Welcome to the National Archives and Records Administration's 2022 Genealogy Series. We are pleased to present this educational series of lectures on how to conduct family research using the 1950 Census. My name is Andrea Matney, and as the program's coordinator, please allow me to do a quick introduction and provide instructions on how to participate. These lectures will demonstrate how to use records from the 1950 Census and other federal resources for genealogical research. Our presenters include experts from the National Archives and Records Administration and the U.S. Census Bureau. Sessions are intended for beginners to experienced family historians. All are welcome. We invite you to join the conversation. Please participate with the presenters and other family historians during each session's premiere. You can ask questions via chat by first logging into YouTube. Keep your eye on the chat during the broadcast because the speaker will answer your questions there in the chat. Type your questions in at any time, but please keep your questions on today's topic. In addition, find live captioning, handouts, and the events evaluation form under the video box by clicking on Show More. Note on our schedule that all sessions are broadcast on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. Eastern. And yes, all of the recorded videos will remain available for viewing later and at any time. Welcome to today's program from Parchments to Printouts, History of the Census from 1790 to 1950. I'm so pleased to introduce today's speaker, Sharon Tossi-Lacy. Dr. Tossi-Lacy has served as the Chief Historian for the U.S. Census Bureau since June 2015. Previously, she spent 25 years as an officer in the U.S. Army and U.S. Army Reserves before retiring in 2015 as a Lieutenant Colonel. She holds a B.S. in Engineering, Psychology from the United States Military Academy, an M.S. in Education from Long Island University, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Leeds. And now turning the program over to Dr. Tossi-Lacy. Thank you. And thank you for having me here today. I'm delighted to talk to you all about just a brief history of the Census Bureau as we've evolved and changed along with our nation. We can divide Census Bureau history into several distinct errors. And as we go along, you will see how these are parallels to what was going on in the United States at the time. As you know, when dealing with historical material is always best to understand that what you will see and read must be taken in the historical context in which it was written. So why do we even take a census? Well, first of all, it's to ensure representative and proportional representation in Congress and we've done a reapportionment after every census except 1920. The House is capped at 435 members since 1911, and that was actually put into law via the Reapportionment Act of 1929. We did have a temporary increase in 1959 when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted when we increased the House of Representatives to 437. But after the 1960 census, it went back to 435. And there's nothing mysterious or mythical about that number. It is merely the number of seats that can comfortably fit on the House floor. In 1790, only the names of the heads of households were recorded and the demographics were divided into free white males over the age of 16, free white males under the age of 16, free white females, all other free people and slaves with no age or gender changes. Indians not tax were counted and those were simply American Indians who lived in tribal relations or on tribal lands, which were considered their own sovereign nations. Indentured servants were counted under free persons and only aggregate data was compiled. There was no statistical analysis. The reason that we counted free white males over 16 and free white males under 16 was simply so that the federal government knew the number of men available for militias. In 1800, the questionnaire provided space to tally free white males and females in several age categories, under 10, 10 but under 15, 16 but under 25, 25 but under 45, and over 45. American Indians, slaves and free blacks were listed in single categories, undivided into age groups. And here we started seeing that the federal government realized that the census could provide the much more data than simply a count of people. In 1810, we began counting a census of manufacturers. However, that data was so erratic, it was generally considered useless, except to identify broad industrial trends. Unfortunately, many of these early census schedules were destroyed by the British during the war of 1812. And interestingly, the only president for whom we do not have an original census schedule is George Washington, since his census record in Virginia was destroyed. And he died before the 1800 census. In 1820, we added questions on the number of household members working in agriculture, manufacturing and commerce. And this was the first time all races were tallyed by age groups. However, the manufacturing data was still not as useful as hoped. So in 1830, we did not collect that. However, we did begin collecting information on the blind, which was the first time we saw the census used for social statistics and determination of where money would go. In 1840, we once again started collecting data on manufacturing and industry employment data. And because the government needed to be able to estimate the cost of paying pensioners their pensions, we did collect data on revolutionary war pensioners. We had separate agricultural schedules and a schedule is simply another word for questionnaires. We also collected data on schooling, literacy, and on the deaf community. In 1840, we started moving closer to statistical analysis, although we were still just aggregate data. And aggregate data just simply means we counted up and reported the numbers. In 1850, the biggest change was that the individual became the unit of data collection as opposed to the household. And so for the first time, the names of all free people in any household was collected. However, for slaves, they still only collected age and sex. We also added new questions on occupation, literacy, birthplace, property ownership and other vital and social statistics. And this was the beginning of statistical revolution where statistics started becoming a science. So we started seeing some rudimentary statistical analysis. In 1860, looked very much like the 1850 census, using the same legislation actually from the 1850 census, only adding American Indian as to the list of races. 1870 is when we start seeing the shift towards a more modern census. Francis and Moser Walker, who was a statistician, and one of the founding fathers of the statistical sciences was the superintendent of the census. And he understood the power of the data we collected and how it could be used to tell a story. We began seeing graphics appearing in our final reports. We saw the addition of Chinese as a racial category. We saw the elimination of the slave schedule. And we also saw the introduction of the seat and tabulating machine, which would allow the clerks back at census headquarters to speed up how they counted the numbers. And as we added more questions, the time it took to tabulate that data got longer and longer to where it almost took to the next census to finish compiling the data from the previous census. And at this point there was no permanent census bureau. So they had to do something to start speeding it up. Francis and Moser Walker had also been an officer colonel in the Union Army, and he started realizing that we needed to have the workers at the census bureau reflect communities particularly out in the field up until 1870. The data in the field had been collected by U.S. marshals who would appoint temporary deputy marshals, mostly because they were the only federal officers in the field that could access every part of the nation. However, as the federal government grew, we also started having more representatives out in the communities. And Francis and Moser Walker thought that we should start using people from the communities to count the people there. And so he made a concerted effort to hire freed slaves, disabled veterans and the widows of slaves. In 1880, when we began using professional enumerators, instead of U.S. marshals, we started seeing African Americans and women in the field force and back at census headquarters. In 1880, we also for the first time did a census of the Indians quote, not tax, that is those living on reservations or tribal relations. We added Alaska to the census, we had just bought Alaska from Russia. In 1890 was actually our most comprehensive schedule. In between 1880 and 1890, the census bureau held a contest to see if we could speed up the compilation of the material. And it was won by a former census employee Herman Hollerith, who created the first electric tabulating machine, the Hollerith machine. The company would actually eventually go on to become IBM. So this was the first error of computers, and we would use variations of this Hollerith counting machine until 1951. We also saw the addition of new racial categories and 1890 was the only time we used most of these categories, Quadroon, Octoroon and Japanese. And it was very precisely defined. We collected data on Civil War veterans and their widows with a separate questionnaire just for Union veterans. We collected a myriad of social statistics on chronic illness, home ownership and deadness, the number of children naturalization papers. We declared the end of the frontier in 1890, which meant we had two people per square mile living everywhere in the continental United States. Unfortunately, this wonderful comprehensive census that we had was almost completely lost in a fire in 1921. Because for some reason, no one realized it probably wasn't a good idea to let workers smoke around all these fragile old papers. And actually it wasn't the fire that destroyed everything, it was the water they used to put out the fire. And I think 98 or 99% of those records unfortunately have been lost. In 1900, we started using experts in a variety of our areas. For example, when we did the census of American Indians in 1900, we used sociologists to go out and help collect this data. Sociologists and anthropologists and for some of the smaller tribes, this was the only information that we had gathered on those tribes. We did enumerate all American Indians on the general schedule. We used experts like Alexander Graham Bell to who oversaw and actually designed the schedule for the blind and deaf. Because you looked at the data we had collected in 1890 and said, not only are you collecting the data incorrectly, you're not asking the right questions, and you're not asking them in the right way to get the information that you would like. So we had a myriad of these special agents who would come in as experts in their field to oversee that particular area. We saw a lot in the manufacturing side too. We enumerated soldiers and sailors by departments of war and Navy and even might be out on ships or overseas. Hawaii was included for the first time. We collected information on utilities, transportation, juvenile delinquency, and we also eliminated many racial categories such as mulatto, quadrant and octarune. In 1902 was a time of big shift. We had been advocating for permanent Census Bureau for a long time. We started having other federal agencies asking us to collect information for them outside of the decennial census. And so they finally established a permanent Census Bureau in 1902. In 1905, we separated the economic census from the decennial census so that they were two different sets of collections and in different years. In 1910, we began enumerating people where they regularly slept, not where they worked, which is how we still do it today. If you look at some of the older censuses, you'll see sometimes people were enumerated in two places. Many Presidents were enumerated both at the White House and at their permanent home. There's an example in 1880 of Lauren goes Wilders, husband Almanza Wilder is enumerated both where he had his claim and then where he was actually working. And so therefore, temporarily absent family members for the school or the military were now enumerated with their family, not where they might be just temporarily. We also added the racial category for other for people who didn't fit neatly into the available categories. And we use this 1910 census to mobilize the economy and the population for World War One. In 1920, we had to take into account the boundary changes from World War One. So you would see people who identified where they were born in 1910 say hungry because where they were born was the Austrian Hungarian Empire. And then in 1920, they would identify where they were born as Chuckles of Acacia. And we had to take those changes into account. We asked questions about the ability to read and write English. As I said earlier, we did not do apportionment after 1920 because there were questions and pushback from the congressman who represented rural areas versus those who represented urban areas. Because more and more people had moved away from the rural area for the first time lived in urban areas in larger numbers than rural areas. And obviously there was a shift of political struggle, political power that was settled in the 1929 reapportionment act, which was the act that we still are under today. In 1930, we enumerated 48 states, the District of Columbia, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Panama Canal Zone. In the height of the depression, we also did separate unemployment censuses in 1931 and 1937 where we mailed out postcards for people to fill out. But to be honest, the data collected from there just wasn't useful because a lot of people didn't want to admit they were unemployed and didn't participate. Some of the racial categories we had, we started using the term Negro for black. We added Mexican, Filipino, Hindu, and Korean. And actually the addition of Mexican, and it was only in the 1930 census and then it was not there for 1940, was the first time we collected data on Hispanic population specifically. In the past, we had done final reports on people with Hispanic last names, but as you know, that doesn't take into account people who may not have Hispanic descent but may not have a Hispanic last name. And 1940 was really the beginning of the modernization of the census as we recognize it today. We started using statistical sampling, which is where we asked extra questions of a certain percentage of the population. This would eventually become the long form. This included probability sampling, which had only been used on experimental basis before. And sampling had been tested before on that trial census of unemployment carried out by the Civil Works Administration and surveys of retail stores in the same decade. Where you could take just a percentage of households and ask them a question and extrapolate that data to the larger population. And the sampling in 1940 census allowed the additions of a number of demographic questions of these enumerated persons without asking, adding an undue burden on either the enumerator or the person answering the question. Sampling also allowed the Census Bureau to increase the number of detailed tables published and review the quality of data processing with more efficiency. We also saw the use of imputation, which was meant if data for one household didn't make sense in the context of their neighbors, they could or data was missing. They could fill in the data based on the data of their neighbors because neighborhoods tend to be fairly homogeneous and population and housing was collected at the same time but on different questionnaires. And this information was very important for World War Two. If anyone's ever heard of the victory plan, which was the plan that laid out exactly how many people, how much equipment and how many manufacturers and literally down to the number of nuts and bolts and how much steel we needed to win the war was all used with information that had been collected by the census. Not only demographic but economic are minerals, data we collected on minerals and everything like that. It was also used for a verification of birth information by people trying to prove citizenship to participate in war work, trying to prove their ages. And also for people who may have been stuck overseas at the break, you know, at the beginning of the war, they were able to use the census to prove that they were American citizens to be able to come home. And within our library, our librarian actually had a whole staff that probably dealt with up to 10,000 inquiries a day about about the census and because it wasn't available to the public, they had to look it up for people. The census data has also been used to settle wills. There was one famous case that took 10 years to settle it. A millionaire had left no will and the Census Bureau librarian spent 10 years establishing family connections using census data. And as you know, the National Archives just released the 1950 census. And let's look at 1950 looked very much like 1940 with a few important changes. So let's take a look of what the world looked like in 1950. Well, there were enormous social shifts post World War II. People had worked, moved for war work. And between the Depression and the war, we had seen the migration of so many millions of peoples, both North and to the West, and particularly the African American community that moved west and north and then stayed after the war was over. We saw education opportunities via the GI Bill. We saw economic and building booms, places out West like Arizona and Nevada that previously were not considered habitable. Now with rudimentary air conditioning, they can start building there and actually that's where we saw some of our biggest growth. Approximately 57% of the population now lived in metropolitan areas. And the percentage of people, increasing people living in metropolitan areas as opposed to rural areas was actually twice as great for African Americans as compared to white. And in fact, the number of blacks living in non-farm areas increased 33.7%. And we saw the beginning of the baby boom population growth of 19 million more, mostly fueled by that early baby boom which started in 1946. The census showed 16,196,536 children under the age of five, which made it the largest of any five year age band. And by comparison in 1940, there were only about 5.5 million in that age group under one to zero to five. So 90% of the growth was fueled simply by natural growth. Eventually the baby boomers would grow to 76 million and they would be the first demographic cohort that was named by the Census Bureau. The other 10% of growth we saw were immigrants mostly from war tour in Europe who came in under the Warbrides Act of 1945, the Fiancé Act of 1946, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. We also saw the birth of suburbs. For the first time, people did not have to live in the city to work in the city. And we also saw that half of all homes were owner occupied, a huge shift from 1940. The number of dwelling units actually increased from 37.3 million to 46 million, a 23% increase, which is the greatest numerical growth of housing between any two censuses. The fastest growing states in terms of percentage increases were California, Arizona, Florida, and Nevada. And the West as a whole was the fastest growing region at a rate of three to four times as great as other regions. We also saw technological advances where the proportion of homes with electric lighting increased from 79% in 1940 to 94% in 1950. 96% of households had radios as opposed to 83% in 1940. TVs were new, but we did collect data on television sets, and about 5 million sets were reportedly owned, mostly people in metropolitan urban areas. Americans were living abroad in large numbers for the first time, mostly military families and federal workers and their families. In the past, when we had had military members living overseas, it was just that the particular soldier, they didn't have their families. Germany and Japan were the places where most of them were living. Statistical sampling now became a more exact science and could be used to collect a wider variety of data without imposing an undue burden. And the world was moving to the computer age. In 1951, we introduced the Univac system, which replaced the hollard tabulating machine, and part of the 1950 census was tabulated with that. Let's just take another quick look at how 1940 and 1950 differed. In 1940, we asked 50 possible questions. In 1950, we had 38 possible questions. In 1940, only 16 were asked of everyone, and then the rest were supplemental or only asked of a small percentage. In 1950, there were 38 possible questions, only 20 of everyone, and the rest were supplemental. We had a larger number of final reports, although in 1940, the compilation of the final reports, to be fair, was cut short by the war. We moved the census and manufacturing minerals industry away from the decennial census year, which helped free up enumerators and made the enumeration much more efficient. And for the first time, the majority of enumerators and crew chiefs were women out in the field. The census bureau had been employing women at headquarters since 1870 and in the field since 1880, but now you had a lot of housewives who chose to go out and be enumerators. And you could see just by the sheer number of enumeration districts how, you know, what a bigger number. An enumeration district was generally how many homes a single enumerator could visit in one day. So let's take a quick look at how did we come up with the questions for 1950. The questions were compiled after meetings with consultants, technical advisory committees, and also by identifying the data needs of other federal agencies, which is pretty much the way we do it now. We had some pre-tests that we did in 1940, but it was much more widespread in 1950 to make sure the wording was understandable and arranged properly on the questionnaires. And we also, for the first time, started experimenting and testing out different ways of collecting the data. For example, in several places in Ohio and Michigan, we had tests during the census where we tested self enumeration where people would fill out the forms on their own versus the enumerator visiting the home and collecting the data. We often used existing surveys to test our questions, such as survey of current population. And this was the first move towards removing enumerator bias. One of the concerns that they had is that enumerators sometimes would fill out the questionnaires based on their own observations or beliefs. And I have a family that we use as an example.  And in one census, the entire family is listed as white because obviously the father was home. So an answer met with the enumerator. So the enumerator made the assumption that the entire family was white. And in the next census, obviously the mother was home. So the enumerator made the assumption the entire family was black. The Bureau of Indian Affairs requested a separate form for the census of federal Indian reservations. And because of the baby booms and because we also know that one of the historically undercounted populations are children under the age of one. They had infant cards for those who had been born since December 1949 and up until census day of April 1st. Unfortunately, those were not preserved and are not available. We conducted a census of housing agriculture at the same time. Again, these schedules were not microfilm, but these, and so they're not really covered here, but they included questions on irrigation, drainage, horticulture. And again, we worked with self enumeration. For example, the agricultural schedule was mailed to the household for them to fill out. And then the enumerator picked it up when they visited others such as the survey of residential financing were actually mail out mail back because people were often reluctant to give those type of personal details to an enumerator. So they had the option to mail that directly to the Census Bureau. In fact, the enumerator bags were pretty full. They could have up to seven forms to fill out at one household. And in 1950, again, was a time of innovation and changes were at the beginning of the computer age. One of the big things we had to do because we weren't the only ones using the census data. We had state and local and even private entities wanting to use this data to make their own assumptions, but everyone had a different measure of what a metropolitan district was. Some places used election districts. Some places use the town and someplace just determine boundaries based on population density, which is what we did. It was how much an enumerator can count in one day. So we actually teamed up with the Office of Budget Management and they came up with some standard metropolitan areas. And in that way, the data we were giving them could be used by anybody at any time because we were all looking at the same population and the same territory within that population. So in 1949, these standard definitions were issued by the Bureau of the Budget, which is the predecessor of OMB, the Office of Management Budget, and given the designation standard metropolitan area. And for the first time, we had a large number of American soldiers and federal employees and their families living overseas. So we did special overseas census reports, which were sent and distributed by the Department of Defense and the Department of State to each family. They collected these and sent back. And in all, in the 1950 census, we found a little more than 481,000 Americans living and working abroad for the federal government or on a merchant ship. And you have to compare that in 1940. That same survey would have found about 118, 119,000. Now, these people were not included in the importionment count unless their ship was docked in the U.S. And the simple reason was there was no way to know what locality to attach them to. For historically undercounted populations, we made an effort to do missing mispersons forms and newspapers and had a specific night to count transient locations such as motels, tourist courts and shelters. As I said before, we use variations of the Hollerith machine from 1890 until 1951. And actually the Univac one was the first non military commercial computer. And I think the serial number was 00001, the one that was brought to the Census Bureau. We experimented for the first time in those 10 districts in Ohio and Michigan. And some of the experiments were not only mail out where they would get the form in the mail and hold it for the enumerator, but we also tested maybe moving back to the household as a sampling unit versus the individual self enumeration versus direct enumeration. And actually the numbers on self enumeration versus direct enumeration were significant enough that we tested it even further with bigger populations in 1960. And after that, after 1970 went completely to self enumeration, which we still do today. The counting of college students prior to 1940, actually prior to 1950, college students were generally counted at their parents' homes, not at their college, because it was considered that on their breaks they would go home and live with their parents. So that would be their usual place of residence. However, the number of GIs returning to school with their families meant when school was not in session, they didn't live with their parents. And so to go more in line with the usual place of residence, college students were counted where their college was. And actually that remains a standard to today, which presented a bit of a challenge in 2020, as many students were sent home because of COVID to do school remotely, but we still counted them at their college. And finally, in 1950 was the first time we did a post enumeration survey, which meant we went back to a certain number of households and double checked the information we collected from them to make sure we hadn't missed anyone to make sure that the information we got was correct that had been written down correctly that the people understood the questions correctly to check individual data to check agricultural data and most significantly double check the data from the experimental areas. So we did post enumeration surveys and 3500 small areas to identify any households we may have missed, and approximately 22,000 households were re interviewed to check accuracy of data. And again, we still do a post enumeration survey until today. So 1950 really set the stage for the census to move forward to where we are today. The agriculture and economic censuses were separated from the decennial census, the housing census was integrated into the demographic questionnaire, although it was eventually pulled out and made its own census. We did not conduct any more censuses of reservations for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The experimentation and self enumeration continued, and we started seeing long forms. So instead of asking supplemental questions, what the enumerators would do is we had mailed out the forms for people to fill out the enumerators when they picked them up a certain percentage of the households. They dropped the enumerators dropped off long forms to those households, who then would fill those out mail them back and actually that sample size was about 25%. We saw the development of FOSDIC, which was developed here at the Census Bureau with in conjunction with a couple of other agencies where you would fill out a circle, and it can be read the light could be read as it went through the machine anyone who's taken a standardized test where you to fill in the little bubble. That's FOSDIC. We added questions about employment and transportation because as the suburbs grew, people started living further and further away from their work. And so we wanted to see how that affected how people were getting there you had more households with two cars and things like that. And one of the most significant developments after 1950 is the opening of the National Processing Center in Jeffersonville, Indiana, which became the center for packaging and shipping equipment supplies, preparing maps, and the preliminary processing reports forms and the distribution of printed reports. So as you can see 1950 really set us up for the census of 2020. Thank you for your time. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact me and my myself my historians are always available to answer questions and to help guide people through census data. Thank you for joining us for today's presentation. We are wrapping up the lecture portion of the broadcast, but we'll continue to take your questions about today's topic in the chat section. Please take a minute to complete our short evaluation form so we can plan future programs based on your feedback. Find the link to it under show more. If we did not get to your question today, please send us an email. Note that the presentation's video recording and handout will remain available on this YouTube page and our website. If you enjoyed this video, check out our Know Your Records program. We have many more educational videos on how to do research with us. Thank you to the genealogy series team who contributed to the success of this program. We are grateful for your work. Again, please stay if you have questions, although we are concluding the video portion of the broadcast. We will continue to take your questions in chat for another 10 minutes.


Welcome, I'm Esther Allen, a professor at City University of New York and here with me is Allison Markin Powell, who translates Japanese literature and works with the Penn Translation Committee. She and I are co organizers of translating the future the conference you are attending. Thank you Esther, and thank you all for joining us for week 18 of translating the future. This conversation on Transiting Trauma features Ellen Elias Bursuk, translator and author of a book on her work at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, writer and editor Aaron Robertson, who translates from Italian, and Julia Sanchez, who translates from Portuguese, Spanish, French and Catalan. Our moderator, Queenie Sokadia, is a scholar of global human rights literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. You can learn more about all of our, all of today's highly accomplished speakers by reading their full bios on the Center for the Humanities. In her extraordinary 2016 essay, War in Translation, Lina Munzer, who participated in week two of this conference, describes her experience translating Syrian women's accounts of their lives under war and siege. Stories so harrowing that to translate them was itself a trauma. There is a violence in undoing someone's words and reconstituting them in a vocabulary foreign to them, a vocabulary of your own choosing. Lina Munzer writes, there is a violence to in the way you are for long moments, annihilated by the other, undone in return, neither the translator nor the text emerges from the act unscathed. Today's guests, believers in the powers of documentation, will talk about how they have risk that violence that annihilation by the trauma of the other to become part of an act of bearing witness. The expression is one of the pillars of pen America's mission. And I'd like to point out that the works that Aaron and Julia will be discussing today. Beyond Babylon by Ijiaba Shago and Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernandez were both awarded grants from the Penheim Translation Fund. It's so important to see works such as these supported by the publishing community here. As usual, please email your questions for Ellen, Aaron, Julia and Queenie to translating the future 2020 at gmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous, unless you know it in your email that you would like us to read your name. Translating the future will continue in its current form for one more week. Beginning September 22, the conference finale in week 20 will feature a number of evening events with speakers to include Kate Briggs, Tracy K Smith, Natalie Diaz, can you Jen for Croft, and a host of others. You can find out more on the Center for the Humanities website. We'll be back again on September 15 next week with week 19 of our hour long Tuesday events. Please join us then at noon Eastern Standard Time for a conversation on activist translation with Anton her zooming in from Seoul, JD Pluker and seven to come. Translating the future is convened by Penn America's Translation Committee, which advocates on behalf of literary translators, working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators publishers critics bloggers and others with an interest for an international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by Lynn Miller-Lachman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translation resources at penn.org. If you know anyone who was unable to join us for today's live stream, a recording will be available afterward on the Howl Round and Center for the Humanities sites. Before we turn it over to Queenie and the others, we'd like to offer our utmost gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the College of Library and Penn America and to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at Howl Round who make this live stream possible. And now, over to Queenie. Hi everyone. So before we begin, I'd just like to take a moment to thank all of you for tuning in to what I expect to be a very generous conversation today. Thanks to our participants, Ellen, Julia, and Erin for speaking with us today, and a big thank you to Allison and Esther as well as our sponsors for creating a space for us to have these rich hour-long conversations. So to kick off today's discussion, I'd like to ask you, Ellen, Erin, and Julia, to situate us with respect to your work. Can you tell us a little bit about your projects themselves and then also your journeys, be they intellectual, biographical or linguistic that led you to undertake this work of translating trauma.  Yeah, sure. So I am talking about Ijiaba Shago's novel, Beyond Babylon. Ijiaba is a Somali Italian writer. She's writing in Italian, and this is a novel that is set in multiple nations, so Italy, Argentina, Somalia, and Tunisia, and it's essentially about the legacies of Italian colonialism throughout all of these nations. And so the novel kind of tracks the stories of five characters. The two main protagonists are half sisters who go to Tunis to participate in an Arabic language program. So it's a novel about kind of intergenerational migration. It's about language learning and the actual process of translation. And in many ways that we'll probably talk about here, it is about the traumas that are sustained on both in individual and national scale. Julia, how about you? I'll be talking about Slash and Burn, which hasn't been published in English yet. I have a Spanish copy here. It's by Claudia Hernandez, who is a Salvadoran contemporary Salvadoran writer. This is her first novel. She's mostly written short stories until now. And it follows several characters. There's one sort of main woman that revolves around she is unnamed and she lives in an unnamed country. During a civil war and also in the aftermath of the war. And it also tells a story of her daughters and essentially how she's trying to bring up her daughters to have a respectable, well, not respectable, but just like a happy, not happy fulfilled something life. I'm trying to not project all these Western concepts of productivity to these people. And I remember speaking to Claudia a while ago, and she apparently had thought of it as a film she'd been interested in writing screenplays and had wanted to make a movie about this more in the vein of a documentary and it hadn't quite worked for her. So what we have is a very oral history of the of the Civil War period and the post war period of a place that would be assumed as El Salvador, but could be any other place in Latin America, where a proxy war was fought. Well, I lived in what was then Yugoslavia for a long time. I come from the States but I married there had my kids there worked as a community translator for a total of 17 years, and then why is it echoing all of a sudden. And then and then moved back to my local to my where I'm from which is Boston in 1990 and then the war broke out. And here I was. So, ever since then since really 1990 I've been translating people's writing about those wars that went on in, in what became all the successor countries after Yugoslavia broke up and. So, in terms of trauma and translation almost everything I've translated has had some resonance with that except the most recent writing or the very early things I did before the war began. And that shows for today this snowman by David Al-Bahari, which shows a glass of orange juice on the cover, and that's his one comfort as he's in this strange city and Kennedy clings to his glasses of orange juice that will somehow get him through the worst of times and, and it's an amazing book and probably of all the ones that I the novels that I've translated about war. It goes the most deeply into personal trauma and loss just directly into it just to end. And so I thought of it as as what to share with Julia and Aaron before and Queenie before we started and then just briefly the other thing that I've done that has to do with trauma and translation is I worked at the war crimes at the National Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for six years in the translation unit and then wrote a book about that and was able to survey my colleagues about their experiences of trauma and bias and all those things we talk about. And so that helped me articulate some of my own thinking about about translators and how they relate to those things. So much that's really fascinating. So personally, I've always kind of been interested in thinking about how we receive narratives of trauma, and then also how we transmit them forward, which is what each one of you seems to be doing through the act of translation. So I'm curious about how you position yourselves with respect to these texts that you were working with, as both individuals are receiving these narratives and then also stepping into the shoes of these writers to do this work of translation. So particularly thinking you're about the risk of appropriation that kind of attends this work of translation, but I'd also like to hear you speak more generally to any of the ethical dilemmas that you may have faced in kind of doing this work of translation and how you've worked through them. Julia. I spend a lot of time thinking about my position as a translator with respect to any text that I translate. It's very helpful to imagine the translator as a close reader rather than as a proxy for the author. Because at the end of the day, what you have to work with is the text that they have produced, you don't have the background information you don't have the research you don't have whatever context that they were in when they were working on that. So I found out, again, after translating this book from someone else who had met the author that she based this book on like a decade's worth of interviews. I don't have access to these interviews I don't know how she ended up bringing them together to create this narrative if there was one person whose story she followed or if the protagonist is actually a mix of all these different narratives. I was also hesitant to ask too much of the author because I know that she wrote this out in a during a period of exile she was born in 1974 so she would have ended the civil war in El Salvador started in 1979 and ended in 1992. So she would have been four years old to 15 to 16 I can't laugh, but something around that. And I didn't feel it was my place to make her bring up any possible trauma that she might have experienced. So as I said I think in an email I, I read around, I read around this book which is what I always try to do when there's a time for some of the vocabulary they has to do with like the gorillas. And some of the politics because there are very specific terms that have been used internationally, but otherwise I just sort of wrestled very closely with the, the information I had. I wanted to identify the mood of the writing like what it was trying to convey. Through its word choice that's it sits at this very interesting intersection between an oral mode and also, you know, this is going to sound obvious but prose like literature so the grammar is always correct but it's always very finely styled, and it feels like someone could be saying these things the whole time. So yeah I guess that's where I positioned myself. Don't know if that can take you. Yeah, that's really helpful to hear Aaron or Ellen, whoever things. Yeah. So this was a book that I translated in in 2017. And this was something like that I came to during college so it was my first translation project I had no kind of no plans of becoming an actual translator. I had learned of Ijiaba's nonfiction and in journalism and she wrote a lot about racism in in modern day Italy and kind of how, how you could trace that to a certain extent back to, you know, Italy is colonial projects in North Africa and the, the horn of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Libya. So one, one quality of this book, which, which focuses on five you know separate narratives is that you always have characters who are leaving a place and then reflecting on what it means to leave and to arrive. In 2016, one of the reasons I wanted to study abroad in Italy but but frankly, you know, anywhere was that I was still was still thinking of Michael Brown, and the start of the black lives matter movement in 2014. And I was trying to get a sense of my own place, like in this movement. What did I want to contribute. What did I think I could contribute. I didn't know the answer really. I was kind of inspired by, by James Baldwin, you know, who, who went to France, and was always kind of thinking about, Well, what does, what does the, you know, situation in Algiers have to say about what's happening in Harlem. I wondered what in Bologna or Rome or Florence, could I learn about what's happening in the US, you know, and so I encountered this book. I'm somewhat randomly in a library. I knew her name, like I said, but I didn't know much about her for fiction. I read this book, and I hear all these echoes of Toni Morrison in it, and she is very explicitly engaging with Toni Morrison. And so you have all this crosstalk across boundaries already across, you know, literary texts. And when I saw the ways in which she was engaging with with trauma itself with the use of the color red. Like in this book, I said, Well, that's my permission maybe that's, that's my way in, because it's Yaba is very conscious of the kind of, you know, African American literary tradition to and so I saw it, not as a way to to stake a claim on the text but to engage like in an actual conversation with the Java. And nowadays, I'm fortunate enough to actually talk to her about what's going on in Italy, what's going on here in the States. So that's how I came to her work. As far as I'm concerned, when I was leaving Yugoslavia in the late 80s I got in touch with David Al-Bahari because I was really interested in his distinctive postmodern approach to literature and I really liked his stories and I ended up translating the collection of them for Northwestern University Press in the early 90s, and then he moved to Canada in the about 93 or 94, and started writing, he left, I was right in the middle of the war going on and the war went on for the greatest intensity of the fighting was between 91 and 95 and so he left right in the middle of that and went to Canada as a writer in residence and various other capacities there and and when he first sent me snowman he wanted me to translate it and I read it. And I was so devastated by it, it was so painful and I was still so much in my own losses that came out of the war that it was very hard for me and I wrote back and said I just don't think I have the courage and the strength to translate this it's too hard and he went back and said oh try please try and when I sat down and started to my surprise which I hadn't even, it's not that I hadn't noticed it but it's so different when you start to translate you get so much deeper into a text that this whole novel is just completely full of this bizarre manic humor that he uses he kind of he builds the humor and the and the despair sort of running along in parallel dipping back and forth between them in this very intense very compelling way and that's I was only able to translate it because I sort of attached myself to the humor and the humor took me through it and and made it possible to face and deal with some of the other parts that were that were harder the sense of loss and and that to deal with in the novel. And and what I found in general in translating and I thought about a lot when I was reading Julius and Aaron's translations is that when a novel grapples directly with deeply traumatic subject matter. It's never superficial. It's always very intense and the intensity may manifest itself in all sorts of different ways but I find that no matter how difficult it is if I can connect to that intensity I can translate it. So that to respond to you. Yeah, that's really helpful to think about kind of narratives of trauma. Thank you. And kind of to pivot to thinking about the concept of translation more broadly and I think Aaron you touched on this a little bit in your response. I'm wondering about kind of translation across time and space right and how do you think. All of you right how do you think kind of trauma gets translated across generational and geographic boundaries in each of your texts but even beyond them. Do you think that trauma traumatic experiences are kind of so localized and specific that they kind of resist translation across context. So do you think that trauma can be translated in these ways. So Ellen can you. Oh yes I think so I mean I think any huge emotions come across I find when I'm translating that once a text becomes deeply emotional that it moves me along I don't obviously there's work to be done with with revising and thinking about holding the work of literature together but but the sort of moments the motor of the emotional content is is always. It all of us have experienced trauma one level or another we can recognize that even if it's what it was like when you started first grade I mean everybody has some kind of has some kind of experience like that I think it's. That's my anyway that's the way I. Yeah absolutely. Aaron can do you have any input on this yeah yeah of course so I'm like I said like this is a book that that that deals with multiple kind of man of the stations of colonial violence and so one one character like in the book her name is. Miranda and she is a poet from Argentina and her work is almost is is pretty much like all about the the kind of you know military. Dictatorship that Argentina experienced like in the 1970s. She is one of the lucky ones and she's able to actually leave the country relocate to Rome, but she's always thinking about Los. Those who are who are you know disappeared as a result, you know often of of state violence and so Miranda arrives in Italy this this country that has deep you know cultural historical ties to Argentina and what's what's fascinating. Like one thing that is not mentioned explicitly like in the text but is which kind of you know underwrites this whole project is that Mussolini you know saw saw Argentina as a possible. You know bastion of of fascism, like in South America right and so you have these ideologies that that really do you know transcend place and transcend time to and the characters throughout this book, they are constantly reflecting on the kind of scars. Mostly on that their mothers inherit because for four of the five like main characters are women, two daughters, their mothers and their father. And so, so families are kind of always reflecting on how their past has kind of informed their own, you know, messy interactions often and something that, you know, that that I think it's Java does, which Claudia does to translated so well by Julia because she really hones in on the, the kind of complicated relationship between mothers and daughters. Like at a certain point, you don't really forget about the wars, like in the violence but you, you have to focus on your own life and maintaining your own household right. And you can look at your scars, and you can blame them, but at the end of the day, your daughter needs needs you as a mother right, she doesn't want kind of this weight of, of, you know, history, bearing down on her so that, like that I think is one of the really interesting dynamics of both a job and and Claudia's novels. So, I think this applies less to snowman, though of course, the experience of that, you know, that post war, I mean, be possibly even shell shocked that the protagonist is experiencing when he goes to Canada, can apply to a lot of different European backgrounds, since Europe has been like carved up and in the last 150 years. I think there's a, there's a stronger connection between beyond Babylon and Slashenburn, in the sense that the two books. Beyond Babylon talks about colonialism and it's hard to find a nation on this planet that hasn't experienced some form of colonialism so like that, in a way, is a narrative that I don't like the expression travels well but it's one that is easy to relate to across borders. And so Slashenburn is, I've already said this but I'll repeat it, and that the characters are named there's only one place that's named that is Paris France and it looms like very large and the protagonist's imagination because during the civil war she gets pregnant and her child is taken from her and sold for the cause by some nuns to a family in France so right there you're already extending the web of the aftermath of this, this experience of war and then you also have characters who flee for that northern country that doesn't get named which is obviously the United States. And one of the reasons why I believe she doesn't name anyone is because it universalizes the experience more. The book was first published in Colombia and which is almost perfect because there's a similar experience of neighbors fighting each other and that ended much more recently. And also there's the sexual violence that a lot of the characters encounter from childhood onward and that is also sadly the kind of trauma that translates across humanity. I kept seeing so many parallels between beyond Babylon and Slashenburn because of this, you know passing down the story, the protagonist and Slashenburn tells her daughters about her experiences over and over to the point that the daughter's like, I'm sick of hearing about the war. But one of the things you learn at the end of the book is that for her the war never ended. She's still in a constant state of crisis even if it's quite muted. And can I add that, you know, what's so one part about Slashenburn, there's one line and I'm, you know, badly paraphrasing here but Claudia writes about names and she basically says that names are, you know, for the dead. So, so what's the point really right and this idea that naming makes it easier to kind of identify and you know fix one person almost one identity. But obviously, you sustain some horrible trauma that becomes troubled and that's something that you also see in snowman to you have this this really neurotic, you know, narrator, who constantly is like, I, I feel like I'm living multiple lives almost like there are multiple selves here. And he, you know, keep saying that, like here in Canada, I'm going to grow old, but, but I heard someone say that, and then, you know, few pages down. Once again, he says, I feel like I'm going to grow old, but he doesn't like really have a sense that it's just this one person saying this right. And so the way that that trauma, I think troubles a sense of location. And not only, you know, geographically and temporally but for the, like for the individual, it's hard to really take stock of yourself to kind of contain yourself in one one place in time. Also, there's an interesting connection between slash and burn and, and very striking connection between slash and burn and snowman which is that the lack of names I mean there isn't. He never even says worries he's surviving in he doesn't say what the protagonist doesn't give a name. The only name that's offered to us is a dog named Freddie and he then says that he always calls dogs Freddie so it doesn't even make specific that one dog. But, but again it's a universalizing moment as you said Julia that that that having having people are named by their categories like the professor of political science or the secretary or whatever and but never but never named and it's it's interesting. I just found that very interesting that comparison and also with with beyond Babylon. At the beginning, even though there are the five narrators I had to spend some time to sort of work out, and some of them have similar names and that got confusing Miriam and whatever all the different names so I was kind of working on on names there as well it was and also the geography is all three books are all about geography and again it's movement and people who are refugees or displaced and and and beyond Babylon's astonishing the way it moves among free continents and and and and then as you said between Paris and Salvador in the United States and in my case, the gets into this kind of a wrestling match with all these maps that he's hung on the wall and he's thinking about borders and drawing them in on the maps and it becomes this huge obsession with borders and geography and places and so. Absolutely. And also, I'm also kind of curious about what you think about the relationship between language and trauma, because so many people talk about how trauma is essentially unrepresentable, but we find the representations of trauma like proliferating all kinds of art right so how do you kind of make sense of this seeming paradox like, do you think that trauma, like what do you think other strategies writers often rely on to make kind of trauma, which is so under representable representable. Well, I can start. Yeah. And I, I kind of mentioned earlier that that one of the tools, a job uses to kind of, you know, trace the trace different manifestations, like of trauma is color so you know, in the beginning of the book, the one of the main characters describes her. As a child, she was in, in school, and the school janitor assaulted her. And as a result, I'm like over time she begins to use the ability to actually see colors right so at the start of the book. There's this, this really, you know, beautiful moving scene where the character is retracing her steps through Rome to kind of regain colors, but the only one that she can't get back is the color red. So throughout this this book she's constantly searching for it. And red is, is not only like there's the kind of, you know, the obvious like connotation of a blood like that is spilled, like as a result of war and violence, but one important thing to note about beyond Babylon in particular is, I'm kind of like, like Ellen was saying, the use of, the use of humor is like as a key component of the book, there are multiple sides to your experience is not only trauma so the color red in the book is not only your cue of some kind of pain here, but it's also so it's Yaba is very concerned with the body, this is a very kind of physical book so not only what what damage is done to it but how how it is a, you know, a conduit of pleasure and joy to and of kind of a self understanding. And so so soon after you have this scene like where she's lost where one of the characters has lost her colors. There's also this scene like where she's talking about her period right and, and this is something that comes up at multiple points throughout this book is trying to understand what this means to to her, you know, as a woman. And this is not like, I don't want to spoil the book but this the meaning of blood and pain and pleasure. They all kind of have, you know, similar visual cues. So that is one way that Ijiaba kind of moves around language to really capture what it means to to undergo these experiences. I'll enjoy it. Yeah. So the language and slash and burn is is very straightforward and not not often symbolic and it might be worth mentioning that the word trauma is never used at any point in the book, like, I'm assuming trauma and the assumption comes from one scene that's almost at the very end where the protagonists mother is dying and they've always had this tension over the daughter that the protagonists lost who is who's now in France and that relationship is never mended. And her mother is dying and she decides the protagonists again no names it makes it difficult to talk about but the protagonist decides to go find her mother's wedding ring that she'd taken off during the war. And she this is sort of a journey through all of these sites of trauma like all of these sites of actual physical battle. And that is the only moment when the language starts becoming a bit more metaphoric. Like she she goes to the site where there used to be a doctor who would who would give the women abortions because they didn't want women pregnant during the war they wanted them fighting and the doctor, when she when he found out that she was pregnant it was too late to do anything about it and he helped her bring this baby into the world and she always feels grateful and she imagines his body in the earth, feeding the trees. And she goes this protagonist goes through, you follow her throughout the book and at no point does she really talk about pain, or, you know, how it had affected her that she had almost been raped as a young girl. It's only at the very end when she's talking to one of her friends who had also fought in the war. I think the term is companion in battle is what I went for, where she doesn't have a mirror so that her friends serves as a mirror and she starts listing off every single one of her battle scars, and starts for my and like reminds her of the fact that she can, she can't hear anything very well because she had been very close to about to an explosive going off and reminds her that she wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. And she'd been so centered the project has been so centered on helping her daughters get ahead and recovering her lost daughter that she had completely blanked on any of the physical and emotional trauma that she herself and suffered throughout the war. But when I think of language specifically I'm always reminded of Paul Salon and the way that he sort of deconstructed the German and chose to write right in German to start and then deconstructed the language and did something on the level on the level of like the syllabic components of the words. So I guess it's not that trauma can't be expressed through language is just that you have to maybe shake up the container and yes. Well, it's interesting this question of language and particularly in snowman because just as he clings to glasses of oranges to salvage him and difficult situations he also clings to words and he, he writes about that I actually quickly found a place where I was thinking trap deception loss and quickly everything I saw became one of these words without resistance without effort. And then I remembered the Atlas, it appeared like a fourth word as Atlas at a moment when the others had replaced the world and then he anchors himself in the word Atlas, and it's like he's clinging to these words to save him. It's so in a way, he's showing us by doing that, what the trauma, what the wordless part of trauma is like that that he's reaching for words to pull him out of it. Yeah. Sorry, please. He's also obsessed with precision.  And I think that has to also do with the loss of language. Yes. And, and this is true for, for many, you know, cultures and locations but the Italian language is, you know, it is a fundamental part of the way that Italians, you know, view themselves right and historically, it has been used in cases like there's a way to distinguish between who was Italian, and who was not Italian right.  How do we translate that right and these, these activists are looking to, to the Black Lives Matter movement here in the US to kind of see what, what terminology is being used and what's like what's incredible about Italian is that the word for race. When you use that, many people will think that you're talking about these, you know, laws that the fascists passed like in the 1930s to talk about, you know, Jewish people and the kind of, you know, prohibitions that were placed or that were imposed on Jews in Italy, because of Mussolini, like in the fascist, right. So now, in 2020, when you're talking about race in Italy, do you use RATSA or do you use like some other word to describe like what you're talking about right so the fact that language is often like it's, I mean, it holds, you know, decades and kind of centuries worth of meaning of connotations and experience. That is something that even today is being negotiated, not only within literature but like on the streets too. So since we're, I mean, we might just have time for one more question. But since we're talking so much about representation and I like some of you brought up, like for example, Aaron you talked about red or Ellen you talked about the glass of oranges. I'm just really interested in kind of asking you about the relationship between the visual and the textual and kind of to what extent does, you know, a discussion of trauma rely on images. And do you think trauma kind of needs to be expressed in a way that relies on the visual or do you think that it's even possible or either possible to like completely separate from the visual or that the visual offers something that the textual representation cannot offer. So kind of just thinking about the relationship between those two. Well, certainly the visual as it pertains to place is really important. I think that even if we don't know what the place is still that sense of place is very powerful in all three of these books. Yeah, not necessarily a country as place, but just the physical surrounding of the characters and that's a good question but I'm not sure that any one thing that would apply to all three of these beyond that.  The way that that that actually translates across time is fascinating so when I was working on beyond Babylon like I was aware of the scenes in Argentina where you had you know mothers and and grandmothers who would go to Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and they would protest the state violence against those who are lost against the disappeared right and there is something extremely potent about well nowadays to about you know the images of mothers protesting and the the kind of the violence that they are always forced to talk about right and so you see this image of of Argentinian mothers like in the 1970s going to the Plaza and you look at mothers today like in the States were losing you know their kids right that that like that image I think translates like really well and that's something that you see not only like in the US now but but all over the world so there is a way to communicate like two other people to other nations that you understand what tactics like they are using there's this this kind of you know visual grammar that is being shared across boundaries which I think is incredibly moving I think this is a half form thought but I wonder if I mean I wonder what what the purpose of I guess one question is what is the purpose of communicating the trauma. So in what way can the visual be more effective. Are we trying to get people to do something are we trying to get people to understand. If it's the latter, I keep thinking about a phrase and beyond Babylon where I can't remember which one of the characters that is it might be Mariam essentially talking about how you how these things can entirely be understood. Like if we if we're talking about you know literature as a creator of empathy maybe the empathy is only very superficial none of this will ever entirely be understood but we can pass down the knowledge. What literature can do is give people a glimpse of the interiority in a way that the visual can't. And especially now when the visual images are all over the place were saturated with images that may be the space of quiet interiority that literature provides can actually be a more effective way of communicating. I knew I knew about the civil war in El Salvador before I started translating this book because I'm South American and so I knew what the CIA got up to in Latin America, I made it a point to know about that. But I will never entirely understand what I translated not in a visceral way. I'm not sure that's an answer. Excellent. So thank you Ellen Aaron and Julia for the fascinating discussion, it was truly an honor and privilege for me to be able to moderate this conversation. And I think I'm going to hand it over to Allison and Esther who I see have appeared on the screen now. Thank you so much Queenie this was it this is just such an important conversation to be having right now and I can't think of other people who I would rather hear listen to right now to hear here talk about about these this topic and your work with it. So we do have some questions for you. I don't know and I think but I'm the first question actually comes in from Laura venue who herself wrote a really an excellent essay on the experience of transiting trauma, which was recently appeared on words without borders. And the question is, can the panelists discuss mechanisms of self care, as they translate these difficult texts, in terms of how their own mood or etc is affected by immersion in such dark themes and I think this is a really important question and this is also Lina Munzer, who's a essay, Esther in the introduction also sort of refers to that and that was sort of one of the inspirations for the work that we're doing and talking about this work that we're doing and that any of you have strategies for that. Nobody. Taking a break, telling somebody about it. Coming back to it. Taking a deep breath having a glass of wine. Many, many, many strategies.  Well, if you're crying, for example, that's a hint. But just physical tension I just sometimes I'll just like jump out of my chair and go to the laundry or something because I just need to do something to loosen up a little bit from the intensity of it. And then with beyond Babylon. So I, you know, what's, what's funny is that I can't exactly recall the, like all of the emotions that I felt, like when I first was was translating the book, partly because I was a college, you know, senior and I had a deadline. That was like I need to actually like do the work, but when I returned to it. There are really really harrowing scenes in the book that are that are like, I mean, of, you know, of awful things like that these characters experience but the reason that I love the book so much is that I know so the there are like multiple, you know, sections of the that switch between characters with the last, the last, you know, section, each time a character's thread is over, it is so I mean, it's so beautiful and often quite hopeful. So, knowing that these scenes are coming, it kind of makes the process a little easier, you know, because I know what end I'm translating tour. That's that won't be the case for all books and I have worked on on stories and books, where it's not the case. And to kind of take care of myself, I, you know, I'll translate a bit and then I'll put it away for maybe a week or two like do something else, and then I'll come back to it so. Yeah, I, I'm not very good at the self care I don't think I'm like the protagonist. I don't really notice what's wrong until my body feels very very heavy and I need more sleep than usual. But also this book. I also by stick my head in the sand. I mean, I just like get really deep into the words and I maybe just focus more on the, the, the materiality of the words and I do about the bigger picture that that sometimes helps, but this one. It felt long and laborious, but it didn't. It's, it's the kind of book that sort of simmers but doesn't boil over that much. During the pandemic I was translating a book that was truly harrowing, and my self care was to ask for like several extensions, away from it because it was. And I was translating a book another book about the trauma and I was like, Dan. I have a question actually specifically for Ellen because you've also had these experience of interpreting, which is interpreted I worked with interpreters but I worked on translation of documents not interpreting. But you've also written a lot about interpreting and and work with interpreting and I think that that must be a unique form of exposure to trauma because you're there, you know, with the person. Do you want to say anything about that. Well, it's interesting that you say that because at the war crimes tribunal where we worked we had 150 people in the language unit, half of them were interpreters, half of them were translators like me working on documentary translation for the document standard is evidence and lots of people have issues with trauma in that work. But we had a really great psychologist who was there to help people deal with these things and one of the things that he said, was that although interpreters are in the booth hearing everything live and speaking it they speak it to other people. So even though it's difficult they have the option of being heard and there's a direct communication between them and the people in the courtroom, whereas and this relates to something. Queenie had raised with us before before this with the secondary trauma translators just sit with a document, and then it just sits in you there's nowhere to go with it. And even at the tribunal there were confidentiality issues we weren't allowed to speak about the documents we are working on with anyone except I was in charge of revising documents and editing and proofreading and so forth that other people had translated go over to the translator put my arm around them and say well that was that was a rough one but but but there was no other way for us to deal with it and it does it is difficult to deal with. And it's certainly I think early on in the years of the tribunal when it was first starting and people were coming in with raw experience that hadn't had the benefit of some years between them and and the events that was also very difficult for the interpreters in the booth obviously. Yeah, I think this is an important issue for for translators I mean I'm, I guess one of the reasons that I thought Laura's question was important and this other question about interpreting to I mean I think because I, I myself happened to be working on a memoir that is traumatic and I'm finding you know and I'm working with the author and you know and this is her story and finding like that I need to like sort of think of it as a vortex that you know that there's a vortex of her, you know her trauma and her story and I can step into it, and then I can step out of it, when I need to sort of make dinner or walk the dog or something like that so that I'm not necessarily like carrying you know this trauma in my own body all the time. But I think there, there was another question that Esther like well the group when we were planning this conference this subject this topic was sort of always always something that we wanted to highlight and one of the things that came up as we were thinking about whom we might invite is like the idea of trauma, the gender with regard to trauma and testimony and thinking about it and there was a point at which we wanted to make sure that it wasn't all women telling women stories about trauma. And I'm not sure if this is really a fully formed question but I didn't know if any of you Queenie you included if you wanted to sort of respond because we can see we have men telling you're translating women's narratives and women to translating male narratives here and so I think. Would any of you have anything to speak to about gender and trauma. I think what drew me to slash and burn was the fact that it was a narrative of war told from the perspective of women, which I don't think is very common. In the background reading, I read, so fun, I like so which is the only woman they face of war, which is the only other thing that I could find that talked about how women also participate in these very violent spaces. No, if there's particular I mean there's there's the possibility of sexual violence that comes up several times I think those were the bits that I found most difficult to to translate, because I can relate more to the idea of sexual violence than I can relate to the idea of war. Fortunately or no. It also it felt very comforting to be in a space that was predominantly female, like that's mostly daughters, there are very few male characters, mostly they're, they're fleeting. And it somehow felt safer. And it's interesting that question because in the literatures that I work with. There were very few prominent women writers before this round of wars in the 1990s. Just a few cases of strong women writers and then suddenly in 1990 just as the war was breaking out a whole generation came forward and so I've been really translating those women mostly I didn't choose to bring their work to this just because this particular novel seems so well suited to the discussion but, but it is now none of them were actually like Julia's characters describing being in a war they were commentators, social cultural commentators, writing from a distance position but still women have been the most important voices that have come out of Bosnia Croatia Serbia I think in the last 20 years. It's interesting. Yeah, and, and I like, I never wanted to, to like, overstate my own role really like but I think in in translating it job was work. I've always viewed that as an active solidarity like which I, and it's because, you know, frankly, black women everywhere have been seen as an as an underclass the kind of last people to be considered in a kind of cultural too and even today, because of the kind of long, long legacy of, you know, of sexual violence against black women in Italy and also in the colonies.  And it's this kind of lack of imagination as to the key role that black women have played in Italy's history that like that is something that it's Java and other writers like her are always addressing and so I saw. There was a way that I could bring like these stories, you know, into English for a wider audience that I think was was my like small way of saying, I recognize like what you all are doing. I see it and I am so grateful for it. Thank you. I think we're out of time. This I wish we could honestly, I wish we could go on another hour this has been so fascinating. Thank you all so much and Queenie. Wonderful job. Thank you. Alison to honestly a final final thank you to our sponsors. We would once again like to thank our partners how round in America, the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Martin E Segal Theater Center. We'll be seeing you again next week and then for our big finale week of events so please keep watching. Thank you.


The Aleppo pine trees in Aljabel al-Aqdar region were planted in the 1960s and are now mature adults. The oldest tree was established in 1962 and the youngest in 1984, indicating a gap of more than 20 years between them. The average diameter at breast height, dbh, and tree height were typical for similar pine stands in the area, with an average dbh of 29 cm and tree height of 10 m. Thinning may be necessary to ensure optimal growth and high yields from these trees. This article was authored by Atiyah Al-Sanusi and Abduzalim Imali.


What's good y'all is your boy Ross back here again with another video So we're gonna check out Bray Wyatt his real reason or the real reason why WWE have released him a few months back and we're gonna also talk about WWE Canceling the TLC pay-per-view that was supposed to happen in December of this year So we're gonna get into both of these stories man appreciate all the love and support. I know this has been the talk of On YouTube in the wrestling community for the past few I want to say for the past day Day and a half or whatnot. So we're gonna get into this I'm gonna give my thoughts and opinions on it and go from there from these articles So the first article is from wrestling Inc. Bray Wyatt reportedly had issues in the lead-up to his WWE release There were reportedly multiple issues in the lead-up to WWE release and Bray Wyatt Well, I don't know how to pronounce his first name properly with them rotunda back in the summer It was noted by Andrew Zarian of the Matt man podcast how Wyatt was being a Being a little difficult in the lead-up to his release and that he had Performance issues in the ring as well as issues with his weight. It was also said that Wyatt Just wasn't happy which Understandably, so if you're not happy and what you're doing then you may need to step away from it These were not the reasons for Wyatt release according to Zarian but But a number of issues led to the decision to cut the former WWE Universal champion it had been reported that Wyatt and others in the company were told that he was released due to budget cuts Which is a lot what people were speculating what the rumors were being said it was budget cuts But at the same but at the time many people in the company reportedly did not believe that was that was it as Wyatt was a strong merchandise mover and no moneymaker this new report Notes that while finances were weren't the only reason for Wyatt's release It was one of the many to that led to the departure It was also reiterated that these release decisions are not cut and dry The report on why its weight issues is interesting as photo surface of Wyatt With a fan where Wyatt appeared to be a much better shape here is the photo at hand and do looks Much slimmer than when he was in WWE He's looking like he's been working on his physique. He's been working out do looks healthy as hell looks much better Man, so it's good to see that he has been keeping up with his health. So that is good to know The photo surface on social media just two days before WWE Announced Wyatt's release. So wow, he was actually looking pretty good and they still released him Rotunda has been rumored To be in talks with AEW and impact wrestling, but there's no solid word on where he is headed next WWE release Rotunda from his contract back in on Saturday, July 31st of this year If he's under a standard 90-day non-complete clause with WWE He would be coming free agent on Friday, October 29th so that is literally later on this month and From that picture that we saw he was looking Pretty healthy before WWE released him. I knew it wasn't budget cuts when they were talking about it It definitely was not budget cuts Apparently they weren't happy with what was what was going on with him. They weren't happy with his look They weren't happy with With I guess his you know what he was producing and he wasn't happy either So I think it was more I it seems like it was more along the lines of them just meeting a mutual Mutual understanding and deciding to part ways But they released them. That's what it seems like because it doesn't seem like he was too upset about it because Reports were saying that he was unhappy himself. He wasn't really feeling it and I'm just glad that he's worked on his health He's lost more weight. It's all about making sure at the end of the day your mental your health is more important than the dollar bill There's no point of being in a place where you're not mentally there You're not emotionally invested. You're you're you're not healthy This is why I can't get mad at people. I see him punk and Daniel Bryan and whoever else who chooses to leave Who chooses not to extend their contract because at the end of the day? When it's all said done your health your mental and your physical health and your happiness That's more important than anything else. So it would be cool if he does come back to WWE But I've said this in the past and I will keep saying this again I do not want him to come back to WWE if They're gonna continuously Book him in a way where it doesn't make sense if they're not gonna utilize him properly There's no point in bringing them back and if he does go to AEW. I think that would be cool as well I think that'll be dope if he if he is able to go to AEW and they utilize him correctly I don't think he should go to impact because not many people are watching that and I feel like someone as talented as him in the creek care the characters he create and how he Believes in the characters that he create I think he deserves to be on a mainstream setting where he deserves to be seen by a lot of people. So I Wish you the best for him and you know, we'll see where where things lead to when he becomes a free agent WWE reportedly cast those TLC in December. No pay-per-view will air that month, man No TLC. Let's see if we can figure out what According to the reports, WWE has taken the decision to cancel the tables ladders and chairs pay-per-view Event that was originally slated to take place in December on the latest Wrestling Observer Radio Dave Meltzer notes that TLC which has originally slated for December 12th has been canceled by WWE the decision was made to cancel the show according to Meltzer because two pay-per-views are going to Going to be taking place in January damn Two pay-per-views Damn I'm gonna I'm gonna get to my issue with WWE and their overabundance in pay-per-views We get to that along with the Royal Rumble at the end of the month WWE is going to be putting on the day one pay-per-view on New Year's Day Which is why TLC has been canceled. Oh The decision was made that originally there was going to be a pay-per-view in Chicago at the Allstate Arena in mid December and the feeling is now that during 12 a year and the December pay-per-view will actually be January 1st in Atlanta the idea of doing January 1st rather than doing it mid-late December and Then they're still going to do Royal Rumble as the January pay-per-view a lot of people were wondering when they moved to December Chicago day from being a pay-per-view to being a television taper Who's gonna get the pay-per-view and the answer is that there is no that there is no pay-per-view WWE has put TLC pay-per-view Every single year since the gimmick show was introduced in 2009 and it doesn't look like it's going to be taking place in 2021 this also means WWE will only put on two pay-per-view events for the remainder of 2021 with Crown Jewel next Thursday and Survivor Series next month on November 21st You can find out the latest news about Survivor Series and Included Dwayne Rock Johnson. It's going to be involved at the show. Hey, I don't know if that's true or not But we'll see this is from a give you sports calm my issue. I've been having with WWE when it comes to their Pay-per-view selection. I think it's too many. I think it's too many I get it and trying to capitalize on having the pay-per-view on the first of the year first of the Other new years on a Saturday. So I I get it. It makes sense. I didn't even know that but In the same time, I don't think they need to do that. I think I mean granted Of course, we got crown jewel and then we would have Survivor Series and then TLC Which is I think TLC would have been fine in a place that was in but then to backdoor to have TLC to be on the first and then you have the Royal Rumble later on that but two pay-per-views and one month is kind of It it makes builds harder to build It makes any sense. I think what makes pay-per-views work is you get time to progress the story lines between characters Of course, the Royal Rumble built itself at the same time you want Other story lines to be important. You don't want it to just only be about the Royal Rumble You want to have important matches important feuds It's hard to do that when you just had a pay-per-view and then two to three weeks later You have another major pay-per-view So that's always with my issue lately with WWE. They've added too many pay-per-views We already have a plethora of pay-per-views set up. So I Don't know man. I Don't know like I said, I get it Falls on a Saturday the first of the year you want everyone to you know Be hyped for the new year and watch your show I get that but I feel like it's just a little bit too much and they could have just had it in December and Just promote from December all the way to the end of January and whenever you're not the Royal Rumble Be promoted at build-up stories leading up to that You can have some special shows. Maybe have like a special show leading up to the new year or Monday night raw And in Friday night Smackdown how special shows make those shows feel, you know special like many pay-per-views Like they used to do you don't have to have a pay-per-view Every single month you can skip a month, but hey, I don't run the company. I'm just a guy that watches the company so Comment down below. Let me know if you guys wouldn't want to see Bray Wyatt back in the WWE Or would you like to see him in AEW or for some odd reason you will want to see him impact wrestling? Let me know down below. Also. Do you guys feel like the TLC pay-per-view pay-per-view should be In January on the same month as the Royal Rumble pay-per-view or do you guys feel like it should should have still been in December and also do you guys feel like WWE has too many pay-per-views on their hand? I would love to get your thoughts and opinions on this appreciate all of sport roll to 60k appreciate y'all kicking me. See y'all next week. Peace


The National Association of People with Living with Disabilities in Kaduna State has displayed its support for one of its members, Lois Outer. Outer is aspiring to represent Kaora Constituency in Jamal Local Government Council in the state. About 100 groups of physically disabled people showed solidarity with the aim to get voice, equality and inclusiveness to persons living with disabilities who, according to them, have been marginalised in the Nigerian society. Plus, TV News correspondent Habila Daroufai filed in this report. Since the return of democracy in the state, this was the first time a woman with physical disabilities would be contesting for a political office in the State House of Assembly. Declaring her intention at the State Rehabilitation Centre in Kaduna, Lois Outer says her mission is to explore her international contacts and global network to bridge noticeable development gaps in the constituency. Voting for me means making Kaduna State House of Assembly inclusive in 2023. Voting for me means inclusion. Voting for me means equal representation. Voting for me means growth and development. Voting for me means persons with disabilities participating in every sector of government. And I'm not going to be there for only persons with disabilities but for young people and for women. Also, the National President of Persons with Physical Disability, Comrade Rilwan Muhammad, is optimistic that Outer can deliver the seat for APC, and also commanded her giant stride in making PWD's voice be heard. I have never come across women with disability, particularly physical disability, that have aspire for a political position. Persons with disability should have enough space, not just in creating disability leaders that they have it from national to world level, but they are even given opportunity for persons with disability to aspire. Similarly, the Resident Commissioner of Independent Electoral Commissioner, Aine Kaduna State Hajia Ashmau Mekuri says there is enough provision for women and persons living with disabilities to contest any political position in the 2023 general elections across the country. We want the PWD's, we want the gender people to be involved, and we are looking forward to more women participation to PWD's being also elected as candidates in the 2023 elections and subsequent elections. Some of the physically disabled persons express happiness over the interest of their members. I really feel happy and appreciated for coming out to tell the world, the community, the society, that women with disability can do it. So, she has sold our power. Recall that persons with disabilities had long advocated for inclusion and the country's leadership, until President Mahmoud Buhari signed the Disability Act 2018, encouraging fair participation.