<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 the

United 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. New York: Routledge, 1995. </bib>

<bib>Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” Illuminations:

Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken

Books, 1968. 59–67. </bib>

<bib>Brownlie, Siobhan. “Situating Discourse on Translation and Conflict.” Social Semiotics

17.2 (June 2007): 135–50. </bib>

<bib>Chan, Brenda. “Virtual Communities and Chinese National Identity.” Journal of Chinese

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<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 World

Next 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>