The Translator’s Silence
Shown at: ‘Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space’, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, New York (2012)

Foldable take-away, perforated text on paper

The Translator’s Silence incises three poetic fragments – from Faiz AhmedFaiz, Rabindranath Tagore and Agha Shahid Ali – on to a take-away embellished, folded paper card. 

hum ke thahrey ajnabi itni madaraaton ke baad
phir banai.ngain aashnaa kitni mulaqaton ke baad

we who have been rendered strangers, after so many travails
how many meetings will it take for us to embrace each other again

Faiz Ahmed Faiz

AAAchena-ke bhoy ki amaar ore ?
Achena-ke-i chiney-chiney uth-be jibon bhore

what fear have I of strangers,
the cup of life will fill by knowing the unknown

Rabindranath Tagore

Will you, beloved stranger, ever witness Shahid
two destinies at last reconciled by exiles?

Agha Shahid Ali

The care of strangers is the gentlest and the sharpest form of sedition.

India, Pakistan, Kashmir – so many names for so many states of quarantine. So much familiarity, so much contempt. Better the admission of a future mutuality of strangeness than the bitter explosive ancestral familiarity of hatred. At least there will be questions left to ask of each other.

None of these fragments appears in translation. The work moves directly from one language to the next, unmediated. To read it, viewers must seek out a ‘stranger’—someone who speaks an unseen tongue—to unlock its meaning. In doing so, the piece suggests that a ‘stranger’ can transform into a ‘beloved’ when once-adversarial destinies—common across partitions and “lines of control”—meet through a willing encounter with the unknown. Such an encounter, crossing languages, memories, desires, and nightmares, may initially bring a loss of words. Strangers who venture into this space must first translate each other’s silences before hearing each other’s voices. That interval—a fold between utterances—carries the gift of silence. This take-away that takes the form of a fold between utterances, embodies a gift of that silence.