The Politics and Poetics of Transliteration in the Works of Olga Broumas and George Economou

Although a number of prominent critics have written about the politics and aesthetics of translation, very little critical attention has been paid to literary transliteration.¹ By literary transliteration I mean not only the literal act itself but also a more aestheticized, here poeticized, version of this process that allows for a multiplicity of cultural, linguistic, and even historical registers to be made apparent. Within the US, the lack of critical attention given to transliteration is particularly frustrating considering the nation’s often suppressed polyglot literary history. Recent studies, such as Martha J. Cutter’s Lost and Found in Translation (2005), Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien’s Weird English (2005), and Lawrence Rosenwald’s Multilingual America (2008), have illustrated how varied and complex this history is. Such works are crucial to understanding the American literary tradition as a site of multilingual contacts and traditions. However, these multilingual realities are almost always viewed exclusively through the critical lens of translation theory, often leaving a process such as transliteration insufficiently theorized and ignored.

The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (2000), edited by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, is a perfect example of this critical oversight. Some texts in the collection make use of transliteration—for example, chapter five, “The Walam Olum or the Red Score of the Lenape,” considers a pictographic Native American text—yet the editors make no theoretical attempt to account for any possible differences between the practices of translation and transliteration. Despite the welcome turn in how we examine American literary history, most of these discussions are conducted through the tropes of translation, and almost all of them focus on prose rather than poetry.²

In light of this critical gap, I engage directly with what poet Olga Broumas calls in her poem “Artemis” “a politics / of transliteration” (27-28). Literary transliteration is a process that does not simply give voice to neglected and marginalized peoples within the nation-state but also fosters possibilities for new and different national subjectivities. My conception of the political and how it relates to aesthetics owes much to the work of Jacques Rancière. For Rancière, politics is not about “the practice of power” but “a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways of speaking” (152, emphasis added). Transliteration makes apparent the multiplicity of voices inherent to any supposedly monolingual national (and lyrical) voice while making visible dominant and counter dominant trends within the nation-state.³ The works of Broumas and George Economou make viable and visible—make “sayable,” to use Rancière’s parlance—the pluralistic realities of the modern national subject.

This essay intervenes in the conceptual realm of cultural exchange that is primarily situated through the language of translation. The poetry and poetics of Broumas and Economou allow for productive critical excursions into the possibilities that transliteration can afford that some theories and practices of translation cannot. For example, although critics such as Yiorgos Anagnostou and Karen Van Dyck return to translation as their leading metaphor, these readings ignore the possibilities that transliteration illuminates how certain subjects resist assimilation into the nation-state.⁴ If there is one major distinction between transliteration and most multivalent translations, it is that the former makes far more tangible the existence of the source language and cultural context than the latter. Aside from transliteration’s own creative and literary potentialities, it is a prime linguistic example of what can be both lacking and successful in the best literary translations, a corrective to the process of translation. However, transliteration also gives shape to the limits of cultural translation and manifests what is invisible in translation, allowing us to better see, using Rancière’s terms, “the sensible,” or dominant power, of any national language. Finally, this essay draws attention to two poets who have been neglected. Both Economou...