Translation as Radical Act

Featuring 120 women artists and collectives from 15 countries (including the United States), the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2017 before traveling to the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil. Using a feminist historiographical lens, curators Andrea Giunta and Cecilia Fajardo-Hill showed how Latin American and Latina artists challenged, subverted, and denied the politically, culturally, and biologically constructed body in favor of a new, rediscovered body, expressed via novel iconographic representations that made way for new forms of imagining, representing, and existing.¹ The show was as revolutionary as the artists included in it: alongside recognizable names like Marta Minujín, Ana Mendieta, and Lygia Clark, the exhibition also presented works by artists who had, until then, received little scholarly or institutional attention.² Thus, the focus of the Radical Women Translation Project has been to address the call to action put forth by the curators and to seek out the oral histories of those artists who had few, if any, previous interviews given or translated into English from Spanish.

The translation project, which I initiated in January of 2022, started with the transcription and translation into English of a ten-minute interview with Argentine artist Marie Orensanz. Appearing to have been conducted as a part of the curatorial research involved in Radical Women, the interview consists of a still shot of the artist in her studio with the disembodied voice of her interlocutor, who sits off camera. Their conversation begins with reflections on her influences and early career. Midway through, a choppy editorial cut introduces us to an event which occurred during the Onganía military dictatorship, a repressive, authoritarian regime that held power in Argentina between 1966 and 1970. In the interview, the artist recounts an exhibition she participated in in the city of Mar del Plata with another artist named Mercedes Esteves which was censored and shut down within a day.

As Orensanz recalls it, while driving from Brazil to Argentina in 1969, the artist happened across a political manifestation blocking traffic in the road: people carrying posters reading, “el pueblo La Gallareta lucha por su única fuente de trabajo” (el pueblo³ La Gallareta fights for its only source of work.) Moved by the demonstration, the artist decided to present the poster as a series of identical, repeating ready-mades lining the exhibition space. While her story was shocking, her closing words were amusing: “The next day they announced they would close the exhibition. They thought that because we were women, we were going to show flowers.”

Marie Orensanz at the opening of her two-person group exhibition with artist Mercedes Esteves. Mar del Plata, Argentina, 1969. Courtesy of the artist.

As the first interview of The Radical Women Translation Project, the translation of Orensanz’s account posed a series of important questions around how to translate artist interviews. Whenever possible the project has drawn from audiovisual interview material, a choice that has largely revolved around the given veracity of the artist’s words, orality and the gestural and tonal inflections which accompany it, as well as the condition of inaccessibility that follow an absence of translated subtitles. However, given the temporal restrictions implicit in subtitling, a form of constrained translation, The Radical Women Translation Project has opted for a method of translated transcription, resulting in a translated text accompanied alongside the original video recordings. As such, the decision to start with recorded video interviews meant that the artist’s body became the point of enunciation, or even the source text itself.

Sandwiched between any source text and translation is a translator. While motivated by a desire to share the contributions of these artists in their own words, so to speak, the project inherently grapples with the impossibility of translation free of intervention: what does it mean to intervene in the stories people tell about themselves, to steward that meaning into a different context where it exists, in many ways decontextualized, and yet with the veneer of wholeness and transparency?

In her essay “The Politics of Translation,” feminist postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak criticizes the propensity for English language translation to homogenize foreign texts “so that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan.”⁴ What Spivak argues against here is the assimilation of the values and the voice of the other into a hegemonic language like English, or in other words, the loss of difference and the erasure of political point of enunciation in a context of unequal power relations between cultures and their interlocutors. Oral historian and translator Bogusia Temple likewise, argues for a reflexive approach to translation in which the biography of the translator, and thus their vantage point and blind spots, are made visible and evaluated together with the resulting translation.⁵

With this in mind, let us consider the case study of the Afro-Peruvian playwright, composer, costume designer, and thinker Victoria Santa Cruz (1922-2014). Santa Cruz was an icon who, together with her brother Nicodemes Santa Cruz, were leading figures of the Afro-Peruvian Reconstruction Era, a mid 20th-century movement and celebration of Black theater, music, and dance drawn from traditions of oral history and aimed at claiming visibility and agency in the political spheres of Peruvian society.⁶  As a white mestiza⁷ and Colombian-American translator, the translation of Santa Cruz’s words required that I seek knowledge in a number of areas from Afro-Peruvian traditional dance and music, translation and race, the historical context and formation of Black communities within the multi-ethnic country, and a review of the artist’s works and collaborations.

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, installation view,
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, September 15-December 31, 2017.
Photo: Brian Forrest.

Like other translations I have undertaken for the Radical Women Translation Project, the translation of Santa Cruz’s interview aims to make the translator’s presence and intervention visible, therefore acknowledging the translation as a new document, a product not only of the artist and the interviewer, but of the translator as well. To this end, Santa Cruz’s translation, like others included in the project, features foreignizing strategies such as the choice to conserve some Spanish syntactic structures and to leave select terms untranslated, accompanied by footnotes. Thus, I have elected to leave certain culturally specific terms untranslated, like jarana⁸ or el pueblo (mentioned in Orensanz’s interview), which cannot be separated from the weft of associations, connotations, and history that shaped them, and therefore possess no true counterpart in contemporary Anglo-American culture.

Indeed, the way that concepts and terms are developed, used, and divided is not always a 1:1 between languages and cultures. These nuances are especially important in oral history translation when representing the experience of others into a hegemonic language like English. Foreignization (and its inverse, domestication) constitutes a translation approach introduced by translation theorist Lawrence Venuti, which can refer to the practice of leaving certain terms untranslated or allowing for the structures that underlie the source language to come through to the translated text, thus signaling to the discerning reader, no matter where or when they encounter the translation, of the translator’s presence. The inverse of this approach is called domestication, a practice which seeks to assimilate the source text to the structures and logics of the target language, producing a text which could deceptively pass for an original.

In the case of Colombian artist María Teresa Cano, in the absence of either English or Spanish-language interview material in audio or visual formats, I was thrilled to be granted permission to translate a text interview written in monologue form by the artist. Here are some excerpts of my work:

“I remember Alberto Sierra invited us young people of that time to participate alongside those who had a professional trajectory.”

“On a long table of almost 4 meters, there were several platters that contained my edible face elaborated with natilla [a traditional Colombian-style custard], chicken and rice, vegetable soufflé, white rice, chocolate, cake, and cookies.”

“The result of all of this was the realization of the exposition Arte correo.”

These translated extracts from an interview with Cano feature noticeable Spanish-language structures and forms. A bilingual speaker of Spanish familiar with the kind of language typically used in Spanish-language art spaces will note that the word trajectory (an uncommon way to refer to mid-career artists in Anglo-American art spaces) derives from the common use of the word trayectoria. Likewise, the second extract features several foreignizing choices, from the syntactic structure itself, which mirrors that of the source text, to the choice to translate elaborado directly to elaborated, a word used in English typically in the context of writing or speaking rather than to describe visual details. The choice to conserve the term natilla accompanied by a brief definition invites a persistence of cultural nuance in the English-language translation. Likewise, the use of the cognates realization and exposition is purposeful, allowing for a direct transfer of the words exposición and realizar.

A more domesticated translation of the same sentences might look something like this:

“Alberto Sierra invited those of us who were emerging to participate alongside more established artists.”

“The project later became the subject of an exhibition titled Arte correo”

“On a table measuring nearly four meters, there were several platters that contained my edible face fashioned from custard, chicken and rice, vegetable soufflé, white rice, chocolate, cake, and cookies.”

In this interview with Cano, originally published in the Colombian visual art magazine ERRATA# in 2017, the artist writes about the above described work Yo servida a la mesa (Me, served as a meal, 1981), the documentation of which was featured in the Radical Women exhibition. Produced during the conceptual art boom that swept Medellín in the 1980s, the work consists of a four-meter banquet table upon which the artist placed a series of edible portraits of her own face which visitors were invited to interact with and even eat.

The translation of María Teresa Cano’s interview is perhaps the only English-language interview material available for the artist. In many ways, a reading of Yo, servida a la mesa is incomplete without the retelling of the conversations that occurred between viewers and the artist while they devoured her likeness. As such the translation choices made by the translator seek to conserve these details within their cultural context (for example, leaving natilla untranslated), while also pointing to the translator’s presence in that retelling.

To translate in a way that refuses to conform totally to values of fluency in English is radical. In his widely influential work, The Translator’s Invisibility: a History of Translation, Lawrence Venuti points out that American cultural standards for translation privilege the feeling of fluency as the ultimate criterion for evaluating the quality of a translation.⁹ Fluency here refers to the assimilation that Spivak criticizes: the illusion that what the reader encounters seems, in the flow and the feel, to show no sign of difference.

Alicia Barney, from the series Diario objeto (Diary object), 1978–79.
Found objects. 16 × 70 × 2 3/4 in. (40.6 × 177.8 × 7 cm).
Courtesy of the artist.

Another useful example can be found in a transcribed and translated interview with Peruvian critic Emilio Tarazona, where pioneering Colombian ecological artist Alicia Barney explains how she came to the decisions that lead her to create her iconic work, Diario Objeto (Diary Object 1978-79). The work, included in Radical Women, is a conceptual, object-based portrait of the artist and the landscape she encountered in the quotidian rituals of her life, and was produced during her time as a student at Pratt Institute in New York City. It constitutes a collection of found objects and detritus organized, as she explains, according to the logic of the quipu, a precolonial Andean note-taking system also famously explored by another artist included in the Radical Women exhibition, Cecilia Vicuña. In the interview, together with Tarazona, the two make connections between Diario Objeto, calendric registers of time, and other works by the artist that address issues of environmental degradation and extinction. The interview fashions a portrait via the artist’s aesthetic and ecological concerns, which, while not explicitly political, point to issues that fix Colombia in a broader context of environmental exploitation by multinational corporations and armed groups, a subject which has been extensively explored in Colombian art in recent years.

When Barney says “me quedé muy impactada,” the translator makes the decision to write “I was left very impacted,” rather than “I was shocked.” Here the approach rejects fluency while making sure that nothing essential in the meaning changes or becomes illegible. The conservation of Spanish syntactic structures, a method called syntactic calque, is considered erroneous within translation norms that privilege idiomatic, or fluent-feeling translations. However, this approach also has a potential function: the preservation of Spanish syntactic structures and cognates allows for the discerning reader, no matter when or where in the future, to recognize that the text is pointing to another text, one ostensibly in Spanish, even if it is nowhere to be found. The translations included in the Radical Women Translation Project use this method sparingly. Other examples like “It’s an [artwork that concerns] memory in a manner” and “I had on the floor everything that I would pick up,” allow for a transfiguration back into the Spanish phrases “de una manera” and “tenía en el piso.” The most radical of these translation decisions in Barney’s interview is the use of the cognate cursar/course that appears in Emilio Tarazona’s introduction of the artist: “The appearance of the magazine Heresies while Alicia Barney courses studies in New York, comes into the story because the number 13 issue of this historical publication, which appeared in 1981, is the reference used by the curators for the title of the show.”

What can the translation of artist interviews do for the production of knowledge?

Drawing from the aesthetic theories of Jacques Rancière, Giunta and Fajardo-Hill show how the pioneering iconographic explorations made by the artists included in Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 amounted to the production of new knowledge.¹⁰ Central to the curatorial thesis of the exhibition was the conviction that these artist’s contributions to contemporary art had been rendered largely invisible within narratives of Western art history, and therefore, that their absence constituted a loss for those of us who, otherwise, may have gained much from experiencing their work.¹¹ In the case of these particular artists, the translation of their interviews both recognizes and responds to this loss.

To translate has always been political. Historically, the dissemination of information and knowledge across language has provoked changes that have enormously altered the course of human history. Artist interviews are history, and their role in the production of knowledge about ourselves and those places we inevitably touch in our hyper globalized context are not only about art objects and the history of art. As the artists included in Radical Women show us, aesthetics and representation are vital to imagining a different world and our place within it, and thus essential to the struggles and unfoldings of political life. The Radical Women Translation Project is indebted to the artists and curators of the Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 exhibition. While the project seeks to expand on Giunta and Fajardo-Hill’s contributions, it also looks to the relationship between the politics and aesthetics of the body and representation that the artists of Radical Women interrogate to think about the politics of representation in language and translation as well.

Bibliography

Eiss, Paul K. In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community, and the Politics of History in Yucatán. Latin America Otherwise. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia, and Andrea Giunta. “Introduction.” In Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, edited by Rodrigo Alonso, Hammer Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (Project), 17–19. Los Angeles : Munich ; New York: Hammer Museum, University of California ; DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2017.

Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia, Andrea Giunta, Rodrigo Alonso, Hammer Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (Project), eds. Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985. Los Angeles : Munich ; New York: Hammer Museum, University of California ; DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2017.

Giunta, Andrea. “The Iconographic Turn: The Denormalization of Bodies and Sensibilities in the Work of Latin American Women Artists.” In Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1965-1980, 29–35. Hammer Museum, University of California, 2017.

Porras, Katherine A. “Afro-Peruvian Dance: An Embodied Struggle for Visibility and Integration.” Masters of Art in Dance, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2012.

Santa Cruz, Victoria, Ritmo: el eterno organizador, Lima: Ediciones COPÉ, 2004.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Politics of Translation” In Williamson, Sophie J., ed. Translation. Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2019.

Temple, Bogusia. “Casting a Wider Net: Reflecting on Translation in Oral History.” Oral History 41, no. 2, (2013) 100-109. Accessed March 7, 2024. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23610428.\

Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: a history of translation. New York: Routledge, 1995.

1. Andrea Giunta, “The Iconographic Turn: The Denormalization of Bodies and Sensibilities in the Work of Latin American Women Artists,” in Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1965-1980 (Hammer Museum, University of California, 2017), 29-35.

2. Ibid.

3. Paul K Eiss,  In the Name of el Pueblo: place community and the politics of history in Yucatán.

4. Gayatri Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” 26.

5. Bogusia Temple, “Casting a Wider Net: Reflecting on Translation in Oral History,” 104.

6. Katherine A. Porras, “Afro-Peruvian Dance: An Embodied Struggle for Visibility and Integration” (Masters of Art in Dance, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2012), 9.

7. Mestiza: (noun) a woman of racially mixed ancestry, esp., in Latin America, of mixed indigenous and European ancestry or, in the Philippines, of mixed native and foreign ancestry.

8. Victoria Santa Cruz translated by Susan G. Polansky, Rhytm: The Eternal Organizer, Ritmo: el eterno organizador, Lima: Ediciones COPÉ, 65. jarana refers to the casas de jarana that existed for some time in Peru where on weekends, people would come together to sing and dance.

9. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: a History of Translation, 16.

10. Andrea Giunta, “The Iconographic Turn: The Denormalization of Bodies and Sensibilities in the Work of Latin American Women Artists,” 33.

11. Ibid.

Main image
Maríe Orensanz,
El pueblo La Gallareta lucha por su única fuente de trabajo, 1969.
Readymade. Dimensions unknown.
Courtesy of the artist.

Image description
A vintage poster featuring bold black text on a light background, reading ‘el PUEBLO LA GALLARETA lucha por su única fuente de trabajo,’ which translates to ‘The people of La Gallareta fight for their only source of work.’