4W Women in Translation: Circles of Meaning
The 4W Women in Translation circle (4W WIT) is an engaged research effort that explores the meaning and practice of collective translation, It is inspired by experiences of collaboration related to literature and the arts, gender and wellbeing, and also community, urban sustainability and the environment, in particular, our collaboration with the award-wining writers of the City and Nature José Emilio Pacheco Literary Prize, organized by the Museum of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guadalajara.
4W WIT began with the desire to give voice to Latin American poets or writers from all of the Americas. Our scope created ties with national and international writers and translators with a similar vision regarding the role of poetry and translation for cultural wellbeing. Our circle of translators come from a variety of disciplines – from literature, to anthropology to public health. UW-Madison students are key collaborators and inform the pedagogical component of the research. Often students initiate engagement with us through an interdisciplinary course on the subject of translating cultures and disciplines taught by Dr. Mercado in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Students join the circle as equals, bringing their own experiences and insights about language, readings of the text from their own generational perspective, and fresh perspectives on fluidity and newness of language itself.
We understand translation as an “instrumental” or a “hermeneutic” process that allows multiple forms of cultural transformation through a complex practice of rereading, re-contextualization and re-writing. It is as much an art as writing itself. Suzanne J. Levine notes in The Subversive Scribe that one of the most subversive acts of a translator is in the selection of materials. The 4W-WIT approach to translation echoes and embraces Levine's notion of subversive provocation and deliberate betrayal of canonical or mainstream ideas. Further WIT adds a collective reading and translation process which enhances the depth and dimensions of meaning, and distributes power over interpretation in a way that centers the text. So, we have given ourselves permission to disrupt the usual hierarchies - reader and writer, writer and translator, native and foreigner.
4W-WIT selections work from linguistic or cultural minorities (Latin American indigenous languages relegated to more dominant languages), and the underrepresented voices of women. For us, the collective practice of translation is indeed a true “zone of cultural contact” that also aims to be a form of resistance and decolonization creating a new literary canon for a new generation of readers from around the world.
With the voice of the writer and the text’s cultural context in mind, our methodology for collective translation includes multiple perspectives, initial presentation by the author, iterative layers of translation and revision, and review by the author. In this way we create a dialogue and employ a circular approach to our creative process. Some examples of the women writers we have translated include the Mexican Mixtec bilingual poet Nadia López García, or the Colombian poet Juana María Echevarri part of the Poetry for Peace project that aims heal the traumatic experiences of women and children in rural areas in her country. We also have translated writers of a younger generation such as Silvia Goldman from Uruguay and well-known writer Luisa Futoransky from Argentina. Together with writers and translators, students have collaborated in the creation of two of two of our key projects: the bilingual anthology A Lantern Radical Light / Linterna, Luz Radical (2020), Montañas and 3 or 4 Ríos —a bilingual anthology of the City and Nature José Emilio Pacheco Literary Prize and the result of our collaboration with the Museum of Environmental Sciences of the University of Guadalajara.
About the Author
Lori DiPrete Brown has worked to advance health, human rights, and sustainable development in Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Cameroon, India, Nepal and Malawi. She teaches in the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison and holds degrees from Yale College, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Harvard Divinity School. Her novel, Caminata, A journey, is based on her Peace Corps service in Honduras, where she lived and worked in a youth development program and first came to know and love the Spanish Language.
About the Author
Sarli E. Mercado, Ph.D. in Latin American Contemporary Literature, is a literary critic and author of Cartographies of Exile: On the poetry of Juan Gelman and Luisa Futoransky [Cartografías del destierro: En torno a la poesía de Juan Gelman y Luisa Futoransky (2008)]. She has published and presented her work on contemporary Spanish American poetry in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Sarli co-directs the 4W Living Poetry-Women in Translation Project (4W-WIT) and is part of the ongoing collaborative interdisciplinary projects between UW-Madison and the Museum of Environmental Sciences (MCA) at the University of Guadalajara.