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Translation, Travel, Migration

a
Loredana Polezzi
a
University of Warwick, UK
Published online: 21 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: Loredana Polezzi (2006) Translation, Travel, Migration, The
Translator, 12:2, 169-188, DOI: 10.1080/13556509.2006.10799214

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 The Translator. Volume 12, Number 2 (2006), 169-188 ISBN 1-900650-90-8

Translation, Travel, Migration

LOREDANA POLEZZI
University of Warwick, UK

Abstract. Over the past few years, the connection between travel
and translation has gained currency among scholars of a number
of disciplines, including critical theory, postcolonial studies and
anthropology. Yet the increased visibility of both translation and
travel has tended to hide, rather than highlight, the complexity
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of social as well as representational phenomena linked to both

spatial and linguistic mobility (which encompass, on the one hand,
economic migration, exile and self-exile, diasporas and other
forms of displacement, and, on the other, interlingual translation
and interpretation, self-translation, and instances of multilingual
production). A tendency to use terms in a rather loose and often
figurative manner has resulted in a frequent shift of attention away
from actual practices and their protagonists: the people who travel
and translate, for themselves and for others. The present article
argues in favour of an approach to mobility and translation phe-
nomena which highlights their cultural and historical specificities
while also foregrounding the socio-political implications of both
practices and their interconnections. Such an approach calls into
question a number of traditional assumptions, including the ability
of travel writers to write selectively for a home audience, and the
negative aura surrounding the translator as a potential cultural
traitor. Additionally, stressing the impact of complex instances of
mobility on the contemporary world also invites us to rethink binary
models of identity and of translation, positing multiply translated
(and translating) subjects as the protagonists of today’s global
communication processes.

The British Indian writer simply does not have the option of rejecting
English, anyway. His children, her children, will grow up speaking
it, probably as a first language; and in the forging of a British Indian
identity the English language is of central importance. It must, in
spite of everything, be embraced. (The word ‘translation’ comes, ety-
mologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne
across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that
something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the
notion that something can also be gained.) … Indian writers in these

ISSN 1355-6509 © St Jerome Publishing, Manchester

 170 Translation, Travel, Migration

islands, like others who have migrated into the north from the south,
are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective: because
they, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this
society. This stereoscopic vision is perhaps what we can offer instead
of ‘whole sight’.
Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands, 1992:17-19)

Una donna molto anziana a piazza Dante, vestita in modo decoroso

ma povero, mi si rivolge in italiano, ma con forti inflessioni dialettali:
“Per piacere, mi potrebbe accompagnare al bar Mexico? È la prima
volta che prendo un caffè in un bar in vita mia e non so come si fa alla
cassa”. Uno dei piú lunghi viaggi di cui abbia mai udito. Quel bar era
piú lontano del Messico, pensai, avviandomi verso quelle Indie.
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Fabrizia Ramondino (In viaggio, 1995:18)1

Over the past two decades, travel and travel writing (as a set of practices
and the related textual production) as well as translation (as both practice
and product) have gained wide currency among scholars and critics across
a number of fields. Additionally, increased attention is being paid to migra-
tion phenomena in all their varieties, from mass emigration to postmodern
‘nomadism’, from the plight of diasporic communities to that of individual
lives spent in exile. While well-established debates – for instance, on the
distinction between travellers and tourists – continue to occupy a number of
scholars,2 the focus has to a large extent moved to a discussion of modes of
mobility which encompass both spatial dimensions (mostly associated with
travel, its means, its routes and its narration) and socio-economic ones (usually
connected to migratory movement).3 This shift of focus has drawn attention
to areas which had previously been only marginally explored. Alongside the
aesthetic and educational value of journeys, the two dimensions underlined
by the Grand Tour motto of docere et delectare, studies devoted to travel are
now likely to ask questions related to the nature and function of representa-

1
“A very old woman, dressed quite properly but inexpensively, accosted me in Piazza
Dante, speaking Italian but with strong dialectal inflections: ‘Could you please accompany
me to the Café Mexico? It’s the first time in my life I have a coffee in a café, and I don’t
know what you’re meant to do at the till.’ One of the longest journeys I have ever heard
of. That café was further away than Mexico, I thought, as I was making my way towards
those Indies.” (My translation)
2
See in particular Buzard (1993), Urry (1990, 1995).
3
Such distinctions are not, however, obvious, nor uncontroversial. Mobility phenomena
are almost invariably connected to complex and multiple causes. In his analysis of global
diasporas, for instance, Robin Cohen proposes a subdivision into ‘victim’, ‘labour’, ‘trade’,
‘imperial’ and ‘cultural’ diasporas, but immediately qualifies this typology by noting that it
is “more unambiguous than the history and development of diasporas suggest” (1997:x).
 Loredana Polezzi 171

tions and to issues of politics, voice and agency. How do images produced by
travellers influence the ideological construction of identity and difference?
What roles have travellers and their narratives played in historical phenomena
such as colonialism and empire-building? To what extent have exploration
and exploitation gone hand in hand? Can travel accounts also play resistant or
subversive roles, offering testimonies of and bestowing visibility on peoples
and events that would otherwise be easily forgotten? And, most of all, who
travels today, for what purposes and along what itineraries, with what social
consequences, and leaving what kind of textual traces, written by whom, for
whom and in whose language? Furthermore, the idea of travel as a form of
spontaneous and free movement across space is increasingly compared and
contrasted with that of displacement: the more or less directly enforced relo-
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cation of people outside their place of origin and dwelling. As a result, while
it is still possible to give the word ‘travel’ an all-encompassing meaning, it is
no longer possible to do so in a naïve or uncontroversial fashion: the modes,
causes and protagonists of ‘travel’ need to be specified and qualified, and the
same is true of its consequences.
As illustrated in the passage by Salman Rushdie quoted above, a direct link
is often drawn between contemporary instances of travel and translation, the
latter understood here as both a set of language practices and an existential
condition. It is through notions of mobility that this connection is made, and
Rushdie’s definition of “translated men” with their “stereoscopic vision” has
in fact become an iconic image of contemporary modes of mobility and of
their implications for individual and collective identity. Equally frequent are
reminders of the connected nature of travel and translation, starting from their
etymological roots (movement, transportation of goods, peoples and ideas)
and encompassing historical as well as phenomenological parallels: the way
in which travellers have always relied upon interpreters, as well as acting as
intermediaries in their own right; the need experienced by both translators
and travellers to relay the new through the known, the unfamiliar in terms
of the familiar; the ultimate unreliability of those who travel and those who
translate; their potential to deceive, confound and betray, as well as to act as
reliable guides, mediators and witnesses. Susan Bassnett concisely captured
these similarities and ambiguities when she noted that “the discourse of faith-
fulness that has so dogged translation studies … is also a dominant discourse
in travel writing”, adding that “travelling and translating are not transparent
activities. They are definitely located activities, with points of origin, points
of departure and destinations” (1993:103, 114).
Rushdie’s description of migrant writers carries similar connotations of
potential renewal and threatened betrayal. His assertion of the inevitable,
almost biologically-determined role of English as a means of communication
 172 Translation, Travel, Migration

for post-colonial4 communities – communities which identify themselves

through a double link connecting them to the Western metropolitan centre,
but also to a distant land of origins (the Indian subcontinent in Rushdie’s case,
though African and Arab countries, or Caribbean homelands play the same
role for other individuals or groups) – has sparked contrasting views in the
critical debate about ‘hyphenated identities’. This dramatic destabilizing of
national affiliation and of its traditional association with language (an effect
achieved by invoking notions of mobility which include and conflate travel and
translation) does indeed mask a number of problems and ambiguities, some of
which are brought to the fore at the start of this article by the juxtaposition of
Rushdie’s often-quoted passage with an extract from a less well-known text
by the contemporary Italian writer Fabrizia Ramondino. Here the author’s
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encounter with an old Neapolitan woman reminds us of the microscopic as

well as the macroscopic dimensions of travel, and of the multiple dislocations
it can cause. The woman’s trip to a local café becomes the longest of journeys
once habits and norms concerning social distance and gendered behaviour are
taken into account. Her need for a guide (perhaps also an interpreter, given
her lack of familiarity with standard Italian) underlines how the boundaries
between the familiar and the unfamiliar may well run just outside one’s own
neighbourhood. Her unfamiliarity with a common public place such as a café
highlights the gendered nature of most social spaces. And the fact that this
encounter between the deeply cosmopolitan Ramondino and her older, much
less travelled counterpart should happen in the centre of Naples, one of the
most complex, multicultural and polyglot cities in the Mediterranean, is itself
indicative of the fundamental paradox of contemporary mobility: we can re-
main deeply local (and Ramondino knows this well) even as we live our lives
fully immersed in an intrinsically multiple, layered, ‘globalized’ environment.
If Rushdie invites us to acknowledge the inescapable reality of mobility and
its interconnections with translation in the contemporary world, Ramondino
warns us not to homogenize today’s travellers and their experiences in the
name of any overarching model, not to reduce distances to a pure matter of air
miles, not to forget the deep-seated power of habits and the visionary quality
of our mental maps – and not to underestimate the role of translation, as well
as the need for help in ‘translating ourselves’. Stereoscopic vision does not
just come naturally to all of us.

4
Throughout this introduction, I use the term ‘postcolonial’ to refer to a body of criticism
and an area of study which refute Western-dominated, ethnocentric approaches to cultural
and artistic production; ‘post-colonial’, on the other hand, carries a chronological connota-
tion, indicating the period that follows the age of colonialism. In quotations, however, I
have preserved the original spelling chosen by authors.
 Loredana Polezzi 173

1. Methodological issues and territorial claims

While mobility among different spaces, languages and modes of identifica-

tion can be singled out as one of the marks of contemporary life, it is not an
exclusive prerogative of our times, nor can we reduce it to a specific typology
or a dominant model (pace recurrent media frenzies about migrant invasions
or the renewed popularity of elite models of cosmopolitanism).5 In fact, it
is perhaps precisely their ability to cut across different realities, approaches
and specialisms which has made terms such as ‘translation’, ‘travel’ and, to
an extent, ‘migrancy’ particularly attractive at a time when disciplines are
converging and the textuality of cultures has become a central concern across
the Humanities and Social Sciences. Literary critics, historians, philosophers,
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sociologists, anthropologists and ethnographers, as well as scholars associ-

ated with the emerging fields of cultural and translation studies, are among
those who have seen the usefulness of these notions and adopted them as
‘ciphers’ of the contemporary world. Yet perhaps inevitably the tendency has
been for these concepts to become somewhat fuzzy and frayed at the edges.
Their frequent appearances and their malleability, which have been central
to the exceptional productivity of notions of travel and translation, also make
them amenable to generalization and to transformation into almost transpar-
ent labels: containers to be filled by a multiplicity of meanings and practices,
until they become too generic to be truly useful. Excessive popularity can
be a dangerous thing in academic circles, and both travel and translation run
the risk of becoming victims of their own success, of being made invisible
(again) by their omnipresence. After a long period when they were treated as
‘marginal subjects’ and overlooked as ‘minor genres’, both travel (writing)
and translation are now identified as strategic areas of enquiry, but, paradoxi-
cally, this exposes them to a double threat of erasure: being swallowed up by
‘bigger players’ and seeing their specificities diluted into a series of generic
references no longer associated with dedicated methodologies and research
questions; or being discounted as fashionable labels, to be ‘done’ by theory
and then quickly superseded by the latest trend (after all, the logic of fashion
is also the logic of the unfashionable, seen as ‘last season’s model’).
It was only a matter of time before the two concepts of ‘translation’ and
‘travel’ also became blurred into each other, offering an emblematic (and
often metaphorical) representation of the complex patterns of mobility which
have become synonymous with the human condition in (post)modern times.
Postcolonial Studies is one of the areas which have given particular impulse
to this association of travel and translation under the aegis of mobility and

5
See for instance Kwame Anthony Appiah’s latest volume, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a
World of Strangers (2006) and, for a critique of his position, James Harkin’s ‘Cosmopoli-
tanism’, published in The Guardian (Harkin 2006:23).
 174 Translation, Travel, Migration

transfer. By the end of the 1990s, Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi could
write that “at this point in time, post-colonial theorists are increasingly turn-
ing to translation and both reappropriating and reassessing the term itself”
(1999:5). While the two authors approvingly remark on the fact that, thanks
to this reassessment, “we can now perceive the extent to which translation
was for centuries a one-way process, with texts being translated into European
languages for European consumption, rather than as part of a reciprocal pro-
cess of exchange” (ibid.; italics in the original), there is more than a hint of
irony in Trivedi’s subsequent observation (1999:13):

In current theoretical discourse, then, to speak of post-colonial

translation is little short of a tautology. In our age of (the valorization
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of) migrancy, exile and diaspora, the word translation seems to have
reverted from its figurative literary meaning of an interlingual trans-
action to its etymological physical meaning of locational disrupture;
translation itself seems to have been translated back to its origins. As
André Lefevere suggested, ‘the time may have come to move beyond
the word as such, to promote it to the realm of metaphor, so to speak,
and leave it there’ ….
Meanwhile, however, the old business of translation as traffic be-
tween languages still goes on, in the once-and-still colonized world.6

It is clear that Trivedi has no intention of relinquishing translation, of relegating

the term to the metaphorical realm and leaving it there. What he points out,
rather, is the need to anchor translation firmly to historically located practice,
to that “traffic between languages” which still speaks of asymmetrical power
relationships “between the various local vernaculars” and “the one master-
language of our post-colonial world, English” (ibid.).
Something similar can be said about travel, and other related forms of
mobility, as well as travel writing. Travel, as already underlined, is a multiple
activity, encompassing temporary and voluntary displacement, repeated move-
ment, exile, diaspora. Places of origin are often plural and unstable, in spite of
the enduring appeal of traditional labels such as ‘mother country’ or ‘patrie’.
‘Arrival’ and ‘destination’ are equally ambiguous notions, and do not always
constitute part of individual or collective itineraries. It is both significant
and comforting to observe the growing recognition of the spatial dimensions
of textuality and of social practice, as in Michel de Certeau’s often quoted
remark that “every story is a travel story, a spatial practice” (1984:115),7 or
Arjun Appadurai’s assertion that the new modes of mobility (of people and

6
The quotation included in this passage is from Lefevere (1994:vii).
7
De Certeau’s maxim is often quoted in connection not only with travel writing (see for
instance Clark 1999:28) but also with new spatial conceptions, such as those involved in
computer-generated environments (see Fuller and Jenkins 1995).
 Loredana Polezzi 175

knowledge) enabled by mass migration and by the electronic media are the
linchpins of a “rupture” which is in the process of creating “diasporic public
spheres” (1996:3-4). Yet such wide-ranging assertions (especially when quoted
in bite-size and decontextualized form, as I have just done) can become dis-
tracting and allow a shift towards the generic use of terms which have very
material correlatives and a dramatic impact on the lives of individuals and
communities.
In exploring the relationship between travel and translation, therefore, we
need to be aware that both practices are frequently seen as metaphors of mo-
bility and flux, and as closely linked to the globalized nature of contemporary
‘postmodern’ society. But this awareness of the abstract, iconic quality acquired
by the link between travel and translation must not discourage us from asking
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more detailed and probing questions of a methodological as well as ethical

nature. In order not to essentialize both translation and travel, it may therefore
be useful to concentrate on the practices, realities and social actors residing
within the labels. The metaphorical slide needs to be resisted if we are not
to give up our ‘words’ and the analytical power which accrues to them. This
argument has been put most cogently – with respect to translation, travel and
the connections between the two – by Michael Cronin. In his two latest books,
and in a number of articles devoted to related topics, Cronin has underlined
the increased currency of the terms within both popular culture and academic
discourse (2000a, 2000b, 2002a, 2002b, 2003). He links this growth of inter-
est to the specificities of information flows and interpersonal exchange in our
globalized, yet also firmly local, post-colonial world, but also underlines a
paradoxical state of affairs whereby travel, and especially translation, are both
over-used as a convenient shorthand for complex phenomena and overlooked
when it comes to detailed analysis of intercultural contact and communication.
Cronin criticizes, in particular, scholars such as Mary Louise Pratt and James
Clifford, whose work, while extremely influential and inspirational for many
scholars of travel and of translation, is marked by a notable lack of attention
to the actual “phenomenon of language and translation in the travel experi-
ence”, as well as “the entire body of scholarly work” produced by translation
studies (2000a:102, 4). Pratt’s notions of transculturation and of contact zones
– which are central to the argument she develops in Imperial Eyes (1992), her
extended study of travel writing and colonialism – are particularly useful for
a critical practice intent on taking a closer look at the way in which travellers
interact with the people they encounter (travelees, to use another of Pratt’s
fortunate coinages). Yet having briefly mentioned the issue of “contact lan-
guages” (pidgins and creoles) in her introduction (1992:6), Pratt then reserves
little consideration for linguistic practices in situations of contact, or for “the
problematic transcultural role of the interpreters” (Cronin 2002a:53).
While there are so far very few studies of mobility and translation, it is
however true that a number of scholars are calling for precisely such areas to
 176 Translation, Travel, Migration

be explored. In their ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Companion of Travel

Writing, for instance, Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs note that “translation
studies has brought another dimension to travel, giving thought not only
to translation between languages but also between cultures” (2002:9). In
an earlier remark which makes explicit the colonial roots of the connection
between biology and language on which Rushdie’s figure of the ‘translated
man’ is built, Robert Young states that in investigating “the mechanics of the
intricate processes of cultural contact, intrusion, fusion and disjunction” (an
area we are only starting to explore), some of the “most productive paradigms
have been taken from language” (1995:5). He significantly goes on to make a
parallel between linguistic and sexual contact (ibid.):
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Pidgin and creolized languages constitute powerful models because

they preserve the real historical forms of cultural contact. The structure
of pidgin – crudely, the vocabulary of one language superimposed
on the grammar of another – suggests a different model from that
of a straightforward power relation of dominance of colonizer over
colonized. … If language preserves one major product of contact, a
second, less usual model … is equally literal and more physical: sex.
… The historical links between language and sex were … fundamental.
Both produced what were regarded as ‘hybrid’ forms (creole, pidgin
and miscegenated children), which were seen to embody threatening
forms of perversion and degeneration and became the basis for endless
metaphoric extension in the racial discourse of social commentary.

As Sherry Simon rightly remarks in commenting upon this same passage, “it
is surprising that Young does not look to translation as a site for investigating
intercultural contact”, particularly in view of the stress he puts on language
and on the realities of cross-cultural communication (2002:11). Yet both that
stress and Young’s comments about the historical (mis)fortune of hybrid-
ity and of its “endless metaphorical extension” are particularly fruitful for
an analysis of the connections between translation and travel phenomena,
including migration, as well as of their discursive construction. Can we re-
ally take a ‘collaborative link’ between physical mobility and translation for
granted? And can we attribute positive connotations to that connection and to
its products, as does, for instance, Homi Bhabha, in affirming that “the sign of
translation continually tells, or ‘tolls’ the different times and spaces between
cultural authority and its performative practice”, and that “cultural translation
desacralizes the transparent assumptions of cultural supremacy, and in that
very act, demands a contextual specificity, a historical differentiation within
minority positions” (1994:228; italics in the original)? These may be rightful
aspirations, but Young reminds us that historical processes have not always
been so kind, and that mobility, contact, miscegenation (of people, languages,
cultures) do not always get a positive reception.
 Loredana Polezzi 177

Similarly, we may criticize James Clifford’s reluctance to take translation

phenomena (rather than a figurative notion of translation) fully into account
in his explorations of ethnographic writing, yet it is useful to keep in mind his
recommendation that in rethinking “cultures as sites of dwelling and travel”
and in learning to take “travel knowledges seriously”, we “hang on to travel
precisely because of its historical taintedness, its associations with gendered,
racial bodies, class privileges, specific means of conveyance, beaten paths,
agents, frontiers, documents, and the like” (1997:31, 39). Clifford defines travel
as “a translation term”, adding that all such terms “used in global comparisons
… get us some distance and fall apart. Tradittore, traduttore. [sic] In the kind
of translation that interests me most, you learn a lot about peoples, cultures,
and histories different from your own, enough to begin to know what you’re
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missing” (ibid.:39; italics in the original). The definition used by Clifford is

far from being ideal, since translation is not just a term of comparison or a
generic container word. However, his call for an awareness of the strategic and
contingent way in which translation can be used, and his invitation to encour-
age our curiosity while at the same time remaining conscious of the partiality
of our perspective seem highly relevant for a reassessment of contemporary
critical practice.

2. The politics of travel and translation

What Young and Clifford point out (however indirectly) is that both travellers
and translators, as well as their products, are deeply enmeshed in relationships
of power and in their constant renegotiation. As crucial instances of material
contact and exchange between groups and individuals who perceive themselves
as ‘different’ (and conduct themselves accordingly), both travel and translation
practices are involved in the making and unmaking of representations which
have a central role to play in creating and maintaining (or destabilizing) cul-
tural as well as political and economic hierarchies. Such insights do not come
as a surprise to students of translation: the politics of language involved in
interpreting and translation are a central concern of recent scholarship, and the
complex network of relationships between translation and power has become
one of the focal points of research in translation studies in recent years, as
testified by the work of scholars such as André Lefevere, Lawrence Venuti,
Maria Tymoczko and others.8 Nevertheless, the connection between travel
and translation further highlights the complex nature of such power relations
and the need to think of them in historically and geographically located terms,
resisting any residual temptations to aim for a ‘universal’ model or set of

8
The titles of recent publications in the field also testify to the interest in the topic; see for
instance Translation, Power, Subversion (Álvarez and Vidal 1996) and Translation and
Power (Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002).
 178 Translation, Travel, Migration

parameters, equally applicable to multiple scenarios. Travel and its accounts

bring into focus the power differential which separates all kinds of travellers
from ‘travelees’; 9 while contemporary studies of migration, on the other hand,
underline that an opposite, but equally variegated hierarchy of power applies
in the case of migrant individuals or communities and their hosts.10 Perhaps
this reversal of power relations is, in fact, the fundamental difference, beyond
innumerable variables and contingencies, which distinguishes the ‘traveller’
from the ‘migrant’, both in his or her own mind and in the eyes of others.
Language and translation issues are crucial to both travel and migration
scenarios, and are vital when it comes to their critical analysis. As recently
noted by Charles Forsdick, “the rise of travel literature … crystallizes a series
of concerns central to contemporary literary and cultural studies, relating to
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colonial and postcolonial issues: interculturality, translation, the desire to

describe grounds of comparison according to which the metropolitan and the
non-metropolitan may coexist in a non-hierarchical relationship” (2005:158).
We can easily reverse Forsdick’s statement and ask how it might be possible
to study colonial and postcolonial contexts without devoting explicit atten-
tion to issues of translation – but whichever way we phrase the connection,
the need to ask questions about hierarchical relationships (their history, their
overturning, …) remains unchanged. Talal Asad was among the first scholars
to focus on such questions. In his analysis of the concept of ‘cultural transla-
tion’ and of the increasing importance it has come to occupy within the field
of contemporary anthropology, Asad pointed out that the fundamental problem
for the (cultural) translator is not deciding between a contextual interpretation
of cultural data and one which is not contextual, but rather “determining the
relevant kind of context in each case” (1986:151). In the same article, however,
Asad also denounced the notion of ‘culture = text’ as a fallacy (ibid.:155):

society is not a text which communicates itself to the skilled reader. It

is people who speak. … The privileged position that [the anthropolo-
gist] accords himself for decoding the real meaning of what [others]
say can be maintained only by someone who supposes that translating
other cultures is essentially a matter of matching written sentences in
two languages, such that the second set of sentences become the “real
meaning” of the first. … In other words, it is the privileged position
of someone who does not, and can afford not to, engage in a genuine
dialogue.

9
See for instance the already mentioned work by Pratt, as well as Campbell (1988), Clark
(1999), Duncan and Gregory (1999) and Hulme (1986).
10
For an overview, see Cohen (1997); an excellent in depth study of localized phenomena
which also gives large space to language issues is Parati (2005).
 Loredana Polezzi 179

Here Asad is underlining what he calls “the inequality of languages”

(ibid.:156): an asymmetry of power which invites the (bad) translator to force
all original testimonies to ‘make sense’ in the terms of the receiving culture
and language, sustaining the assumption that “translation is essentially a matter
of verbal representation” rather than a more complex process in which “the
construction of cultural discourse and its translation … seem to be facets of
a single act” (ibid.:160; italics in the original). Such assumptions are first
made possible and then kept alive by the presence of a dominant force in the
communication process. This asymmetry of power is sustained through eco-
nomic and political mechanisms which make resistance difficult (though not
impossible). And, under such conditions, “the process of ‘cultural translation’
is inevitably enmeshed in conditions of power” (ibid.:163).
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Returning to the theme of translation years later, Asad placed even stronger
emphasis on the need to attend to the historical and textual embodiment of
translation, noting that “translation is … at once a sequence of human acts and
a narrative recounting it, both being and representation” (1995:325). He then
went on to note that “it is precisely what people do, and what they are able
to do, that has received inadequate attention from those who are interested in
translation theory”, and to suggest that “we need a more systematic consid-
eration of the social preconditions and consequences of translating Western
discourses on a range of social practices”, because “what is called modern
world culture turns out to be rooted not in images … but in social practices
of power [in which] access to ‘modern world culture’ by ‘local audiences’
becomes a matter of translating from ‘stronger’ languages to ‘weaker’ ones,
a change from ‘worse’ ways of living to those that are ‘better’” (ibid.:329-
30). Asad’s recommendation that we keep our eye firmly trained on practice
and on its material and ideological consequences can anchor the analysis of
translation and travel to social reality and prevent the flight into metaphor.
His position firmly reminds us that both travel writing and translation are
forms of representation which, far from being neutral or academic, have both
practical and moral consequences. In a similar vein, discussing the power of
representations of space, Trevor Barnes and James Duncan have noted that “the
question of representation … is both epistemological and moral. On the one
hand, it poses the question of the translatability of cultural difference – how
do we know that our point of view is also the one of the native whom we seek
to represent? On the other hand it also raises the question of the morality of
speaking for others” (1992:7).
Speaking for others is something that both travellers and translators need to
do all the time, and today that professional requirement is made more complex
and fraught (or perhaps just more visible) by the presence of multilingual,
multicultural audiences. Both the traveller/writer and the translator are finding
 180 Translation, Travel, Migration

it increasingly difficult to avoid the question posed by postcolonial scholars

such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Sujit Mukherjee and Gayatri Spivak: who speaks,
and also who translates, for whom? (Ngũgĩ 1986, 1993, Mukherjee 1994, Spi-
vak 1993, 1995). There is no single, absolute answer to this interrogation (and
indeed Ngũgĩ, Mukherjee and Spivak give substantially different answers),
yet the question cannot be ignored. In fact, it has potentially pervasive and
dramatic consequences for our understanding of both translation and travel
writing. Maria Tymoczko has remarked that “as the world gets smaller, more
and more of what is read is literature-in-translation, more and more literature
is produced in an international context” (1999a:16; see also Tymoczko 1999b).
This situation gives rise to both production and reception scenarios which do
not easily fit with well-worn binary models of ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘home’ and
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‘abroad’. Increasingly often (and as a matter of course in the case of post-

colonial writing), authors address multiple, complex audiences. Their works
may receive (or strive for) the patronage of international publishing houses,
of powerful brokers such as metropolitan intellectuals, or of individuals who
have successfully made the journey from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘centre’, as in
the case of Spivak. Authors may opt to produce originals in a language which
gives them access to a larger audience (a macroscopic phenomenon in the case
of Anglophone literatures), or make a political statement, as Ngũgĩ did, by
renouncing Western languages in the name of a local mother tongue and the
community associated with it. In other cases, it is translations that are produced
with complex rationales and targets. Travel texts, for instance, may find a large
audience among the people they purport to represent (or their descendants),
whether out of curiosity or in an attempt to harness the prestige which can be
bestowed by the gaze of a powerful outsider. Elsewhere, translations may
be published for plurilingual home audiences which share access to an ex-
colonial language. At the same time, the ambiguous role of the self-translation
(or language censorship) exercised upon themselves by postcolonial writers
is crucial to the work of scholars/writers such as Ngũgĩ. And both minority
cultures and migrant experiences are providing us with texts which bear the
mark of translation in their own genetic imprint and question the notion of
‘mother tongue’, as, more and more often, we encounter authors as well as
communities which simply cannot be identified with, nor feel at home in, any
one language.
For travellers this means an increasing awareness of the fact that a compart-
mentalized audience is effectively an impossibility, and that the circulation
of travel writing among travellers and ‘travelees’ is an inescapable reality,
only to be ignored at one’s own peril. Indeed, the rise in the number of self-
deprecating, ironic travel texts and the increasingly popular choice of irreverent
but also unprepossessing personae on the part of their authors/narrators – a
 Loredana Polezzi 181

trait often noted in twentieth-century travel accounts – is in all probability at

least partly to be ascribed to such awareness on the part of the traveller.11 Ad-
ditionally, recent criticism has underlined the way in which the (in)visibility
of translation affects the perception of ‘sameness’ and ‘otherness’ in travel
accounts. Michael Cronin (2000a), in particular, has explored the multiple
representations of interpreters and translators within travel accounts and their
political implications. Seen in this light, the connection between translation,
travel and migration raises fundamental questions about the way in which we
perceive the link between language, national or ethnic identity, and individual
voice. It also asks for a closer examination of our assumptions about who the
translators and the interpreters are and what roles they play in society.
A similar de-centring and destabilizing move is also needed with regard to
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our models of the translation process. The binary image of translation which
couples source and target text, source and target language, source and target
culture, with its ‘one-size-fits-all’ aspirations and its rigidities, is increasingly
unable to offer a sound basis for the analysis of contemporary writing and
publishing networks. Such models need to be re-read and revised in view of
new modes of mobility and community formation, in which, as Appadurai
has pointed out, media and migration, mobility and access to information af-
fect subjectivity and imagination, and “moving images meet deterritorialized
viewers”, creating new social realities (1996:4). Ultimately, this is a route
which should lead us to question the continuing reliance of translation studies
on models that assume as normative the movement of a stable, monolingual
original from the source to the target language – these latter to be understood
as two equally fixed poles, identified with national languages. The result may
be a more flexible and pervasive image of translation, which encompasses a
wide range of practices, from self-translation to multilingual writing, from
community interpreting to inter-media adaptation, without losing sight of the
geographically and historically located nature of practices and of their ethical
as well as social dimension. Such a conception would be able to accommodate
Rushdie’s “translated men”, with their whiff of elitarian cosmopolitanism, and
Ramondino’s old Neapolitan lady, on her journey to Café Mexico.

3. This special volume

This special issue is an attempt to contribute precisely to such a reassessment. It

draws together articles which take a close look at a variety of aspects of travel
– in all its forms, including exploration, migration, (self-)exile, and nomadic
ways of life –, translation – and, to an extent, interpreting and self-translation –,
and their multiple intersections. And while contributors are fully aware of

On irony and anxiety as central motifs of contemporary travel writing, see in particular
11

Holland and Huggan (1998).

 182 Translation, Travel, Migration

the double identity acquired by all of these terms in contemporary scholar-

ship (namely, as material practices and as theoretical concepts), the emphasis
remains firmly on the side of place- and time-specific experience, as well as
its representation and interpretation. All contributions are explicitly located in
a specific historical and cultural context, and the flexibility with which they
use theoretical models and approaches testifies to the need for a more pliable
set of methodological instruments, capable of fostering and facilitating our
understanding of cross-cultural phenomena without forcing them into pre-
existing formats.
The chronological span covered by the articles goes from the 18th to the
21 century, while geographical co-ordinates take us from Britain to China,
st

from Russia to Alaska, from Scotland to Sudan, from South America to the
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United States, and then back into the (multiple and mobile) heart of ‘Old Eu-
rope’. Methodologically, most of the articles combine a micro-approach which
pays detailed attention to specific texts with reflections on the macroscopic
dimensions of the phenomena under examination and on our understanding
of both writing/translation practices and their political and ethical implica-
tions. The most eminent testimony to the complexity of both travel writing
and translation practices can perhaps be found in the variety of text types and
genres covered by the articles: while travel accounts are indeed among the
primary sources analyzed by a number of contributors (St. André, Filonova,
Larkosh), others take their materials from poetry (Toninato), the novel (Steiner,
Cooper, Pireddu), autobiographical or semi-autobiographical writing (Larkosh
again), and even popular music (Susam-Sarajeva). And although writing is
by far the dominant medium explored in all contributions, orality makes a
number of appearances: in the analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
contact between Russian travellers/settlers and non-literate Alaskan popula-
tions (Filonova); in the examination of the interplay between oral and written
traditions in the production of contemporary Romany poets; and in the his-
tory of Rembetika songs and of their repeated migrations across the Bosporus
(Susam-Sarajeva).
The first four articles take a broader view of translation and travel phe-
nomena, analyzing significant moments and cases in the history of their
intersections. James St. André asks probing questions about the respective
prestige and popularity of travellers’ accounts about China and translations
from the Chinese in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. He shows how
travel and translation diverged and competed as modern Europe attempted to
create its own image of China. Claims to personal experience and academic
knowledge were not necessarily combined by writers in order to bolster the
reliability of their work, but could instead be used as competing forms of
textual authority, pitting translators against travellers and, at least in this case,
inciting the British audience to privilege ‘home’ over ‘foreign’ knowledge.
Elena Filonova’s contribution asks complex questions about the role and posi-
 Loredana Polezzi 183

tion of the interpreter in situations of contact where a literate (and dominant)

group encounters a non-literate one, whose cultural transmission mechanisms
are entirely reliant on oral communication. Her article is particularly effec-
tive in showing how interpretative difficulties are likely to be encountered by
both sides, and how the hermeneutic skills of the interpreters place them in a
crucial but ambiguous position with respect to both communities. A similar
difficulty is experienced by contemporary Romani authors who choose to
translate their travelling culture and its oral tradition into a written form of
their mother tongue, as well as into the language(s) of one or more host com-
munities. Their case, which is the subject of Paola Toninato’s contribution,
combines the effort to ‘talk back’ and to engage multiple audiences, in an
attempt to dislodge existing stereotypes about the Roma, with the realities
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of a complex linguistic background implicit in a traditionally nomadic way

of life. The latter, however, is gradually being replaced in both Western and
Eastern Europe by the establishment of semi-permanent camps which enforce
settlement while maintaining marginalization. As a result, those who make the
journey into writing and become ‘translated men’ (and women) are often seen
with suspicion by their own community. Another story of movement between
margins, and now perhaps from marginality to a newly found centrality, is
the one told in Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva’s article. Here, the author traces
the complex history of the musical genre of Rembetika from its Anatolian
origins, through its transplantation into Greece (which coincided with the
migration of thousands of displaced people in the first half of the 20th century),
and finally to its renewed popularity in today’s Turkey, where the genre has
recently become part of a variety of discourses, ranging from the nostalgic
resurrection of Ottoman memories to the political debate about the relaxation
in Greek-Turkish relationships.
The second group of articles focuses on the work of specific authors for
whom the experience of travel and migration has been crucial, both person-
ally and in terms of their artistic production. The authors and texts examined
in these four contributions are linked to the growth of migrant writing, that is
of a form of literature produced by ‘travelled’, ‘translated’ individuals in the
language of a host community (Chambers 1994, King et al. 1995). As observed
by Samia Mehrez, because of their internal “culturo-linguistic layering”, these
texts “have succeeded in forging a new language that defies the very notion of
a ‘foreign’ text that can be readily translatable into another language”; on the
contrary, works “written by postcolonial bilingual subjects create a language
‘in between’ and therefore come to occupy a space ‘in between’” (1992:121).12
This is the case of all the authors examined in this group of articles, though the
label of ‘postcolonial writers’ may sit more comfortably next to the names of
Abdulrazak Gurnah and Leila Aboulela than those of Manuel Puig, Christine

12
On this subject see also Tymoczko (1999a, 1999b).
 184 Translation, Travel, Migration

Brooke Rose and Diego Marani. Yet Puig, who is the subject of Christopher
Larkosh’s article, was a multiply displaced individual, whose (self)-exile took
him from his native Argentina to North America and Europe, and led him to
write works which are deeply marked by the experience of travel and multi-
lingualism. As pointed out by Larkosh, such shifts are not only the product of
the contingencies of Puig’s life and of his geographical travels, but are rather
rooted in his search for an identity-in-motion, a subject position which could
be constantly rewritten and was capable of escaping the constraints of national
as well as sexual boundaries. Tina Steiner’s article on Gurnah and Brenda
Cooper’s piece on Aboulela are in-depth explorations of the themes of lan-
guage and identity in novels by and about displaced postcolonial subjects. Both
authors have experienced migration at first hand, and both make migrants the
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protagonists of their works. Steiner examines the different strategies adopted

by Gurnah’s postcolonial subjects in the novels Admiring Silence (1996) and
By the Sea (2001). She identifies mimicry as the dominant but doomed inte-
gration strategy in the first novel, comparing this with the function played by
translation in the second book, where communication, if initially more prob-
lematic, is ultimately more successful. By the Sea shares with Aboulela’s The
Translator not only the thematization of translation as an activity, but also the
dramatization of the figure of the translator. This is an increasingly popular
choice for contemporary authors (Cronin 2000a, Polezzi 2004), and one which
has led Adriana Pagano to talk of a double ‘fictional turn’ characterized on the
one hand by the “fictionalization of translation by theorists and novelists” and,
on the other, by “a movement of critics and theorists who approach fiction as
a source of translation theorization” (2002:81). It is precisely such a double
movement which can be traced in the articles by Steiner, Cooper and Pireddu
included in this special issue. The contrast between mimicry and translation
drawn by Steiner in relation to Gurnah’s work, with its emphasis on the mutual
effort involved in communication and on the social role of interpreting/trans-
lating, is echoed in Cooper’s analysis of how displacement, alienation and
translation interconnect in Leila Aboulela’s portrait of Sammar, a Sudanese
woman living between Scotland and Khartoum, between her Islamic faith
and her position as a translator in a British institution, between her family of
origin and her newly-discovered love for a Western man. Cooper notes how in
Aboulela’s novel translation needs to become embodied in reality, in objects
and gestures of solidarity, before it can breech the gap between cultures and
individuals, allowing us to function in our daily lives. That breech, however,
only offers an unstable and tentative solution. Equally tentative, and even
more uncomfortable, are the answers given by Marani and Brooke Rose, the
two authors examined by Nicoletta Pireddu. Both a polyglot, experimental
novel such as Brooke Rose’s Between (1968) and the europanto fantasies of
Marani’s newspaper and internet articles break down the boundaries between
European languages and identities. Yet, in doing so, they implicitly reinstate
 Loredana Polezzi 185

those same frontiers, underlining the multiplicity of ‘national’ elements within

the ‘transnational’ subjectivity and expression of their narratives. The result
is an interrogation of notions of inside/outside, of the boundaries which are
meant to be containing national languages, and of those encircling ‘Europe’
itself. Pireddu’s article, then, radically questions what translation and travel,
linguistic and spatial mobility, may mean today, especially if, as many of us
are doing, we pose this interrogative while standing at the heart of the Euro-
pean continent, protected by its cultural hierarchies. Pireddu’s analysis also
posits the translator as a paradoxical hero of our metamorphic contemporary
world, someone who has understood the powers (and is prepared to run the
risks) of mobility and (self-)translation. In this, Pireddu echoes the views of
Zygmunt Bauman, who identified in the “rise of the interpreter” a distinc-
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tive trait of contemporary culture (1987:127). For Bauman, “communication

across traditions becomes the major problem of our time”, and “the problem
… calls for specialists in translation between cultural traditions … [casting]
such specialists in a most central place among the experts contemporary life
may require” (ibid.:143). Marani’s and Brooke Rose’s travellers/translators
also resemble another unlikely hero: the translator-as-apostate portrayed by
the semiotician Paolo Fabbri (2000). This is someone who has moved between
cultures and languages, and discovered that their incommensurability is a
protective myth, an injunction designed to support the identity of competing
groups (be these national, religious, or of any other type). Apostates, travel-
lers, translators must be prepared to transgress that injunction in order to
allow communication and transformation to take place. Like the authors and
characters which inhabit the pages of this volume, they must be prepared to
translate and to become translated.

LOREDANA POLEZZI
Department of Italian, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
[Link]@[Link]

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