Axon: Creative Explorations

This paper will critically consider the ethical responsibilities and positionality of the translator of Witness Poetry (poetry written in response to mass social trauma), primarily through engagement with the work of Dale Tracy in With the Witness: Poetry, Compassion and Claimed Experience (2017), and Gayatri Spivak’s ‘The Politics of Translation’ (2000), and through interdisciplinary considerations of trauma theory, testimony, and poetics. Translation engenders fluctuating movement into, and out of, the text; it requires thorough exploration ‘inside’, considering the micro levels of language, and a frequent moving ‘out of’, in order to remain aware of one’s own position and linguistic context (Slavitt 2010: 509). The ‘frustrations’ of translation, that a shift across languages will always create changes in weight or meaning, reminds the translator of their limited position: limited, in terms of distance from the original event via systems of language. Translation affords intense, prolonged attention to the original poem, and imbedded reminders of distance and refracted positionality. Crucially to Witness Poetry, translation provides opportunity for participation in the continuation of testimony, in the act of remembering (Slavitt 2010; Deanne–Cox 2013). I argue that the position, responsibilities, and possibilities of the translator to Witness Poetry can be (re)imagined through the transdisciplinary, trans–epistemic lenses of compassion, trauma theory, ethical readership and response.