Following is a transcript of remarks made by Eliot Weinberger during the Katharine Washburn Memorial Program: Translating the 21st Century, May 30, 2002

"In this crowd I need hardly go on about the importance of translation, but I thought I'd cite one recent bit of evidence. As you probably know, the first Trade Center bombing, in 1993, might have been averted if the FBI had bothered to translate the boxes of letters, documents, and tapes it had already seized in the course of various investigations. But those were in a foreign language—Arabic—and who could be bothered?

Now, however, they are bothering, and there is something called the 300th Military Intelligence Brigade. 1500 language experts, most of them Mormons trained for missionary work in heathen lands, housed in six sites in the state of Utah, are frantically trying to translate the mountain of documents that have been gathered by the various agencies. Their commander, Col. Dee Snowball, recently rallied the troops with these words: "You will not garner the glory that the combat soldier receives, but you will make a huge impact in the defense of your country." It is the military version of what all translators experience and feel.

The topic tonight is translation in the 21st century, but I don't think that the act of translation in the 21st century will be much different than it was in the 20th or any other century. Translation is like baking bread; styles and fads come and go, but it's essentially the same mixing, kneading, shaping, and sticking in the oven. Anybody can do it, but some do it better than others. The only difference between translators and bakers is that bakers are not continually invited to symposia to discuss the problems of baking.

Nevertheless, there are three larger phenomena that will affect world literature in this century, and which will inevitably affect translation. The first is mass migration. It is obvious that, despite the last stands of certain reactionary forces, mutual isolationism—after a long and slow process that began in the 19th century—has vanished forever. Not only in the metropolises, but almost anywhere in the world. Go into any peasant village in the Third World and you'll find people who have been to Europe or the U.S., or have relatives there, who are fans of a mass culture that is not, as it is usually demonized, exclusively American, but which equally includes such things as Brazilian soap operas or Hong Kong martial arts movies—things which are strangely not attributed to Brazilian or Hong Kong hegemony. The images may be exaggerated, but, for the first time in history, people in the villages of the world have images of what a lot of the rest of the world looks like.

In terms of literature, we are already beginning to see the effects of this extraordinary mass migration. The two things that rejuvenate a literature in any given language are translation—the importation of new ideas and new ways of writing from abroad—and when a new people begin writing in that language. There are always individual exceptions, but generally speaking it takes a certain number of generations of an educated middle class before a kind of critical mass is achieved—one which allows opportunities for bright people born into poverty—and a boom occurs. To take a few examples: Latin American literature, which at the beginning of the 20th century became, and remains, the liveliest writing in Spanish and Portuguese; or currently, French, where it is safe to say that most of the most interesting work is coming from Caribbeans and Saharan or sub-Saharan Africans (in France or in their countries of origin); or the English-language novel, whose brightest practitioners at the moment tend to be Indians (again, in India or in the diaspora).

In the US, African-Americans generally began producing important literary works in the 1920's, sixty years after the end of slavery; Jewish-Americans in the 1930's, about fifty years after the first wave of immigrants (and the Jews, of course, started from a higher level of formal education). It seems inevitable that the transformations of American literature in the 21st century will be greatly the work of those of Asian and Hispanic descent. An opening occurs once the new people have assimilated the tradition, but because they are new people they are not paralyzed by it, and they are able to transform it; new minds are new lines.

The second is a current that is both contradictory and complimentary to the migrations of new people into the major Western languages, and that is the assertion of a local cultural identity. In the Third World, the first generations of the educated middle-class are usually preoccupied with the modern (meaning the Western) and tend toward a wholesale rejection of anything reminiscent of a peasant past. By the third or fourth generation, however, they are no longer afflicted with the snobbery that comes from a sense of cultural inferiority. They become appalled by what they see as Western anonymity and sterility, and begin to turn to a cultural heritage they barely knew. Suddenly their modern houses are full of folk art. The literary version of this is the discovery that their regional language is an untapped treasure-trove, one that has been rarely or never utilized in such Western genres as the novel, the play, or the written poem. And furthermore, to write in the original, pre-colonial language is to rectify history, to restore what has been erased, to assert the intellectual capabilities of those who were once taken to be incapable. At the moment—to take two examples—in Mexico there are vibrant movements of poets in their 20's and 30's writing in such languages as Mazatec, Zapotec, and Nahuatl, complete with their own literary magazines and presses. And, in Africa, the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiongo may be the first writer of international reputation to abandon writing in a Western language in order to return to the regional, in his case, Kikuyu. I should also add that these writers are generally bilingual, or multilingual, and tend to translate themselves, and thus are working in an unprecedented triple role as regional writers, international writers, and the bridges between themselves.

The third is the internet. Ten years ago, the future seemed more dismal than usual, heading toward a near-complete corporate takeover of all the means of conveying information; dissident political voices and what James Laughlin used to call "serious literature," among other things, would be forced to retreat to the monasteries of tiny presses and magazines struggling in an inflated economy. The Internet has changed all that, practically overnight. Suddenly, like-minded souls who share specialized interests—and serious literature will always be a specialized interest—can easily find one another. Suddenly, there is access to everything. The sensitive youth in a small town in the hinterlands doesn't have to move to San Francisco or New York to discover the latest writing, or buy the books, or communicate with others who are reading the same things. The writer in New York doesn't have to travel to Bolivia to find the latest Bolivian writers. And, it should be added, it is the way around government censorship: today you can't publish a book by Bei Dao in China, but you can read him on the web.

I don't believe that the Internet will replace books, the most convenient vehicle for the written word, but I think it will largely replace the printed version of the little magazine, which now can be done for almost nothing (assuming the usual volunteer labor of the editor) while having the possibility of an enormous audience, previously unimaginable for a literary magazine, as well as the thrill of instantaneous publication.(Jacket, a poetry magazine on the web from Australia is in many ways a typical avant-gardist magazine, except that it has 20,000 readers a month. A printed version, as you know, in the US, would be lucky to have 500.) In countries with economic difficulties, few bookstores, and poor postal systems, it is already the case that most of the literary magazines are being published on the web, where, of course, they are available not only to the entire country, but to the entire world. Moreover, a website has unlimited space and flexibility. There are already projects underway to create websites of international poetry where, let us say, a Russian poet is published in Russian, with links to translations in other languages, and with new translations being easily added as they are written.

For the last 30 years or so, American poets have been in a kind of cocoon that is nationalist but not patriotic, not xenophobic but merely indifferent to the foreign. Before 1970, it is difficult to think of more than a handful of American poets who never translated anything. Since 1970, excluding a few veterans from the 60's such as Merwin or Rothenberg or the Waldrops, it is difficult to think of more than a handful of poets, known themselves as poets, who do translate. Leaving aside the pamphlets of micro-presses, the total number of poetry translations of all kinds, published by all nationally distributed small presses, medium, large and university presses is between 25 and 35 books a year. And that includes translations of the classics, and the inevitable new Neruda, Rilke, and Rumi editions.

This is a pathetic ignorance, and one that is—like so much of America—oblivious to all the things that are happening on the rest of the planet. Are most American poets today all that different from little George Bush, who, on his first trip to Paris last week, said, "Jacques [Chirac] keeps telling me that the food here is really fantastic, and I'm going to find out"? At least he was showing some rare curiosity. At a big conference on translation in Iowa last fall, sponsored by the International Writing Program, with 50 or 60 foreign writers and translators, I was told that not a single student or faculty member from the famous Iowa Writing School had bothered to show up—and in Iowa, after all, there isn't much else to do."