translated by Aung Aung Taik

About ten days later after battling the weeds in my garden, I began to see the little reddish sprouts of lettuce. The green peas were perhaps shy at the beginning; just one or two came out.

Since I had never seen a turnip plant, it was difficult to know which sprouts were turnips and which ones were weeds. Then again, I saw places where the seeds I had laid were germinating. What a pleasant mood they put me in!

Since it rained every two or three days, I did not have to give special care to the garden. However, my daily task was to fervently dig out the ever-growing, useless creepers with my three-pronged fork. They are fast to grow, and fast to destroy other plants. Some must have fallen as I carried the uprooted ones to the garbage, because the next day I found the roots were already clinging to the surface of the ground.

Every day, I wrestled with these pests. The weeds were not only ready to rise from death, they were also difficult kill. My neighbors and passersby must have been thinking, “This woman, stooping on her knees every day, is doing serious gardening!” They did not know I was pulling out plants, not planting them.

My saga turned into jubilation as I saw the little plants finally grow larger and larger each day. It improved my outlook as I realized that cultivating goodness includes protecting the process of growth. My weeding efforts were essential to the welfare of my garden.

The wild flowers that Jana did not pull out are now in full blossom with beautiful purple flowers. The lettuce is now about an inch high. The turnips and the green peas are growing well.  And the lone beet grown from one we bought at the supermarket, is now fluttering with leaves.

In the evening when my sons come home from school, we go to the garden.  The two of them connect the long hose to the faucet to water the plants. I, holding the three-pronged trowel, am ready for the search and destroy mission. As much as I will enjoy the bounties that are to come from my garden, I am at present enjoying the role of the terminator of the wicked weeds.

Click here to read Khet Mar’s bio.

“Many people talk nowadays about messages everywhere, inside the organism a hormone is a message, a beam of light to obtain teleguidance to a plane or from a satellite is a message, and so on; but the message in language is absolutely different. The message, our message, in all cases comes from the Other.…The unconscious has nothing to do with instinct or primitive knowledge or preparation of thought in some underground. It is a thinking with words, with thoughts that escape your vigilance, your state of watchfulness. The question of vigilance is important. It is as if a demon plays a game with your watchfulness…

“Probably we would all be as quiet as oysters if it were not for this curious organization which forces us to disrupt the barrier of pleasure or perhaps only makes us dream of forcing and disrupting this barrier…[and] permit[s] the full spectrum of desire to allow us to approach, to test, this sort of forbidden jouissance which is the only valuable meaning that is offered to our life..”

–Jacques Lacan, “Of Structure as an Inmixing of Otherness Prerequisite to any Subject Whatever”

Each of us harbors a displaced writer within, irrepressibly writing the most piquantly personalized texts. We all have an “authority problem”: No matter how hard we try, we cannot impose our will on this writer within, the demon eludes the censors. Identity is an illusion masking our essential hybridism, a locus for dialogue. Language–others disembodied in language and re-embodied Osiris-like in our brains– is the source of the joy that sustains the meaning of life.

People have asked me why I gave up business to become a volunteer to City of Asylum/Pittsburgh. This is why.

Click here to read Henry’s bio.

After working for many years as an editor and a translator, I have become increasingly aware of the many ways the two activities overlap. How their roles change and how we view these two activities bring up important issues regarding publishing, texts, authorship, and artistic integrity.
Both require deep, concentrated, meticulous, magnifying-glass reading—a kind of reading that exposes failures of execution, narrative inconsistencies, stylistic missteps, and just plain errors. As an editor my job is often to intuit what an author really wanted to say and didn’t quite manage to, then suggest a more elegant, accurate, or efficient way to do so. As an editor, I mark the page with a pencil or, more often, turn on Microsoft Word’s “track changes” feature and decorate the text with colorful and graphic deletions, additions, and comments.

As a literary translator, a certain level of such “edits” can, as we all know, be made invisible, obscured under the fog that hovers in that low-lying space between languages. But what does a conscientious, loyal, and engaged translator do when, after teasing out a complex, multilayered, and seemingly elegantly constructed metaphor and parsing it into some form of English, it becomes apparent that it is, god forbid, mixed? How does one deal with a “quiddity,” that actually makes no sense, even after extensive etymological, lexicological, and historical research in Google and beyond?

Literature, which we may want to define roughly as works of art that employ language as their medium, is inhabiting an increasingly narrow space, hemmed in on one side by the blockbuster and on the other by the blog. Within this space, the role of the editor and the publisher—among the many gatekeepers of culture—is becoming more intrusive on one hand and more neglectful on the other. The implications for the translator—ethically, aesthetically, pragmatically—are far-reaching, especially as regards her “loyalty” to the text and the author, as that author’s “representative” in its new home (language and cultural context, of course, but also marketplace). As we creep along the spectrum toward the blockbuster, the concepts of fidelity, loyalty, and integrity may mean something quite different; they may mean creating a text by any means that offers the greatest chance of selling the most copies; that is, being faithful to the market rather than any highfalutin concept of textual integrity.

Jorge Luis Borges once made a quip about the original remaining true to the translation. Perhaps that has become a physical, rather than a metaphysical concern.

Click here to read Katherine’s bio.