Guest Editor’s Letter

Tôi trân thành và nhận người Boonwurrung và người Wurundjeri Woy Wurrung ở đất nước Đông Kulin chưa bao giờ bỏ những đất biển, trời cao của các tổ tiên người áy. Tại đây, tôi đang làm các công việc, và sắng tác những tạc phẩm mới trên mảnh đất này.

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The most political person I know is my Aunty Kim. In the family she is known for her belligerence, a quiet, and often barely noticed belligerence. 

Kim Nhung has never been shy about gently offering thoughts on my practice and the general artworld nonsense that comes with the territory of contemporary Australian art. 

As the eldest of the one and a half generation in my family, I am regularly tasked with the role of the primary language broker; negotiating and deciding how members of my family are to be rendered intelligible and made socially acceptable. Without ever being explicitly asked to, I intuitively wore the linguistic Redcoat¹ of the settler-colony, taking on the role of a subject administrator. Ever vigilant, I was always ready to translate for my family, with the aim of imposing order and extracting compliance from the ethnic chaos that uncontrollably spewed from their broken-english. 

Kim challenged me about how I would regularly, without question, perform the Acknowledgement of Country on her behalf. Without ever addressing the anti-Aboriginal racism and entrenched colonial mentality of Vietnamese people and its diaspora. 

She made me translate the Acknowledgement of Country into Vietnamese, and through her, I began to recognise a more complex story of my Vietnamese ancestors as both victim losers and self-aggrandising perpetrators. The Vietnamese had historically and in ever evolving ways, continue to inflict colonial violence, linguistic imperialism and genocide on the Cham, Khmer and countless other ethnic minorities throughout  the current borders of Vietnam. To hide behind the convenience of another coloniser’s tongue and defer to the ‘post-colonial’ civilities of Australia’s settler colonialism had allowed me to conveniently skim over the nuances of my own. The Aussie approach to performative decolonisation has created a new space for  me, and many others, to immerse ourselves in the delicious delusion of innocent victimhood or hapless bystander. 

The complexities and playful complicities of what it means to be a translator in-between-worlds are core to the inquiries and contributions that form in this issue on translation.

Helen Ngo, when thinking through the playful inter-generational heart words passed on through her multi-lingual family, reminds us that translation can dangerously upset the social order as much as it binds us together; ‘traduire, c’est trahir (to translate is to betray), but maybe also, to betray is to translate (trahir, c’est traduire).’ By uncovering the interplay of literal and standard translations, Helen demonstrates how a family’s everyday love-language to betray and break open expected translations. 

Colluding in linguistic and un-linguistic forms of literary refusal, that is, refusing to be translated fully or translated coherently has allowed Ellen Van Neervan & Jessica Kejun Xu to share a form of intimate knowing, one separate from that of an extractive and paternalistic model of care. The politic of redaction and poetry exchange becomes essential to surviving a colonial language that was created to marginalise and control neurodivergent and racialised queer and crip bodies.

Wen Pei Low offers an additive approach. Where these bodies continue to be subject to the humiliation of a medicalised language of care: one that ‘remains in the waiting rooms.’ An entire body of work, one which is embodied and carried across multiple places and bodies, demands to be carefully and accurately recorded, collected, interpreted and translated as an evolving resource that can help others to safely navigate a medicalised landscape that continuously forgets, over-looks and disregards those difficult bodies that are left permanently waiting. 

Sri Vamsi Matta, also keeps meticulous records through memorised menus, recipes and conversations shared because of food. Retracing the many cumulative and life-shaping encounters of people across Australia on a performance tour and international residency, Vamsi thinks of foodways as a form of ongoing reciprocity; of following unexpected digestive tracts that continues to translate and evolve a recipe of collective memory and social infusion. 

Reading through cycles of time, oceans and genetic lineages, Leitu Bonnici processes translation through the iterative and repetitive mathematics of typography. Like the repeated waveforms in spoken language, the written and printed text carries the inheritance of knowledge that can fold in words, numbers, weather patterns and celestial geometry. To the untrained eye, the alphabet remains an alphabet. But for those who carry the lineage of wayfarers, the alphabet becomes a journey through time and space, a spatial connection to the people before

Jacqui Shelton applies the process of relearning and becoming reacquainted with a mother-tongue that uncovers a story of colonial-era female incarceration of Irish or Gaeilge speakers who could barely speak bad English. Unable to be translatable, legible or made intelligible to the British Law, the Irish speaker is erased until an artist many generations later begins to retell her story with an imperfect Gaeilge voice. 

The looping video and the subtitles for Agus Wijaya becomes a site of poetry and opacity. Like the acts of linguistic refusals previously mentioned, and the cyclic and iterative nature of grasping meaning through expanded language, the subtitle is not always “sub”. Coming to the fore as a video loops and repeats itself, subtitles become a site for multiplicity, misreading and uncertainty, not rigid or formal translation. Translation involves trust and trusting in the fact that language continuously evolves and changes with each version of itself. 

Last year when I visited my Aunty Kim, I was sitting on the toilet when I saw that she had written a series of translations on the bathroom tiles to expand her English vocabulary. Not wanting to rely on my unreliable translations, she took down slang that she encountered online and sought out a Vietnamese meaning for each. I realised that my Aunty’s language was evolving; she was trying to decode the slang of young people. 

The words being  translated were:

• Low key (kín đáo) ~ (discreet)

• Flex (≠ kín đáo) ~ (not discreet)

• Simp (≠ quán tâm) ~ (not mindful)

• Slay (tỏa sáng) ~ (brilliant)

I noticed that some of her translations were weird. They described the opposite of their negative, and were Vietnamese terms I would not have chosen to use myself. Looking closer at the words she chose, I realised that her translations were Vietnamese slang words that were equivalent to the English version and not necessarily a strict English translation as I had initially assumed when questioning her accuracy. It was me, and not Kim, who was being left behind by language.

¹  In Australia, ‘Redcoats’ refer to the British regular soldiers who served across the Australian colonies from 1788 to 1870. They guarded convicts, maintained colonial authority and deployed the rule of law and punishment over throughout the colony.