Shushan Avagyan, ‘A Book, Untitled’ (trans. Deanna Cachoian-Schanz) and ‘Violent Phenomena’ (ed. Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang)
To read A Book, Untitled is no mean feat. On both levels - that of Avagyan’s original writing, and through Cachoian-Schanz’s translation, Book or Girq (as it is known) asks its readers to accept the uncomfortable feeling of not being able to always understand what is going on, or to be sure of whose voice we are reading.
The extremely experimental form of this book (part translation diary, part archive reconstruction, part novel), where many voices overlap and create a very fragmented narration, seems itself to be a commentary on the silencing of Armenian women and the translation of Armenian literature throughout history. The frustration we often felt while reading the text mirrors the frustration of working with the censored and incomplete archive. And yet, even in its fragmented and complex form, Book alerts us to this history of feminist literature in Armenia that has been silenced. It raises our interest in these writers, and allows us to hear their voices, deconstructed and incomplete, and partly fictionalised or imagined, but still audible through Avagyan’s writing.
The almost impenetrable writing of Book creates a distance between the text and the reader and makes us doubt: is this a bad translation, or bad writing, or is this just a different reading experience than what we are used to? But most importantly: are we meant to understand everything when we read a translated text? Is reading always meant to be an easy and comfortable experience? Is there value and meaning in this ambiguity that is erased when a translator intervenes on the text to make it more understandable and palatable?
Cachoian-Schanz talks about how her biggest challenge in translating this work was how not to domesticate it, and make it easier and more comprehensible for an English language readership, especially when the text itself begs: “please don’t distort the meaning of the work! Don’t make it ‘comprehensible’!”. In her translator’s afterword, she calls her approach one of "double de-domestication", which "visibly estranges the text in English translation beyond the comfortable ambiguity of the Armenian, so that the translation becomes a renewed reading of the primary text, over, against, and beyond it." The translator thus takes part in the book's project, in its "experiment of multi-authorship", adding another voice to the chorus created by Avagyan, and giving - Cachoian-Schanz suggests, taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin - "the text an afterlife, or perhaps a new life altogether".
The idea of not making a text more comprehensible through translation ties really closely with the essays included in Violent Phenomena, all supporting the decolonisation of the discipline. The collection gives a great introduction to the colonial history of translation and raises the reader’s awareness around the power dynamics involved and the consequent potential harm of translation itself. Most importantly, it explores the political, cultural and social implications inevitably embedded in the act translation, making it so that “neutrality is neither possible nor desirable”.
