Abstract

Craig Santos Perez's poetic series from Unincorporated Territory describes and decries the U.S. militarization, colonization, and environmental degradation of Guam in the Western Pacific through multilingual, excerpted, and series-long poems. Perez's writing style requires slow, careful reading with translations sometimes appearing on the same page, various pages later, or not at all. I describe this kind of elongated translation as slow translation, recalling translation theorist Michael Cronin's "Slow Language" movement. This thesis invites readers, especially multispecies ethnographers, to slow down the translation of nonhuman species and their stories by paying attention to moments of untranslatability in multispecies literature and interactions. In modeling how to think-with untranslatability, I call upon translation scholars Barbara Cassin and Cronin, who describe untranslatability in temporal and agentic terms, and environmental humanist Donna Haraway, whose tentacular thinking model and multispecies approaches have slowed our tendencies towards linear and assumptive modes of thinking. In conjunction with these thinkers, my multispecies reading of from Unincorporated Territory proposes slow translation as a model for resisting easy or colonizing translations that homogenize the Other. Perez's multilingual, fractured poems create moments of untranslatability, especially when describing nonhuman species or environments, that are difficult to immediately understand due to nontranslations or delayed translations. This thesis pays special attention to such moments as opportunities for slowing down and staying with difference. Thus, moments of untranslatability offer an ethnographic and interactive mode for engaging with difference through slow translation, valuing the process and experience of translation, the agency of the subjects in translation, and the incomprehensibility or unknown nature of the nonhuman and Othered world.

Degree

MA

College and Department

Humanities; English

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2022-04-22

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd12741

Keywords

untranslatability, multispecies ethnography, slow translation

Language

english

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