鼎ollecting and Translating the Non-Western Other on the Internet

<au>Rajini Srikanth</><at>Collecting and Translating the Non-Western Other</><ast>The Perils and Possibilities of a World Literature Website</> <@@@>The founders of the website “Words Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature”—at the URL www.wordswithoutborders.org—launched in July 2003 and funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and W. W. Norton, are not unaware of the political dimensions of the project they have undertaken. In describing the initiative, they say, “[W]e hope to present international literature not as a static, elite phenomenon, but a portal through which to explore the world. In the richness of cultural information we present, we hope to help foster a ‘globalization’ of cultural engagement and exchange, one that allows many voices in many languages to prosper.”1 Alane Salierno Mason, the magazine’s founder and one of its three co- editors, was inspired to start this project by, among other things, the appalling statistic in a 1999 NEA report that only about 3 percent of books published in the United States were translations, compared with 40 to 50 percent in Western European countries (Salamon E1). The magazine featured for its first three issues the provocatively titled series “literature from the Axis of Evil” (North Korea, Iraq, and Iran). Thus, Words Without Borders (WWB) attempts to rectify the publishing imbalance by making available online English translations of texts from numerous source languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Urdu, and Japanese. Their choice of texts and languages would appear to be, therefore, not apolitical. I would also argue, the editors’ objective of enriching cross-cultural engagement may be thwarted not because of the limitations in their vision but by their implicit optimistic view of readers and by the impression of easy access that the internet medium of the website promises. Furthermore, their use of the phrase ‘“globalization’ of cultural engagement and exchange” does not sufficiently communicate the hard work entailed in engaging fully the texts and the cultural information they offer. If Words Without Borders seeks to avoid the pitfall of easy consumption by English- speaking readers of non-Anglo cultures, then the editors may need to intervene in very specific ways to create the kind of readers who will help them realize the full potential of their project.2 The typical reader sees in a translated text the opportunity to encounter a different culture and through this encounter to glean something of significance about that relatively unfamiliar culture. Unless the reader is a scholar of translation and her/himself a translator, s/he is not likely to dwell too long on the issues under-girding the final product: how the translator feels about the quality of the translation, what the translator’s criteria of success are, the painful ethical decisions the translator may have had to make (see especially Brownlie 147–48 in this regard), and the several intercultural chasms the translator has conceded cannot be crossed. The reader likely bases her/his satisfaction with the text on whether or not s/he is “moved”—intellectually, emotionally, ideologically, or politically—by the reading. In other words, reading a translated text provides a brush with another reality; a collectible keepsake and reminder of one’s encounter with the unfamiliar that can be added to the halls of one’s cosmopolitan consciousness (not unlike the purchase that a museum visitor might make at the museum shop as a memento of the visit). Words Without Borders has the rare opportunity to engage this typical reader and introduce her/him to a new way of approaching translated texts—not as a prescriptive directive but as an intriguing invitation to participate in an alternate method for shaping knowledge.3 The online quality of the magazine places in its editors’ hands a unique technology to construct the desirable thoughtful reader of translations—one who seeks not the quick pleasure of easily collected glimpses but who appreciates the complexity of the unknowable even as s/he prepares to engage it. Literature from the “Axis of Evil”: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations (2006) is the book version of a selection of writings from the Words Without Borders (WWB) website. As its title reveals, it includes translated literature from nations that theUnited States government deems enemies. The editors of the published anthology (who are also the editors of the website) address the challenges of their endeavor, specifically the risk of having simplified their readers’ interaction with cultures and peoples of the non-English speaking world. In the introductory essay to the collection, the editors anticipate and respond to their critics: <ext>[S]ome academics contest the idea of reading literature in translation at all, especially in translation into English, arguing that this is a colonialist exercise that can only distort and tame foreign works—especially, now, those coming from Arabic writers.As the brilliant radical critic Ammiel Alcalay [whose translations from Hebrew appear on the WWB website] has said, “once you sanction and legalize a certain kind of border crossing, it domesticates the concept and precludes a truer border crossing that would really disrupt ways of thinking and approach.” Likewise, some argue, our general ignorance of the contexts in which these works were written, and the literary antecedents to which they refer, can only inhibit if not actually deceive our understanding. Yet communication is essential ... especially the complex and profound communication to be found in literature, and we still believe that it is better to get someone on the telephone— even if there’s some static on the line—than not to make the call. (xviii)</ext>The editors present themselves not as slick purveyors of “difference” but rather as reflective and self-interrogating agents of cultural exchange who facilitate the widening of knowledge and perspective of English-speaking readers. Given the thoughtfulness with which they approach their task, one imagines that they have considered the ways in which the online website can subvert their best intentions precisely because it offers quick and easy access to a vast assemblage of texts from different cultures. The internet has convincingly proven its capacity as a force for democratic participation and for the formation of virtual communities (Chan, Friedman, Slane, Whitaker). Thus, it is no surprise that, as Siobhan Brownlie says, the “combination of translation with the internet has contributed to the creation of communities bound by a similar vision of the world that are unhindered by linguistic and national boundaries” (140). In this internet-powered context, the editors of the WWB website are hoping to cultivate a global citizen by “allaying ignorance, stimulating curiosity, and opening the minds of readers” (Literature from the Axis of Evil xx- xxi). The editors have collected additional translated stories in a second anthology, Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers (2007). For this collection, they approached twenty-seven well-known writers from around the world and asked each to recommend a work by a favorite author writing in a language other than English. How can the editors create the best website environment to encourage in their readers the continuous and ongoing process of interrogating established frameworks of knowing, reorienting perspective, and examining firmly held priorities? It is this question that the present essay addresses. Textual experience of unfamiliar cultures and peoples is alluring, because it gives pleasure—of the encounter with well crafted language, complex narrative, rich characters, and urgent questions requiring our intellectual and emotional commitment. This pleasure can become fulfilling in and of itself and take the place of the hard work, the labor, of interrogating the self and restructuring frameworks of perception that must accompany any truly meaningful interaction with those unlike us. In this regard, Said’s assertion is worth heeding: “It seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human” (93). The WWB website is especially tempting because the texts are so readily available. Given the difficulty of finding translated texts from languages other than Spanish, French, and German in the United States, the WWB website makes it a point to present itself as the conduit for a range of writings not typically found in bookstores. The website’s success in attracting readers depends on how well it makes the case that readers can roam in its space and search its collection easily. A site such as WWB, within the cultural context of ubiquitous discourse on globalization and cosmopolitanism, is likely to draw the kind of reader who at the very least is interested in acquiring cosmopolitan flair and a basic exposure to various cultural landscapes. Such a reader will find a ready store of treasure in the translations available at the WWB. The risk of translations, however, is that they facilitate a faux familiarity (unless the reader is especially careful to resist the ephemeral thrill of brief contact), inviting readers into the emotional lives of peoples elsewhere, in parts of the world significantly different linguistically, politically, philosophically, and culturally from the English-speaking regions. Thus, while it is essential to bring translations of texts to the English-speaking reader, it is also critical to cultivate in the reader the interrogative stance: What does this text reveal? What does it not reveal? Why does it reveal what it does in the manner that it does? What intellectual journeys does this text suggest might be valuable? What realities does it gesture to that are not wholly explored in the text? These questions take on particular urgency with respect to the WWB website, because the internet has been designed to simplify and speed up access to information precisely to give readers (users) the sense of an infinite collection of material merely a mouse click away. What does it mean to be a responsible reader under these circumstances? Is it even reasonable to expect the WWB editors to be able to guard against the reader as casual collector of difference, given that increasingly complex web technologies are continually being developed to bring to the reader at his or her desk the myriad curiosities of the world? How does a website such as Words Without Borders achieve its objectives of complicating one’s understanding of the unfamiliar and the different?To attempt to answer these questions, this essay focuses on the roles of the website editor and reader. It does so by likening the internet website to an online museum, in which the translated texts are seen as the equivalent of a museum’s collections. The translator supplies the editors with the material to display; the reader is akin to the museum visitor. The editors, translators, and readers are all collectors of global experience, but their collecting practices vary, as I explain below. The editors can also be likened to the curators of a museum, making important decisions on how to display the material at hand. Unless all three participants— translator, editor, and reader—understand the implications of their roles in this exchange of cross-cultural knowledge, the reader’s experience of the translated texts could well be as reductive as looking at postcards to learn about the infinite geographical and architectural complexity of the world. The self-reflexivity of each of the players is crucial to creating the conditions necessary for deep and meaningful cross-cultural engagement. <h1>Words Without Borders as Online Museum</>Nicholas Thomas contends that “the museum expresses a detached mastery over the objects and fields of knowledge that constitute its strengths,” adding that as an “institutionalized collection [the museum] stands as a de-temporalized end product, as an array of works abstracted from the circuits of exchange” (116). Both these points apply in strong measure to the Words Without Borders website. While it may seem specious to call the website a museum, given that this term is usually associated with a physical structure that houses prized collections, the analogy is not entirely without justification: the website has the clearly articulated aim of acquiring and bringing to its visitors (readers) representative texts (in translation) that intimate a world out there beyond the spheres encompassed by English. Words Without Borders does not hide its instructional motivation; in fact, it announces itself as a necessary corrective, given the Anglophone-centric publishing agenda in the United States. Some of the translated texts on the website cannot be found anywhere else, further underscoring the site’s likeness to a museum. The editors have, if you will, launched a museum for the global citizen at a time when the destinies of nations are entwined in complex and not always apparent ways.Susan M. Pearce notes that objects in a museum contain three types of attributes: “their functionalist existence as material goods, their semiotic or structuralist role as messages, and their historicity” (119). The development of museology in the last century is marked, according to Pearce, by the growing recognition that objects assume meaning in the context of relationships and in their value for specific communities. Classification by type—where objects from different geographical locations and historical periods are grouped together because they belong to the same category of classification—has become less important than understanding the object in its historical, economic, political, and sociocultural milieux. “The contextual approach,” Pearce observes, “stressed the unique value of each natural and human community and so undermined the judgmental certainties which an insistence on classification tends to develop. It sought to appreciate and understand each particular community within its own terms as a functioning whole” (113). The WWB website creates several dynamic and fluid contexts for its texts: readers can search the website by region, language, country, genre, topic, environment (i.e., physical landscape such as cities, coasts, deserts, mountains, villages, and plains) and period. While these multiple categories liberate a text and encourage readers to engage it in diverse ways, they do not facilitate sustained immersion in the “historical, economic, political, and sociocultural milieux” from which the text emerged and which serve as the text’s visible or invisible backdrop. The emphasis is on the reader’s ability to imagine the texts as having various avatars—as examples of specific genres, or descriptors of physical landscape, or representatives of a regional ethos— and to excise the texts from their deep embeddedness in particular and specific realities. This lack of rootedness, this unmooring of the text from its “thick” (used in the sense popularized by Geertz, 6–24) descriptive context is, on the one hand, to be celebrated, because it rescues a text from narrow categories of reception (though some of the placements of text are puzzling, especially in the category “environment”). On the other hand, one should not be surprised if it facilitates the casual encounter with the non-western other that the editors wish to avoid. While the editors have succeeded impressively in collecting a range of fascinating and valuable translated texts, giving readers a glimpse of a bustling creative landscape beyond the English- speaking world, they have, to some extent, stripped the texts of their capacity to function as documents of complex realities, whose intricate contours are worthy of our sustained attention and investment of time. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s description of the ethnographic object as an ethnographic fragment provides a useful lens through which to consider the translated texts of the WWB site. “Like the ruin, the ethnographic fragment is informed by a poetics of detachment,” she says; “the artfulness of the ethnographic object is an art of excision, of detachment, an art of the excerpt” (388). The object or fragment gestures to a larger world beyond itself, to the physical and cultural landscape from which it was removed or excised. The task of museum curators is to imbue these fragments with the fullness of reality so that the museum visitor can, upon looking at them, imagine the worlds from which they were detached. Translated texts, too, may be read as excerpts of other worlds. In fact, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak might insist that they be read as excerpts, as mere brushes with or “traces” of the density of these other worlds (see “Translating into English”). It is the density and textures of these other worlds that the editors of the WWB website have the task of evoking. Because the editors are, unlike private collectors, not concerned simply with enhancing themselves through their collection of translated texts, their keen attention to the texts’ “semiotic or structuralist role as messages,” to return to Susan M. Pearce’s articulation, is especially crucial. In the cluster of articles on the practice of collecting that appeared in The Comparatist last year, the guest editors observe that a principal impulse of private collectors lies in their enriching themselves through the objects collected and constructing through these objects “a narrative that links the objects they have collected to their identity as it has unfolded in time …, a narrative that resonates with their perception of themselves” (Walker, et. al. 37). Material collections become surrounded by a certain aura of magic. Russell W. Belk explains the fascination to collectors of the things they acquire: “Where we once built temples to make manifest the idea of God, we now build museums to allow ourselves to worship ‘neat stuff’” (156). Belk claims that<ext>perhaps the deepest benefit of collecting to most collectors is one they find most difficult to articulate: that of providing contact with self-transcending sacredness or magic in their lives.... If ... the locus of sacredness in contemporary life has shifted from religion to science to consumption, collecting epitomizes the sacralization of consumption in the contemporary world. Although the locus may have changed, the need for something that is transcendent, numinous, or magical in our lives remains.... [C]ollecting can be ritualistic and ... collectors may act as sacred priests able to transform an ordinary object of use into a sacred object in a collection.(94)</ext>Similarly, Walter Benjamin asserts that in the collector’s possession an object attains a transcendental life and worth, a reason for existing that is independent of any crass utilitarian considerations (64). The object is, because someone has deemed it to be worth saving, worth possessing and caring for. In Benjamin’s declaration, the object serves only to enhance the collector; it has no existence before the collector’s discovery of it. It could have remained forever imprisoned in obscurity and for all practical purposes, non-existent. Though the editors of the WWB website do not, by any means, imagine themselves to be rescuers of the texts they collect, one might say that they see themselves as rescuing the general Anglophone reader from insularity of perspective and ignorance of the world. But simply bringing the translated texts to the reader will not, I would argue, achieve this objective. Though the presence of the texts on the website is a powerful testament to the literary output of diverse non-Anglophone cultures, their mere appearance on the WWB website cannot magically complicate the reader’s understanding of unfamiliar parts of the world. That kind of transformation can only come from the conscious intervention of the editors, in much the same way that museum curators shape our experience of the objects in a museum. Susan Vogel’s discussion of the editorializing hand of the museum curator serves to dispel quickly the notion that all objects are in themselves magical or worthy of being prized as “art”; it is usually the curator’s techniques of display that invest an object with value or, conversely, divest it of worth. For example, says Vogel, an ordinary object such as a hunting net from Zaire, when “reverently displayed in a pool of light on a low platform” generated inquiries from art collectors as to where they could come by such an aesthetically pleasing item. By contrast, “some extraordinarily fine pieces of African figure sculpture” that were displayed haphazardly in a case crowded with miscellaneous objects and pictures were stripped of their impact by the “indiscriminate assemblage” of the material (197). Editors of verbal texts are not unlike museum curators, in that they too exert a powerful influence on readers’ perceptions through the framing explanations they provide in their introductory essays, the structure they impose on the textual material, and the decisions they make as to what to foreground and what to relegate to a footnote. Editors of internet websites have even greater directive powers: the technologies of menus and electronic links enable them to organize material in multiple ways and to provide numerous and different potential pathways into and beyond a single textual source. In the word “portal” of the Words Without Borders mission statement (see above), the editors signal that the translated texts represent glimpses of the more complex realities of their source cultures and languages. The editors do attempt to supply some part of these contexts, but their best intentions may be subverted by several factors, chief among them being the availability of appropriate material—whether in the form of analytical essays on the translated texts, commentaries on the politics of the region, or reflections on the literary culture of the area. In the absence of accompanying material to provide the contours of the sociocultural terrain surrounding the translated text, the short story or poem appears as a stand-alone object stripped of its “circuits of exchange” (see Thomas above). Not for one moment am I suggesting that the editors are unaware of the layers of signification attending every translated text. On the contrary: Alane Salierno Mason repeatedly emphasizes that the website seeks to underscore the diversities of the cultures whose literatures they present to their readers; the editors’ objective is to compensate for the reductive rhetoric of those who are determined to carve out the world in the language of geopolitics by resorting to terms like “allies,” “enemies,” “hostile states,” “infidels,” “terrorists,” and “extremists.” The technological tools of the internet provide both an opportunity and a challenge to the editors in their aspiration to enlarge and complicate the understanding of their readers of the diverse cultures represented on their website. As I argue in the rest of the essay, the medium of the internet is both friend and foe to the editors, enabling them to evoke a community of nations and peoples pursuing through literary endeavor urgent questions of life and humanity, and yet, at the same time, making it easy for them to package neatly the uncontainable particularities and specificities of diverse cultures and peoples. There is a link on the website for educators that currently offers “Units/Lesson Plans” on the themes of “Exile,” “Self-Sacrifice,” and “Justice.” The discussion questions and writing prompts for these units offer educators the means to probe specific texts to considerable depth. One imagines educators using the WWB website to lead their students to the kinds of material that would situate the translated texts within the particular fields of culture, politics, and economics within which each text’s significances are illuminated and complicated. Particularly because the website announces its service to educators, it may be incumbent on the editors to provide them with the kind of material that reveals how each translated text exists within a “multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit” (Geertz 10). There is great potential on the website for the design of thoughtful pedagogy and the cultivation of a student/reader who moves from initial enjoyment of the text to a desire to learn about the webs of history and other material realities underlying the literary artifact. How exactly the editors will fulfill their obligation as “museum curators” is not just a function of their intentions; the devil lies, as well, in the details of website design. <h1>Two Key Lessons from the Classroom</> Before addressing the possible approaches to website design that could deter readers from the casual collection of difference or acquiring a veneer of progressive cosmopolitanism, I must discuss my experiences as a classroom teacher with two texts not found on the website. One is a short story written in English and the other a novel, translated from the Arabic. In different ways each demonstrates the dangers of easy consumption by Anglophone readers in the West of the experiences and realities of unfamiliar peoples and cultures. More than once in teaching these two texts, I have seen how easy it is to become seduced by their aesthetic qualities, to see them as “neat stuff” (see Belk above), and to approach them with “a poetics of detachment” (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett above). As a result, students ignore the historical, political, and cultural circumstances that inform them. The first text is the short story by Jhumpa Lahiri, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” (1999). Lilia, the ten-year old Indian American protagonist of the story, gains a valuable perspective on life through the friendship that develops between her Indian Bengali immigrant parents and Mr. Pirzada, the Pakistani scholar who is in the United States on a Fulbright to study the foliage of New England. Mr. Pirzada becomes a regular visitor to their home in the Fall of 1971. During that period, a fierce civil war breaks out in Pakistan, a war that both her parents and Mr. Pirzada follow anxiously on the television every evening. Mr. Pirzada’s family in Dacca (East Pakistan) is in the thick of the crisis and he does not know whether they are safe. Lilia realizes that she has no idea why her parents are as interested in that “distant” war as Mr. Pirzada, or why they seem so completely to share his feelings. Gradually, Lilia learns the barest minimum about the history of the subcontinent, the fraught relationship between India and Pakistan, and the odd fact of Pakistan’s being split into two parts—West and East—with the landmass of India separating them, and why her parents and Mr. Pirzada speak the same language, Bengali. The knowledge she acquires, through her father and through surreptitiously consulting a book in the school library before she is caught by her teacher, is basic, even superficial. Readers of this story readily connect to its themes of friendship and discovery, and they find its character development and elegant symbolism compelling. It gestures to a complex political and historical reality far beyond the borders of the United States, but it does so in a way that makes this “other world” manageable, and information about it easy to assimilate—because it is presented to us through the consciousness of a young girl who is herself struggling to make sense of it all. When I ask my students (many of whom are educators at the high school and college level) whether they feel the need to inform themselves of the history of the subcontinent when they teach the story, they respond that the narrative’s unfolding through a young girl’s perspective obviates the need to acquire deep historical and political knowledge. All the background information they need is contained in the story, they rightly say, and so neither they nor their students would need additional contextual information. The story is a self-contained narrative of friendship, kindness, and awareness, they remark appreciatively, and it is precisely this quality of the text that makes it appealing. One does not need to know the myriad details of the history of Pakistan and India’s conflicted relationship to appreciate Mr. Pirzada and Lilia or to be moved by the delicate friendship and understanding that develops between them. However, Lahiri dexterously embeds within her story the question of how much historical knowledge is necessary. Lilia’s father reacts with consternation when she asks him to explain what they are watching on television: ‘“You are, of course, aware of the current situation, aware of East Pakistan’s fight for sovereignty?’” (26). And when he realizes that she has no idea, he asks, ‘“What exactly do they teach you at school? Do you study history? Geography?’” (26). His question evokes, of course, the American school as the site of socialization into the attitude and discourse of American exceptionalism. When Lilia tries to correct her ignorance by reading a book on Pakistan in the school library, she is reprimanded rather brusquely by her teacher, who chastises her for wasting her time in reading material that has nothing to do with the topic they are researching—the American revolution (which, Lilia tells us, they study year after year in school). It is easy to demonize the teacher, Mrs. Kenyon, and to project onto her all the undesirable insularity of American education and the ignorance it fosters about the complexities of the rest of the world. I would argue, however, that her reaction is not significantly different from the reaction of those who appreciate the story for its literary qualities alone, and who see the narrative as an Indian American girl’s attempt to straddle her American-ness and the multiple histories she has inherited from her parents. Mrs. Kenyon discourages Lilia from probing the histories pertinent to her ancestral heritage, but the non-Indian and non-Pakistani readers of this story, who see Lilia’s limited knowledge of the history and politics of the subcontinent as pertaining only to Lilia, and who tend to think of that deep history in relation to themselves as an optional element of the story, are not that different from the teacher. I can imagine the aesthetically minded literary readers fiercely guarding their interpretive approaches, pointing out that the brilliance of Lahiri’s story is precisely that one does not require extensive background knowledge or deep history of South Asia to be captivated by her narrative.Granted, that is Lahiri’s skill, and she does indeed deliver reading pleasure. But why not use this textually generated pleasure as a springboard to sustained and complex engagement with subcontinental history? Educators might consider this encounter with Lahiri’s story as an ideal moment to introduce their students (and themselves) to the complex history and politics of the region, the tormented legacy of Partition that haunts all three nations in the subcontinent, the birth of the nation of Bangladesh (the outcome of the civil war in Pakistan), and the relationships among India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. There is undoubtedly the pleasure of reading, but there is also unfinished business to attend to. The WWB website can address these imperatives in a dynamic active mode through hypertext technology, and I discuss these strategies below. The second text, which presents a slightly different scenario though also, in its reception, illustrates the desire for easy consumption of the non-western experience, is Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Miramar, written in Arabic. In this novel, references to Egypt’s history and politics in the twentieth century abound, permeating the characters’ monologues and their interactions with one another. The end of formal British colonialism, the rise of the Wafd party, the role of the army, the discontent of the peasantry, the emergence of Gamel Abdul Nasser and his push to empower the hitherto landless are among the many events alluded to in the text. The characters’ motivations and actions can be traced to specific political movements, and their current situations can be attributed to their membership in particular political parties and association with certain political figures. They are all now at a moment in their lives when, for a variety of reasons, they lodge in a boarding house in Alexandria, Egypt, and the action of the novel unfolds in this setting. A 1983 translated edition of the novel (with an introduction by novelist John Fowles) provides detailed endnotes to explain the historical and political references(perhaps these could have been better arranged as footnotes, to increase the chance of readers’ consulting them rather than having to turn to the back of the book each time they encounter an unfamiliar reference). The edition of the novel most readily available in the United States, however, is a 1993 Anchor publication, which contains no explanatory material. When I have taught the novel (in English translation) to Anglophone students unfamiliar with Egypt’s twentieth-century political history, I have encountered two reactions: (1) either they look up the historical and political references they encounter by consulting the brief history I supply them as well as a copy of the endnotes from the earlier edition, or (2) they read the text without consulting the explanations, focusing instead on the literary aspects of the novel. Readers in the first group are of two kinds: they are happy to inform themselves about the background and consider their reading experience immeasurably enriched by the information, because it gives them a deeper insight into the characters’ attitudes and actions; the other kind of reader resents the interruption to the narrative, grudgingly consults the background information, but finds the necessity to do so a negative attribute of the text, and, therefore, a diminishment of the reading experience. Those who employ the second approach—i.e., reading the narrative without turning to acquire any explanation of the references—either appreciate the literary quality of the text (its character development, imagery, multiple narrative perspectives) and are thus satisfied with the reading experience, or they find the work too opaque for their liking (and, therefore, less literary) because of its references to events outside the text itself. Ideally, of course, one could strive to cultivate the first kind of reader—who both appreciates the work as a literary artifact and also sees it as an opportunity to deepen her/his knowledge of the complex realities of the context from which that work emerges. There is labor involved in going beyond the pleasurable response, and it is this labor of cross-cultural interaction/engagement that the editors of the WWB website could simulate in their design of the website.4<h1>Designing a Website Museum</>The home page of the WWB site (accessed on January 21, 2010) presents choices in two bars that run across the top of the page. The bars contain links that the reader can click on to go to specific pages. Theoretically, internet technology puts in the hands of the reader a formidable array of material that could significantly enrich and complicate understanding of an issue or subject. Allusions, historical contexts, cultural backgrounds, visual and audio supplements, alternate perspectives, geographical terrain, artistic renditions—any information deemed by website designers to be pertinent to one’s comprehension of an item could be integrated into a reader’s (internet user’s) journey through a website. Thus, a thoughtfully designed web experience can impress upon the reader the complexity of an issue and the necessity to immerse oneself in a sustained examination of it. The links in any website are analogous to a museum’s hallways that control one’s approach to an exhibit. A museum curator crafts the visual experience for visitors (for example, objects in a traditional museum could be arranged chronologically or functionally; lighting could be soft or harsh; signage could be elaborate or stark, and so on), and the website designer similarly controls the way the reader/user can navigate the site.In June 2009, the organization of material on the WWB website enabled me to navigate the site in the following way: selecting “Middle East” from the links to geographical regions arranged on the right-hand side of the home page brought me to a page containing links to selected texts featuring the Middle East, as well as the option of sorting the full complement of WWB’s texts on the Middle East by several categories. One of these categories was “language,” another “country,” a third, “genre.” I could choose to sort by any category or select any one of the translated texts listed on the page. Today (January, 2010), the links are organized differently, but nonetheless my journey through the website is controlled by two factors: the visible links on any given page and my act of selecting from among those available links. Here lies the opportunity. A creative website designer could ensure that the reader’s path through Words Without Borders is structured in a particular way. The home page could, for instance, have a single link that says “Translators on Translating.” Readers would click on this solitary link and so enter the page where they would read about the opinions of translators from various time periods about the act of translating. Or, even if the editors retained multiple links on the home page, clicking on any one of these need not take readers directly to translated texts but could, perhaps, lead to relevant historical and sociocultural information illuminating the texts. In other words, each successive page could be carefully designed to serve as the next stage in the reader’s navigation to the “heart” of the site—which would be a translated text. But a truly impatient and disgruntled reader could merely scroll to the bottom of every page without reading the text on it, click the link to the next page, and continue doing the same until s/he reached the translated text. This scrolling without reading, so as to reach the page desired, is the equivalent of flipping the pages of the introduction of a book so as to get to the translated works. There is, of course, the danger that readers may not tolerate such disruptions to their encounter with the translated texts and may choose to leave the site altogether. There is no denying that museum curators and website editors (with the help of website designers) can have a formidable influence on viewing and reading practices. Susan Vogel’s call to curators to be self-aware and to acknowledge their “power” could just as easily be made to website editors. How a website lays out its material is, therefore, as important as what it makes available to the reader. The interfaces of a website can chart very specific pathways for readers to encounter and absorb information. Just as the curators of a museum can carefully shape the messages visitors take away from museum exhibits, so also website editors can significantly influence the epistemological experience of visitors to their site. At the bottom of the home page of the WWB site for the July 2004 issue is a link to an essay by Lawrence Venuti titled “How to Read a Translation,” which in June 2009, the WWB editors characterized as “an essential guide” (surprisingly, this characterization does not appear in January 2010). Venuti’s essay offers readers valuable suggestions about reading translations responsibly. Into the body of his essay, Venuti weaves in five rules for reading translations: (1) Don’t just read for meaning, but for language too; appreciate the formal features of the translation; (2) Don’t expect translations to be written only in the current standard dialect; be open to linguistic variations; (3) Don’t overlook connotations and cultural references; read them as another, pertinent layer of significance; (4) Don’t skip an introductory essay written by a translator; read it first, as a statement of the interpretation that guides the translation and contributes to what is unique about it; (5) Don’t take one translation as representative of an entire foreign literature; compare it to translations of other works from the same language [no source given]. The irony is that a reader is not likely to derive the benefit of Venuti’s essay and his rules if s/he has not accessed the archived July 2004 and then taken the trouble to click on the link at the bottom of the opening page for that issue. The question then arises: given that Venuti’s essay provides crucial information to ensure that readers of translated texts understand the challenges that translators face and the cultural and philosophical complexities of transporting meaning from one linguistic realm to another, why does Venuti’s guide not occupy a more prominent position in the domain than it does currently? Should it not be visible today or in the future to a reader who happens to enter the site? The internet is a medium that permits innovative interplay between the visual and the textual. It might be possible, therefore, through the skillful use of visual cues to draw the reader first to Venuti’s essay before s/he enters deeper into the website. To encourage readers to engage his essay, and not simply to scroll to the end and click to the next page, one could insert appropriate visual images and other compelling stimuli to convey to the reader the importance of Venuti’s assertions. That Venuti’s essay is buried deep within the site and likely to be missed by current readers leads one to speculate whether the editors are moving away from their initial political motivations for founding the website to becoming a consumer-oriented marketplace for rare “things” (in this case, hard-to-find texts). As early as 1994, Cynthia L. Selfe and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. were interrogating the cultural biases of computer interfaces. Although they were focused at that time on the user interfaces within individual computers—how menu options are phrased, file organizers constructed, icons made available—their observations have critical implications for the interfaces of internet websites. They were among the early scholars who called for an engagement with interfaces as texts—to see the ways in which information is organized and presented on the computer as reflective of certain cultural assumptions and biases. Their interrogative stance encouraged non- computer specialists to realize that they could intervene in powerful ways to shape technology. Selfe and Selfe envisioned “map-making sessions” in which teachers, students, and software designers “would come up with ideas for changing the interface to reflect a broad range of cultural, linguistic, and ideological perspectives” (499). In this connection, a discussion of bricolage is especially relevant, since it represents a less authoritarian or manipulative way of envisioning website design. Levi-Strauss’s 1966 description of bricolage has found application in many environments, including corporate organization and education. Bricolage is an approach to making meaning in which the individual brings together items at hand in intuitive relationships that make sense to her/him. The bricoleur (handyman) is someone who constructs significance with available objects and in the process, invests things with extempore symbolic value rather than viewing them on the basis of their inherent functional purpose. Cynthia Selfe and Richard Selfe extol the value of bricolage in the design of computer interfaces, believing that it will contribute to an ‘“epistemological pluralism’ ... that might especially benefit individuals who feel ‘more comfortable with a relational, interactive, active and connected approach to objects’” (493). The bricoleur makes meaning in a dynamic fashion.Both the website editors of WWB and their readers could be seen as potential bricoleurs. The editors theoretically have at their disposal all the items available on the internet—documents, images, and audio files of historical, geographical, cultural, political, and economic significance pertaining to the languages and cultural milieux of the literary texts that appear as translations on their site. They could design a cluster of relevant supporting material to accompany each translation, like bricoleurs making “thick” meaning from what is at hand and, thereby, determine for their readers what is of value. Let us consider how the editors might turn bricoleurs with the story “Hitchcock and Agha Baji,” which appeared in July/August 2003 on the WWB site (and which I accessed as recently as June 24, 2009 by clicking on “Back Issues”), by Behnam Dayani and translated from Farsi by Nahid Mozzafari. (Accessing this story in January 2010, I learn, however, that the translator is Naguib Mafhouz, the Egyptian Nobel Laureate! Even if the version of the story in the current archive is different from the version I accessed in June, 2009, the argument I make in the following paragraph is not affected.) There are two links that accompany the story as accessed in June 2009—“About the Author” and “About the Translator.” The former link contains no additional information about the author and merely returns the reader to the translated text. “About the Translator” offers us a brief paragraph, noting that Mozaffari “received her Ph.D. in history and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University. Her research on intellectuals in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution is being revised for publication.” The endnotes that accompany the story provide contextual information directly relevant to the story and, we must assume, are supplied by the translator. The narrator of the story is an 18-year-old Iranian male, a twelfth-grade Alfred Hitchcock fan. The story focuses on him and Agha Baji, an old woman who is his grandmother’s sister-in- law. The narrator takes Agha Baji to see Hitchcock’s film Psycho. It’s a delightful story—one that demonstrates the universality of fear, the incubation of vengeance, and the depth of patience.It’s also a coming-of-age story of the young man. He learns about Agha Baji’s life, what it must have meant to her to be married to a bully, how old age is endlessly complicated and not merely a surface of senility. The endnotes particularize these universals by placing them within the specific historical and cultural context of Iran in the 1960s. But what if one does not read these endnotes after having finished the story, or what if one does not interrupt the linear flow of the narrative to inform oneself of the contextual detail? How could the editors intervene? Would a hypertext link within the body of the story (see below for a detailed discussion of hypertext) be a more compelling reason to take a detour? The website editor is in a position to be much more involved than the editor of the printed book. Footnotes or endnotes can be easily ignored because they occur in peripheral positions on the printed page and are usually in smaller font than the body text. In the case of the website, its non-linear structure and its technological capacity to move the reader rapidly, instantaneously almost, from one text segment to another, give to the editor formidable power to affect the reader’s textual engagement. The editors could, in their role as “curators,” supply diverse informational links —on the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the westernization of Iran during his reign, the secret police of the Shah, the rise of religious observance as a form of resistance to westernization, Iranian cinema, women filmmakers in Iran, filmmaking in present-day Iran as a form of interrogation and oblique critique of the theocracy, feminism in Iran, the role of grandmothers, etc. The possibilities are limited only by the inclusion of hypertext links and the desire of the editors to shape the epistemological experience for the reader. The intervention could be discreet, with appropriate words in the body of the text appearing in hypertext links (although some readers may perceive even such interventions to be disruptive), or they could be aggressive, with explanatory contextual material appearing in flashing pop-up windows as the reader scrolls through the text. Embedding links creatively could begin the process of encouraging a new type of reading, but there is no guarantee that this would happen. The editors’ objectives may be defeated if readers print a hardcopy of the translated text rather than read it online, for pop-up windows and hypertext links would be rendered inactive in this situation. Despite all the possibilities for editorial designer control of the reading experience that I have discussed, one ultimately cannot police the act of reading, nor should one do so. Yet, within the ever increasing sophistication of web design utilities lies the hope of building a website that could in its very structure embody the kinds of reading practices that do justice to the complexity of the translation process, the source text, and its contexts. Web designers, philosophers, and cultural studies scholars have to work together to transform the internet from a phenomenon of rapid consumption and “driveby downloads”5 to a medium that encourages deep and complex thought in the midst of fast-changing stimuli. George Landow draws upon poststructuralist theorists like Barthes and Foucault to demonstrate the radical changes that computer technology has triggered in reading practices. Hypertext—the term used to describe many different types of text (verbal, visual, audio, and animation, for example) and “the electronic links that join them”—gives to readers a means of rapidly familiarizing themselves with the numerous associations and related information that an “expert” author is likely to possess in a particular area of inquiry. Hypertext is “a vast assemblage” of information brought to the reader (34). In addition, the pathway that a reader follows on one occasion of encountering a hypertext may be quite different from the pathway that s/he could pursue on a second reading of the same hypertext; such an open-ended textual journey—with multiple pathways and “trails” to follow—gives the reader the capacity to undergo several different types of textual experience. Hypertext technology enables a reader to be a bricoleur—constructing different types of reading experience for the same text, depending upon the sequence of hypertext links s/he follows for separate readings of the text. Each reading experience becomes a special encounter with the text and, through the text, a cultural milieu and historical context. The textual object can multiply, in a manner of speaking, enriching the reader’s sense of acquisition and possession of meanings. This experience is akin to visiting a museum multiple times to engage the same painting or piece of pottery in different ways: aesthetically, simply enjoying the work for its visual effect; relationally, by studying it in comparison to similar objects that are placed nearby; contextually, by listening to an audio tour of the collection in which the object appears, as representative of a particular genre, a particular phase in an artist’s development, a particular historical moment in a culture, and so on. Hypertext technology could create in the reader two diametrically opposite responses: either humility in the face of the immense amount of available material on any given area of inquiry, or, alternatively, a sense of control and empowerment, because the reader is able to navigate through linked information and thereby construct an individualized domain of knowledge. Landow poses the critical question: “What then are the political implications of hypertext and hypertext systems?” (279). The example he provides—that of a professor and student preparing independently for the next day’s lesson on Milton’s Paradise Lost—shows that the hierarchical relation between teacher and student, expert and novice, is nullified through hypertext, because the new technology puts in the hands of the uninitiated all the relevant information that the expert can call to mind. The professor, in preparing for her class, refreshes her memory with the connections that she knows to be pertinent to the poem—the allusions in it to the Old Testament and Milton’s simultaneous “homage” and “challenge” in the opening lines to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Spenser. Landow observes that <ext>Whereas Professor Jones experiences the great seventeenth-century epic situated within a field of relations and connections, her student encounters a far barer, less connected, reduced poem, most of whose allusions go unrecognized and almost all of whose challenges pass by unperceived.... Suppose one could find a way to allow Smith [the student] to experience some of the connections obvious to Professor Jones. Suppose he could touch the opening lines of Paradise Lost, for instance, and the relevant passages from Homer, Vergil [sic], and the Bible would appear, or that he could touch another line and immediately encounter a list of other mentions of the same idea or image later in the poem or elsewhere in Milton’s writing ... and that he could then call up any or all of them. (279–80)</ext> No one would deny the democratization of knowledge made possible by hypertext. Information is made accessible that previously might have been available in libraries, archives, and remote locations that not everyone could have reached or entered easily. The internet and hypertext technologies bring to the average reader many storehouses of information. But therein lies the potential danger of this medium. The paradox of hypertext is that the better designed it is and the more intricate the network of information it contains, the more likely it is that the reader will feel confident of having understood the nuances of cultural, historical, and political contexts. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with such confidence; however, when a hypertext encounter is too readily accepted as a substitute for actual immersion in an unfamiliar culture and cognitive framework, then a confident reader runs the risk of becoming an irresponsible reader. Barbara Johnson’s phrase “how to suspend knowledge” (182) is especially applicable to the reader who, having dutifully followed every link embedded within the website and absorbed the information there, assumes that s/he is now an authority on cross-cultural engagement. Responsibly relating to unfamiliar peoples and cultures is not merely a matter of equipping oneself with all the available information and discourse on them. In fact, many contemporary translators insist that readers understand the impossibility of ever crossing certain cultural gaps. <h1>The Role of “Foreignizing” Translations</> The translator’s role in the WWB website is central. Without the translated texts, there would be no website, no possibility for the editors to build their collection. Translators, too, are collectors in a way. They immerse themselves in a particular environment and make decisions as to what “fragments” from that environment they wish to “excise” and present to the rest of the world. Through their presentations, the translators perform their own curatorial functions. From the translators’ collections the editors build the collections of the Words Without Borders website and anthologies. In the texts they choose to translate and in the approaches they take to translation, translators play a significant part in constructing the readers’ understanding of unfamiliar cultures (see Brownlie 147). Kelly Austin, in an essay on the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda published in this journal in 2008, writes of the ways in which translating and collecting intersected for Neruda. Neruda was an avid book collector, and among the books in his collection were several editions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. She observes, “Neruda dialogues with ‘Song of Myself’ [the long poem that forms part of Leaves of Grass] to cast Whitman’s catalogues and his poetic practice, especially the variation in tone and levels of diction, in the service of Neruda’s communist convictions. He turns the tables and ultimately uses Whitman’s tools to critique the very sympathy for the United States that Whitman creates” (55), translating Whitman’s lines in ways that serve Neruda’s agenda of putting what he “possess[es] at the disposal of the people’s struggle” (40). Austin’s essay reinforces the relatively recent (within the last 30 years) trend in the field of Translation Studies to avoid seeing the translator as an innocent and uninvolved mediator or go-between across cultures.6 Whether the translator aggressively or subtly shapes the reader’s perception of the source culture, what is undeniable is that the translator could be enlisted as museum co-curator to provide the reader with the necessary guidance in how to consider the process and results of translation. One of the most important observations translators make is that translations are only approximations of the original text and that readers would do well to remember that some linguistic and cultural chasms can never be bridged.As Thomas Greene argues in his essay “Misunderstanding Poetry: Teaching Outside the Western Canon,” expecting to cross every cultural gap and assuming that we will do so is a kind of arrogance, in that we coerce the source text to fit our notions of what ought to make sense. Greene discusses a short lyric poem by the eighth-century Chinese poet Meng Hao-jan. The poem in the original is arranged vertically in four lines and is made up, as Greene points out, of “nouns, verbs, and adjectives without connectives so that the reader is obliged to make the connections himself or herself” (73). Connectives he describes as “conjunctions and prepositions, as well as other helpers like article adjectives, pronouns, and verb tenses” (74). The translations Greene uses (because he does not read Chinese) all fill in the connectives, thereby revealing “the amount of emotional logic, the amount of coherence, motivation and rational connection that the English-language poet feels he has to bring to the bare bones of the Chinese original in order to make it acceptable to the Western reader” (75). Greene believes that Western readers are uncomfortable with the purely impressionistic quality of the original poem and require some direction in how to read the text. Greene suggests that an instructor (or editor) might, in teaching (or displaying) the poem, provide students (readers) with several different translations of it and guide them in a comparative reading of these, pointing out the varying degrees to which the translations insert the connectives. Such an exercise helps readers see how and where their cognitive frameworks are different from someone who is culturally Chinese. <!>Please make the following into a chart. Thank you!<!>Line 1 Line 2 Line 3 Line 4 move (v.) sun (n.) wild/wilderness (adj./n) river(n.) boat (n.) dusk (v.) wilderness/far-reaching/empty (n./adj) clear (adj.) moor (v.) traveler (n.) sky (n.) moon (n.) smoke (n./adj.) grief (n.) low (v./adj.) near (v./adj.) shore (n.) new (adj./v.) tree/s (n.) man (n.)(Greene 73–74)The three translations that Greene includes were all done between 1919 and 1944. Greene makes the point about the translators that they were probably right in assuming about the majority of their readers at that time that “a text that fails to specify a cast of characters, fails to supply connections, motivations, spatial and emotional coherence is bound to disturb ..., bound to seem incomplete [to such readers]” (76). Greene then articulates the discomfort: “We don’t even know whether the Chinese poem is inviting the reader to make the connections it deliberately omits, or whether the reader is expected to live with the indeterminacy, to sacrifice the coherence that we Western readers seem to require. Perhaps the very absence of connections is what constitutes the poetic element” (76). Having acknowledged the Western reader’s difficulty with the absence of connectives, Greene then makes the valuable suggestion that <ext>[r]ather than gliding over the signals of our estrangement with the text, rather than concentrating on what we can assimilate and explain, it may be useful to pause precisely there where our conventional habits of reading desert us. We need to look for the feature that defeats our ingrained habits; we need to be alert to that violation of our expectations and pause over it. In that very puzzlement may lie precisely the potential enlightenment the text can offer us. (77)</ext> Greene’s observations, which may be viewed as curatorial in nature, could serve a critical function in the WWB website, reminding readers that there is value to being puzzled and frustrated in the quest for meaning. Greene, like many contemporary translators, believes that it is important to be humble about what can and cannot be apprehended with ease and what might never be entirely brought within one’s paradigm of knowing. His position is akin to Lawrence Venuti’s notion of “foreignizing translation” (148) in the service of dissidence—i.e., by “using a discursive strategy that deviates from the prevailing hierarchy of domestic discourses (e.g., dense archaism as opposed to fluent transparency), but also by choosing to translate a text that challenges the contemporary canon of foreign literature in the target language” (148). The practice of foreignizing translation signals the “linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text” and announces its refusal to be contained within domestic or target-language literary frameworks. <h1>The Reader as Consumer, Collector, and Website Museum Visitor</>In printed work, translators locate their meditations in introductions, forewords, afterwords, footnotes, endnotes, and other textual devices. These interventions, though valuable, disrupt physically disrupt the neat boundaries of the translated text and break the smooth flow of the act of reading; consequently, the obdurate or resistant reader can ignore them. The eye can slice through the pages, creating its own navigational path and steering clear of these distractions. Constructing appropriate circuits of exchange is, thus, not without its own challenges. The question then becomes, “How does one restore the context of translated text without compromising its aesthetic integrity (itself a fraught notion)?” What are the internet equivalents of forewords, introductory essays, afterwords, and footnotes? Just as there is no way of guaranteeing a reader’s immersion in these accompanying documents, is it not possible that such interventions in the internet sphere will ultimately prove ineffectual? We have become accustomed to thinking of the internet as a space where purchases can be made with ease, and information about the rest of the world can be found from the comfort of our homes. A reader, like a collector, has autonomy and can choose to consume a text entirely for pleasure and in the manner most appealing to him/her. Ultimately, is it impossible to create a non-consuming, non- collecting reader through the internet? Perhaps such a sensibility can emerge only through active debate and interaction with others, in “disorientations of direct encounters with the human” (see Said, above). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s observation that the “desire to explain might be a symptom of the desire to have a self that can control knowledge and a world that can be known” (In Other Worlds, 104) is helpful in imagining the preferred or ideal reader as someone who is not consumed by such desire and is, instead, comfortable with the inexplicable and with a text’s opaqueness to easily digestible meaning. One might say that this reader would resist the temptation to see the translations in the WWB website as offering quick cultural tours, engaging the texts instead as opportunities to “question the explanations of culture” (In Other Worlds, 117) or, in Barbara Johnson’s words, learning from them “to become conscious of the fact that what one thinks is knowledge is really an array of received ideas, prejudices, and opinions—a way of not knowing that one does not know” (181). Is the preferred way of reading one that encourages the reader to experience the pleasure of the text first and then use that pleasure to initiate a more involved engagement with the culture of the text? Or can the text be appreciated fully only upon knowing in sufficient detail and nuance the culture from which it springs and the circumstances of its creation? These are the questions that the site can pose, can even raise as unresolvable dilemmas enveloping the reading of each translated text. Active curiosity and empathy are not emotions generated by labels that have been quickly learned and superficially applied, implies Mason, but rather by continued and regular engagement with the feelings and attitudes of those who share the globe with us. For instance, Mason explains, <ext>In the work of both Iranian and Iraqi contemporary fiction writers, one can’t help but see the Iran-Iraq war as the formative experience of a generation, as central to both literatures as World War II to the literature of Europe and America. (Yet when Americans read these pieces without introduction, we tend to assume that the missiles falling are always American—a strange kind of narcissism.) (12f)</>The question then is, how much information on the Iran-Iraq war is necessary to enrich the reading experience, and how does one ensure that readers take the time to immerse themselves in this material? Readers as bricoleurs may choose to use all the links the editors have supplied or only a subset of them or none at all. Different readers may choose to follow different links, and in the order that best speaks to their individual interests. The uncurious reader avoids bricolage altogether, preferring to “consume” the story simply for its narrative pleasure and eschewing the pursuit of contextual knowledge. Some readers are already aware of the numerous cross-cultural, linguistic, ethical, aesthetic, and political complications attending translating and therefore understand that the translated text is always an incomplete construction, always fluid, likely to be contested, and always open to reworking. Such readers may find the editors’ aggressive interventions highly problematic because they interfere with the experience of the text as an aesthetic product. To them, the annoying reminders of their responsibility as readers may seem patronizing and insulting. But there are other readers who are intelligent yet casual in their approach to translated texts. These readers may not be insensitive to or uninformed about the idea of “difference” but they may not be willing to invest significant time and energy in truly exploring all the ramifications—power, history, perspective, and so on. How does one galvanize such a reader into responsible engagement with translations; specifically, what conditions enable the emergence of a responsible reader within a web-based environment? <h1>Conclusion: Encountering the World Through World Literature</>Words Without Borders is a website for all interested readers—the casual and the informed, cultural gazers and deep divers. The website has an impressive advisory board, so it is probably safe to assume that the editors will negotiate with care the terrain they travel. But they will need to remind themselves constantly that the internet alters the nature of the information landscape in such profound ways that traditional paradigms of knowing will have to be continuously reexamined. In the final analysis, the translated text, like its original, succeeds on the strength of its language—the translator’s skill in manipulating the target language to create in the reader a sense of the source text’s and its culture’s complexities. The pleasure of the text can be so overpoweringly satisfying as to insulate readers from the messiness of living, even convince readers that there is no need for engagement with the tumult of the world. Words Without Borders, in making available its rare pleasures to readers, has the difficult task of leading them outside its chambers to the mountains, villages, cities, deserts, and coasts where people suffer and love and aspire. The editors of the website will need to take particular care that they do not create easy consumers and collectors of cultural difference. One can envision the website’s missing its own original goal and creating, instead, a situation such as the one we encounter in Monique Truong’s novel, The Book of Salt. The Vietnamese narrator of this work, in describing the messieurs and mesdames who interview him to be the cook in their homes, identifies one category of these potential employers as collectors:<ext>[C]ollectors are never satiated by my cooking. They are ravenous. The honey they covet lies inside my scars.... They have no true interest in where I have been or what I have seen. They crave the fruits of exile, the bitter juices, and the heavy hearts. They yearn for a taste of the pure, sea-salt sadness of the outcast whom they have brought into their homes. And I am but one within a long line of others. The Algerian orphaned by a famine, the Moroccan violated by his uncle, the Madagascan driven out of his village because his shriveled left hand was a sign of his mother’s misdeeds, these are the wounded trophies who have preceded me. (19)</ext>It is easy to recognize in these employer-collectors the reader-collectors of translated texts. It is this type of reader that the internet is most likely to attract, with its endless array of collectible experiences.7 It is this type of reader that the editors of websites such as Words Without Borders need actively to engage and guide toward a far richer and more textured interaction with the vast non-Anglophone world. <#><aff>University of Massachusetts Boston</><bmh>Works Cited</><bib>Austin, Kelly. ‘“I have put all I possess at the disposal of the people’s struggle’: Pablo Neruda as Collector, Translator, and Poet.” The Comparatist 32 (May 2008): 40–62. </bib><bib>Belk, Russell W. Collecting in a Consumer Society. 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Selfe, Jr. “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones.” College Composition and Communication 45.4 (December 1994): 480–504. </bib><bib>Slane, Andrea. “Democracy, Social Space, and the Internet.” University of Toronto Law Journal 57.1 (Winter 2007): 81–105. </bib><bib>Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988. </bib><bib>_____. “Translating into English,” in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. Eds. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 93–111. </bib><bib>Srikanth, Rajini. The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. </bib><bib>Steer, Linda M. “Photographic Appropriation, Ethnography, and the Surrealist Other.” TheComparatist 32 (May 2008): 63–81. </bib><bib>Thomas, Nicholas. “Licensed Curiosity: Cook’s Pacific Voyages.” Cultures of Collecting. Eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. 116–37. </bib><bib>Truong, Monique. The Book of Salt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. </bib><bib>Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge, 1995. </bib><bib>Vogel, Susan. “Always True to the Object, in Our Fashion.” Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.191–204. </bib><bib>Walker, Janet A. “Van Gogh, Collector of ‘Japan.’” The Comparatist 32 (May 2008): 82–115. </bib><bib>_____, Helen Asquine Fazio, and V. G. Julie Rajan. “Introduction: Collecting and/as Cultural Transformation.” The Comparatist 32 (May 2008): 36–40. </bib><bib>Whitaker, Mark P. “Tamilnet.com: Some Reflections on Popular Anthropology, Nationalism, and the Internet.” Anthropological Quarterly 77.3 (Summer 2004): 469–98.</bib> <bmh>Notes</><unn>I wish to thank Janet A. Walker for her thoughtful feedback. This essay has been immeasurably enriched by her judicious suggestions.</unn> <en>1. Mission statement accessed at http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=AboutUs(last accessed on June 24, 2009).2. In regard to consuming cultures of unfamiliar others, Janet M. Powers asks in her essay “The Outsider’s Gaze”: “Wherein lies my fascination with the other? Is it a concern for the weak, which gives me a notion of power? Is it a delight in the exotic, which makes me something of a voyeur? Is it a reveling in things imagined, which causes me aggressively to explore the boundaries of what is possible? Or is it the desire for an originality, so lacking in myself, that I must appropriate another’s?” (74–75). The links between collecting and colonialism have been explored extensively: for instance, see Russell W. Belk (12), Linda M. Steer, Janet A. Walker, et al. See also the program description of the 2002 conference of the Association of Art Historians, “Collecting the Colony: Contemporary Thoughts on Imperial Histories.” Panelists John Zarobell’s, Rainer Buschmann’s, and Kavita Singh’s abstracts address especially well this connection between collecting and colonialism. See www.aah.org.uk/archive/2002session11.php (last accessed on June 24, 2009) for details. 3. I emphasize that these suggestions to read with an interrogative stance, so that one is examining one’s own assumptions as one encounters another reality, are not made with a view to policing the act of reading. They are offered not as exhortations, but as invitations, with the hope that the reader will consider them at a convenient moment. 4. On the “labor” of caring and learning about those unlike oneself, see Srikanth, The WorldNext Door 23–33. 5. Christian Pulver, a graduate student of mine in Fall 2003, introduced me to this phrase in a conversation. 6. See Brownlie on translator Francis Jones, who chose to translate mainly works by Bosnian writers (over Serb writers) so as to “defend and promote Bosnian and Herzogovinian culture”: “in situations of conflict [such as the Yugoslavian war] the translator is more acutely aware of his or her position as a constrained but autonomous social actor than in ‘unmarked’ settings in which social, ethical, and ideological considerations may remain below the level of conscious awareness” (142). 7. By contrast, Janet A. Walker, in her essay on Van Gogh’s large collection of Japanese woodblock prints as the source of his inspiration for his paintings of flowering trees, offers us the vision of a different kind of collector. She shows that although the artist imagined Japan and the Japanese people in a particular way (as living close to nature) and then drew on that imagined space to replenish himself and his art, this fixed idea of Japan, wherein the country and its people were denied their complexity, was not ultimately merely self-serving and did not reinforce “European political and cultural hegemony” (108); Van Gogh was “able to translate ‘Japan’ for his fellow Westerners, and thereby contribute to enlightened cultural interaction between Japan and Europe in the age of imperialism” (109). But such a happy outcome is not typically the case with collecting enterprises that begin as endeavors to replenish one’s own sense of self or energize one’s depleted perspective.</en>

鼎ollecting and Translating the Non-Western Other on the Internet

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