Summer Reading #3 — Translation
By Robert Wood
Poet Robert Wood is the Liminal Summer Reading columnist for 2021.
Join us over the summer for six columns, on Decolonisation, translation, resistance and more.
Readers are warned that this article contains material by and about deceased people.
I have been going to the Pilbara since 2000. This is with the guidance and permission of Ngarluma traditional owners, whose country includes Murujuga (Burrup Peninsula) and can be seen here. My main point of connection is my gumbarli (brother in law/sister’s husband) and, as his guest, I have been to Roebourne, Woodbrook, Jigalong, Yandeyarra, Port Headland, and elsewhere on his traditional and neighbouring countries. I do not know much, but compared to many readers of LIMINAL unfamiliar with this country, I know a little. I have also been employed in a cultural capacity since 2011 by Aboriginal owned and run heritage groups including Tarruru. My work was firstly in archives, but now it includes more contemporary work such as editing, interviewing, transcription and translation. I have also been a cookieman. It is translation that interests me here partly because it connects at a conceptual level to many Asian-Australian communities in their linguistic diversity.
For the last two years, I have been involved as a translator on a song poetry project concerning tjabi. Tjabi are public, personally authored song texts about daily life, and, they circulate freely in the Pilbara, being part of the corpus of performance in at least thirteen language groups. They reached their height in the mid-century period and people still perform them today, though less so. Tjabi do not have proscriptions in place that prohibit their listening (or composition) by uninitiated audiences. Non-local composers could even write them if they so wish like haiku or pantoum or ghazals. Compared to the well known secret-sacred, religious, songlines, which readers might be familiar with, they are accessible and open; but compared to contemporary First Nations writing in the literary economy, they are more traditional and somewhat difficult, partly because they are in languages other than English. I have been working on tjabi with my gumbarli for ten years now and readers can still take a look at our first published piece on this in Jacket2 in 2012.
Recently, I contributed a piece about song poet Pinningu to a community publication. Pinningu is my favourite tjabi composer because of his wry sense of humour, use of double meanings, referential quality, propulsive vocalisation, and his prodigious output. Born around 1900, Pinningu was a legendary performer with song poems about cards, mining, cattle, fishing, family, sex and Country. As Carl von Brandenstein wrote in Taruru, Pinningu ‘is probably the best and most prolific tjabi singer alive’. While Pinningu was Nyiyabarli, he also sung in Nyamal, Warnman, Ngarla, mixing languages from all over the Pilbara. He also let other people sing his tjabi, including Maggie Horace, Doris Churnside and Peter Coppin. His audience also extended to Portuguese, Afghan, and German immigrants that listened on country. Pinningu’s tjabi was grounded in the Pilbara but reached an audience from all over the world especially in the circulation of recordings made by anthropologists and locals.
Pinningu exists in the written record too, where he is more often refereed to by his white name, Donald Norman. Dorothy Hewett in her introduction to Max Brown’s Black Eureka writes, ‘Donald Norman, who has 410 songs’ and ‘sang a corroboree [by Banjo Fland] that circles the Fortescue, Fitzroy, De Grey, Davis, Oakover, the Southern Cross, the sun, the morning and the evening star.’ Speaking about Pinningu's role in the 1946 Pilbara Strike, one writer says ‘his strong social conscience, which speaks out of his work, also involved him in the struggle for better wages.’ The Strike was part of life up there, and, Pinningu sang about life in the whole, especially in his tjabi. Pinningu most often performed in Marble Bar, but he sang about all kinds of other places too - Shaw River, Googalygong, Mumbulina Bluff, Noreena Downs, Balfour Downs, Corunna Downs, Oakover River, Nullagine, Roy Hill. He was a world historical figure who happened to be in the Pilbara.
In the course of translating Pinningu’s poetry, I have learnt a lot; not only about tjabi and him. I have also learned the value of collaborative effort in repatriating archival material and reaching new audiences in the process. To map out the process, there are recordings of Pinningu’s tjabi in white institutional archives that are then digitally copied onto thumb drives, which are then repatriated to the Pilbara to community members, including some contemporary tjabi singers and family. The community provide glosses into English of the tjabi lyrics and then we sit down together and decide how to render them into a written text. This then gets ratified by people with authority before determining how it will be passed onwards. The publications stay in the community and are not for public sale, not in bookshops or tourists bureaus or anywhere else. I do not get a publication credit, which often goes to an organisation or the Elders that have done the most work. It is collective and consultative, and, we do our best; but it is by no means perfect and nor does everyone agree. There is still a lot more to learn, and, I am certain I have and will continue to make mistakes along the way. This acknowledgement of my own failure (and learning) makes me more confident that I am getting somewhere after twenty years going to the Pilbara and ten years working on tjabi. Getting somewhere includes towards a better understanding of the Country itself and tjabi in general even as I know my gumbarli knows far more than I do. I am simply there as a fellow traveller who he invites along for the ride.
What translation teaches us about the colonial process, however, is important. I want to refer back to the debate in post-colonial circles between Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thi’ongo. Although it was in an African setting, there are lessons to be learned here and now. In “The African Writer and the English Language”, Achebe argues that his literature is “a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home [of England] but altered to suit its new African surroundings.” It reads, in reductive terms, as a defence of English, a kind of acceptance that this world language is how one should express oneself if one wants to be read. Around the same time, Thiong’o proposed something like the opposite, turning away from English to write in Gikuyu, his ancestral tongue and an avowedly local and African language. The debate over the appropriate language of literature seemed to fall between ideas of Achebean assimilation and Thiong’oan self-determination.
What seems to be missing in both of them remains missing in the post-colonial arguments that come after. Not in hybridity or creolisation, the porousness of language, the subaltern positions of identity. Precious little thought has been given to multilingualism, to the heterodoxies and heterogeneity of multiplicity, of polytheism. In my work in the Pilbara, Elders I have collaborated with speak seven or eight languages plus ceremonial ones. This continues to be the case despite the monolingual hostilities of the nation state as it emanates from the British Crown and the Queen’s English. When thinking about language then, and the language to use in literature, I see encouraging signs such as Anita Heiss’ new book cover in Wiradjuri, or Kim Scott’s use of Noongar in Deadman Dance, or in Lionel Fogarty’s poetry. Language, and the politics of language, is there too in many other writers, perhaps in all writers, but prominent in the idiosyncratic Aboriginal Englishes of Alexis Wright, Tony Birch, Claire Coleman. In relating it back to Achebe and Thi-ongo, we might speak more of the value of multilingualism. Rather than thinking we must choose between English and Gikuyu, surely we can do both? Especially when texts can be reproduced. And that is where translation matters.
Translation matters because it doubles our audience. It can connect us to countries that are new to us. It can enable us to reflect more deeply on our mother tongues. My own experience in the Pilbara has run alongside a developing and deepening interest in my own native place - Kerala - and its language - Malayalam. I am working on another project right now where my poetry is being translated into Malayalam. There are three of us involved, which is smaller than those of us working on Pinningu’s corpus but is communal and consultative nonetheless. The outcome, however, will be a book for public sale and circulation if only in Kerala and its diasporas. My relationship to English then is something of a pivot, not a place to rest in, or to flex from; but a place that connects out to the Pilbara and South India. What we need more of is language itself, and, the space it takes to work on its artistic expressions. The question of translation is how it allows us to be fellow travellers to the people that are better versed in those tongues themselves.
When translation is central to decolonisation, it is not about a naive and ahistorical return to a pre-colonial past, as if we could wave a wand, and forget what has happened, or go back to speaking only in our mother tongue. In a settler society, it is hard to see the exodus of white colonisers from the geographic shores. But that does not mean simply living with them as they determine the rules of engagement. It is about repatriating, reconnecting, re-invigorating ourselves in light of colonial power relations in the present. It feels good for me to help just a little in returning reproducible archival materials to the Country it is from. It feels good for me to have my own poetry translated into my mother’s language and script. And those are personal projects towards different types of decolonisation itself. It is not then about loss, or even truth telling, but about what we gain when we realise we can work with other people in our midst towards a vision of the present that speaks in more than one tongue.
Robert Wood is a poet. He is interested in dream, enlightenment, nature, suburbs and philosophy. Robert is a Malayali with connections to the East Indian Ocean. He lives on Noongar country in Australia.