13. Translation and catastrophe

Luci Rivka Ramos Mendes (UFPR)

Even though it has been repeated exhaustingly that language is insufficient and fails before historical catastrophe, literature keeps responding such events in a consistent and insistent way. Testimonial literature, by the way, is a literary genre which has the narrative os such facts – usually considered unable to be spoken about – as its main concern. It is about the narratives of survivors, first account descriptions of what has been experienced by the ones who were left to tell the story. But there are many other ways for literature to speak about the catastrophe – poetry, theatre, prose.

At the same time the impossibility of translation is something that is also spoken about a lot. The question of 'untranslatability' is something that has its captive place in the field of translation studies. A throughout translation of any given text would be impossible to achieve, for something from the original is always left in the translated text – and somethings are 'lost'. As one text is recreated in translation it is 'the same' and 'other' text.

In this symposium we take as a starting point the question: what happens when these two impossibilities clash? They are two impossibilities which generate a lot of discussion, studies and speculation, but, at the same time, ignored. Even though one can't write about the catastrophe, people write about it. Even though there is this untranslatability, people translate.

How can we thing and work on the translation of this kind of literary works not only in a theoretically coherent way but, specially, as an ethical practice? How and how much the translation of these literatures helps the building and maintenance of memories of catastrophes like the Shoah, the pogroms, the World Wars, ethnical persecutions, the horrors of dictatorships in the West and in the East? Could translation, instead, contribute to the erasure of these memories?