Why Translation Matters: Global Musicologists Speak Out

I often feel linguistically incompetent, a lack shown up by my multilingual research subjects: the world of Black South African choralism (performed in any of the nine Black languages, such as isiXhosa, that are officially recognized in South Africa); and Paul Robeson, the African American singer-activist and noted polyglot. Linguistic incompetence compounds the truism that the historian can only ever access the worlds of their subjects incompletely. And so, translation has been crucial to my work; in my study of Robeson this has involved translation from Russian, Ewe, Spanish, and Japanese into English. Translation is of course not neutral. It gives us access to “content” and knowledge, teaching us about interpretation and loss of meaning—matters urgent to consider in the age of automatic internet-based translation services. However, in thinking about researching multilingually, Alison Phipps in her article “Linguistic Incompetence” critiques the limitations of the competency model, arguing for a “capabilities approach” that allows “us to speak of what we have become through not knowing, or not being able to speak the language.”¹

I can’t describe here Phipps’s argument in detail which rests on her experience that linguistic incompetence enables certain capabilities: we are capable of becoming beginners again. When linguistic fluency does not permit access, a capability for attentiveness and a heightened corporeal (and sonic) capability arise; the result is the capacity for de-centering one’s own subject position, of the inversion of relationships. These are values to which researchers—and teachers—working in a multilingual musical world should aspire.

As an Argentine musicologist who went to university in Argentina and continued graduate studies in the UK, I realized that most of the research written in Spanish goes unnoticed in the Anglophone musicological world, unless the researcher is an expert on a Spanish-speaking area, where the knowledge of sources written in Spanish becomes essential to their own work. At the same time, while there might be an interest in translating into English the work written by Spanish native speakers about their own cultural contexts, there is a complete unawareness and/or disregard for the scholarship written in Spanish, coming from Spain and Latin America, devoted to the analysis of (European) Western art music from medieval times to the present. The fact that for these researchers the sources are usually remote and that they have less access to the latest publications in the field are some of the causes for this neglect. Translation can be transformative. By making this scholarship available in English and teaching it in Anglophone academia, we will be able to provide new perspectives on how Western and non-Western music is perceived, in this case, from a multiplicity of Spanish-speaking approaches.

The author’s own words in Spanish

Like many other academic conventions, the habit of undervaluing translation is an enculturated practice that is learned during the PhD. Ironically, it is at the most opportune juncture to convey the significance of translation—the PhD secondary language requirement—that the opposite is often accomplished. In many institutions, the language requirement is treated as bureaucratic formality that is fulfilled once a student translates a scholarly text in the secondary language. But the preselected texts are often generically musicological and peripheral to the student’s field of research. Hence, removed from the site-specific concepts and lexical articulations in which students are intentionally cultivating an expertise, the worth of translation is inevitably hollowed out. What if translation were introduced under different terms? Imagine if the second language requirement instead asked students to contribute a translation (into one’s home language or another research language) of an as yet untranslated source that the student identifies as critical to their chosen field. In this context, translation would have students performing the creative work of defamiliarizing, recontextualizing, and relearning a set of hyper-situated categories in order to render them legible across locales. Translation would push students to lean further intentionally and analytically into the myriad notional threads looming behind the most richly referential concepts from their domains of study. And, if these brief translations were then published on a multilingual online database of doctoral translations—a gift to the global scholarly community to mark the beginning of one’s dissertating years—then far from a stale and insulated program requirement, translation would enliven a renewed culture of knowledge-making in which due fanfare is given to the connective, world-opening intellectual work that is critical intercultural interpretation.

The author’s own words in Chinese