Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life ed. by Sherry Simon (review)

This anthology presents thirteen different texts on the topic of multilingual cities, multilingualism in cities past and present, and translation as a factor in all of this. It comes out of a Cities in Translation conference held recently at Concordia University in Montreal. The contributors include a human geographer, a translation studies specialist, literary scholars, media and communications scholars, and academics working in cultural studies, comparative literary studies, and art history. With such a broad spectrum of authors, it provides an equally broad spectrum of views, accounts, and assessments of multilingualism and diverse forms of translation, which, not only widens considerably the concept of what counts and works as translation but also points to the many academic directions in which translation studies can (and perhaps should) be heading.

Sherry Simon's introduction opens with an evocation of the "exuberant mix of languages" in Czernowitz, one of the cities of the Hapsburg empire in the early twentieth century, and she observes how the subsequent wars and conflicts, as well as the nationalistic movements underlying them and arising from them, not only transformed the city (and other cities of the former Hapsburg empire) but also caused translation to "take the form of sudden and forced suppression of languages and the imposition of others." A number of the articles in the book, such as those by Laimonas Briedis on Vilnius, Katia Pizzi on Trieste, Will Straw on the politics of public broadcasting in Montreal, and Andre Furlani on different flâneurs in Montreal today who "exempt themselves from the imposition of fixed linguistic subject positions," further develop the idea announced in the introduction that "multilingualism points to pure diversity," while translation "speaks to the relations of tension, interaction, rivalry or convergence among them as well as specific spaces they occupy in the city." The question of space (evoking ghettos, immigrant neighbourhoods, or cities divided by race, class, or rival settler languages) plays an important role here, as accounts of the same city translate it quite differently, depending on the "translator's" own ethnicity or language. We see this in Matteo Colombi's text about Prague in the nineteenth/early twentieth centuries and in Michael Cronin's study of how the newest communications technologies allow Dublin's contemporary immigrant communities the usual ghettoization. The immigrant, the refugee, the migrant loom large in these articles where authors assess patterns of integration through language: Simon Harel sees translation in Montreal as a constraining, not a connective, process and Roch Duval sets his piece in the immigrant city of 1920s Sao Paolo where the "macaronic" language deployed by writers such as Machado renders the soundscape of multilingualisms, creoles, and pidgins of those changing places.

But translation is not all bad: Myriam Suchet and Sarah Mekdjian, for instance, describe and trace translation projects of sorts in artivisms (art+activism) such as graffiti, guerrilla gardening, and translational installations. Here, translation is redefined as "changing the established order of things and expanding our horizons." Simon ends her introduction on a positive note: translation, she asserts, brings into dialogue languages that are "states of memory in the history of the city" and "vehicles of memory in the present" putting long-standing inhabitants and newcomers in touch and bringing about a convergence of languages that can create new conversations. On the whole, though, this collection of articles celebrates multilingualism and, therefore, unofficial, subversive, and activist forms of translation as the other and more creative, vital side of "the doxa associated with monolingual and monocultural existence." This makes for an interesting and alternative reading experience, which sees and theorizes questions around multilingualism, interlingualism, and translation in new ways.