Word! The Language Column
The Limits of our Ethics

Ulrike Almut Sandig finds herself grappling with unfamiliar ethical issues every time she goes about another translation – or rather “adaptation” – into German. Which opens her eyes to different, non-German takes on social conditions – and social ills.

By Ulrike Almut Sandig

How we see the world depends largely on where and under what conditions we are raised. Our ethics do too. Rendering foreign-language poetry in German often makes me question things that I’d always taken for granted – and, in the best-case scenario, shows me what the world looks like outside the German perspective.

Cotton bombs

Sometimes it feels like physical pain. That’s how I felt in the studio, recording a remix of a Ukrainian song with the other members of the Landschaft poetry collective. Whilst singing my German renditions of poems by Lyubov Yakimchuk and Irena Karpa, I was shocked by my own words:
 
I was raised on anti-war songs, Gandhi’s call for non-violent resistance, and the Gospel precept of “turning the other cheek”. But now I had to face the fact that you can only cry “No more war!” if you believe you actually have a choice in the matter.

The title of the Ukrainian poem, Bavovna, means “cotton”. But it’s a Ukrainian euphemism for a military counterattack because, among other things, the smoke clouds caused by explosions resemble white balls of cotton. Yes, I’m singing about bombs these days. I wish I didn’t have to.

Static Range

Translating also means giving someone a voice. In the following translation, it’s the imagined voice of a plutonium-powered surveillance device, based on a very real suspicion of radioactive contamination in the Himalayas.

In 1965, the CIA teamed up with the Indian Intelligence Bureau to install such a spying device, with a generator half the size of the Hiroshima bomb, on the peak of Nanda Devi Mountain. But the expedition had to be aborted before the climbers had reached the top owing to a blizzard. Before turning back, they stowed the device on site – but it was never found again.

Radiation levels in the area are slightly elevated to this day. The local Sherpa community’s significantly elevated incidence of cancer also suggests the possibility of radioactive contamination in the region.

Himali Singh Soin, a London- and Delhi-based artist, investigates the story in her interdisciplinary multimedia project Static Range. So far, the project includes an animated Indian stamp, embroidery, planting, healing sessions and a performance installation. Static Range has been shown in a number of different countries, including Germany at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and the E-Werk Luckenwalde.

“and the mountain found itself moved. Mov_moved.”

The centrepiece of Static Range is a “toxic love-letter” from the “spy device” to the mountain. Here’s an extract from the original in English:
  The “spy device”, which hears everything and knows many things, also reports on the discovery of a healing herb – a reference to a mythical plant called sanjīvani, “reviver of the dead”. Indian Hindu supremacists claim they might be able to find it and so prove that the Rāmāyaṇa, one of the founding texts of Hinduism, is based on historical and scientific facts, thereby substantiating their claim to India as a pure Hindu nation.

My German rendition of this letter is posted on the author’s website and can be downloaded. I also recorded myself reading it aloud and embedded the recording in a piece of music by David Soin Tappeser that forms part of Static Range. Tappeser’s composition makes use of rhythms drawn from the Uyghur community of Xinjiang, an oppressed ethnic minority in China. The missing surveillance device was originally intended to monitor Chinese nuclear missile tests conducted in that particular region. Tappeser’s music “incorporates faults, interference and nuclear mutations” that serve to point up connections and parallels between the fates of the marginalized ethnic groups on either side of the espionage project.

My efforts to render this centrepiece of Himali Singh Soin’s work really drove home to me the fact that without a powerful lobby, the harm inflicted on local communities is often irremediable.

“that they will die from praying”

I had initially planned to embed the composition, in which my German rendering of the spy device’s letter is embedded, in this article for the Goethe-Institut. But at least for the time being, Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser refuse to work with (German) cultural institutions that, in their eyes, after condemning the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, won’t take an equally unequivocal stand against the annihilation of the Palestinian population of Gaza. So the piece can’t be heard here after all.

Static Range describes the mechanisms of “slow violence” used to oppress and kill off minorities. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus. This is one of them.