Beatriz Seelaender

Autotheory

---

I am at the English school, summoning the goddesses of patience, explaining Chomsky’s Generativist Grammar to a child’s parents. They don’t understand why I only speak to their child in English, without translating. For the umpteenth time that day, I make a brain out of my hands, telling them their child is a sponge capable of absorbing any language without an intermediate. They blink in disbelief, but three months later they are thanking me, mesmerized at the fluency with which their kids now correct their pronunciation. 

Children are easy to teach. All you have to do is speak to them in the desired language and they’ll be speaking back to you perfectly in no time. It’s adults who give you the real trouble, asking for context and equivalencies, translating things back in their heads. 

“What’s that in Portuguese?”, “How would you say it in Portuguese?”, “Is that the same as this Portuguese word?”. I shut my eyes for a second, posit with my hands: even if I had the answer, I would not give it to them. This is not the way to learn a language: one must breathe it in for what it is, in close reading, throw oneself under the bus, into the current and undercurrent of unfamiliar rhythm, slowly start dreaming in it, slowly discover a new layer of being. 

Neurologists have suggested that there is a separate neural net for every language a person knows. Two words may share the same concept, or approximated concept, but they exist independently from one another, occupying a different space. Not only does that favor the separation between meaning and the object it denotes, it separates meaning itself. It’s as if each language presented a concept under a different light, a different lens. To learn a language is to rediscover the world. Words bend in different places. A concept may become itself. We may become someone else, some split-tongued chameleon. A double-edged tongue from a two-parent household. 

In contrast, to translate something is to shrewdly tame it. Don’t take my word; take Shakespeare’s: shrew denotes a mouse-like mammal, whereas its usual Portuguese translation, “megera”, derives from Megaera, the Greek fury. Though Shakespeare had no way of knowing, the shrew was the first mammal to develop a placenta, meaning we owe it our lives: there is a reason scientists have nicknamed it “Mother Dawn”. In contrast, the second meaning for “megera” in Portuguese is “a bad mother”.  

Let’s not waste too long positing about the inherent malfunction of linguistic comparisons. Monolingual students tend to become suspicious of teachers who cannot immediately come up with an equivalence, as if to know a language meant memorizing the dictionary, and to know two languages meant memorizing a bilingual dictionary. When I tell them it’s not like that, they think I am biding my time until I remember the translation. I get defensive, I pontificate about Saussure’s concept of value, and how to us a lamb is a lamb on the pasture or the table, but to them it’s mutton on the table. How to us this school table is a table, and to them it is a desk, though sometimes to us the school table is a wallet, as we might use “carteira” for both. Moreover, a grownup lamb is a sheep, and two sheep is still two sheep. How do they count sheep at night? But we don’t count sheep, we count lambs. When you grow up, there are no more plurals. But there are a ton of questions. How does one tame sheep? How does one shepherd language? If we must shave off the wool, do we pull or push it over someone’s eyes? In Portuguese, pulling is pushy. Either way, are we more interested in the sheep or the wool? 

Those are questions I never cared for – my mother loves them, so perhaps I was being a rebel. Years of decent English schools have left me with an emergency break in my mind in case any translating instinct creeps in, which it never has. There are different channels for different languages, which is why they never run interference. Languages are not lines running in parallel to each other, but wobbly strings springing in opposite directions. Getting them to conform into vertical maneuvers so as to stand side by side is, at least, uncomfortable. 

Unfortunately, translation classes were mandatory during my English and Portuguese degree. Go figure. It felt like the professor wanted to reach my brain through my throat, smash it into crumble, and bake it to sprinkle it over ice-cream. Mixing languages seemed profane and unnatural – like the mixing of unrequited chemicals, the energy required to even catalyze this reaction could break a spine. Pushing the strings and hardening them into artificial sludge for brand new bones – the construction plan for the Tower of Babel, which was the Tower of Babel in itself, because it can only ever be idealized and never built. 

As I child I thought I’d solve the problem of translation by learning every language, as children are capable of. Unfortunately, I didn’t, and my brain, like the finest sponges, has deteriorated into poriferous dampness. I may never learn Russian, meaning I might have to read Tolstoy in translation. Still, I do make an effort – over ten years ago I told myself not to buy any book in translation if I was in the least bit familiar with the language it’d been written in originally. Thus, I have saved a pretty penny, managed to get through German and Spanish, and acquired shameful lacunae in my knowledge of French literary classics. I’ll learn French one day. This is my emotional support lie. 

Throughout the challenging semester of translating random texts into Portuguese, I cursed and rolled my eyes and walked in circles. I knew what the words meant, but I didn’t know what the words were. I did not want to grab them in the wild; they would bite me. It would take me ages to get through a single sentence. Only by the fifth or sixth homework did I realize I could look in the dictionary. That I did, in fact, possess an English-Portuguese dictionary – that I had, as a matter of fact, been quite offended when I received it as gift, as if my English-speaking qualifications had been put into question. Yet now I understood its value: the dictionary was my friend. With it, my mind broke a little less trying to spot a word’s soul mate, and the process became quicker. 

Nevertheless, I still do not understand how those simultaneous translators do it; change from channel to channel without breaking the remote. Isn’t that what happens to a lightbulb after constant switching off and on? Don’t you start speaking like a bilingual character in a YA novel, peppering in some obvious idioms? Or do languages lose their distinct color? They all start tasting the same on your tongue? The neural pathways fold into themselves and the concepts are joined in whole mother tongue laundry? 

Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, first published in 2021, centers around an unnamed woman who works as a simultaneous English and French translator at the Hague. The narrator is an opaque center, which is justified by a wandering childhood and a certain rootlessness which, we are told, is inherent to most of her profession. She has grown up all over developed countries, collecting languages along the way. The book sees her search for an anchor in the arms of a married man, recently separated from his wife. Though the protagonist is an interpreter, she struggles to interpret this man’s actions, as well as those of everyone around her – which includes a bookdealer who may or may not have been attacked, his twin sister, and the narrator’s best and only friend Jana, whose defining quality is to live in a dingy neighborhood, the one where the bookdealer was (or wasn’t) attacked. Our protagonist is keenly interested in gossiping about those people who inhabit the edges of her life, and not extremely focused on her day-job, which consists of interpreting for an accused war criminal she refers to as “the former president”. 

The verdict on these war crimes has been long passed in her mind – “He surveyed the lawyers around the table, he could not bear them because they were the physical manifestation of his culpability, of which I had little doubt,” our narrator admits without shame. She would not be allowed to serve on a Jury, yet she is the one in charge of interpreting his testimony faithfully and without prejudice: She should in no way be allowed to serve on this case.

Truth be told, I bought this book because I’d thought, upon reading the synopsis, that the former president was a US president. Perhaps that is due to either Western bias or Global South wishful thinking – in any case, the character in the book is described as the former president of an African country. We are not told which country, as it matters little to the narrator. She is more interested in describing the operational system of a coffeemaker. Throughout the novel, several people from the nameless country protest the trial, and many times our narrator is warned against imperialist bias – hypotheses which she dismisses with impervious nonchalance. Even as she concedes that the former president has a point about the Court’s role in fomenting neocolonial traps (“in the end, you are part of the institution that you serve”), she does not doubt his blame for a second – the interaction is portrayed as the familiar “The Villain Has a Point” trope, as he remains a villain for his alleged actions, even if cleared of all charges. 

According to My Mother, whose master’s dissertation was about legal translation, cases of this magnitude should ideally be handled by a lawyer with linguistic proficiency and a theoretical background in translation. When I told her about this book, she explained that European legislation is groundbreaking and rock-solid. There are minimum guidelines in place concerning the rights of the accused, and those are for each member of the European Community to follow – adding, yet never subtracting. Portugal, she mentioned, was recently sanctioned for failing to draft its legislation before the deadline. One of the most important guidelines is that every accused person has the right to a translator who speaks the language they are most comfortable with – thus the significance, for example, of the mix-up at the beginning of Intimacies, when an accused war criminal (a different one) refuses to speak to our protagonist in French. She is unnerved and scared: despite acknowledging he does in theory have a right to speak Arabic, she sees his attitude as childish as he clearly is fluent in both languages. But perhaps he believes an interpreter with a similar background would be more sympathetic or less biased. 

I’d be more convinced of the guilt of such “war criminals” had it not been for the events of the past decade in my own nameless Latin American country: in Brazil, I have watched imperialist propaganda turn public opinion against a man who’d left office with an 87% approval rating. I have seen them replace the democratically elected president under bogus corruption charges, and I have seen US collaborators put up my country for sale. Since then, I have been paying more attention – to Nicaragua, to Peru, to Venezuela, and to every Latin American country which has recently elected a leftist leader who is not afraid to speak out against US Imperialism. 

The narrator in Kitamura’s novel easily shrugs off the supporters of the former president protesting in front of the Court. Everything about it in the novel is exasperatingly non-committal. Western liberals could read this novel and concentrate on the symbolism of linguistic accuracy and the protagonist’s complicated Asian-American identity, nodding in self-congratulatory acknowledgement of some US war crimes. Tell them that every single living US President, apart from Carter, should be tried at The Hague, though, and they may have some qualms. 

The first qualm might well be a legal one: the US is not a member of the International Crimes Court, and therefore cannot have its war crimes tried in this (or any) manner. Moreover, a bill passed by US Congress in 2002, on the eve of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, authorizes “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court.” Informally known as The Hague Invasion Act, this law extends beyond American citizens to citizens of any member of NATO – meaning, in effect, these countries may commit war crimes untried. Unless of course The Hague wants a full-scale army invasion on their hands. 

Imagine what a refreshing novel Intimacies could have been: a former US President accused of war crimes faces trial at The Hague, which may prompt a constitutionally ratified invasion of an EU member. Instead, noted drone-bomber Barack Obama is recommending the novel for his Book Club. Whatever questions Kitamura might have presented in the text, they were obviously not articulated beyond a left-eyed wink-wink to anti-imperialists.  

A book that Obama has certainly never read – and would not make it into his book club if he ever did pick it up – is Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America. It was famously gifted to him by former Venezuelan president – and stone-in-the-shoe-of-US-imperialism – Hugo Chavez. When asked about whether Obama would understand the book, Galeano said he would not. “To be sure, he gave it to Obama with the best intentions in the world (…) but he gave Obama, as a present, a book written in a language that he doesn’t know.  So, it was a generous gesture, but a little wicked,” Galeano explained. 

Yet perhaps the books that we most desperately need to read are those written in languages we do not know. Veins of Latin America does have plenty of translations, yet there is something to the unbridgeable gap described by Kitamura’s protagonist in foreign coverage of the book. Everything in it is fairly obvious to any educated Latin-American, but in the US people are predisposed to stop listening once the ideas start contradicting their national ideology of patriotism, and unfortunately the words “Western Imperialism” have somehow become dog whistles. 

In Europe the deterioration of critical political thought is not as serious – in Intimacies, one of the Dutch characters is a Marxist, though he is portrayed as a hypocrite in the typical manner of neoliberal neutralizations. He is also the only interesting character; the only one, including the narrator, who seems to have any interiority whatsoever – a paradox if there ever was one. This man, Anton, is the same whose attack at the beginning of the book is put into question later. In fact, the entire reason he has been lying has to do with cheating on his never-before-seen wife with a very-much-out-of-his-league girl (who may well be his wife, a thought that never occurs to our interpreter, however unlikely it may have been). His attitudes exist in contraposition to those of the love interest Adriaan, who against all expectations is not cheating on the protagonist with his wife. 

Despite our narrator’s admiration for him, Adriaan seems to offer us no personality traits other than a home he insists his girlfriend stay at while he travels to see his family in Portugal. He is a rich man of few words and stable habits. He gives her no clarifications or satisfactions, effectively ghosting her well into the novel. Through it all, the protagonist admits she would forgive him in a heartbeat – and reader, she does. 

It is through this enigmatic boyfriend that she meets another potentially interesting figure, though he too soon fades into the background. The character, posed as an antagonist of Adriaan’s, also becomes an antagonist for the narrator once she discovers he is part of the accused war criminal’s defense team. Portrayed as a sexually menacing presence, this character is given even less nuance than Anton. The narrator finds his job morally offensive, though she admits to the inalienable rights of legal representation. Not once does she wonder if it’s not actually her job that is unethical, or the way she is doing it. 

People have often pointed out that there is a German word for everything – from silly mental reminders (Äselbrücke) to existential dread (Weltschmerz) – but the lack of words for basic concepts is the most glaring in the English language. Why does the United States, the nation that has thrown and supported the greatest number of coup d’états, not have its own word for it? Why does Oxford dictionary define “liberal” as both “supporter of policies that promote social welfare” and “supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes free enterprise”? Perhaps they should define oxymoron next. Much of the political discourse of the past few decades has depended on the knowledge and good-faith of translators who know that, in any other language, liberals are not quite keen on the welfare state. Not that American liberals are, either – their supporters are often deceived into thinking they are supporting the Left, when they are simply falling for the good-cop-bad-cop act (something, it turns out, that is difficult to translate into other languages). 

Be that as it may, I never bought into this inherent distrust of the colonizer’s tongue. I am, after all, writing in English. A language is what you make of it – people who make the argument that linguistic structure denotes an imperialistic mindset need to actually pick up a book of Linguistics. Though language is and always has been an instrument of colonization, perhaps we are ill-advised to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If a language is a lens through which to see the world, it might be wise to collect as many as one can – even if it is no guarantee we won’t try to tame these perspectives to our liking, as is the case with our narrator. With its calcified discourse of typical dog whistles, of which “talking point” is the easiest way to discredit an idea, English needs the creativity of second-language speakers to give their opinions from scratch, unaffected by formulaic headlines of discourse genres. On the paradigmatic sphere, it seems that the English-speaking world is proofed to bar any serious talk of left-leaning politics. Let the alarms go off.   

It is not enough to be decolonial. It is actually beside the point to be decolonial all the while colonization is still happening in various spheres. It is actually offensive to Global South citizens such as myself to listen to Ivy League pricks disavow Kipling and Gaugin while still supporting Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, much more active and much more alive agents of colonization. The problem with USAmerican liberal ethos has always been a stubborn immunity to contradiction. The false dichotomy forced upon them since birth has been a bipartisan system with the very same goals, focusing their attention on irrelevant issues while their military pillages the world. 

Once again, I subscribe to Noam Chomsky: current political discourse exists “so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is” (from Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky). 

And that is the rest of the iceberg alluded to by Intimacies from a satellite transmission at our narrator’s apartment in The Hague. But this is an iceberg she is inherently disinterested in considering – it only matters outside of the text. Whatever “the point” is – compartmentalization, meaninglessness, alienation – it is not made clear enough by the text, so that this novel’s politics (and I don’t think it’s mandatory for a novel to be intentionally political, unless that is its clear goal) are extremely vague, entirely dependent on symbolism lacking allegoric orientation. 

For example, significant attention is paid to the narrator’s living arrangements throughout the book, so that it presents as some sort of allegory for occupation, although I’m not sure what to make of it. There is a clear mention of the Dutch-Portuguese colonial wars in Brazil – it not being irrelevant that Adriaan has left for Portugal (a country recently sanctioned for insufficient laws on interpreting), effectively abandoning her in the family apartment. Does the colonized become the colonizer, to that effect? Only if you accept the rhetoric of a woman’s body as a space to be colonized, and that is not referenced in the text. However, our narrator definitely feels like a colonizer, in the uncomfortable position of “looking after” the apartment while Adriaan is out. The same way imperialist forces interfere in elections and throw coups, declaring random officials rightful leaders, he has put her in charge of his wife’s house. The puppet metaphor does adjust well to the narrative – as an interpreter, she is the one people talk through.  

Of course, the Netherlands lost that colonial war – not before pillaging everything they could from the Brazilian Northeast. Don’t worry, there was still plenty left for the Portuguese to continue their pillaging. In any case, the reference to this episode of colonial history happens during a visit to a museum. In the longest pages of the entire book, the protagonist feels the need to describe a painting to us. I rolled my eyes – this is just like Villette, I thought. And then I realized it was, in fact, eerily and intentionally similar to Charlotte Brontë’s most monotonous book. For who could forget the passage in which our unremarkable main character Lucy Snowe stares at a painting for pages on end? Everyone, except David Lodge cited it in The Art of Fiction, a book every English degree cherishes to the point of being convinced to actually read the snooze-fest that is Villette by Charlotte Brontë. 

In both novels, an entirely feckless woman moves to an inhospitable town in the Low Countries for a job involving her language skills. Both have unbalanced relationships with their love interests, who seem not to particularly care for them romantically. Both women are lonely in a strange town that makes them feel a special kind of unwelcome, and both spend their time passing judgment on their colleagues and friends, wishing more people liked them. They go to museums and speak French and feel sorry for themselves. 

However, it must be said that Intimacies is not as tiresome as Villette – on the contrary, it is succinct to a fault. As theme and premise are the same in both, I was no doubt deceived by Kitamura in thinking plot progression would also follow suit. This was the one commonality I was looking forward to, as the ever-irritated Paul Emmanuel – the second love interest who is a nuisance to Lucy in the first part of the novel – did bring some dynamism to Brontë’s story. Intimacies could have made for a fine aemulatio had it included a Paul Emmanuel-esque character to make our current Lucy Snowe a little less obstinate. At first, I thought it would be the lawyer – then, Anton. Then, no one. The book was coming to an end. Adriaan comes back. He and the narrator move forward with their relationship. In Villette, prospects aren’t as sunny – conspiring to separate him from Lucy, Mr. Paul’s family sends him to run a plantation in Guadalupe. As one does. To be fair, going off to run a plantation is as appealing a romantic impediment as going off to serve in the US Army is to current romance novels – but that in not in my, or the Hague’s, jurisdiction. 

Unlike the crimes depicted in Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo, first published in 2000. The story takes place in a remote Mozambican village by the name of Tizangara, where strange explosions have begun to kill UN agents sent there to “keep the peace”. The explosions cause their whole bodies to disappear, except for their penises. Concerned for their agents’ safety, the UN sends an Italian investigator to find the true motives behind these deaths. 

“Thousands of Mozambicans have died, we’ve never seen them here. Now, five foreigners disappear and it’s the end of the world?” The village prostitute articulates the core of international relations better than any USAmerican foreign policy specialist. 

Signor Massimo is not presented under a bad light. Italy was rather late to the colonization game, and did not do nearly as much damage as other European countries. The man carries with him the civilizing mission of ancient Rome, appropriated by Western ideology, but very little of the colonizer’s MO. For all his irritation at the village’s inefficiency, I suspect – having lived in that great country of his – it would not be that different in Italy, though it would involve much more bureaucracy. Massimo, like every single Italian, loves him some bureaucracy. He loves a paper trail. Which is a problem, because his reports and pictures all disappear in a very magically-realistic/ realistically-magical way. The papers are still there, blank, as if nothing had been registered on their surface. We must depend on the oral tradition of Tizangara, on the ancestral heritage and its messages, to interpret the events in the novel. Spoken testimonies are the only source, however unreliable. These testimonies invariably draw attention to the fact that Tizangara is not to be understood, and mock the Italian for trying. 

In this novel, most things lose and recover their names cyclically. One must catch them in the act or not catch them at all. That is why the most reliable witness is the village prostitute – as she puts it herself, her denomination does not allow for as smooth a transition: “you (…) will stop being minister. You will move on to ex-minister. But I will never move on. A whore is never ‘ex’. There are ex-nurses, ex-ministers…only there is no ex-prostitute. Whoredom is an eternal condemnation (…)”. 

I am reminded of the Walter Benjamin text The Storyteller, in which the author demonstrates some concern for this dying breed – but the storyteller is both alive and dead in Tizangara, where the dead “tell stories through the living”, and a praying-mantis may well be your grandfather. A translator’s function is, effectively, “to translate the words of the dead,” except “to die” is only to “relatively die,” and this relative death is an untranslatable concept because, like everything in the village, it is mutable; suited to the fancies of language. “Everything has the right of being a word, and every word has the right of not being a thing,” we are informed. 

Moreover, some of the villagers are not even speaking Portuguese, but the local tribal language – “licking their own tongue” as the saying goes. While much distinction is made between the dialects spoken in different regions of Mozambique – for instance, the corrupt village administrator is also an outsider who does not speak the language of Tizangara – there is virtually no difference traced between European languages. Our primary narrator, the translator called in to help Massimo, initially asks which language exactly he is supposed to be translating, to which the answer is “it doesn’t matter.” 

I never liked the concept of “magical realism”. It has always seemed to me like a semi-offensive generalization. In its most obvious form, it’s a criticism of frustrated attempts at translating. Magic is that which cannot be understood. Magic is a foreign tongue with concepts we’re not willing to grasp. Science used to be magic. The only reason the events of this novel seem like magic to the outsider is his reluctance to learn the underlying structure on its own terms – the bones of the language, in a way, which the translator’s father, an old man on the wrong side of history, hangs up on a tree every night. 

This character, who has retired into the wilderness, no longer speaks any language – he only knows accents. Exactly like the flamingo, which is the same in almost every language. The one in this novel exists eternally in a bedtime story, when he decides he’s had enough and chooses to fly for the last time, creating night in the process. That is his death. His relative death happens whenever he is resurrected by the story, only to die again. 

There’s no such thing as learning a language through translation, unless you’re performing an autopsy on a dead language. Because the act of translation is an autopsy. A living tongue must be killed so that we may run our tests, slice it open without mercy, go over the faults in its DNA as well as what it ate last night, determine which organs are ripe for collecting. Maybe not an autopsy, but a transplant. Maybe not a transplant, but a killing. Maybe a resurrection; a butchered reincarnation. Or the opposite, who knows? It’s doing the splits while sewing the split tongue back together. An autopsy-turvy body text needs embalming, but the cat got mine and everybody else’s tongues, meowing in the pithy rhythm of noncritical wisdom. I bite my tongue, which the cat has tied – luckily in English he only “gets” it, whilst in Portuguese I would be in far more trouble, as the accusation is one of eating my tongue. Perhaps the cat had my best interests in mind – it tried to simply bite it, but so loose was it, so lacking in silver, that it dissolved into a land without anything, a cat’s intestines. Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words, says Eliza Doolittle. I hear words all day through, first from him, now from you. I show this film to my students; though perhaps I shouldn’t. Nonsense: it helps to see the English language in action, words changing shape in the characters’ mouths. More than anything, My Fair Lady made me fall in love with the English language. This was an untranslatable movie. Either you get it, like the cat, or you don’t. Living, breathing English, no autopsy necessary. If the cat bit my tongue instead, we may as well both be tongue-tied. Desperately searching for subtitles. Then realizing whoever wrote the subtitles is an idiot because this is not what the characters are saying at all. Realizing the implications of linguistic ignorance and hammering that into my students who still believe that “business English” will save them. Hammering that into academics who think dubbing is the future of accessibility, because they believe ignorance should be made more accessible, as that should be easier than bettering public education. God, I hate dubbing. The liminal spaces of dubbed movies and their unnatural expressions itch in parts of my brain un-scratchable. Though my forked tongue may be a consequence of my (oxidated) silver spoon, why should I ever dub myself? That, more than anything, would mean the triumph of cultural colonialism over independent thought and education. As the translator tells the Italian’s deaf ears, You don’t know how to live in my world, but I know how to live in yours.

---

Beatriz Seelaender is a Brazilian author from São Paulo. Her fiction has appeared in Cagibi, AZURE, Psychopomp, among many others, and essays can be found at websites such as The Collapsar and Guesthouse. Her novellas have earned her both the Sandy Run and the Bottom Drawer Prizes. Seelaender’s poetry has been published by Inflections Magazine, VERSION [9], etc.

Photo Credit: Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash