The platitude about literature knowing no borders isn’t one to be believed. Only literatures written in major languages enjoy passport-free travel. Writerly representatives of major literatures travel without papers, a major literature their invisible lettre de noblesse. Writers estranged or self-estranged, exiled or self-exiled from their maternal literatures, they tend to travel on dubious passports. A literary customs officer can, at any time, escort them from the literary train under absolutely any pretext. The estranged or self-estranged female writer is such a rare species she’s barely worth mentioning.
All these reasons help explain my internal neurosis: As an ON-writer I always feel obliged to explain my complicated literary passport to an imagined customs officer. And as is always the case when you get into a conversation with a customs officer on unequal footing, ironic multiplications of misunderstandings soon follow. What does it matter, you might say, whether someone is a Croatian, Belgian, or American writer? “Literature knows no borders,” you retort. But it does matter: The difference lies in the reception of the author’s position; it’s in the way an imagined customs officer flicks through one’s passport. And although it would never cross our minds to self-designate so, we readers—we are those customs officers!
Every text is inseparable from its author, and vice versa; it’s just that different authors get different treatment. The difference is whether a text travels together with a male or female author, whether the author belongs to a major or minor literature, writes in a major or minor language; whether a text accompanies a famous or anonymous author, whether the author is young or old, Mongolian or English, Surinamese or Italian, an Arab woman or an American man, a homosexual or a heterosexual. . All of these things alter the meaning of a text, help or hinder its circulation.
Let’s imagine for a moment that someone sends me and a fellow writer — let’s call him Dexter — to the North Pole to each write an essay about our trip. Let’s also imagine a coincidence: Dexter and I return from our trip with exactly the same text. Dexter’s position doesn’t require translation, it’s a universal one — Dexter is a representative of Anglo-American letters, the dominant literature of our time. My position will be translated as Balkan, post-Yugoslav, Croatian, and, of course, female. All told, a particular and specific one. My description of the white expanse will be quickly imbued with projected, i.e., invented, content. Customs officers will ask Dexter whether in the white expanse he encountered the metaphysical; astounded that I don’t live at “home,” they’ll ask me why I live in Amsterdam, how it is that I, of all people, got sent to the North Pole, and while they’re at it, they’ll inquire how I feel about the development of Croatian eco-feminism. Not bothering to read his work first, they’ll maintain that Dexter is a great writer, and me, not bothering to read my work first either, they’ll declare a kind of literary tourist guide — to the Balkan region, of course; where else?
To be fair, how my text about the North Pole will be received in my former literary community is also a question worth asking. As my encounter with the metaphysical? God no. Croats will ask me how the Croatian diaspora is getting on up there, how I — a Croatian woman — managed to cope in the frozen north, and whether I plunged a Croatian flag into the ice. Actually, in all likelihood my text won’t even be published. With appropriate fanfare they’ll publish Dexter’s. It’ll be called “How a great American writer warmed us to the North Pole.”
That literature knows no borders is just a platitude. But it’s one we need to believe in. Both originals and their translations exist in literature. The life of a translation is inseparable from the relatively stable life of its original, yet the life of a translation is often much more interesting and dramatic. Translations — poor, good, mangled, congenial — have rich lives. A reader’s energy is interwoven in this life; in it are the mass of books that expand, enlighten, and entertain us, that “save our lives”; the books whose pages are imbued with our own experiences, our lives, convictions, the times in which we live, all kinds of things.
Many things can be deduced from a translation; and let us not forget, readers are also translators. The Wizard of Oz, for example, was my favorite children’s book. Much later I found out that the book had traveled from the Russian to Yugoslavia and the rest of the East European world, and that it wasn’t written by a certain A. Volkov (who had “adapted” it), but by the American writer Frank L. Baum. The first time I went to Moscow (way back in 1975) I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had turned up in a monochrome Oz, and that I, like Toto, just needed pull back the curtain to reveal a deceit masked by the special effects of totalitarianism. Baum’s innocent arrow pierced the heart of a totalitarian regime in a way the arrows of Soviet dissident literature never could.
Every translation is a miracle of communication, a game of Chinese Whispers, where the word at the start of the chain is inseparable from that exiting the mouth of whomever is at the end. Every translation is not only a multiplication of misunderstandings, but also a multiplication of meanings. Our lungs full, we need to give wind to the journey of texts, to keep watch for the eccentrics who send messages in bottles, and the equally eccentric who search for bottles carrying messages; we need to participate in the orgy of communication, even when it seems to those of us sending messages that communication is buried by the din, and thus senseless. Because somewhere on a distant shore a recipient awaits our message. To paraphrase Borges, he or she exists to misunderstand it and transform it into something else.
2.
According to data from the International Organization for Migration, the number of migrants has increased from 150 million in 2000 to an estimated 214 million today, meaning that migrants make up 3.1 percent of the world’s population. Migrant numbers vary drastically from country to country: In Qatar, 87 percent of the population are migrants; in the UAE, 70 percent; Jordan, 46 percent; in Singapore, 41 percent. As a percentage, Nigeria, Romania, India, and Indonesia have the lowest numbers of migrants. Women make up 49 percent of the migrant population. Among the migrant population, 27.5 million are categorized as displaced persons, and 15.4 million as refugees. If all migrants were settled in a single state, it would be the fifth most populous in the world, after China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia, but ahead of Brazil. It’s a fair assumption that in this imagined migrant state, there would be at least a negligible percentage of writers, half of whom would be women.
Writers who have either chosen to live in the ON-zone, or been forced to seek its shelter, need more oxygen than that provided by translations into foreign languages alone. For a full-blooded literary life, such writers need, inter alia, an imaginary library — a context in which their work might be located. Because more often than not, such work floats free in a kind of limbo. The construction of a context — of a literary and theoretical platform, a theoretical raft that might accommodate the dislocated and de-territorialized; the transnational and a-national; cross-cultural and transcultural writers; cosmopolitans, neo-nomads, and literary vagabonds; those who write in “adopted” languages, in newly-acquired languages, in multiple languages, in mother tongues in non-maternal habitats; all those who have voluntarily undergone the process of dispatriation1—much work on the construction of such a context remains.