On a whim, I read Katie Kitamura's most recent book, Intimacies. I saw it at the local bookstore, and not knowing anything about the author, I picked it up and read the back. Intimacies follows an interpreter to The Hague "to escape New York and work at the international court." It looks at language and identity, and "confronts" power, love and violence. I was interested in all these things. I had been studying transnational literature, and it seemed to fit into some of my focus for the PhD I was pursuing, especially the aspect of translation and international adjudication. Without looking much further I took it to the register and made my purchase.
I loved the book immediately, and to say the least, it lived up to the description it provided. I found it was filled with tension, mystery and tenderness, and it scratched that itch for something tied to what I had been studying. But aside from all that, there was something about the voice of the book, the narrator that I especially connected with. I found myself, once I'd finished it, going back to certain passages and sections of the book. The part where she confronts a dictator she was translating for, and the moments she spends loitering in her boyfriend's apartment while he is away visiting his kids and estranged wife. There was something about the care Kitamura took with her word choice and sentence structure. The focus of her eye even seemed at times unconventional in a way that made her narrator seem ungrounded. But the cause of this effect wasn't clear to me. I couldn't quite put my finger on. I knew this meant I would need to buy her other books to see if this was something she had developed--her style--or if this one book was just a particularly good fit for what I needed in the moment.
After reading her other books, I noticed a distinct change from her second novel to her third. Similar to Intimacies, Kitamura's third novel, A Separation, uses a first person narrator who internalizes their own misgivings by imagining the thought patterns and emotional rationale of those around her. The story follows a woman--who also happens to be a translator--to a small town in Greece so she can ask for and finalize the divorce she needs from her husband. They were separated at the time, thus the title of the book, and before the trip, she had been aware of his philandering past. In a way the details of this character spill over into Intimacies. Each protagonist is transitioning into another part of their lives, and love, intimacy and betrayal are all key points of tension throughout both books.
The thing that had drawn me to her most recent novel was there in her third novel, too, though I still couldn't quite figure out what that was. As I obsessed over these two books, I started watching interviews with Kitamura. She toured for both books, and most of these conversations were recorded from Zoom and posted to YouTube. There I noticed a theme developing. The interviews had a heavy focus on the idea of translation, which I admit was one of the initial themes that had drawn me to Intimacies. The narrator is a translator for The Hague, and much of the drama hangs on the intimacy of interpreting that which can't be clearly translated, like inflection, diction and emotion. These ideas were present in A Separation, but they seemed more refined and deliberate in Intimacies. In the interviews, there was one phrase that Kitamura repeated several times. She would say that she wanted to write as if she was being translated from another language.
At first, I didn't really know what that could mean. Sure it sounds good. It's the perfect kind of thing to say on a book tour. It is the type of answer that prompts more questions. But I really found myself digging into it more and more. Of course, it could be simply a model to get more global readers, but this was a cynical way to think, and it reminded me of old critiques of Haruki Murakami's work. Instead, I wanted to think about the challenges of translation that are present in the book.
There are a few things that stand out as troubling to the narrator that are specifically difficult aspects of her job as a translator. One is the lack of time. There is a temporal intimacy in the act of translation. It doesn't allow for much forethought and therefore demands a certain amount of trust. Another thing is the almost fugue state one assumes while in this level of intimacy. It's often described in the book as a lack of agency. The term "conduit" is often used to describe it. And the most difficult aspect is what this lack of agency leads to, which is, of course, a kind of complacency to the systems and structures that are using translation as a tool to maintain certain power dynamics within those systems and structures.
That got me thinking. If translations are meant only to uphold certain power dynamics, it raises the question: Who are these translations for? Walter Benjamin once raised the now outdated question: "Is a translation meant for the readers who do not understand the original?" This led Benjamin to declare that a translator of poetry must also be a poet, which in turn has led to critiques of colonialism and capitalism that place translation and not authorship as the primary model of cultural and knowledge production (Stahuljak 315). But I don't mean to get too far into the weeds with Benjamin's argument and the academic side of Translation Studies. What I do mean to say here, though, is that the main thing Benjamin stirs up for me is the connection that translation and language have to the state and the perpetuation of culture the the means of state power.
Again, without getting too far into it, this is all to say that translation is complicated, and it is an inevitably fraught topic no matter how it is discussed. And I will say, too, that it is probably one of the reasons Publisher's Weekly might have given Intimacies a negative review, missing the thrust of the novel completely. Simply said, it's hard to make such a complicated theme the foundation to a story that also successfully delivers a conventional plot with a beginning, middle and end and full characters with their own arcs and resolutions. What I found myself admiring most about these two novels was not that every aspect was tied up at the end with a simple thesis and commentary on contemporary culture. Instead, they were the exact books I was looking for in the moment, because they explain how complicated and impossible the world is when we look at one seemingly simple aspect of everyday life like language, how it's used, manipulated and forgotten.
All of these ideas were rattling around in my grad student latent brain when I heard Kitamura bring up this goal of hers, that she aspires to write as if her work were being translated from another language. I was thinking heavily about the corruptibility of language, and the duty of a translator--their importance on the original work, contemporary or otherwise. I was thinking about the global pressures that link cross-cultural fluency and non-fluency. I worry about the distribution of power through translation and the ripples of trauma that are caused by those who can and can't afford access to translation. So, when I heard Kitamura's goal I wasn't simply thinking about the difficulty of commensuration. I was filled with the notion that this burden of translating is internal as much as it is a reflection of so many external pressures, and when I read Intimacies for the first time, of course, I wasn't picking up on those goals of Kitamura's directly, but I felt that it was doing something different. The language she uses is direct. It stays clear of idioms and cliches. Her descriptions avoid assuming what the reader already knows. The main thing I felt while reading Intimacies--and A Separation to a lesser degree--was how much care Kitamura was bringing to the language of her prose and how that care wasn't assuming a shared intimacy, but instead provided an example, one we could all use. I think we could all benefit from being a little more precise with our words and not lean so heavily on shared experience and common knowledge when we try to articulate what we see and how we feel. Making those intentions clear to ourselves might also help us see when they are being misused and abused by others, because there is more to information literacy and critical thinking than just the way we consume content, it also matters how we contribute.
Work cited in this piece:
Stahukjak, Zrinka. "Translation." Transnational Modern Languages. Liverpool University Press. p 313-321. 2022.