Borders: Translating Transcultural Experiences brings together English translations of literary works by authors from a number of languages. We have translated source texts that in themselves explore cross-cultural encounters of both collaboration and conflict that reveal identities that are in-between, or “both”, or beyond, developing and challenging ideas of national and global belonging. These encounters and identities are reflected again in the process of translation itself, through which texts, authors, and translators are shown to struggle, survive, and even flourish.

The translators contributing to this volume form part of the Translation and Interpreting Research Cluster at The University of Queensland, Australia. We live and work in Meanjin (Brisbane), the land of the Jagera and Turrbal people. We acknowledge their sovereignty and the knowledge in their stories.

Contributors, University of Queensland

Letter from the Editor

To translate is to contend with boundaries, whether linguistic, regional, cultural, or temporal.  A translation implies that, for its audience, the borders that define the original text are impassable, or else, obstructed.  However, as Barbara Hartley reminds us in her note on translating the work of Itō Noe, “borders are notoriously porous”.

In this special issue brought to us by the Translation and Interpreting Research Cluster at The University of Queensland, translations weave in and out of shadowy bounds, exposing the fluidity and porousness of the boundaries they traverse. 

In doing so, the translations lay bare the violence which so often underwrites the delineation of borders, and the ways in which this determines how borders may or may not be navigated, and by who.  The culture of Ainu indigenous people, whose lands were stolen and identity suppressed by colonizing powers in Japan, comes to us through layers of mediation in Tsushima Yūko’s Tōkina-to: The Story of the Owl God’s Little Sister (tr. Lucy Fraser & Akiko Uchiyama), a retelling of a traditional Ainu story, and in one of Itō Hiromi’s essays from Delicious! (tr. Mariko Kishi-Debski and Tomoko Aoyama), in which a traditional Ainu recipe makes its way to southern California by way of Japanese manga.  Grappling with his role as an unwelcome other and an occupant of Tibetan land, the Han Chinese narrator of Ma Yuan’s “The Khampa Encampment” (tr. Will Gatherer) hypothesizes, “If it were me and I saw an outsider, a non-Tibetan, colliding into people as we were performing our sacred ritual of walking around the Barkhor, then I’d be doing a lot more than just rolling my eyes at them, that’s for sure.” The narrator's identity is defined by the national borders surrounding him.  Although changing and permeable, borders indelibly impact the existence of those whom they include, exclude, and divide.

Editing this issue from Iowa City on the week of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the Exchanges staff is reminded that we work on the stolen land of the Ojibwe/Anishinaabe, Báxoǰe, Kikapú, Omāēqnomenēwak, Myaamiaki, Nutachi, Umoⁿhoⁿ, Wahzhazhe, Jiwere, Odawaa, Páⁿka, Bodéwadmi/Neshnabé, Meskwaki/Nemahahaki/Sakiwaki, Dakota/Lakota/Nakoda, Sahnish/Nuxbaaga/Nuweta and Ho-Chunk Nations.[1]  Our own existence is predicated on the violent delineation of borders.

 These translations refuse a two-dimensional rendering of borders, instead tracing their shifting topographies to reveal their holographic nature.  The selection succeeds in describing the spectral nature of borders while conveying the weight of their material consequences.  We are grateful to Akiko Uchiyama and the other contributors at the University of Queensland for allowing us to edit and publish this bold and brilliant selection.

—Kaylee Lockett, Managing Editor

 

[1] https://english.uiowa.edu/about/ui-acknowledgement-land-and-sovereignty