my loves can never be straightforward
I was reading Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri recently and was struck twice by the keenest blows of self discovery. I was not surprised by the pain, but I was hit nonetheless.
The first was within her essay about the optative mood, which I loved, because I love the optative. I wasn't exactly prepared to be hit in the face with the exact reason why I would love the optative at six pm on a Tuesday, but here we are.
I don't think it is surprising that someone who has been overwhelmed for years with the persistent, perpetual weight of waiting would feel so attached to a mood that expresses wishes and a sense of possibility. It is the mood of hope, of prayer, of want, of expectation, and so of course, of course, I would be enamored with it. One expresses with the optative the things that lurk consistently inside my head: those delusional, hopeful, desperate feelings for change, for interference, for protection.
The second was the line: '[to translate is] to cope with exile.' And that just destroyed me, because it made me think not only about Babel by R.F. Kuang which I am also currently reading, but also about myself and why I am so comfortable with translation.
When I translate, I'm bringing the unknown into my world, my understanding. I'm creating a connection there, where it has possession of me and I of it. I'm situating myself in a space where I shouldn't feel comfortable, and yet I do. I'm working through the shadows, the complications. I'm solving a problem. I'm putting my mark on it, and it's returning the favor. I'm no longer forced to cope with an existence that feels so foreign, I can manipulate the foreign into something that I'm familiar with.
Translation empowers me to accept the unknown, the discomfort. It allows me to feel at home in something that should terrify me, that feeling of being lost, unsettled, ungrounded. It trains me to take charge of that discomfort and work my way through those difficulties until I have made sense of it.
I used to think that I was just naturally attuned to appreciate the process of translation, like it was in my life blood somehow. But this is convincing me that there was something within the nurture side of things too.
~nan