter of weeks, the world would fall into this major worry and massive death?
Who could have predicted this? Nobody. Now we need to make sense of that.
Why did we not in the first place? Why didn't we understand?
Why didn't we understand the signs of what was going to happen?
We are really facing a linguistic problem here, not just, you know, in a technical sense.
We are not probably translating literature into other languages, but we are translating experience, dock experience,
obscura experience, complicated experience, controversy and experience unexpected experience into a new language, into a new medium.
Now the very act of translation what we literary people can consider a translation in in the literal meaning is still part of it.
I mean, I don't I don't. I don't think translation a as a linguistic linguistic act is out of the out of the picture
because we are all now right now translating our languages into into other languages.
We are trying to communicate globally. And what we're doing here is indeed creating one common language for everybody to speak the same things.
And that's exactly the aspiration of translation.
All translations in the history of of human communication have had that ambition to make sense finally of finally available for the whole community.
Now the community's global. So we are indeed, when we speak of it, we are really trying hard, probably still quite helplessly.
But nonetheless, we feel we should try hard to speak the same language.
That is, we all agree on some things and creating we need to create a new code.
Ovid should really come with a new code to speak about it.
Now, creating a new code into which accommodate the discoveries of experience is translation.
So I don't see that to illness and translation as inimical. Yeah, a date.
All major experiences of the of the human being are linguistic experiences because they do not just happen.
They need to be told they they need to be analysed.
They need to be understood. And we are.
A stand linguistically. Of course. Thank you so much, Nikola.
Now that you're talking about Dick, I'm thinking that humankind throughout history has tried to make sense,
to give name and to make it exist linguistically to make a linguistic sense of absurdity and illness.
So disrespected during the coronavirus lockdown, there has been renewed interest in pestilence fiction.
On the 20th of March, the Guardian reported that Penguin Classics,
which is the British publisher of the Plague by Albert Company, was shipping thousands of copies of the book every month.
They're struggling to keep up with orders. Can you help understand how pandemics have been translated across space and time?
And what can we learn from these acts of translation? Yes.
Well, pandemic pandemics are political problems. Pandemics, of course, concern doctors and and and whoever is involved in coming up with the remedies.
But when we look back to the great narratives of of pandemics, epidemics in the history of world literature,
we will always see this bond between disease, illness and and the politics.
I mean, to here is a very good example. It's a it's quite a recent one.
He's his plague test is indeed a major metaphor for colonialism in northern Africa.
But just let's go back to the very beginning.
I mean, to to his account of the plague in Athens, interestingly enough, that that plague happens at the very beginning of the Peloponnesian War.
And it it well, it seems to come from some external source that preceded his debates,
whether it's the Spartans who disseminated the disease or or the eastern US, that is the Persians or whoever came to to to the Port of Athens.
But he leaves it open. He says, Well, you know, we can't in the end, really establish who who started this.
Nonetheless, it's interesting that his own account of the wall is opened by the account of the play,
as if the plague were there to signify a made a big a bigger picture,
a greater scheme than the actual military events or the political crisis, which which brought about the conflict between Sparta and Athens.
The same is true of other plagues. There's one which is less known, and I'm quite familiar with the epidemic of syphilis in the early 16th century.
I work on the Renaissance, and syphilis was indeed diagnosed or indeed even discovered by one Girolamo,
A or a famous Italian doctor in in in the history of epidemiology.
Pakistan is a big guy, is a big name. A big shot? No, I mean, probably scholars know him because he was also Latin poet and knew Latin.
But anyway, he wrote not only a treatise on contagions, but also a poem in three books very gradually and in language nonetheless.
Very scientific in its approach on syphilis and Geronimo Castro is very clear on the connexion
between the middle and the military crises of Italy and the emergence of the disease.
So the disease is both an allegory, a metaphor for a lack of equilibrium, for the loss of balance in the political stability of of of a given country.
And it is also the outcome of that of that lack of balance, of that lost balance.
So all contagions are to be understood within a bigger framework because they do not just happen for no apparent reason.
They are the result of a long chain of errors.
And some of these errors are of a political nature.
Well, thank you very much for this, Nicole. Makes me think no.
As we discussed in the past month together, is it although the language of war sufficient a sufficient lexicon to express the experience of COVID 19?
Right? Yes. I mean, this is a good question mark.
You are referring, of course, to a prevalent metaphor or metaphor ology, which is current and very,
very common to hear COVID as an enemy and as as somebody or something we need to wage war on.
Now, Susan Sontag wrote, What remains to me a definitive interpretation of military metaphors of figurative military figures,
figurative speech in relation to illness, and she was right in rejecting that language.
She was speaking of AIDS, which is another great pandemic. Interestingly, it's very hard to see the connexion between COVID 19 and and and AIDS today.
But let's not forget that another big pandemic was just this one.
The AIDS not too long ago and HIV on the ground?
Yeah. And so a lot of what AIDS taught us through literature.
We seem to have forgotten, actually, and we're still struggling to devise a new code to speak about what's going on.
Um, no, it's not enough to to treat to treat COVID as an enemy, and I don't think it's correct code.
It is is just a natural phenomenon. It's something that nature does.
Viruses exist. They are neighbours.
They are lives that are around its life.
It's one of the many forms that life takes on two two two two two to stay in the world.
We need to live to learn how to live with viruses, with bacteria, with people we don't like and and a lot more.
So I'm I'm completely against wars.
I wouldn't think of myself as as a person who would defend war ever in, in life or anywhere in the world.
I do think that we humans have got language to communicate,
even when language is extremely difficult to use, even when cultural translation seems the hardest.
But nonetheless, it's really what we need to always resort to.
So I would go for other metaphors. Of course, it's hard.
It's easier to agree on such a blatantly dramatic over dramatic metaphor.
Now we feel under attack. We are not attacked. We are just coping with a very difficult disease.
But we should also come to terms with our responsibilities. Yes.
What are you saying? Very much, Nicole? I thought, if I care you, I was just thinking of, of course we are not here defending in defending death.
But what you are talking about is very thought provoking indeed is the fact that the translation provides
a language of tolerance and equality that allows us to see things from a different perspective,
perhaps the perspective that we naturally would reject.
And to see things within a broader picture in this case, the eco system of the Earth.
Indeed. Thank you, Mata'afa, for completing what what I left implicit in what I was saying.
Yeah. First of all, let's learn what a virus is. I mean, we people speak, speak of enemies when they don't know what they're talking about.
Once we we know things and people better, there's there's less room left for for making up an enemy.
Now viruses need us because they don't have a strong identity and they they need another body, another another set of cells to feed on.
This is what happens with HIV.
So actually, if we knew more about viruses, we would know that identity in nature is something fluid, something uncertain.
Of course, we're very jealous of our own identities. As humans, I mean, the the whole immuno system was was biological is a biological create,
a wonderful biological creation which determines and determines what is the South and what is not the south.
And we manage to evolve as a as a species because we did create a south biological south.
But this biological self is not definitive,
and it's definitely not safe all the time when these viruses attack us to just repeat what the supporters of the military metaphors would say.
We would claim when these viruses enter the system, they show us that we are permeable systems.
We are permeable entities. We are not one as we think we we are.
And this is true also in in the human interaction.
So viruses teach us that we we mix with one another, that we we penetrate one another by all kinds of of interactions and exchanges.
There are some exchanges that are possibly deadly, like letting the virus do what it wants with our body.
But there are. But but this is the rule of nature. We are constantly entering other realms and we are constantly entered by other kinds of light.
I tried to do to speculate about this and in a novel of mine, that's why I have some ideas about this.
HIV is indeed and the virus of HIV, which is a very mutant virus,
definitely more mutant than than it is a very good example of what what I've just said.
So yes, we need other metaphors. And as you said, we need peace.
Only through peace will we be able to look at the other to look at our neighbour in whatever form it comes to need column.
Yeah. So the novel that you just mentioned, you'd love it and we tardy and the life published by February 19,
2015, and they have actually found quotations from it.
If you don't mind them, I read them, although the translation mine is really bad.
So please forgive it. But I think that these two quotation tithing very well.
What you say in the attempt to describe the illness,
we never consider the primarily linguistic nature of suffering the clash with the unspeakable and the inexpressible,
the failure of semantics, the imprecision of conclusions.
It just makes us believe in a foreign land where all languages we know are put to death and none of them prove to be useful, not even silence.
And then Nicola adds that however, in the very moment one would leave us and I quote language it springs out of cells.
Each bird eats of practise autonomy. It is what we call head.
I is very beautiful line that I want you to read.
So now that are talking about the the special perspective the translation provides us with, which is the perspective of tolerance,
of understanding, of allowing the other to interact with the author and yet in a way that allows us to preserve our own identity.
I would like to move on to another question which is related to this idea.
So in one of our last phone conversation, you told me in Italian that there some phenomena associated South African radio
that we can not understand the phenomenon that has been turned into an absolute.
So would you like to comment a bit more on the sentence and perhaps is going to ask that what is the link with translation in this case?
Yeah. Yes. Well, nothing taken as an absolute can really help us understand how things work.
So we need to always see things in their connexions with what is probably not there to be seen immediately, but must be inferred as being present.
And therefore COVID must be understood within the broader framework of our political choices of economic crises of international.
All relationships, relations of all, we need to see it as a cultural phenomenon, also not just as an emergency.
And and that's why, again,
translation comes in and comes back in into the picture because it's again a question of relating what phenomena that might look discrete,
separated independent from one another and the bonds, the links, all the connexions we may come up with will be that act of translation.
Of course, if we take translation as this cultural say strategy, we would probably not come up.
We won't come up with that with the text, with the definitive text.
The translation is not a result. It's it's a process. And it's that kind of process we need.
We need to cultivate. So and this probably also answers your very first question.
Well, concerning the entertaining nature of translation.
Well, if we think that translation is just something we want to read and take pleasure from and get pleasure out of?
Well, probably, yes, that we don't need translation in this case, but we need another kind of translation the process,
the effort to reach out for something that we still haven't been able to define, and it's the constant quest for definition.
That, to me, is the very nature the core of the translation we need here.
Thank you so much for showing us so many different facets of this process.
And there is one final point I would like to discuss with you.
And if 13 specifically to your artistic life because Nikola, as well as the academic, is also right there that mentioned before.
So as a novelty, the order could pull out what that contagion mean to you.
Why should a writer cross the boundaries of literature, which in a sense, are the homeland to trespass into the foreign territory, or Madison?
In other words, wouldn't it be better or more efficient if everyone stuck to their role?
Yes. Yeah, I mean, it took me some years to approach medicine.
Of course, there were some autobiographical motivations.
I think it all started when my father got Alzheimer's, and I observed and very closely,
and I became very acquainted with his linguistic impairments as a linguist, myself as a literary student, a scholar.
I managed even though I was his son.
I managed to observe him from, you know, from a critical point of view, almost as if I were doing some, some close reading.
And that prompted me to stop reading quite a lot of literature on the mind, you know, neuroscientific literature.
Some of it, of course, was quite hard for me. But I, you know,
I started speaking with the neuroscientists and I really did try hard to translate what I
as a man of letters said or could say into what a neuroscientist had to say or could say.
It was hard. It was hard because neuroscientists,
at least those I spoke with and I even worked with at some point in New York were quite reluctant to my metaphors.
The language they don't know. I mean, most doctors don't know that they too use metaphors all the time,
even though they think they're using a perfectly shaped and crystallised terminology.
But they're terminologies full of metaphors.
And but they, of course, wouldn't tell you that this is the case because they're looking for, you know, clear and transparent sense.
They want meaning to be graspable for everybody in the same manner.
They don't want ambiguities. On the contrary, we mean people of letters meet the men women of letters in the youngsters.
We cultivate ambiguity. We we we try to look into it.
Now it all started like that, and then I, I became all the more interested in medicine.
Every time I had to see a doctor and every time I realised the doctor had very poor linguistic tools to talk to me or to talk to my my loved ones.
So I, I became ever more aware that medicine today would greatly benefit benefit from literature.
I spoke with even the university faculties in Italy.
Some people, some some professors, became interested in my work.
I was invited to conference says I opened the World Conference on AIDS two years ago because of my novel.
And they even were even tempted to ask me to teach courses in literature for four doctors.
Of course, it was flattering. I didn't do it, but I think it's about the time we really reconnected medicine and literature,
which is something that was at the very beginning of of literature of medicine.
I mean, the bond between medicine and poetry has always been there.
We forgot it. But let's go back to Africa star or the guy I mentioned, the guy who made who named syphilis.
He was an amazing poet and the very, very, very good scientist and medical doctor.
Medicine is a language. It's it's hard to call it a science.
It rests on many sciences, but it's still a very humanistic world of of interests.
We need to rekindle the linguistic awareness of medicine.
Thank you. Need Cohen. And this is absolutely true, and I shall leave you completely.
And that would also, of course, add to the. Once the other of the toll, could that be in the same manner?
Also, literature is a very bodily experience and there is no literary text without the beating heart or thinking mind moving to.
Let me say this, I don't know if you if you if you like me to say this,
but we don't wish I shouldn't silence the fact that you were a medical student yourself at some level and you compare it to literature.
I mean, I think you started as a literature student, then moved to medicine, and after some years in medicine, you moved that back to to literature.
So there could be a more qualified, I believe, a scholar than you to make to conclude these terms.
Thank you very much. Anthony Gola, this is very kind of you, and I thank you immensely for this wonderful talk.
I could not have hoped for a better and fascinating beginning.
And thank you to each one of you for watching this video.
We hope that these reflections will help us find new ways to translate in.
Thank you so much. Thank you and good.