Translating Fear – Translated Fears

In the Call for Articles published, the editors of the present volume aimed to discuss whether, and how, fear can be verbalized and translated – i.e., carried across continents, languages and cultures – and how different discursive practices (re)produce fear and violence. As culturally produced, the fear of other(s) can, arguably, be read as a form of externalizing experiences of displacement and unbelonging and translating a nostalgia for stability as fixidity.

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The first section of the volume – Othering fears: Translation in times of political duress – starts out with an essay by A. Boukhaffa (Translating the Middle East: From the Exotic to the Crazy Dog). The author revisits the Orientalism denounced by E. Said (the biased, partial and false image that the Western, even post-colonial, scholars have built of the Middle East) in order to highlight the connivance between disciplines such as historiography, anthropology and translation and Western colonialism, as far as depictions of the Middle East are concerned. Native societies are correspondingly translated by Western anthropology through a discourse shaped both by “Eurocentric rationalism” and by the conventions and stereotypes of the Western academic reasoning which, according to Boukhaffa, lie far distant from the self-perceptions of Middle Easterners. The same accusation is made against historiography, against the “Orientalist historians” who appropriate local history according to a “European frame of thought.” The target here becomes Bernard Lewis, a very influential author and historian but severely criticised in the Arab world, even in the prefaces of translations of his works into Arabic.

He refuses to insist on either the concept of fidelity in translation or the metaphor of translation as a creator of bridges. Based on Mona Baker, the author agrees that translation and interpretation are “part of the institution of war”. In the same vein, despite providing no factual examples, he is very critical of MEMRI (the Middle East Research Institute) that, by means of their translations of Islamic texts aimed at a global English-speaking readership and across several types of media, especially the audiovisual, has largely contributed to maintaining the fear of the “Islamic threat” (i.e. of the crazy dog) and thereby perpetuating a negative image of the Middle East always in association with an ideology of terror.

In the study by Maria Amélia Cruz, we move to the present-day topic of migrations and their effects on children and young people. The author elaborates this topic around two kinds of literature: the IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) project aimed at migrant children and novels in which young immigrants describe their experiences of emigration and integration in their host societies. Based on these two cases, the author is able to discuss the emergence of new literary subgenres as well as the necessity of rethinking the concept of translation. The current context of international migrations, in which children and young people represent 14 % of migrants, clearly evokes fear as a central experience among this group forced to leave behind that familiar to them and cope with new and different worlds.

The “silent books” project (in which images prevail or there are no words at all, except for those in the title) was launched by IBBY for refugee children from Africa and the Middle East arriving at Lampedusa but has now already spread worldwide. Cruz explains this art of visual storytelling in which the image carries the narrative responsibility which, on the other hand, requires the visual literacy of young readers. Nevertheless, wordless pictures contain a strong narrative power that elicits the reader’s active collaboration. It is the reader who eventually builds his/her own narrative, observing and interpreting, filling-in the empty spaces among the visual elements. In this case, the reader simultaneously becomes author and mediator/translator as he/she mentally translates the sequence of images before him/her into his/her own language and culture.

The heroes of such narratives are simultaneously real authors and the narrators of their stories but with the collaboration of adults as mentioned on the covers of these books. According to the author, this collaborative work can be considered an act of translation in the sense attributed by Michael Cronin who, among other authors, claims that “the condition of the migrant is the condition of the translated being.” Amélia Cruz concludes her study by bringing the two cases together as regards intentionality and meaning.

The next two contributions lead us into the 20th century history of Portugal under dictatorship (1926–1974). During this period, the Estado Novo regime (1933–1974) officially established censorship to control national and foreign publications as well as cinema, theatre and radio. In the first part of her study, Teresa Seruya refers to several fears around translation, an activity pervaded by ambiguities, contradictions and paradoxes. Firstly, it is the author who may fear misinterpretations of his/her text but then it becomes the reader who may or may not trust translations. In the meantime, it is the translator who fears not being faithful to the original and/or not pleasing his/her readers. The insecurities and vulnerabilities of the various actors involved in any translation are simultaneously varied and constant. Additionally, censorship, in a dictatorial context, is surrounded by ambiguities because, as an instrument of control and surveillance, it fears the power of books and free thinking and expression while nevertheless allowing, à contrecoeur, the development of strategies to bypass this. The corpus of this study gathers the reports about foreign books, their actual or prospective translations, seized by the political police PIDE and presented to the Book Censoring Commission between 1934 and 1939. This commission, through its Director, decided whether the book would be admitted or banned or whether eligible for publication following cuts. There was a report issued for each work analysed by the Commission and it thus proves easy to grasp whether or not the values of the regime supported by the censor were met, attacked or otherwise jeopardised by the book in question. The author focuses on what she terms the regime’s fears, displayed in the arguments applied by the censors to ban the “circulation” of both translations and imported originals in French, Spanish, German or English: out of fear of antifascism, of cosmopolitism, of communist propaganda, of anticolonialism, of women’s emancipation, of birth control, of free sex and erotism, of criticism against the Catholic Church, among others. At the same time, both the banned books and the texts by the censors provide relevant information (however incomplete) about the multiple interests of Portuguese readers.