The Translator’s Silence
Shown at: Purdy Hicks Gallery, London (2017) | Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago (2017) | Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2019)

Three lenticular panels
22 inches x 36.6 inches each

When familiarity breeds only contempt, or at best indifference, the slim hope there is for solidarity lies in the kindness of strangers. the close ties between the words ‘host’ , ‘hostility’ and ‘hospitality’…

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.

English, Bengali, and Urdu/Hindustani are Raqs Media Collective’s primary working languages; translation remains their mother tongue.