Notes for a Paleface Museum

Co-Translators’ Notes
by Jenna Tang & Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Translating across Borders

by Jenna Tang

Translating Enza García Arreaza’s poems, to me, is an act of activism. The more I decipher the language of hers, the more I feel seen.

As a translator and writer who grew up in Taiwan, a place that is still unfamiliar to many English speakers, there are views about America—especially views about racism in America—that are shared not only by Taiwanese people but also by the internationals who are looking at America from different sides. What makes our cultures so unseen, once we step out of home? Why is there a hierarchy of our rights to express ourselves, or to even exist on this side of the world?

Every culture has its own identity. Coming from one place never means coming from one culture only. We are all hopes and dreams together looking for a place to speak, to scream, and to live. Every individual exists with a diversity of cultural experiences, be they regional or widely international. Diversity is a thought kept within us that connects us with one another. Our stories matter, and the merciless reality of our stories having to coexist with white supremacy and power dynamics makes it ever more important to speak up, to show who we are, and that’s the energy I felt while translating Enza’s “Notes for a Paleface Museum.”

Enza speaks boldly about American whiteness. She speaks about the emotional impact of self, having to carry our stories while attempting to live in a new place that is not always welcoming to us. How do we perceive the idea of “border” now? What are borders for? Can borders exist while diversity seeks to thrive? This is a series of daring verses that spark great conversations. I feel honored to have the opportunity to translate Enza’s work and to share my perception of these topics with my co-translator Arthur Malcolm Dixon.

“Coming from one place never means coming from one culture only.” —Jenna Tang

False Universals

by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Translating “Notes for a Paleface Museum” put me in a position as a translator that is unhealthily uncommon: it brought me face-to-face with my whiteness.

The predominant whiteness of literary translation into English is thankfully beginning to fade, as is evidenced by the work of my talented co-translator Jenna Tang and many others. But it is still the norm for white translators like me to bring writing from other languages into English.

This is not inconsequential. Our whiteness tends to lull us into a false sense of universality. We have the privilege of seeing ourselves as the standard—the etymologically apt “blank slate” whose blankness makes it the ideal transmitter of foreign speech. But, as Enza García Arreaza suggests in this poem, whiteness comes with its own distinctions, expectations, prerogatives, and pathologies. The circumstances of our birthplace, race, first language, and so on are just as relevant to our practices as they would be to any other translator’s. This does not mean white translators shouldn’t translate authors of color, but it does mean we should think, while translating, about our place in the world and how this place may differ from that of the author at hand.

“Our whiteness tends to lull us into a false sense of universality.” —Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Translating Enza’s poem, this was not optional. She addresses whiteness directly and white people anthropologically—a taste of our own medicine sans spoonful of sugar. It would be impossible to translate this poem without thinking about whiteness from without. It demands that its translator see white people as “they” rather than “we.”

This is good for us. I see all translation, literary or otherwise, as a pursuit of empathy, and empathy demands that we look in at ourselves from the outside. I’m thankful to Enza for this chance to pursue empathy as one only can through translation, and to Jenna for sharing it with me.